More on Pedagogy and Technology

December 29, 2005 By 4 Comments

From InsideHigherEd, an article by Laura Blankenship, “Technology as a Liberal Art,” focuses on the uses of blogging and other forms of technology in a liberal arts setting.
There’s more reportage here on how professors are using technology as a tool for commenting on papers, or for offering lectures via podcasts and screencasts to be consumed before class meets:

At Bryn Mawr, Michelle Francl, a professor of chemistry, is recording all of her lectures for her physical chemistry course. She’s capturing her computer screen and her voice, saving the video and the audio file, and posting them to her blog. For now, these recorded lectures, or screencasts and podcasts, serve primarily as review for the students. In the future, however, she plans to assign these recorded lectures much as she would assign a text and use class time for something more engaging than a lecture.

As she said recently at a conference, “I used to always show the students the easy case during the lecture and send them home to work on the hard case, but that’s just the opposite of what I think I should do. Now we can work on the hard case in class.”

I liked this for a number of reasons. First of all, in some courses, lecturing, in some form and at least some of the time, is actually necessary. (This flies in the face of the pedagogical styles most writing and literature folks, like myself, have been moving towards, but for some types of content, lecturing serves an important function.) Secondly, Francl is using the technology to spring-board her in-class work to new levels. Rather than offering podcasted lectures as a way for absent students to catch-up, Francl’s method challenges students with information needed for the next task they’ll do together.

I can also see some barriers here. Faculty need support in identifying creative and useful ways–like those Francl has found–to use technology to enhance existing courses. This means time, money, and human support (skilled people who can help with the process). I hope that colleges see the value in this work, and invest in it.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Literacy, Pedagogy, Technology

Strike

December 21, 2005 By 3 Comments

The strike in NYC has me thinking about an assignment for a course on communication or a communication-intensive course. Students would collect the public documents, videos, publications, and press conferences related to the strike and trace the communication styles of the two sides and the press, mayor, etc. Students would identify what kinds of rhetoric each uses, its effectiveness, how different sides stop the communication flow, etc.

After a one-day conference last week in which we discussed making assignments relative to a student’s personal experience, this seems like an interesting idea. I’m sure other communities have similar public disputes they could use.

Filed Under: Pedagogy

Vocabulary?

December 18, 2005 By 1 Comment

In high school, students are actively and consciously taught new vocabulary through a variety of methods – quizzes being the most obvious. I remember receiving extra credit on my essays whenever I incorporated words we had recently learned. Of course, the situation changes in college – students are expected to expand their vocabulary on their own, with the exception of discipline-specific terminology.

I am a little concerned about this. Often when I am working with students on their essays, I find that they have more clarity when they explain things to me themselves in regular conversational English. In these cases I tell them that they should “simply” write what they said because it is so much clearer. Although this kind of clarity and vocabulary aren’t the same thing, couldn’t the upshot be that I am asking students to limit their experimentation with more challenging verbal styles?

How do we encourage students to become more sophisticated writers, rather than better basic writers? How do college students learn to become familiar and competent with SAT and GRE type words as well as with jargon? I am afraid that by striving for clarity with my students I may be sacrificing the learning that comes from awkwardly trying out a new phrase or “big” word.

Filed Under: Language, Pedagogy

(Why) can’t Johnny (B.A., honors) read?

December 16, 2005 By 1 Comment

Today’s Inside Higher Ed includes an article on the new report from the Education Department “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy,” which makes some alarming claims:

Not only does it find that the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, but it also reveals that just 25 percent of college graduates — and only 31 percent of those with at least some graduate studies — scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” from a literacy standpoint, which the government defines as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

“This seems like another piece of hard evidence, a fairly clear indication, that the ‘value added’ that higher education gave to students didn’t improve, and maybe declined, over this period,” said Charles Miller, the former University of Texas regent who is heading the U.S. education secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. “You have the possibility of people going through schools, getting a piece of paper for sitting in class a certain amount, and we don’t know whether they’re getting what they need. This is a fair sign that there are some problems here.”

