Teaching Journal #15

During the final week of class, I held half hour meetings with each of my students in order to discuss their drafts of their Reflective/Analytical essays and their Major Revisions for their Final Selected Portfolios. I also reminded them of what grade they were guaranteed to get according to the grading contract, so there would be no surprises when final grades are posted.

 

The meetings were really helpful for my students, I think. I spent ample time explaining the Reflective/Analytical essay in class to them, but for some reason it seemed to not really sink in for some of them until we talked one-on-one about their preliminary drafts of their essays. I had conferenced with some of my students about their project ones, but I think the immediacy of the looming revisions for Project 4 has given them a bit more of an impetus to pay attention during the conference and start working immediately after. Since these meetings I have received a subsequent revision a student requested I look over, and it was leaps and bounds ahead of where he was. Because he is one of the weaker writers in the class, this makes me think that conferences are worth the time and effort. I plan to incorporate more of them into my classes next semester.

 

Because of the required meetings, I cancelled class on Monday and Wednesday of week 15.

However, on Friday we did meet to recap some Project 4 necessities, as well as reflect on the class as a whole. I made them a Final Selected Portfolio Checklist, as well as a document that addressed general concerns about the portfolio that I saw come up during conferences. We went over both of those documents, both of which I posted on Blackboard. We then discussed general questions and concerns about project 4. I also made them an MLA cheat sheet that showed the formulas and examples of essentially all the types of sources they would need to include in their Works Cited Pages. We reviewed the Purdue OWL and how to navigate it. I asked them an MLA formatting question and we worked our way together through the Purdue OWL to find the answer. Finally, I showed them one of my term papers as an example of correct MLA formatting. I think showing them how to find answers to questions themselves is one of the most valuable skills I can teach them, so I hope they took something away from our activity with the Purdue OWL.

We then discussed the class as a whole, what they thought they learned, which activities worked well, which didn’t, which readings they thought they learned the most from, and which just confused them. This activity gave me some things to think about as I prepare to teach this course next semester. For example, some of the students said they were unwilling to talk because others were unwilling to talk, and that on the day when I warned them ahead of time they would be called on at random in class, they were more inclined to better prepare themselves for discussion and participate when the time came. I think I will start to call on people a little more next semester. Sometimes being put on the spot is the push students need to start engaging in the conversation.

 

I think this time next semester I might spend some more time throughout the semester doing brief workshops on grammar, style, and organization. I value these things in a student paper and it seems unfair for me to expect it in their final drafts when I have not emphasized it throughout the class. I at least need to create a series of handouts that makes clear for them my expectations in terms of grammar and style.

Teaching Journal #13/14

I knew the class before Thanksgiving break would pose a challenge, and I was right. On Monday, the 19^th of November, my class and I discussed Jonathan Alexander’s “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body.” Things started off promising; I had the students take Kate Bornstein’s Gender Aptitude Test, and the results showed that the students were fairly open to questioning the traditional gender construct. However, while the test results showed that students were willing to an alternative gendered reality, they certainly were not as willing to discuss it in class. I tried asking them some of Pat Califia’s writing prompt questions that Alexander cites in his article, but they were at a loss there as well. They kept asking if they would still have their own brains, if they would still be “them.” I asked them to what degree they think their genders define them, but they were not willing to engage for whatever reason. I was finally able to get them to talk about gender stereotypes by having them analyze the student narratives in groups. I think I need to utilize more group work as a way to foster conversation, especially this late in the term, when they seem to become less motivated daily.

After break, we discussed Cixous’ “Viewpoint: The Laugh of the Medusa.” During this particular class meeting, my students seemed inclined to undermine me at every turn. First a girl tried to argue with me on the correct pronunciation (she insisted the Americanized “knee-chee” was correct.) I did not engage with her at the time, explaining to her that I was not going to waste class time looking it up. However, I did take the liberty of playing a video of the correct pronunciation as I took attendance during the next class meeting. A couple of boys in the back also seemed particularly chatty, but it didn’t distract me, so I talked over them until the chatter subsided. The synthesis activity I made worked out pretty well. I displayed quotes on the board and asked the students to explain the quote and synthesize it with some of the other readings we have discussed. However, I had to resort to calling on people to answer in an effort to make sure everyone was paying attention. I might have been better off turning this into a group activity.

