Urban Culture and Underserved Populations, Community College Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Teaching and Learning in Wartime

Dear All,

I am wondering if we might be able to bring up the war within the context of our "Pedagogy in the 21st Century" series. 

It seems to me we have all been operating from the hidden premise that it is possible to practice, research, or otherwise examine pedagogy without addressing this. 

It seems unacceptable to me that we at QCC have debated whether or not students should be allowed to perform poetry on the quad because it is offensive to some while there is complete silence about the war and what it means that military recruiters may set up their tents on the quad. 

In writing this entry, I was unsure about which category it should go under because all of them seem appropriate.  At first, I thought I might write it as a comment in response to Peter's latest entry about race and class because I see many points of intersection between our entries.  I finally settled on Politics and Ethics in the classroom, but it really belongs to all of the categories.

I believe it is vital that our discourse situate teaching and learning within this historical moment - as difficult as that may be.  It would be good to have an open discussion on campus and I would be willing to help with it.  I'd really like to know what the students feel about all of this. 

Summary of applicable ideas from our seminar this Spring

Hello All,

      This is a summary of easily-applicable ideas for improving teaching I extracted from the 3 presentations we had this spring; I read this on Friday.  They are mostly from the talk of Pedro Noguera, but these ideas have been reiterated and spoken about by all of us.  They by no means represent a complete list, but this is something we can add to.  I identified three groups, with the ideas within each:

Teacher support for students:

    Teacher-student mentoring
    Teacher expectations for student assignments clearly delineated
    Emphasis on development of supporting skills (eg. test-taking, bibliography) in students
    What is the "core" syllabus, and what can be traded for improved learning?

Teacher preparation

    Voluntary objective (not by the department, but by a separate entity (CETL?)) observation
    Early teacher evaluations - Why wait until it's too late to do anything (can be in addition to normal         evaluations)?
    A repertoire of teaching methods in addition to and supplanting the "cemetery" method
    Conversation and mentoring between departmental faculty on teaching styles
    Posting evaluations publicly - teacher accountability for learning

Curriculum

    Establishing personal connections to the syllabus for students, to enhance their participation in the         learning process
    Project-based learning
    Emphasis on critical thinking skills

Planning for Fall

Our meeting on Friday is an important one as we need to use that time to begin to plan our work for the fall.During the course of the semester some themes and topics have emerged in our discussions that we should now plan to investigate in more depth.

During Friday's meeting we would like to form 3-5 interest/working groups around the topics you would like to investigate.

The idea is that during the fall semester the groups will work on developing pedagogical research projects (around their topics) that they can investigate in their classes the spring semester.

We will try to plan the guest speakers for the fall seminar in relation to the topics you choose and we will provide support for research project design and for preparing an IRB proposal. We will ask each group to do some background research on their topic that will serve as a lit-review for their project and to share what they learned with the seminar group, sometime during the fall semester.

All projects should be designed with the intention that they will result in a publication (or publications for the group members.) Since Ron Scapp, who visited our seminar last time is editing  book series for SUNY press and encouraged us to consider proposing an edited volume for this book series, that is one venue we will pursue.

We really want everyone to work in groups because part of the purpose of the seminar is community building and your research projects will be more interesting and will yield more useful and valid data if they include larger samples and diverse input from your various areas of expertise. Some projects may be discipline focused, but some may include cross-disciplinary groups.

Here is a list of some possible topics for research/exploration. These are based on our seminar discussions and in most cases I tried to preserve the language that was used when we talked and wrote about them (though there are lots of ways to discuss and describe these issues and many of them are overlapping and intertwined.) Please read through them and begin to think about ideas for a project. If you have others that you would like included in the list please email them to me if possible (and/or they can be added on the day of the seminar.) These topics are intentionally broad/general to allow room for a range of ideas and with the idea that you will develop your specific interests in relation to them.

• Assessment, "Audits of Learning," "Visible and Invisible Learning"
• Student Preparation and "coverage vs. depth"
• Addressing remedial needs while engaging students in higher order and critical thinking
• Affect and learning
• Language and Culture in the Classroom
• Preparing students for the workforce vs. other conceptions of education and other teaching and learning goals
• Students as agents of history (&/or student agency in general)

I look forward to seeing you!

