I'm always encouraging students to visit my office for extra help with assignments, further explanations of difficult concepts, or general check-ins. It's an opportunity for me to celebrate successes, encourage, motivate, and supplement. Last summer The Chronicle of Higher Education published two articles on faculty office spaces or how best to help our students connect with us outside of class and then I set up in a new office as a new faculty member at Bowie State University, so I have been thinking about office space a great deal in the last nine months or so. I decided to communicate the inclusivity of my office space to students with a little sign I made.
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I use sequenced assignments to plan all of my courses.
Sequencing assignments allows educators to think purposefully about each piece of a course and to break their major assignments down into step-by-step processes, which helps students feel less overwhelmed and learn strategies they can use beyond the classroom. This is a visualization of eight sequences I use in WRT 106 at URI, Introduction to Research Writing. For the first homework assignment every semester I ask students to read the syllabus in full and answer a few questions to give me a sense of their preparedness or enthusiasm for the course and how I can support them in my teaching. After asking what they are looking forward to and how they plan to handle things that look challenging, I ask, “What do you think I can most help you with?” It is, intentionally, a pretty open question. Students answer in varying degrees of specificity. Some students know what they want help with, but in composition courses I often get replies like:
“Everything. I’m not a good writer.” “I hate writing, so I guess making it interesting.” “Tell me when I make mistakes.” These discouraged answers don’t discourage me. I see my niche in these answers—a place where I my help is needed and I belong. Answers like these show me students who can’t quite point to what intimidates them about writing or what, specifically, they have a hard time with. They might know that they have gotten low grades on writing assignments, or that someone told them they are “bad” at it, or someone once filled their assignments with red-inked marginalia like “awk.” or ✓ and they don’t know what it’s all about. The students I work with come from diverse backgrounds, socioeconomically, racial, culturally, and educationally. For my students from underserved communities, writing anxiety often stems from feeling or being unprepared for something as intensive as “college writing.” For my students who are English Language Learners, there is the challenge of writing effectively in a language they are learning and, particularly for international and immigrant students, the cultural challenge of writing in an American context with its direct, up-front arguments that can seem too forward, even aggressive. For my students who are first generation college students, there is the added problem of trying to figure out college, know which questions to ask, or find out where to get support. For my students with learning disabilities, writing can be a frustrating, disheartening activity and the pressure to write well is on. For my students from low-income families there is the very real problem of not being able to afford course materials, which can quickly result in learning setbacks if their instructors don’t know or don’t help. For my non-white students, there is often also the problem of not seeing themselves reflected in the institution or their course materials (hello, literature by dead white dudes). Because of the legacy of institutionalized racism in this country, many of these experiences intersect. What sounds like dislike of writing, or even like a student’s reluctance to try, can be a sign of another, bigger issue. I respond to these issues through the three principles at the heart of my teaching: breaking each assignment and skill down step-by-step, making room for practice, and building in opportunities for feedback along the way. Breaking everything down step-by-step makes the challenging work less intimidating. Instead of focusing on the number of pages or sources, my students work through the writing process incrementally. Making purposeful, step-by-step plans also means choosing affordable materials and planning their use accordingly. It involves taking time to discuss cultural writing forms with international students. One of the best things I do in my courses is turn my classrooms into writing workshops where we can build, tinker, or modify writing projects. Writing is a skill we learn by doing, so we practice writing and work on assignments in class. This gives me opportunities to work with writers one-to-one, to be called over for advice, and to give real-time interventions and help (rather than only assessing a final product and finding that a student missed something important). My students with learning and language difficulties benefit from this on-the-spot response and additional explanation. I have been increasingly refining this approach over the past three years, no doubt influenced by my summer tutoring for incoming college students from underserved and low-income communities. Obviously practice benefits from feedback. Feedback (from me and from peers, along the way and when drafts are done) helps keep up writing momentum and supports consistent improvement. These methods help build confidence and capability. It’s important to look at examples when we learn something new. My students agree and frequently say this is a learning strategy that works for them. In a writing course that means reading. When I ask for critical writing, I provide critical reading that examines relatable cultural phenomena. Recently we looked at what Beyoncé’s music says about American culture and the complex historical, political, and cultural value of sneakers. We break these pieces down, look at how they work, and find examples of how writers analyze, evaluate, and argue. Then I ask students to develop their own cultural criticisms, insights, and evaluations, one step at a time. Valuing student voices, experiences, and observations improves