Wednesday’s class was dedicated to all things related to project 4. I spent the first third of the class giving the students an overview of the remaining elements of project 4, and then explaining them in detail. In an effort to get the students thinking about their reflective/analytical essay, I had them write individually about what they think has changes about their writing as a result of this class, and what scholars they think have had a hand in shaping or changing the way they think about writing. I then broke them up into groups of four, where they discussed what they wrote and looked for common themes. I asked them to discuss the conversation around their chosen theme. I then went around the room, wrote whatever common theme they chose to discuss on the board, and listed relevant scholars underneath. I think this activity was fairly helpful, though I had to circle the room quite often in an effort to make sure the students stayed on task.

           
Friday’s class covered Anzaldua and Lunsford. We started off the class with a discussion of mosaics and metaphors. My students were totally lost as to what the “tiny fish in the Pacific ocean” metaphor was trying to hint at, but I found out later this was probably because only a handful read the interview from which the metaphor came. In any case, I read the passage aloud and some of my students were able to identify meaning behind the metaphor. In an effort to get their creative juices flowing and shake up the class a bit, I had them individually write metaphors for their own composing processes or draw mosaics of their identities as writers. I do not think my students enjoyed this foray into creativity, though one student did share a mildly humorous comparison of writing to the act of changing a dirty diaper.

Teaching Journal #12

Wednesday we covered Flynn’s “Composing as a Woman” and “Conceptualizing Composing as a Woman.” I ended up deviating quite a bit from my lesson plan during that lecture. For instance, I scrapped my planned freewriting exercise in favor of doing an online quiz (recommended by some of my peers) as a class to explore gender differences in writing. The quiz offered a sample paragraph from an author and we had to guess the gender of the author. I was able to get a good deal of discussion out of my students on what characteristics are representative of “female” writing versus “male” writing, which was one of the goals I wanted to achieve in that class. This opened the door for discussion on gendered genres later in the class.

 

In addition, engaging the class as a whole from the very beginning (rather than splitting them up into groups) proved to be helpful in promoting whole class discussion throughout the rest of the lecture. I am not sure if this was a fluke; I feel like extenuating circumstances are more likely to determine whether my students participate or not, but in any case I was glad of the result.

 

Friday we covered Delpit’s “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse” and Smitherman’s “‘God Don’t Never Change’: Black English from a Black Perspective.” This discussion was one of the best I’ve had with my class in some time. I was surprised, because I confessed to them I did not have a particularly “fun” or “engaging” way in to the material, but they were fairly forthcoming with their conversation on what some could perceive to be a difficult or uncomfortable topic. I stressed the conversation Delpit has with Gee in her article, and they seemed to enjoy seeing firsthand an author finally explicitly and thoroughly demonstrate this concept that I have emphasized from the second day of class.

 

I made a point of asking the students to quote more to me from the text, and I found this to be a really useful impetus for discussion and comprehension of the article. I have steadily increased my insistence on students’ reference to their textbooks in class, and I am finally seeing the benefits manifest themselves. I am absolutely going to continue to have my students get their textbooks out at the beginning of class and ask them questions which force them to look through the text during class time for quotes that answer my questions or support the claims they make about the text.

 

More so than with the other texts about marginalized groups, my students were able to see how this article related to writing in general, to them as a non-marginalized group, and to their own writing. I finally saw them discussing composition pedagogies in relation to this article, the other articles we’ve read, and their own experiences in the writing classroom. I can’t definitively explain this new enlightenment; I didn’t really do anything differently with this piece than with the others. Overall, I have tried to recycle more of the key terms from past articles into our present discussion of a text, as well as solicit more examples of how our current article relates to the others we’ve read (and offer my own,) pushing them to address the academic conversation we are covering as a whole. 