Belle

Academic Law and Order

Picking up
        "PostScript: Of Pomo
Academicus" where Scapp's
            postmodernism's impact(s)
                strike at "...the stability
of academic law and order..." (120)
    tongue-in-cheekily
                he names for me
one concern I hear
         read, echoed, returned to
    throughout his and hooks'
work:
            I'm not really interested in (re)
debating Derrida's now-method
                or "complicated and rich
philosophical critique" (122)

but
        in thinking with the idea
                of an order and law
    we follow (broadly as academics
citizens people job holders on the way to
            or past tenure processes) or resist
on our way to "questioning"
                    whatever we are questioning

[Who's the sheriff in this town? (cue dusty
whistle sagebrush tumbleweedy quickdraw music)
(The Onion's recent podcast plays
the 'new sheriff in town'  motif playfully perfectly:
the current sheriff is doing a fine job and the town
doesn't need a new six-shooter...)]

an orthodoxy so difficult to resist
    so difficult to push against

(can I call that lawfaithfulness?)

        is the "they [students]
need jobs and part of our [academic
               faculty members, via curriculum
    classroom practices, institutionalization
            of ideas] job

(though some days it feels we

articulate only this)

    is to prepare students for said marketplacejobmarket..."

                       What resonates
here, now, rereading Scapp rereading
    Foucault is Foucault's
            call to the local, "specific sectors"
    where a "much more immediate and concrete awareness
of struggles" (125) becomes, maybe,
                    more visible
    tangible....

and the question of jobmarketmarketplacepreparation
            (should be?) (must?) may be (maybe a musty
dusty exercise of irrelevance to ask? I say no) un-utilized as a catch
                    all panacea explication
    of our enterprise (at a community

                college) and replaced by a serious
    looksadaisy at student articulation of
                      their skooled-enterprise

engaged
with our own
professional expertise and understanding
                    of power, discourse, knowledge
    and how they circulate --

Might this, the above that is, be

a pedagogy of hopefulness, situated?

It is the "utter
            rationality" of the call of the market
place to place students
                and circumscribe
    (and it does circumscribe the might-imagined
as alternative enterprises
        of our classroom (and disciplinary?) work)

our work. And it pisses me off.

hooks and Scapp

“Building a Teaching Community: A Dialogue”

My mind is (I originally mistyped “is” as “id”!) swirling with notions of bodies and classrooms, of erasure and assertion, of power implied and realized…and I’ve been wanting to start writing as I’ve read this dialogue but have found the…reminder… that hooks/Scapp continue to see “university settings as sites for the reproduction of a privileged class of values, of elitism” (140) as a provocative (or not really provocative enough) place to insert my voice.

It is their emphasis on “practicing teaching” that I find refreshing and challenging (but that also makes me skeptical) -- how we use our bodies, how we actually move around the room, ‘embody’ the knowledge and traditions we consider as our expertise, what we ask of students (and how we ask it of them). hooks mentions “tone of voice,” for example. Does my tone of voice really have that much impact on how I insist that the writers in my classes participate rather than observe and be passive (though observation can be a part of a process of activity, right?)?

I can’t help but hear echoes of my work with colleagues struggling to incorporate writing assignments – how students suddenly become visible and that the language of the class suddenly becomes much more negotiable in ways that it wasn’t previously when students were not asked to write out their thinking (instead, for example, only taking scantron exams). When we talk about language we can’t not talk about race and class and even gender. What language(s) do we end up privileging? I encounter this in my own poetry class – even this semester, seeing in myself a preference in my commentary and grading for certain kinds of language over others, even when students consciously locate themselves in a specific tradition of poetry writing (and it happens to be one that I don’t necessarily value as they do…).

[I know I’m kind of spinning out my thinking about my specific class, but, well, I’m asking that you accept my contribution here as including this kind of thinking – even if you don’t recognize it as relevant to your own specific case…]

Ok, let me jump a bit to this quote: “I think our fear of losing students’ respect has discouraged many professors from trying new teaching practices”(145). Something like this idea came up with some graduate students I’m working with recently (with Belle) – it was fear but in terms of trying something that might “fail”. Our suggestion was to be upfront with the students involved, to let them know you are trying something new and are not sure how it will work, but to explain why you are trying it….

So let me link that idea to something that happened in my class: throughout the semester I have told my students to push back on assignments that I give if they just don’t work, but that in doing so they must be willing to have thought carefully about why they are choosing an alternative to my assignment and be willing to defend it. I had (gasp!)(the nerve!) several students actually push back, but not on specific assignments. It was on midterm grades. I asked the class, after handing back their midterm portfolios, how they were doing, what they were feeling after getting their grades (they were very quiet for a while, so I rode out their silence). Finally one student burst: she was pissed, frustrated, wanted to know why she got the grade she did, whether anyone else received better grades and wanted to know why.

So there I was, all eyes on me, called upon to justify to the whole class both individual grades and the collective feeling of frustration about their grades. Lots of nodding heads to the question, “Anyone else feel this frustrated?” So I talked about how I graded and why I graded. I was felt a bit defensive (do I deserve this?! I’m a good teacher! I thought they liked me, got me.). At the same time I recognized and valued that they were willing to take the chance, express their anger and make it a part of our ongoing conversation.

