I have this little tickle telling me to start by saying, settle-down people, it’s alright. I know On-line classes are increasing in popularity. And although I’ve only taught (or better, ‘monitored’) one of them, I can see why. They certainly offer all kinds of flexibility to commuter students—those with jobs, kids, marriages and so on. Not that traditional freshman don’t have lives beyond the campus, it’s just that, for the most part, traditional freshman don’t have lives beyond the campus. And that’s great. My Miami University students have very little to do expect figure out this kaleidoscope of a world in the company of new (most likely life-long) friends, new ideas, and the strange people they call professors. At IUE things are different, and while most of the students there make strange faces when I use the phrase ‘On-Line Class,” they’re all bound to use them at some point. Their schedules will demand it, and the administration keeps offering more and more of it’s courses in an on-line format. What I think is most interesting, and probably most surprising, is that whatever the on-line class they’re forced to take, these students are going to engage in the material in ways that a teacher simply would not have provided.
Look, the notion that a professor/teacher (maybe at any level) is still viewed as a spouting source of knowledge that students need to sit before, open their heads, and collect as much precious information as possible is over—can I get an amen!? Not only are facts, figures, diagrams, ‘how-to-videos,’ explanations, and histories all available on the web, so are interesting discussions about what these things might mean, how they connect, and matter. This year I’ve learned to think much deeper about our political system, for example, by reading and commenting (engaging) on blogs, watching arguments made with images (often posted on youtube), and piecing together differing pages of differing websites, than I ever did in a semester of ‘American Politics 101.’ What’s more, I’ve been completely in control of what I've learned and how I thought about it—no one was demanding I puke particular bits of the information back up on a test. That is to say, it’s mine. And it didn’t require face-to-face interaction with a teacher.
What I did need (and still do) is some kind of human experience to give what I learn both relevance and complication. While learning on-line finally gives power to the person who needs it most—the student, it’s still an environment that lacks lots of real humans. I’m not saying that teachers and students can’t build some kind of cool intellectual relationship on-line, they can. They do. I did. But it’s not wholly satisfying, and if the concern about on-line classes is that they will somehow usurp the brick-and-mortar classroom, then , it seems to me, people charged with teaching can rightly start worrying about why their physical presence is so important. Put another way, the on-line class (and the web itself) just may force the blowhard in front of the lecture hall to pipe-down, really listen, and realize they’re probably not disseminating divine information. This may be easy for me to say—none of my ideas are new and half the classrooms I teach in are digital spaces. At the same time, I still blunder my way through most classes not because a lecture fell flat (they always do by the way, I don’t care what expressions our students wear while we’re talking). Rather, I blunder all over the place because of what I hope is an inexperienced attempt to create both an engaging and very human classroom. Of course “we” all do, right? As Alex Reid writes, “asking a room of faculty if they don't want to provide engaging experiences for their students is somewhat like asking a room of people to raise their hands if they are racist.” Any teacher/scholar worth their salt wants to engage their students. But if we’re not offering a place were things happen that couldn’t happen on-line, why even show up (especially if you’re a student). I can read PowerPoint slides on my own. I can memorize a professors notes and spit them back out on a test all by myself; I wouldn't need to leave my house or dorm room for that. What I can’t do on my own is generate relevant knowledge in the presence of other faces that not only challenge that knowledge with their words, they can do it simply with their presence—that is if teachers acknowledge that physical presence as everything that matters.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Yes , Politics and Race are Uncomfortable
9:00 AM, Nov.5th – I stood bleary-eyed in front of 22 18-year-olds who actually looked worse than me. It had been, regardless of political affiliation, a late night. The plan was to have one more conversation about the difference between written prose and prose that is meant to be spoken (their “audio essays” are due on the 7th). That didn’t happen. Out of rummy joy and what I can only call the ‘controlled recklessness’ that defines my teaching personae, I asked a question: “Do you think people voted for Obama simply because he is black?” And I got a straightforward answer: “Of course.” I waited for a minute, nodding my head, convincing the class that these questions had only just occurred to me in the car or the shower this morning. Then: “Do you think that’s a problem?” My normally quiet, too-early-for-human-activity, 9:00am English class erupted. (That may be too strong a word, but the quiet tension behind every face and every uttered argument seems to justify it).