There are, of course, also always problems with these sorts of reports, and these sorts of statistics. I also hope that Charles Miller is not assuming that a change in student outcomes rests solely on the actions of educational institutions, and college-level ones at that. I have not yet read the full report, which can be downloaded as a PDF here, but I have seen many similar reports, as we all have.

Anyone who has ever been forced to sit through one of Jay Leno’s lame routines, where he asks American college students wandering the streets of Hollywood to identify the current President and Vice President, or to find Germany or Hawai’i on a map, and heard their so amusing, so very silly answers, knows Something Is Terribly Wrong Here. To watch Jay Leno, you might believe that “75% of college graduates are not proficient from a literacy standpoint.” Can things really be that bad? Are 69% of graduate students also lacking proficiency in everyday literacy? Am I, to put things another way, completely surrounded by the 31% of grad students who are equipped to survive, literacy-wise? One explanation for the shockingly low numbers is that researchers classified people into three groups: basic, intermediate, and proficient. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?

While I am skeptical about these numbers, I am ready to agree that the education system is not doing enough for students. I do think it is a bit silly to talk about the failures of higher education in this area as if students’ abilities, skills, backgrounds, and most especially their preparation at earlier levels of education were not also factors in the literacy levels they reached at the college age. As the Inside Higher Ed article notes, this point was not lost on the researchers who “agreed there was significantly more work to be done to determine whether (a) colleges are taking students who have been significantly underprepared by their previous schools, (b) the colleges are failing to catch those students up, or both.”

You don’t need a fancy study. Ask College students what they have trouble doing. Ask what skills and tasks are new to them, or rarely asked of them. Ask them what tasks are. What’s missing?

And how do we get more students–at every level–into the “proficiency” (i.e. winners’) circle? Reading Across the Curriculum is not a term you hear bandied about as much, say, as WAC, or CAC, or WID. But it is an integral part of this work. The study identifies different types of literacy: prose literacy (reading the Times or understanding a brochure), document literacy (interpreting a chart or graph), and quantitative literacy (dealing with numbers: checkbooks, percentages). One thing I actually appreciate about the CUNY Proficiency Exam (and I don’t, as a rule, go around appreciating high-stakes tests) is that the second part requires a combination of the latter two forms of literacy. But do we require these of students, outside of the testing scenario, often enough? The article also cites a study at Illinois State which “found that honors students were assigned an average of fewer than 50 pages of reading a week, and that two of five students acknowledged completing less than half of that work.” What exactly do we do about the students who don’t (carefully) read what’s assigned?

Filed Under: Literacy, Pedagogy

If you had a million dollars . . .

December 13, 2005 By 3 Comments

Well, maybe not a million but a lot.

Let’s play a game: Imagine that a big corporation wants to give your school, program, or department a lot of money over three years for an innovative initiative aimed at improving your undergraduates’ ability to communicate orally and/or in writing. How would you spend it?

Now for the rules: 1) The initiative you propose can be hinged on a single big program or a bunch of little ones and can involve curricular support and development as well as co-curricular programs; 2) The outcomes have to be measurable. Assessment of program outcomes, however, may be built into your proposal so that some of the money would go towards assessing how well it’s working. That brings us to . . . 3) Be sure to mention how you plan to assess your program; and 4) Be sure to identify the population of students your program is intended to target.

So that’s it. Put your thinking caps on, people. To add a comment from the cac.ophony.org homepage, click on the post title or the number next to it.

Filed Under: Administration, Funding, What if . . .

Can an Essay a Day Keep One’s Life from Decay?

December 9, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Can writing have any therapeutic effects? As I am researching on ”literature and science,” a scientific research on the use of language fascinates me–it makes me consider writing from a seemingly unrelated context. A study which was allegedly “the first to test the effects on medical conditions of the writing exercise” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was reported in “Can an Essay a Day Keep Asthma or Arthristis at Bay?” in The New York Times (April 14, 1999: A21). The results of the research show that “writing about traumatic experiences measurably improves the health of some patients suffering from chronic asthma or rheumatoid arthritis,” so reported Erica Goode in the Times.