 

Overall this week reminded me that I need to stay on my toes, be flexible with my lesson plans, and to mix things up with my students once in a while. Always relying on group work can hurt as much as it can help, and to me there is nothing more satisfying that conducting a successful whole class discussion.

Teaching Journal #11

For Monday, we read Heilker and Yergeau’s “Autism and Rhetoric” in Readings on Writing as well as the Chapter 5 Introduction in Writing About Writing. Not having assigned homework on the Chapter 5 Introduction, I correctly suspected that many of my students did not read it closely, or even at all. To combat this, I read the rather short introduction aloud to the class and discussed what we would be covering in this next unit and what they should take from the readings. I think this was important to do, because if students don’t read the introductions to the various chapters in WAW as I assign them, they could have questions about how the readings are important for the class, why they have to read them, or how the readings relate to them and their writing.

 

Monday’s lesson plan was pretty straightforward. My students were able, through group analysis of the “Peter Speaks” and “Melanie Speaks” sections, to grasp the construct that autistic behaviors can be read as rhetorical tools of that specific language or discourse community.

 

In the interest of keeping students on task for Project 3, I have been dedicating about 5-10 minutes at the end of each class to ask students about their projects. I find this to hold students a little more responsible for the process work of the paper, and helps to keep them on track. For Monday, I went around the room and asked each student to share with the class what primary research they conducted over the weekend.

 

Wednesday’s class posed an interesting teaching challenge as we covered Victor Villanueva’s “Memoria Is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color” in Readings on Writing. From the beginning of the class, my students expressed a great deal of confusion about what Villanueva was even arguing. When I questioned why they found the article so difficult, they said that he used so much of the work of other authors, they easily lost sight of Villanueva’s own words. I ended up having to start the class by lecturing on Villanueva’s argument for the importance of memory in writing, specifically for writers of color. I pointed out relevant passages in Villanueva’s own words to help my students understand.

 

I then tried to illustrate for my students how Villanueva used various genres of writing from other scholars to illustrate his points. They accepted my argument, but maintained their stance that Villanueva did not rely enough on his own material in this article. This led to a very interesting discussion of academic writing as a genre, an analysis of the style of other articles we’ve read, and a throwback discussion of writing conventions.

 

Friday was a workshop day. I scheduled us in a computer classroom so everyone could follow along with the “Athens Music Community” paper I posted on BlackBoard. I had assigned the students to read the essay beforehand, but I figured if they had the paper in front of them even those who negelected to read it could follow along and make some sort of contribution to the discussion. I made a deal with my students beforehand, that, as long as they all agreed to participate in class discussion (and even—gasp—expect to be called on) I would not assign them any written homework to turn in on Friday. A good deal of my students participated, but I did not hesitate to call on those who did not. As a result, I had to put on my stern teacher hat for a moment and call out a couple of students who were visible disengaged (not following along with where we were in the paper, chair pushed away from the computer, etc.) I haven’t really had much trouble with authority in the classroom thus far, but I am a little worried these last few weeks might be a trial. I am going to continue to hold students accountable for homework and class discussion without adopting an accusatory tone. I usually play it off with a joke, which seems to cut down on potential hostility between the students and me.

Teaching Journal #10

In starting off Monday’s class, I asked each student to share what discourse community they would like to research. In this way I was able to address any problems I could foresee arising in a quick and efficient manner.

 

We also read and discussed Devitt et. al.’s “Materiality and Genre in Discourse Communities.” This essay did a good job of making students more familiar with the terms “genre” and “ethnography,” which the understanding and performance of will be vital for them to succeed in project three.

 

As a group activity, I split the class into three groups and had each group tackle a different essay, summarizing the main points of the article, identifying the genres discussed, and identifying how each mini-article fits into the larger article as a whole. Group work always seems to work fairly well with my class in terms of getting my students to discuss the readings. Whenever we do whole class discussion, the conversation is essentially limited to me and around five students; however, when we start off with group discussion, everyone seems to be comfortable participating on the smaller scale, and I am able to go around to each group and talk to some students who I would not normally have the opportunity to engage in discussion. I think perhaps their comfort with conversation among each other stems from the fact that they know each other well from being members of the same learning community.