Miami University in Ohio is not necessarily celebrated for it’s diverse student population. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The school often gets called “JCREW U”—there’s a youtube video that reflects this sentiment, unfortunately, fairly well. My three classes at the university are not only homogeneous in terms of race (we’re nearly all white), there is very little economic diversity (we’re all from either solidly middle or upper class families). It’s a far cry different than the kind of classroom I’m used to standing in front of in Chicago or Dayton. Not that there isn’t difference—the more I get to know my students, no surprise, the more those differences arise.
Class the day after the election, to say the least, exposed some of those differences. Here’s a few sample comments from my students: “The most ignorant vote people made yesterday was based on skin color.” “Why should my parents be responsible for inner-city school’s problems instead of sending their daughter to college.” “What, you think that paying more taxes is going to go to black people, like Obama is going to hang on the street corner and pass out cash?” “I’m not upset even though I voted for McCain. I just thought Obama’s speech sounded a little Martin-Luther-Kingy. I hope he knows he has to be president of all of us.” “If you don’t know the policies you’re voting for, you shouldn’t vote. It doesn’t matter what the president looks like.”
Discomfort followed nearly every comment in every class. In my last class, we have two people of color (2 out of 22 may be a good representation of Miami’s student body) and, predictably, that class was the only one that tried to evade my question concerning race. People in each class, however, shuffled in their seats, ran their hands through their hair, brought up California’s gay marriage ban, taxes, television coverage, anything that might move us away from race. We kept coming back.
A few days before the election, a student of mine at Indiana University East started laughing in the back row. What was funny, she shockingly wasn’t afraid to show me, was a picture on her phone someone had sent her: the back of man’s T-shirt that read “N***er please, it’s the WHITE house.” It’s not racist, relax, it’s just a silly joke she said.
I’ve never been more convinced that composition instructors are charged with much more than the proper order of nouns and verbs (not that many of us still actually teach such things). Obama, as president, will help us "expose" the very real impact of our seemingly innocent and mundane language on lives lived in flesh-and-bone bodies for our students (and for ourselves). There is always so much at stake in the classroom, cheers?
Miami University in Ohio is not necessarily celebrated for it’s diverse student population. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The school often gets called “JCREW U”—there’s a youtube video that reflects this sentiment, unfortunately, fairly well. My three classes at the university are not only homogeneous in terms of race (we’re nearly all white), there is very little economic diversity (we’re all from either solidly middle or upper class families). It’s a far cry different than the kind of classroom I’m used to standing in front of in Chicago or Dayton. Not that there isn’t difference—the more I get to know my students, no surprise, the more those differences arise.
Class the day after the election, to say the least, exposed some of those differences. Here’s a few sample comments from my students: “The most ignorant vote people made yesterday was based on skin color.” “Why should my parents be responsible for inner-city school’s problems instead of sending their daughter to college.” “What, you think that paying more taxes is going to go to black people, like Obama is going to hang on the street corner and pass out cash?” “I’m not upset even though I voted for McCain. I just thought Obama’s speech sounded a little Martin-Luther-Kingy. I hope he knows he has to be president of all of us.” “If you don’t know the policies you’re voting for, you shouldn’t vote. It doesn’t matter what the president looks like.”
Discomfort followed nearly every comment in every class. In my last class, we have two people of color (2 out of 22 may be a good representation of Miami’s student body) and, predictably, that class was the only one that tried to evade my question concerning race. People in each class, however, shuffled in their seats, ran their hands through their hair, brought up California’s gay marriage ban, taxes, television coverage, anything that might move us away from race. We kept coming back.
A few days before the election, a student of mine at Indiana University East started laughing in the back row. What was funny, she shockingly wasn’t afraid to show me, was a picture on her phone someone had sent her: the back of man’s T-shirt that read “N***er please, it’s the WHITE house.” It’s not racist, relax, it’s just a silly joke she said.
I’ve never been more convinced that composition instructors are charged with much more than the proper order of nouns and verbs (not that many of us still actually teach such things). Obama, as president, will help us "expose" the very real impact of our seemingly innocent and mundane language on lives lived in flesh-and-bone bodies for our students (and for ourselves). There is always so much at stake in the classroom, cheers?