What I find most interesting is a comment Goode makes in the opening of her article, that the study powerfully demonstrates “how intimately mind and body are linked” and writing serves a big purpose in their interactions. According to the study, the asthma patients in the experimental group were instructed to write about their “deepest thoughts and feelings’” about traumatic experience, while those in the control group wrote down their daily plans, for 20 minutes per day and three days in a row. Reseachers found that

. . . of the 70 patients who wrote about traumatic events, 47.1 percent showed significant improvement in their health at the end of four months, 48.6 percent showed no change and 4.3 percent got worse. In the control group, 24.3 percent showed improvement, 54.1 percent showed no change and 2.6 percent got worse.

It was further noted by the researchers that many patients whose conditions “might have been expected to worsen” unexpectedly improved after writing about stressful experiences.

Four-month length … is about one semester in school. Are we able to observe some sort of ”healing” or improvements in our students, even though we definitely are not treating them as ”patients”?

However we want to ”treat” our students and writing, the implications of the study seem to me to be many-fold. In terms of pedagogy, it makes me re-consider that teaching composition may need to be perceived and designed in a more realistic, human context. That writing is able to change one’s life and it’s just that I have yet to find a way to effect that change. And I imagine that the consideration may also help us guage the level of our attention to and concentration on mechanical and rhetorical aspects more effectively. That is, all kinds of reading assignment and writing exercises will serve a certain purpose that we set forth initially, be it a healing, organizing one’s life, elevating one’s soul, writing for writing’s sake, etc.

On the contrary, after reading this research and writing this blog, I also wonder when do (or will) I transfer the attempt to organize ideas in an essay to actual actions of organizing my life in general? Can I organize my life as the way I organize my writing, to have a thesis? Or better yet, will I have to, since a paper is a paper, life is life? In any event, will the moral of this study be: the more we write, the longer we will live? What would the poet John Keats have to say?

Filed Under: Language, Low-Stakes Writing

Attack of the Conference-Ready Undergrads

December 8, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Something noteworthy at the gem that is the MIT OpenCourseWare site: an undergraduate course on Economics Research and Communication. The course description indicates that “primary activities are oral presentations, the preparation of a paper, and providing constructive feedback on classmates’ research projects.”

Constructive feedback involves group peer review at several stages of the writing process. In nine of the thirteen three-hour sessions, students have to: (1) present initial ideas for a paper; (2) present research plans; (3) participate in open forums for discussing project difficulties and questions; and (4) make a presentation based on the first draft. Class discussions always follow presentations.

All these are probably nothing new to many of you. My undergraduate years, however, offered no such communication rigors in my major, no requirements that process be subject to peer scrutiny. How the economics curriculum was implemented at my university implied that economics was a solitary pursuit — you only needed to impress your professor on paper. Any other skills were not the school’s concern.

So I came to the U.S. shy, self-conscious, still somewhat in “I hope I don’t get called on in class” mode. Teaching has helped mitigate some of my reticence; I think I’ve evolved into a self-assured instructor. But addressing peers and superiors can still induce significant levels of apprehension, though I’m finally at the point where academic conferences and presenting at department seminars are inescapable duties. (I’ve hence sometimes bemoaned the deficits in my undergraduate education.) Here’s hoping that university departments are on track to turn out graduates more communication-savvy than I ever was.

Filed Under: Peer Review, Powerpoint and Presentations, Process

Confessions of a Writing Teacher

December 6, 2005 By 4 Comments

I’ve been working my way through Laurence Sterne’s wonderfully comic novel about writing a novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , and recently came upon the following passage (from Volume 8, Chapter 2):

Of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I’m sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

Sterne goes on to speak of how the “plan follows the whole” (as opposed to the work following a plan, presumably) and though admitting that he “intercept[s] many a thought which heaven intended for another man,” he obviously prefers intuitive, discursive writing to something more planned or ideologically driven. (Pope seems to be his target of criticism here.) The approach Sterne describes is pretty much mine too (even in academic writing), though I generally don’t invoke God unless I’m trying to meet a tight deadline.

