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.
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