Thinking Through Practice: Community College Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Spring 08 Semester Begins

Hello everyone.

As a reminder, these are the dates we will meet this semester: Feb 6, Feb 20, Mar 5 (in Denver for Innovations), Mar 19, Apr 9 (to make up for 4Cs conference), Apr 16, Apr 30, May 14.

In anticipation of next week's meeting and to begin our conversation about being in the classroom, please post on your blogs:

- what did you do/have you set up to connect with students and introduce the class?
- what did you do to create "atmosphere"?
- how did you set expectations for the work of the semester and what has the response been so far?

Please post at least twice so we can get in the rhythm again of posting and reading the blogs.

Pete

For Tuesday November 13

For our meeting on the 13th, please read and blog on:

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success, by Alice S. Horning at
http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/horning2007.cfm

Scaffolding Writing Skills for ESL Students in an Education Class at a Community College, by Diane D’Alessio, Margaret Riley at
http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol13/dalessio_riley.pdf

President's Reception

I want to remind you (belatedly) that we have the President's Reception tonight at 5p. He will be interested in hearing about your experience in the practicum so far, the research project we are engaging in designing and which you all will help implement next semester, your own research agendas and dissertation topics, and your changing sense of community colleges (understood broadly; as locations for (pedagogical) research; etc.).

We'll meet at 445p at the English Department and walk over together, or meet us in the President's office on the fifth floor of the Administration building.

See you.
Peter

Woeful Neglect

Colleagues, apologies for neglecting this blog (and blogging in general) over the past week or so. I was supposed to post this way last week, but alas, allowed life and other work to intervene. Again, apologies.

Last meeting, Belle asked you all to anticipate tomorrow's class in the following ways:

On Oct 23, we will talk about

1. Issues of coverage vs. depth

2.  Grading

We wanted you to bring

3. copies of the departmental syllabus for the class you will be teaching in the spring

4. Post revised teaching statement to blog before class

and

5. develop a rubric for your reading and writing assignment

So, because this is so late in getting to you, do as much as you can for tomorrow and we'll take up the slack at our next meeting. Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow night.

Peter

Reminder: For 10/9

Read the materials we gave you on the ACT and CPE and look at the online tutorial for the ACT at:
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/cuny/act/launch.html

Review the article on CUNY open admissions, from last week, that we didn't discuss yet.

Read the overview of the Reading Research Project and be prepared to comment in class.

Bring with you one reading assignment and one writing assignment that you will (or could) use in the course you will teach in the spring.

Possible Blogging topics could include any of the following (or whatever else is on your pedagogical minds:

1.the CUNY open admissions atrticle

2. The ACT or CPE (what can you determine/extrapolate about these tests based on what you see in the materials we gave you and the online guide to the ACT? The ACT has been particularly controversial at CUNY--from looking at the related materials can you imagine why/how/what kinds of issues are raised?)

3. The reading research project proposal

4. Your thoughts on assigning reading and writing in your classes. How do you think about the role of reading and writing in your courses--how do you connect reading or writing assignments to your course goals?

Bass; Problems; Being Intentional

I was wandering through the Bass article yesterday right before my first year composition class. When I hit his sentence, "...I resolved to make every course component intentional" (2), I couldn't not think about my own imminent class. Was today, every part of what I'd set up, intentional? How much was I relying on models of past teachers and practices that worked for me? Had I made visible, and had I planned enough to communicate, the value of what we were about to do to the writers in my class?

Yesterday, the writers were to bring in a first draft of a literacy narrative (basically a history of how they came to be the reader and writer they are today). We'd read a variety of essays and narratives about literacy, literacy development, several literacy narratives, they'd written bits and pieces. For yesterday, they were to collect all they'd written and cull from it all a draft, a single text.  So I began the class by asking them to read their own text to themselves, making any changes (editorial or otherwise) that they wanted to. Then I asked them to reflect on where the text is in its development and where they imagine it could go, what they still wanted to work on, what parts they were particularly proud of, etc.