This brings up a tension I’ve just begun to think about: I teach my students to write a thesis statement, plan ahead, outline paragraphs, etc., yet I’ve never written a paper that way. Could I do an informal survey? How many of you out there begin a paper with a plan, and how many begin by simply starting to write? (I don’t mean free writing here; I mean writing something with the intention of making it work somehow.) Does anyone have any success stories about teaching academic writing in non-traditional ways?

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Process

What’s social psychology got to do with it?

December 5, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Last week I attended a very interesting talk by Joshua Aronson, an NYU professor of psychology on the fragility of human intelligence. Aronson began his talk by recounting how intimidated he was by his academic advisor when he was a graduate student in Princeton and how he lost a few IQ points every time he entered his office. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the feeling. I can’t be the only one who thinks that part of the Ph.D. training is about constantly doubting our intellectual capacity and questioning whether we really belong here or not!

Ten years ago Claude Steele from Stanford University and Josh Aronson published a series of laboratory experiments with White and Black college students and argued that the achievement gap on standardized test scores between White and Black students is not only a result of racism, poverty and unequal opportunities, but also a phenomenon they called “stereotype threat”, that is an “apprehension arising from the awareness of a negative stereotype or personal reputation in a situation where the stereotype is relevant and thus confirmable”. In their study, before taking the verbal part of the GRE students were either told that the test was diagnostic of their intellectual abilities or that the test was in the process of being developed. While White students performed equally well under both types of instructions, Black students’ performance decreased sharply when they thought the test was diagnostic of their abilities, that is, when they were threatened by the possibility of confirming a cultural stereotype about their group if they performed poorly. In the non-diagnostic condition, they performed almost as well as Whites did. These findings stimulated over 100 other studies which replicated the effect with Latino students, Whites’ math ability when compared to Asians, women’s math ability when compared to men, and older people’s memory performance. Stereotype threat has been the hot thing in social and educational psychology in the last decade.

What this volume of research suggests is that academic learning and performance occur in very specific contexts that are shaped by cultural stereotypes and situational pressures such as the awareness of who else is in the room. This is of course not news for us. Nevertheless, I wonder to what extent we are aware of and how we deal with cultural stereotypes that inform students’ expectations for their own performance in our work as writing and communication fellows. For example, while working with immigrant students who hadn’t noticed my accent and who are almost always apologetic about their English, I see that they get more relaxed and more engaged in the work when I tell them that I’m not a native speaker either and that I used to make the same mistakes. I wouldn’t want to fall prey to stereotyping myself but I did notice that, at least among the students I met with, men tend to write shorter papers –and not necessarily more to the point. What are the stereotypes about writing, and verbal communication in general that lead some students to disengage from the activity or that make them anxious, and what do we do about them? And how does the diversity of CUNY classrooms inform students’ expectations for their performance? I’d like to hear from other fellows and those of us who teach.

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Pedagogy

What’s in a format?

December 5, 2005 By 2 Comments

When I was an undergraduate, I used to think that the teachers who insisted that we stick to a certain format (for biblio, notes, etc.) were just bores and had nothing better to do with their time. Now, when I’ve read a few “freely-formatted” student’s reports and papers, I realize how distracting, unprofessional and confusing it may be.
I know that there are all kinds of printed guides for each style, but I didn’t want to tell my students that they need to buy them and read through the whole thing. So, with the help of Google, I found a site by Diana Hacker that presents MLA, APA, Chicago and CPE formats quite clearly and conveniently. It allowed me to make a quick resume of the relevant format for students, and I also referred them to this site, in case they have more specific issues. I must admit, I didn’t do a very extensive search, so there might be a better source with formatting guidelines out there. So, if anyone knows about it, feel free to share :o )

Filed Under: Resources
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