Then I found myself conflicted, or not conflicted but pushed to reflect in a serious way about their response (which was quite angry) and to seriously reexamine my own grading process and how I was complicit in provoking such emotion. It made me uncomfortable. I told them so. But I also told them that they did exactly what they should have done- approach me, confront me in a respectful way, address the issue and find a solution. I don’t know that what ended up happening was my “affirm[ation of] the value of student voices” (149) – of taking students seriously in a way that is negotiated and that attends to the many complex and overlapping contexts we live in our classrooms. But I think it was. It felt like it to me at the time and upon further reflection.

Pete

Audits of Learning

I've been reading widely across the blog posts this morning - affect, emotion and learning, deep learning versus surface learning, race - and also reflecting on the WAC workshop I ran last night for people teaching WI classes for the first time and our conversation there about ESL student writing and our collective difficulty in addressing ESL student texts in ways that (we hope are) productive...

part of that conversation revolved around the emotional states of ESL students and the level of comfort (for lack of a better word) that ESL students do or do not feel vis-a-vis working in English...

and thinking, as well, about a conversation I had with one of my classes about "how they are doing" (seriously, that is what I asked one morning) and after a few moments of awkward silence, they spilled

I  started thinking (again) about how we audit the learning going on in our classes:

I guess I'm thinking here not only about tests or quizzes that we may give (I gave a "pop" quiz on an essay I asked my class to read the other day, not only to make sure they read the assignment but also to gauge their understanding of the essay in context of the larger issues of the class), but the other ways we audit the learning (a colleague next door to me is meeting with his students in one on one conversations, for example). 

So I have several questions: what kinds of audits do we use? how do we use them? do they combine auditing not only the..."factual" learning of a class but also the affective domains, as well?

Peter

Cognition and Affect

I wanted to pick up on the conversation that started at last week's seminar about the role of emotions in learning.  i think its no accident that we wound up at this place, given the focus of the two speakers on issues of community building in educational contexts.

To begin, I wanted to clarify some of the terminology we were using because, for some, it is new territory. The term "affective" is used (particularly in the fields of psychology, education) as an adjective that means: "pertaining to or exciting emotion." "Affect" refers to feeling or emotion.

To give you an idea of the degree to which interest in the role of the affective in learning is being investigated at the institutional level, I point your attention to JCAL, The Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, a peer reviewed journal published out of Oxford College at Emory University.

I also wanted to direct your attention to this article, "Affective Learning--a manifesto," (linked here) from the October 04 issue of BT Technology Journal, a special issue published in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. In some ways it is a bizarre piece of literature in that it has, as one of its goals, the development of a theory of affective learning that would enable/support the design of "intelligent" "teaching" computers that could respond to learner's affective responses and needs as well as their cognitive responses and needs.

At this time, I don't want to even begin to say what I think about that project, (I'm some combination of appalled, bemused, and intrigued) BUT, that said, I like this article very much in the ways that it clearly lays out the established importance of affect in learning as well as some of the challenges, terminologies, and theories. I also like it because it is written by and for scientists and I feel therefore that it may help to bridge the humanities/sciences dualism that sometimes colors our conversations about the role of emotion/affect in learning--where the affective is characterized by some as that "touchy feely" stuff that's fine in English classes but has no place in the  rigorous realm of the sciences.

I would like to invite all of you to read this article with me and to continue, here on the blog, the conversation we started in the seminar last Friday.

Another issue of interest that was raised, (by Peter) but not yet fully explored was the degree to which we are prone to speak and think of emotion and learning (cognition and affect) as separate things--and even as at odds with each other, rather than interdependent. This issue is addressed some in the article and would bear further exploration here as well.

--Belle

Teaching in a Community College

Teaching in a community college is one of the many rewarding services that we can offer to our community. You have to have a passion for people to be happy with your job as a community college teacher. The quality of teaching is not based on the degree that you have but it is based on the commitment for the quality of teaching. You have to have an open mind and an open heart  to help, which is the only way that you can decipher how you can offer the best learning experience for the “people” who are your students.

With the open door policy of community colleges we are inviting people to come to us to help them achieve their dreams. Our students are coming from diverse backgrounds, age, requirements, culture and learning ability. They have jobs, they have other commitments and they have taken the very important decision of educating themselves, to either change or advance in  their career or complete a degree and do something for themselves.

Comparing a “two year college” or more commonly called “community college” to a four year college, we have to determine our roles as instructors and what is required from us to do the best job? We cannot assume the role of “instructors as dictators”, we cannot assume that all students have the ability to take responsibility to excel and we cannot adhere to our traditional format of teaching or being teachers.

The mainstream student body is to attain a degree or skill to entitle them to get into the workforce. Teaching should be the emphasis of a college that claims itself to be a community college.

