Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Considering Pedablogy 4.0

Published
by
Deborah
on January 28, 2006
in Blogs and Blogging, Pedagogy and Technology
. 1 Comment

In some of my last-minute preparations before “Writing for the Social Sciences” begins Monday evening at CWE, I am now Googling the phrase ’student blogs’ and ‘course blogs.’ Somehow Editor Kate seemed to read my last blog as saying I would be doing a course blog…when I in fact said the opposite. Kate! Was that some kind of reverse psychology? It may have worked.

After having looked more carefully at the text I’m using (Ways of Reading), and thinking that I will probably require at least one single-spaced page of writing for students per week, and in remembering WAC advice to demand drafts drafts drafts, I thought, now this could provide nice material for blogs. And for student directed conversation. I’m going to try it. Why not? So forget what I said in my last post. There will be a course blog. Just one blog I think though, that everyone will have access to if my relatively low-tech self can manage that.

So my plan for the first assignment using the blog will be that students will post with initial thoughts for their upcoming writing assignment, or with responses to their first reading of the required essays. They will have the option to post their own comments, or to respond to someone else’s. I do not plan to grade this other than as a checkmark sort of thing.
Here is some of what I’ve come across through Google…

“Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy“, Academic Commons at The Center for Teaching and Learning, Wabash College

Internet & Society Course, Northwestern University

COMM 3344: Games for the web (Interactive multimedia) Spring 2005, Trinity University

Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs, Ritsumeikan University, Tokyo, Japan

And, last from my cautious self, an article from the Student Life publication at Washington University in St. Louis on the question of security risks and student blogs. :-)

WAC and service learning?

Published
by
Kate
on January 24, 2006
in Conferences and Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

Are there any service learning courses at Baruch? Are they Communication Intensive? I am kind of curious, since service learning is popular right now in higher ed. In any case, I am sure this will be of interest to someone.

Call for Papers: Writing Across the Curriculum is a permanent section of the Midwest Modern Language Association. The 48th Annual M/MLA Convention will be held November 9-12, at The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois.
This year’s theme is “Service Learning: Writing for/about the Community.”

This panel invites papers from all disciplines on Writing Across the Curriculum and encourages proposals from community colleges and online learning institutions in addition to traditional four-year colleges and universities.

Panel Description:
This panel will explore the various ways that the pedagogy of service learning and civic engagement are incorporated into English composition courses and writing courses across disciplines. Through analysis and discussion, we will examine the relationships between theories and institutional practices and explore service learning as a framework for discovery, engagement, and professional development.

Please email a 250-word abstract to Joseph A. Barda (Section Chair) by March 31, 2006.

 Joseph A. Barda
Curriculum Chair- Humanities and Social Sciences
Robert Morris College
Chicago, Illinois

(From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List)

Teaching Faculty Members to Fish?

Published
by
Joanna
on January 23, 2006
in Administration, Faculty Development and Pedagogy
. 2 Comments

With the generous support of Baruch’s Provost’s Office, the Schwartz Institute’s Great Works Communication Fellows will pilot a faculty development seminar during the Spring 2006 semester. The idea is to work with Baruch faculty members who teach CICs, helping them expand and improve their communication-intensive teaching techniques. Over the course of the seminar, we plan to facilitate discussion, lead activities, and even assign homework on a variety of issues such as assignment, exam, oral presentation, and syllabus design; grading and responding to writing; Blackboard participation; group vs. individual assignments; in-class writing/communicating-to-learn techniques; and so on. (The irony has not escaped me that we are, in effect, hosting a seminar that revolves around the concept of communication-intensive courses in a communication-intensive fashion; at least we’re practicing what we preach!)

To get things rolling, at the end of last semester, we distributed applications to Great Works and LTT (Literature in Translation) faculty for a semester-long, three-meeting seminar, with a modest stipend. We are delighted to announce that we now have 12 faculty members enrolled.