 

Wednesday we discussed Malinowitz’s “Queer Texts, Queer Contexts.” I started out the class by asking the student to do a freewrite answering the question “what value does this article hold for non-LGBT community members?” I was hoping the answers would foster discussion on how we can talk about how this article’s concepts of discourse communities and identity can be applied to all writers within the composition classroom. What resulted was more of a discussion on the importance of everyone being exposed to LGBT issues. While I think this was a useful discussion on why we should all be exposed to these issued, I found myself having trouble getting the students to focus on how the article applied to composition. I had my students answer questions from the apparatus in groups, and this helped point the conversation more in the direction of the implications of Malinowitz’s definitions of identity and discourse community for the composition classroom. I’ll have to work harder next week in our session on Heilker and Yergeau to define the line between the activism in a piece and the rhetoric in a piece—which is actually applicable to our class.

 

For our workshop day on Friday, I basically copied the activity we did in 5890. I printed off 5 student essays and gave them to certain assigned groups (making sure no one had to review their own paper.) I then asked them to read the essay as a group an answer a group of questions similar to those we answered in our own workshop in 5890. This worked relatively well. I was hoping they would get more out of this workshop than they had with other workshops we’ve done in the past where I read the paper aloud. This way, at least, every student was forced to read another student paper and engage (at least a the group level) with some aspect of peer review.

 

I found myself having to be rather stern for the first time in my classroom when a student brought up grades (always a hot topic in any classroom.) This quickly escalated into a whole class discussion about the grading contract. Now, in addition to explaining the grading contract in depth on the first day, I have talked about the grading contract in class more than once throughout the semester. I was therefore a little surprised when some students expressed surprise at the fact that their absences counted as minor violations. I explained yet again what constituted a minor violation and that three minor violations equaled a drop in their grades by one letter.

Teaching Journal #9

Monday started off by me having to give my students an extension on their peer reviews. A number of my students did not complete their peer reviews because they waited to email each other links to their projects (even though I warned them many times against this.) This just further convinces me to create a Blackboard folder for project 2 links and peer reviews (like we did in 5910) the next time I teach this assignment. I let them turn the peer reviews in by noon on Tuesday and everyone met that extended deadline. I think I need to spend more time ironing out the logistics of teaching this project the next time around.

 

As an introduction to the discourse community ethnography unit readings, we discussed John Swales’s “The Concept of Discourse Community” and Cathy B. Glenn’s “Constructing Consumables and Consent: A Critical Analysis of Factory Farm Industry Discourse.”

 

In an effort to get my students thinking about project 3 early on, I had them define Swales’s six criteria for discourse communities and then we evaluated their suggested sample discourse communities as a classed based on those criteria. This wasn’t as illuminative for the students as I had hoped it would be, but I think it gave them a good base for starting to think about discourse communities, because their understanding slowly grew throughout the week. Plus, they are required to use Swales’s criteria as an evaluative tool in picking out their discourse communities on which they will write their ethnographies, so I think this was still a valuable exercise, and I would do it again. However, I might preface the activity by telling my students that they have to put each criterion in their own words. Often they would just read verbatim from the text and have no idea what each criterion actually meant.

 

With the Gee reading, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction,” I spent a little more time than usual on key terms, and I am glad I did. My students expressed serious confusion on discourse v. Discourse and the relationship between primary/secondary and dominant/nondominant. By forcing my students to attempt to define these terms, and then clarify and show examples when their ideas were a bit off, I think I was able to help them get a better basic understanding of the text. I was also able to elaborate on the relationships between these terms, which in some cases can be more confusing than the definitions themselves (i.e. a primary Discourse can be dominant or nondominant.) The rest of the class was whole class discussion, and went pretty well once the tone of the article had been set by our discussion of Gee’s pervasive key terms.