Then I collected the drafts and the reflections about their drafts and redistributed them randomly, and told the to just read what their colleagues had written. Don't do anything else, don't correct, don't edit, don't comment, just read with a sense of curiosity and discovery. I collected the drafts again and repeated the process. After this second reading, I asked them to reflect in writing on what they'd noticed in the drafts, what surprised them, and how they were now feeling about their own drafts (do they have new ideas about how to proceed? were there ideas they could steal for their own texts?). Then I sent them outside to walk around, to take a break for five minutes.

When they came back, I asked for some discussion on what we'd done so far, their thinking, why I was asking them to just read each other's drafts. Here I spent some time talking about why I wanted them to engage in this process (see below). After this discussion, I redistributed the drafts randomly, but this time I included a handout they were to use to offer commentary on the draft of their colleague (identify and explain why you find a particular passage interesting; identify and explain a passage that you'd like to hear more about; write out any questions you have for the writer that might help her re-see the draft).

That done, each writer received their own draft back with the original reflection on the draft, the draft, and the comments from a colleague reader. Taking all three together, I asked them to sketch out a plan for revision: based on seeing the comments and reading the other drafts, what do you want to do to your own draft and how will you do it? Then I sent them off for the day. (This process took the entire hour and forty minutes).

On intentionality:
The Bass provoked me in a rather immediate way to ask myself why I'd designed the class as I had. One of my goals is to encourage students to adopt practices that will allow them to re-see, re-envision, their own writing throughout the process of writing a text. I want to have them find a process where they can be doing the writing and be thinking in a meta way about what they are trying to do and why. I want them to feel like they can imagine more than one possible future for each text that they begin. As for reading (and JUST reading) each other's drafts, I wanted them to begin practicing seeing each other's writing as writing - as texts that were worked on (some more than others) and that deserved the time to be read and engaged with. I also wanted to slow down the whole process of feeling like they wrote a text and now there wasn't anything to think about or do until the teacher's comments came back to them on their drafts. I wanted them to begin to take more control over what they wanted their text to be like. 

With the handout, I wanted them to begin to see how they could productively respond to each other in ways that did not fall into correcting or editing, but rather communicated their experience as a reader to the writer (ultimately hoping that they can begin to see their own writing "with the eyes" of a reader. There was something in Bartholomae to this effect, but I'll have to go find that particular reference -- something he wrote that I liked about students coming to understand that their intentions are ultimately not as important as the words they choose to put on the page because readers won't have access to their intentions, only their words.

Pete

SOTL in the Disciplines

For 9/25:

Read the Huber article on Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SOTL.)

Read the article on SOTL in your discipline and prepare to report to the group about the kind of research it describes and how that compares with other research in the discipline.

Also, find another example of SOTL in your discipline and be prepared to discuss it.

Here are some possible sources for finding such articles:

ASA published a journal called Teaching Sociology

Journal of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education publishes articles on teaching in the Arts and Humanties

The Journal of Educational Psychology and Teaching of Psychology are two Psych Journals that publish research on teaching

Teaching English in the Two-Year College is one place to find scholarship specifically on Community College Pedgaogy (for English profs.)

First draft of your teaching statement due.

Also read the article we gave you in class on CUNY Open Admissions.

Reminder for 9/11

Bring a copy of a syllabus from a class you have taught (preferably an entry level class)

Reading:

David Bartholomae, “Inventing the University"

Peter Stearns “General Education Revisited Again”

Pete's "visible learning" draft

I think of Paul, in my Freshman Comp classroom. I don’t now remember the assignment but I think it was a pretty standard “bring these three essays together” into some kind of argument (draw some comparisons, how do they speak to each other, that kind of thing). I don’t recall whether he asked for permission to do so, but I do remember encouraging the class to be creative, try something new, to write something interesting and that interested them. Paul handed in a comic book: it was six pages of his draft, each of the three authors represented by a character. He knew what he was doing; knew comic books had his own visual style that was consistent across each panel. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I encouraged him to keep going, was thrilled with the creativity, the uniqueness.