So here’s what I’m wondering. The impetus for this seminar reflects an ongoing question among those of us involved in the development and honing of CICs: where’s the most efficient place for us to focus our limited time and resources – on students, faculty, both? For the past few years, Great Works fellows have concentrated on two methods: running in-class workshops, in which faculty request that we lead their class in a particular exercise, such as how to generate ideas for a paper or how to formulate a thesis; and leading out-of-class workshops, in which students enroll for similar workshops on their own. More recently, though, we’ve started to consider whether we might get better bang for our buck by targeting our efforts directly at faculty as well. Our thinking is that the positive pedagogical changes we’re working for will have to come, in the long term, mostly from the classroom itself, no matter how successful our “support” services are with students. So what do you think? By primarily working with students, are we just running in place instead of improving things more systemically? Should we balance our work with students with an equal emphasis on working with faculty? Would this be doomed in practice by the sensitivities and politics of upward-instruction (i.e. fellows “teaching” faculty about how to teach communication-intensive activities better)? My instinct whispers that each reinforces the other, but I would enjoy hearing comments from others, since most of us have some teaching experience, or have even led similar faculty development seminars.

CAC and Liberal Arts — Strange Bedfellows?

Published
by
Amy H.
on January 17, 2006
in Administration and Liberal Arts
. 0 Comments

I teach THE 1041C (Intro to Theatre) at Baruch, which fosters oral as well as written communication, and I love doing it. I think theatre, as a discipline, is particularly well suited to meeting CAC objectives. But I’d like to play the devil’s advocate for a moment and discuss the tension between skills-development and content in CIC courses.

I recently read Carol Geary Schneider and Debra Humphreys’s article “Putting Liberal Education on the Radar Screen”in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (23 Sept 05). The authors describe a ten-year project by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) called “Liberal Education and America’s Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College.” The initiative aims to increase awareness of the importance of liberal arts education to a generation of students (and their parents) who tend to believe a college degree is “just a ticket to be punched on the way to their first job.”

I imagine most college teachers will not be surprised by the findings of the AACU study, which suggest that students today consider “values and ethics, an appreciation of cultural diversity, global awareness, and civic responsibility” to be the least important outcomes of a college education. Indeed, most view college as “a private rather than a public good,” a way to develop professional skills. The data also suggest that “colleges are not conveying the importance of liberal education to their students,” and Schneider and Humphreys argue that this is part of the problem.

As someone who is personally, politically, and professionally invested in the objectives associated with liberal arts education, I found this article disturbing. It also makes me wonder whether or not CAC feeds the fires of the consumerist mentality described in the AACU study. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I sometimes find myself “selling” CIC objectives to my students, since most of them are non-majors with little interest in the subject: “Two courses in one! More bang for your buck! Learn not only how to talk intelligently about ‘Hamlet’ at cocktail parties, but be scintillating while you do it!” I genuinely believe that communication is intimately connected to critical thinking, cultural awareness, and ethical conduct. But typically, CAC is about skills development, not these other things. Schneider and Humphreys insist that educators and administrators not only need to talk about the value of liberal arts among themselves, but also find ways to articulate their value to students. But will CAC programs, as they expand and proliferate, legitimize students’ tendency to view college as little more than a springboard to a high-paying job? How can CAC teachers and administrators strike a balance between the often-competing objectives of higher education: to shape the next generation of leaders and thinkers professionally, ethically, culturally, intellectually?

Considering Pedablogy 3.0

Published
by
Deborah
on January 11, 2006
in Blogs and Blogging and Pedagogy
. 1 Comment

Now that I have (quite happily) amassed a few replies and even a pingback (!) here, I’d like to respond briefly. As I continue to think blogging in a course through, I have sort of quickly come to two conclusions–one, having a Course Blog in the way that Kate describes it sounds like a lot of fun.

In an email response awhile back, a faculty member at CWE told me she thinks that with blogging students take/have/hold more ownership than in simply responding to a professor’s comment in a Blackboard discussion, and that for this reason blogs can be quite productive. Kate and Mikhail both make this point, that blogs privilege the author.

Students having ownership is important to me, but also requires negotiating and some shaping at times. And I think this would be true in using a blog. Jim’s initial comments also sort of echo some of my hesitations to immediately begin using blog-writing in a course. If I’m new to it using the technology, perhaps a course like Writing in the Social Sciences is not the place i want to first try it, because already there are genres of writing that students need to learn well. Summary, analysis, critique and extensions. That for this first time teaching it anway, it could be me biting off more than I can chew. (Which i am quite good at doing.)

