Peter Elbow introduced the “doubting” and “believing games” in the 1970s to make critical thought conscious and easily practicable. As Elbow described it in his 2008 address to the CCCC, the doubting game is “the disciplined practice of trying to be as skeptical and analytic as possible with every idea we encounter. By trying hard to doubt ideas, we can discover hidden contradictions, bad reasoning, or other weaknesses in them–especially in the case of ideas that seem true or attractive. We are using doubting as a tool in order to scrutinize and test.”
Such an approach is familiar to academics; less so, perhaps, is the discipline of the “believing game,” which asks us to, in Elbow’s words, “scrutinize unfashionable or even repellent ideas for hidden virtues.” The idea is to foster not naïve belief, but belief as a method. “Believing” ideas we disagree with can reveal our unconscious assumptions and foster a dimension of our intelligence that is too often remains uncultivated. The believing game is also an excellent stepstone for the kind of reparative reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick advocates and lens analyses of all kinds.
I. A. Richards once wrote that a book is a “machine to think with.” While such a statement appears opaque to most students at first, practice with the believing game lays the groundwork for adding theories to their toolkits. I introduce both the doubting game and the believing game on the first day of class, with my “Welcome to College” slides. It helps to have students first play the believing and doubting games as a group, with a gallery-style dialectical notebook. I print out individual quotes in large letters and stick them on the wall. Students write their commentaries on Post-Its that they then stick nearby.
In my classroom, students practice the doubting and believing games all semester, with the aid of dialectical notebooks. These lessons dovetail perfectly with the introduction to academic theses that Birkenstein and Graff present in They Say/I Say, and with all kinds of analysis.