Sunday, November 2, 2008
An introduction to difference
My students are always shocked, sometimes quite visibly, to learn that objects such as desks, a chalk/white board, the presence of other people their age staring at someone different than them--someone with their shirt tucked in--all contribute to one loud lecture. Without having to vocalize it, even think it, everyone in such a room knows this is a classroom, and this is how I am to exist in a classroom. Exposing the identity shaping culture of a classroom is relatively easy. I do the same thing a professor in community college did to me. I wait for the first student to raise their hand, then stare at them, making sure to look completely confused. This has, so far, always lead to a conversation about how we all know what such a strange action means. And more importantly, what the action means in a classroom as opposed to a restaurant or at Grandma's Thanksgiving table. It's always different and it's always the place that dictates that difference. Invariably, a few students will begin to admit they have an identity in the presence of desks and chalk boards that doesn't necessarily survive apart from rooms which contains these artifacts. (It's a discovery that convinces me that the real academic conversations, the ones teachers like me long for in the classroom, will only occur in the 'dorms." And that's okay, it has to be). My three classes at Miami University (a SEC, 40,000 student, traditional college) all have a whiteboard, desks, a desktop computer connected to a projector, and this cool "overhead machine" that can put anything and everything up on the screen (including my face...in color. It rocks). So it looks like a classroom. I move the desks all over the room, I teach from different spots everyday--often I sit in one of the desks, and because the class is part of the University's Digital Writing Collaborative, every student has their laptop in front of them--we've never used a pencil. But it's still a classroom.
My three classes at Indiana University East (a 2,400 student commuter campus) look far more classroomy than my Miami classrooms. Yet the students often seem more willing to challenge what should take place in such in a space. No doubt this is because many of these students are what academe dubs "Non-traditional." They don't live on campus, many of them are over nineteen, they're married, working, trying to remember how they're expected to perform within the four walls of a classroom. I have plenty of students who are eighteen or nineteen, who just graduated from high school (in fact, the number of these students is quickly increasing at Indiana University East). But they sit next to forty-year-old single parents excited to finally be inside the college classroom, military men and women, and people (re)training for a new or different career. This changes things--to say the least.
As it stands, I'm not sure which classroom I prefer to be "in-front" of. I suppose choosing would be impossible when I see them both every week. My students and what happens in the classrooms we create together have, quite honestly, become my single obsession. The universities I work for are as widely different as each student's essay I grade. There are hundreds of blogs all over the web that deal with the Rhetoric and Composition classroom; they're personal, interesting, and I learn heaps from them. This blog, however, is a place for me to express my blunders, to help me define what 'success' means in the writing classroom, to connect a huge part of my life to those I miss and love, to support any instructor/teacher who wanders by, and most importantly, to learn what I know by using what will never be mine: language. It's time to do what I push my students to do.
Cheers!
My three classes at Indiana University East (a 2,400 student commuter campus) look far more classroomy than my Miami classrooms. Yet the students often seem more willing to challenge what should take place in such in a space. No doubt this is because many of these students are what academe dubs "Non-traditional." They don't live on campus, many of them are over nineteen, they're married, working, trying to remember how they're expected to perform within the four walls of a classroom. I have plenty of students who are eighteen or nineteen, who just graduated from high school (in fact, the number of these students is quickly increasing at Indiana University East). But they sit next to forty-year-old single parents excited to finally be inside the college classroom, military men and women, and people (re)training for a new or different career. This changes things--to say the least.
As it stands, I'm not sure which classroom I prefer to be "in-front" of. I suppose choosing would be impossible when I see them both every week. My students and what happens in the classrooms we create together have, quite honestly, become my single obsession. The universities I work for are as widely different as each student's essay I grade. There are hundreds of blogs all over the web that deal with the Rhetoric and Composition classroom; they're personal, interesting, and I learn heaps from them. This blog, however, is a place for me to express my blunders, to help me define what 'success' means in the writing classroom, to connect a huge part of my life to those I miss and love, to support any instructor/teacher who wanders by, and most importantly, to learn what I know by using what will never be mine: language. It's time to do what I push my students to do.
Cheers!
Academia 2.0
Kansas State University's Anthropology department has been using video to explore/expose the college classroom. (This work should have been done by "us," Rhet/Comp people, but oh well. I suppose the fact that it's getting done is what matters.) Here's one of their longer, more traditional projects.
While I don't mind the not-so-subtle celebration of digital technology here, I'm far more interested in the quiet assertion that the best way to use technology in the university classroom is to create a relevant and, more importantly, a human environment.
While I don't mind the not-so-subtle celebration of digital technology here, I'm far more interested in the quiet assertion that the best way to use technology in the university classroom is to create a relevant and, more importantly, a human environment.
