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

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.