their confidence. It shows students they have something to contribute, no matter where (literally or figuratively) they’re coming from. At the end of every semester I collect anonymous course feedback to supplement institutional student evaluations and to get a more detailed picture of the course’s success and my teaching from my students’ perspectives. I ask about whether the course was useful and invite them to “please evaluate my teaching style and skills.” To me, the VERY best compliment I can get isn’t that I’m a great teacher. It’s hearing I helped someone become more confident in their writing: “Struggling with English I can say that I am more confident with my writing.” “You make me try harder and believe in my ability.” “I pushed myself to become something I wasn’t before.” I’m teaching URI’s Introduction to Research Writing this semester, which I love because I always get to learn so much about things I may not otherwise read about. My students’ topics have included:
The course progresses from a formal research proposal to an annotated bibliography and a persuasive essay. In the past I have assigned a field research report, but after varied levels of success with it, I decided to assign a public document this semester instead. This assignment closes the course by asking students to design a document that could bring the research they’ve conducted and the arguments they’ve developed to another, broader audience beyond our classroom. While students will write and design something that could influence others, it’s not actually an action project in the sense that I’m not asking students to organize campaigns or events, or even to make their document public if they’d rather not. As much as I want this to be a truly public document—that is, for it to be made public—I cannot ethically require it. If a student designs a flyer, poster, or brochure they would have to spend money to share it in print. Another student could design a website for free. I am compelled to keep the print media options because students might determine that one of them is best for reaching the audience they have identified based on their topic and argument. For the rest of the course I will have determined our writing genres (proposal, bibliography, essay), but this is a chance for students to choose their genre (from a list of options), as well as the design, purpose, and audience (the four broad bases of the rhetorical situation as we are studying it). It needs to engage students’ skills, creativity, and analytical thinking. This week, my colleague Bridget Fullerton (First-Year Writing Coordinator in URI’s Department of Writing & Rhetoric) hosted a workshop for instructors of first-year writing fittingly titled “Inspire Creativity!” The workshop gave me an opportunity to discuss and think through methods for helping students use multi-modal forms of presenting their research. The assignment options always included the above-mentioned flyers, posters, or brochures as well as online videos, websites, and blogs. I decided to add other options like Instagram accounts, Facebook pages, and Prezis or other presentations that are shareable and deliverable. My hope is that some students will take the option to make their public document live and reach some as yet unknown public. I hope they will have conviction in their ideas and confidence in their delivery. I hope they will tap the skills they had before to highlight the skills built in our course. I hope they see how fun research and writing can be. This trimester at JWU I have the privilege of teaching "The Working Life," an interdisciplinary course blending literature, sociology, and history. I’ll be leading this course at JWU’s “downcity” Providence campus in a part of the city peppered with 19th- and early 20th-century brick industrial buildings and overlooking the historic jewelry district.
This week we start by examining what work means to us and introduce the relationship between our work and our identities. To help us think about this relationship, I’ll introduce research on how we find satisfaction in our work by playing a TedEd talk from Dan Ariely, “What Makes Us Feel Good About Our Work?”. Ariely covers the answers to this question as they are borne out in his research in behavioral economics and I think students will find it interesting. Ariely and his fellow researchers found that people will continue a menial task for sequentially reduced pay up to a certain point if it feels meaningful to them. In their experiment they asked participants to build a Lego Bionicle (action figure), for $3.00, but the next at $2.70, and so on. When people stopped it was because the "work" no longer felt worth it for the pay. However, in a second stage of the experiment, researchers took apart the last Bionicle built as participants constructed the next one. They found that people were likely to find less satisfaction, stop sooner, and build fewer of the action figures under these conditions. The ever-reducing pay continued just as before, but this time there occurred a more rapid loss of satisfaction in the “work.” They called this the “Sisyphic condition.” (Obviously named for Sisyphus.) In his talk, Ariely says, “you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if [Sisyphus] pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress…There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating…this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes…we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity.” Obviously destroying someone’s work as they complete it is a very clear cut example, but what about other work we do that turns out to be futile? If a project is not successful—perhaps a rejected proposal or a plan that gets scrapped because things move in a different direction—how can we still maintain satisfaction with the work we did? One answer, Ariely says, is in the sense of ownership that comes of hard work, effort, and pride. That, I think, will be a very good thought for the start of the trimester. K |
BlogThoughts on pedagogy, updates on projects, and analyses of texts, cultural phenomena, social issues, and intellectual curiosity. Archives
November 2017
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