The Audio Essay
My students at Miami University are working on "audio essays." As part of the "Miami Plan" (basic core curriculum that the University would like all the Freshman to encounter), I'm charged with helping my students experience what get's called "Entering Public Discourse." That's really how the administration says it. Now I'm certainly not troubled by the notion of helping students engage with a discourse that is "public," or that exists outside the classroom walls. In fact, figuring out how to get eighteen-year-olds who are living apart from the rule of their parents' house for the first time to recognize that what they say and do can matter beyond me and their grade often consumes me. That said, my problem is with the word "entering." It's as if we, as researchers, professors, instructors, writers, and whatever, believe the illusion that students have not already been moving and morphing "public discourse." And now, lucky them, we're going to show them this illusive door and grant them the full tour.
But that's not what I'm wanting to share with you. What I want to share with you is my excitement for what the students are turning in on Friday. For the last few weeks, they've been researching an issue of their choice that could, in one way or another, be considered "public." We've been verbally hashing out what it means to be a child of gay parents, why the drinking age is 21, whether or not "free speech" actually exists, issues of child obesity, the odd religious feelings generated by the saving rhetoric of technology, politics, abortion, and many other "public" debates. Instead of translating these discussions into formal college essays (a notion that I find myself resiting more and more, yet constantly catching myself using to help me judge the work that gets generated in class), the students have been writing scripts and recording Public Service Announcements. They're working in teams, with new digital audio recorders and access to huge databases of sound effects and music, to construct two different pieces: they only have one topic, but they're communicating to two separate audiences. This is not exactly a new or innovative assignment--composition teachers have been doing such work since the technology has been available. Before that, as many of you may remember, we made collages and posters to argue a particular side of an issue. But this is the first time I've assigned such a project and the first time my 66 Miami students have had to think differently about composition. So, in that way, it's brand new--again. I say all this for a few reasons: 1.) I plan to share some of their work with you on this blog; 2.) I'm frickin' terribly excited about what I'll hear on Friday; 3.) My students have begun to ignore me--they've not only forgotten I'm the "one with the red pen," but also, and more importantly, they're not thinking about me as their audience. They know who they need to convince and they're recognizing that using one particular word for an audience of parents won't work for an audience of college students; and 4.) My students are beginning to realize they've always known how to do this--they're good at it. They "instinctively" know if they should tell a sad story to appeal to the emotions of their audience, or if they should try solid-sounding facts and cite several studies that make use of statistics. And now, maybe, they can recognize when the "public" is doing it to them.
Here are few examples that have caused some controversy in our classroom, and certainly lead to some inspiration:
Free Speech
Heifer Project
Cheers!
But that's not what I'm wanting to share with you. What I want to share with you is my excitement for what the students are turning in on Friday. For the last few weeks, they've been researching an issue of their choice that could, in one way or another, be considered "public." We've been verbally hashing out what it means to be a child of gay parents, why the drinking age is 21, whether or not "free speech" actually exists, issues of child obesity, the odd religious feelings generated by the saving rhetoric of technology, politics, abortion, and many other "public" debates. Instead of translating these discussions into formal college essays (a notion that I find myself resiting more and more, yet constantly catching myself using to help me judge the work that gets generated in class), the students have been writing scripts and recording Public Service Announcements. They're working in teams, with new digital audio recorders and access to huge databases of sound effects and music, to construct two different pieces: they only have one topic, but they're communicating to two separate audiences. This is not exactly a new or innovative assignment--composition teachers have been doing such work since the technology has been available. Before that, as many of you may remember, we made collages and posters to argue a particular side of an issue. But this is the first time I've assigned such a project and the first time my 66 Miami students have had to think differently about composition. So, in that way, it's brand new--again. I say all this for a few reasons: 1.) I plan to share some of their work with you on this blog; 2.) I'm frickin' terribly excited about what I'll hear on Friday; 3.) My students have begun to ignore me--they've not only forgotten I'm the "one with the red pen," but also, and more importantly, they're not thinking about me as their audience. They know who they need to convince and they're recognizing that using one particular word for an audience of parents won't work for an audience of college students; and 4.) My students are beginning to realize they've always known how to do this--they're good at it. They "instinctively" know if they should tell a sad story to appeal to the emotions of their audience, or if they should try solid-sounding facts and cite several studies that make use of statistics. And now, maybe, they can recognize when the "public" is doing it to them.
Here are few examples that have caused some controversy in our classroom, and certainly lead to some inspiration:
Free Speech
Heifer Project
Cheers!
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