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.