 

On Friday we discussed Wardle’s “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces.” I used Christina’s “trick email” activity as a way in to discuss authority in writing and discourse communities. I always email my students the homework that will be due for the next class a couple of hours before class time. So Friday, I took the opportunity for a teaching moment by sending my class an email about the homework for Monday that broke many of the conventions of the accepted genre as defined by our class. The email read as follows:

 

Hey peeps,

 

4 Monday do a RR on Devit &co….n doont forget to pick out a discourse community 4 ur paper

 

love, peace, and chicken grease,

 

ur teach

 

When I asked if anyone had read my email, a few laughed and nodded their heads. I displayed my email on the board for those who hadn’t had the chance to read it, and we discussed how the email affected their view of my authority. Somewhat surprisingly, the students all responded that the email did not make them think of me any differently. Those who didn’t just write it off immediately as a joke were very firm in their assertions that this did not give me any less authority in the classroom. They said that because I adhere to formal email conventions so often, they were less inclined to take this email as an indication that I was ignorant of or unwilling to conform to genre conventions. We actually got a very good discussion about authority out of this “trick email,” even though it did not make the students question my authority directly, it got them thinking and talking about authority in writing and discourse communities.

 

Overall the week was full of productive teaching. I tried some new activities, used some old favorites, and tweaked some based on the needs of the students and the difficulty of the readings.

Teaching Journal #8

As I rounded out the workshop days for project two, I noticed some trends with my students' projects.

 

Many took the "multi-modal" aspect of this project to mean that they didn't have to actually put a lot of thought into this project. I found, with most groups, a sort of intermediary stage between their story boards and their drafts submitted for peer review. As I went around to each group, assessing their progress and making suggestions on how to expand on what they thought were finished projects, I found myself having again and again to push my students to flesh out their ideas, either via more text or more visuals.

 

The next time I teach this course I am going to steer my students away from PowerPoint. The ones I have seen are really lackluster. And, though I know PowerPoint presentations can be jazzy and engaging in the hands of experienced professionals, I think they can be equally depressing and bland in the hands of the inexperienced student. The Weebly's and Prezi's I have seen seem to be a little easier to make truly multi-modal, with images, links, and embedded videos. Although, on the other hand, it may be more beneficial for students to become fully adept at using PowerPoint masterfully, as they might be more likely to use this visual medium down the line in their college careers and beyond.

 

The next time I teach this assignment I think I will show more examples of student projects. For our workshop day on Friday, I decided to show my students not one example of project 2's from other sections, but many. I like the way this turned out. I may do it again, or I may show more examples of projects earlier on in the process, like when I introduce the assignment. I think my react best when they see examples of what I am expecting. For instance, after class on Friday, one group came up and already had ideas for revision on the visual elements of their project, and they said it was thanks to seeing examples of what others had done. I was pleased, because they were able to self identify a problem with their project before they even had their project peer reviewed, and so were able to get a jump on the revision process over the weekend.

 

In this way we were able to assess different visual approaches to the assignment, something my students had been particularly struggling with. We discussed the design elements of CRAP, the use of hyperlinks, and cohesion between theme (if they had one) and message. I have drilled my students constantly about the importance of including all the elements I ask for in project two. To my delight, they were able to pick out instances where projects were lacking certain elements, even when they were not spelled out in clearly labeled sections.

 

On Friday, I spent some time lecturing on my expectations for peer reviews and revisions. I didn’t want to see the same problems I had seen with project one (peer reviews that only focused on grammar, even when whole required elements of the paper were missing, and revisions that weren't really revisions, just edits made for grammatical errors and typos.)

 

When I teach this course next semester, I am going to incorporate blogs for IWA's. Right now, I have some students turning in paper copies and some emailing me their assignments and it's insane. Lesson learned. I also am going to utilize blackboard more for project two. Why I didn't create an assignment area like we did in 5890 I have no idea. As it is, my inbox is flooded (and I am only teaching one class this semester.)