 His next draft was 15 pages or so, elaborately drawn and scanned into his computer, then printed up. What I most remember was having a conversation after class, me bent over his comic book draft, he sitting back watching. I was perplexed, couldn’t name my discomfort with his work until finally it hit me. I said to him, “This is an ok academic essay that looks like a comic book. But it’s not a comic book. It’s missing the stuff I associate with the kind of adult comic book you seem to want to write here….where is the moral ambiguity,…the sudden use of jarring images….” In that moment I realized my problem, and his. And he did too, when he said back to me, “I need to get a good grade. If I wrote you a comic, I wouldn’t get a good grade.” I had pressed him into a corner, and he had written himself into that corner: I had asked him to engage in a complex negotiation of genre and audience and context when I wasn’t even sure how to do it, nor did I feel equipped to guide him, until, really it was too late…ok so that was more about me learning….

Chicken or Egg?

At the beginning of this semester, David raised the issue of theory and practice as a kind of chicken and egg question, prompted by his reading of the Randy Bass article, “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?”  David appreciated Bass’s suggestion that scholarly questions about teaching emerge from classroom “problems” and echoed that his own interests in and questions about pedagogy, always also begin there.  He offered the example of an incident in his class last year that had served to shape his initial “Teaching Statement,” and then pointed out that, with the semester starting, the “problem” of how to approach the first day of class (boring overview? or jump_right_in?) was looming now. 

This made me think about how we had structured the practicum during the first semester, starting with a slew of “big questions” about concepts of schooling, the identity of Community Colleges, concepts of literacy and knowledge, civic education, etc. If Peter and I had been more “constructivist” in our approach we might have asked more specific questions about your (practicum participants’) prior teaching experiences and your immediate questions and concerns about going into the classroom, and then started with readings and discussions that would address those issues. From there, many of the theoretical issues would have emerged.

For example, it’s interesting to think back now on our conversation, last fall, about the concept of civic education. The Carnegie article was superficial and didactic and almost everyone recoiled, and distanced themselves from it and, consequentially, also from the idea of civic education (I first typed “civic vacation”—why do they put the spring break so late in the semester…?) Yet, Susan, in a recent blog entry wrote:

Today we began our discussion with a comparison of ideology and agenda. I used George Bush as an example, asked them to identify common ideological catch phrases Bush uses. They did well on foreign policy (homeland security; war on terror; axis of evil) but not so good on domestic policy (family values (should have been easy, that one!); no child left behind). I think they understood better when we finished, though. Then we mapped the ideologies to political agenda. They did very well on that! I will turn them into little subversives, if it's the last thing I do.

Sounds like a commitment to, or at least an interest in something like “civic education. No?

Back in February Neil wrote:

But even in 101, I'm used to spending more time discussing content.  I would rather talk about the implications of Marx on our contemporary experience than discuss the mechanics and style that make up a "manifesto.

which also suggests (to me) that he sees a potential value, in a writing class, in introducing students to ideas  that could effect how they function as citizens.

I’m thinking also that another effect of foregrounding pedagogical theory and “the big questions” (in the chronological structure of the practicum) is that it places a political (for lack of a better word) agenda, shared by Peter and I, at the center of the conversation, from the start. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it has some consequences, which I want to consider, as we reflect on the year and think about next year’s practicum.

Finally, as I said in class when David first raised the issue (of theory and practice/chicken and egg) I feel strongly that whether we are thinking about (or even directly interested in) the “big questions”;” we are always enacting choices in our teaching that reflect our beliefs. For this reason, I think it’s crucial to explore these questions/issues and to examine the (evolving) relationship between our practices and our beliefs. BUT, I’m wondering whether it might work better to approach it more from the other side in the practicum—starting with more focus on practice and moving towards theory?

Thoughts? Suggestions?