I would like to quote – “ Although instructors often view themselves as the ultimate authority on the subject matter, it is still up to the learners to determine whether the ideas presented in the session should be incorporated into their work or personal lives. Despite the primary role of the learner, instruction is not a passive, laid-back, go-with-the-flow process for the instructor. As the facilitator and catalyst for participants’ learning, the instructor makes it possible for learning to happen by designing and performing all the activities that the learning process requires. Sullivan, Wircenski, Arnold and Sarkees (1990) assert that the establishment of a positive learning climate hinges on understanding the characteristics of adult learners who will be participating in the instructional process.”

Students who come to our classes are adults. Adults have different attitude towards learning – they have experience; they have a mental model of the topic or the class that they are taking; they have expectations; they tend to decide what they need to learn and they have the need to validate the information and above all they have self respect.

Taking into account all of these premonitions, the teacher/instructor has to think differently.

I have prioritized the requirements as I think will help to be effective.

1. To create professional, caring, welcome atmosphere in the classroom.
2. The teacher has to place himself/herself to the students as a facilitator and guide.
3. As we, the instructors, value student’s knowledge and capacity to learn, the mode of instruction will not be the traditional way of dissemination and assimilation of information.
4. Emphasis has to be on active participation. Instructor has to set a dialogue that instruction will be through interaction.
5. Getting to know the students is essential. This allows to break the barrier between instructor and student, it is respectful and provides for self-esteem.
6. To know their expectations. Asking questions as “What is my (student’s) role in the class and what is the role of the instructor?”
7. To assess their knowledge at the beginning of each teaching unit. A common way of doing that is to have a pre-lecture quiz on the topic or raise a discussion topic.
8. Based on the input from the class, the instructor has to design the mode of delivery of information to make it most effective.
9. To provide students with supplemental material to keep them engaged and connected to the material, when not in class and to create their curiosity or desire to learn more on the topic from relevant research work and web links.
10. Assessing whether their learning has met our expectations. The instructor has to have a variety of assessment techniques to evaluate student learning.

---Samita

1. To create professional, caring, welcome atmosphere in the classroom.
2. The teacher has to place himself/herself to the students as a facilitator and guide.
3. As we, the instructors, value student’s knowledge and capacity to learn, the mode of instruction will not be the traditional way of dissemination and assimilation of information.
4. Emphasis has to be on active participation. Instructor has to set a dialogue that instruction will be through interaction.
5. Getting to know the students is essential. This allows to break the barrier between instructor and student, it is respectful and provides for self-esteem.
6. To know their expectations. Asking questions as “What is my (student’s) role in the class and what is the role of the instructor?”
7. To assess their knowledge at the beginning of each teaching unit. A common way of doing that is to have a pre-lecture quiz on the topic or raise a discussion topic.
8. Based on the input from the class, the instructor has to design the mode of delivery of information to make it most effective.
9. To provide students with supplemental material to keep them engaged and connected to the material, when not in class and to create their curiosity or desire to learn more on the topic from relevant research work and web links.
10. Assessing whether their learning has met our expectations. The instructor has to have a variety of assessment techniques to evaluate student learning.

Metaphors for knowledge/random thoughts

I have always referred to students as mine or my "kids" and somehow had convinced myself that this meant I cared about them, which I genuinely do. However, it never occurred to me, and apparently not to them either, that there are connotations of ownership and power contained in those possessive pronons.

********************************************************************************************************************

In response to Belle's comments about how we so easily reduce things to economic relationships, I think the same can be said of the educational community. More and more we hear about how there are achievement gaps for underserved students, yet the very measures aimed at helping those students are targeted at the students most likely to be successfull and not those that are neediest. We are about to offer scholarships to students who can commit to a full-time education and are triple-exempt from any type of remedial work. While this is admirable, it ignores a large population of students who have tuition covered by PELL grants, but cannot come full-time because  most work to supplement the family's meager public assistance allowances. These students are often those who are in the lowest-level remedial classes, who may have GEDs because they dropped out of day school to work to support the household and who are now being excluded from an opportunity to get ahead. If we only wish to help those who don't need remedial work and don't need to work to help their families, aren't we making an economic choice to help only those who will provide the biggest pay-off to the college? Can we and should we be doing more?

Margot

Conversations about Learning

In supplement to and in dialogue with the reading that Dr. Rojas has suggested, I would like to also strongly encourage you to read this article by Theordore Marchese, former vice President of AAHE:

"The New Conversation about Learning: Insights from Neuroscience and Anthropology, Cognitive and Workplace Studies."

I think it provides greater depth on some issues raised in the Reynolds article and a broader overview (including acknowledgement of the controversies) of how some work in nueroscience and cognitive science has been taken up in relation to teaching and learning.