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.