So my first thought being, this sounds cool and fun and potentially productive, my second thought immediately following is let’s dip our feet into the water and try the reading thing first. Blog reading. Kate suggests having students engage with the world through reading and responding to blogs.

(I like this idea, and as a side note, I also think it blows the high-stakes/low-stakes distinction out of the water. Let’s say I decide not to grade their responses: low-stakes. Blogging has a semi-public element to it, an audience in the ‘beyond:’ higher-stakes. I began having issues with the low-stakes/high-stakes distinction midway through my Writing Fellowship. It doesn’t surprise me that in using technology more now as a Communication Fellow, a case would appear in which this framework does not seem entirely useful or accurate.)

So let me be clear about the first conclusion to which I have come. There will not be a course blog in Writing for the Social Sciences at CWE. However, there will be a component involving reading content related blogs and responding to those. Hopefully, I can help shape students’ responses by asking that they incorporate some of the types of writing skills we learn in the course into their blog comments. And again, I wonder, how can I find good blogs with content specific to various social science issues and disciplines? I also would like to know if anyone has any thoughts if there are existing blogs where people are writing on social science issues, that might be appropriate sites for students to comment on the readings we are doing? Am I asking someone else to run a blog for my class? :-)

Considering Pedablogy 2.0

Published
by
Deborah
on January 7, 2006
in Blogs and Blogging and Pedagogy
. 8 Comments

This is my second post in a small series, exploring how I might incorporate blog/s/ing into a course I’ll be teaching for the first time this spring, “Writing for the Social Sciences.” (WFSS) I suppose I’m cutting it a bit short here, in terms of decision-making, but I’ve still got several weeks left to make some final choices.

In my last post I noted my WAC professional development as a CUNY Writing Fellow. That experience has taught me to begin my planning by considering: What are my goals for this course? What do I hope that students come away with from WFSS?

Initially, I want to be aware of contextual issues that will affect my goals. The Center for Worker Education (CWE) is a small liberal arts school within the City College of New York, CUNY. Students at CWE are adults working full-time, and I am told that many of them come to the program because they need a bachelor’s degree to move further on in their field. The average student age is forty. I also want to consider the fact that the degree offered is broadly oriented and interdisciplinary.

With those factors in mind, and given that this is my first time teaching the course, I have decided to use a textbook, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ways of Reading seems to be intended for First-Year Composition courses, but the excerpts they include come from challenging yet readable texts by scholars and writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Adrienne Rich, Edward Said and W.J.T. Mitchell. The readings are also organized in ‘sequences’, for instance, Autobiographical Explorations, Truth and Method, History and Ethnography, or Language, History and Identity, and frames such as these will nicely address a range of topics across social sciences. The sequences take students and professor through a series of writing assignments that can eventually connect into a larger project. For the final paper, I plan to have students select their writing from one sequence and build on it with additional readings and outside research.

So back to my original question, What do I want students to learn how to do? 1)To read challenging texts carefully and to engage with those texts. 2)To make connections: between texts, and between life and text. 3)To provide written summaries, analysis, and critique. 4)To become familiar with one or two discipline-specific styles of writing. In addition to these more outcome-based goals I have for students, I also want to make sure that what we do helps them engage further with the world, whether that is within themselves, family life, work life or some other arena. This may be where blogs come in. Blog/s/ing may partly be about connecting.

I have been wondering how adult students with full work and personal lives would feel about taking time with blogs. Are blogs interesting to people beyond a small technophilic world? I don’t think I want students just reading live journals. If we’re reading blogs, I’d want them to read something substantive, that relates to their professional field or to what we’re reading. I’m not sure that exists. I’ve done some searching for blogs relating to Social Services and Social Work professions and haven’t found much. It occurs to me now that I might look for Teacher Education blogs.

Why even use blogs in a course? Well, I do think it’s beneficial to be aware of the new forms of technology and writing that are out there. In a sense, I think it’s good to ‘keep up.’ But I want more than just keeping up with the Joneses… Of course, there are blogs on writing—I could always have students read and respond to more general writing-focused blogs. These questions I’m asking are about content. The content of the blogs matters to me. I don’t want to waste students’ time, and I guess I’m aware that my own entry into the blogosphere has taken place over a number of months. I am leaning toward having us engage with other blogs that are out there, rather than say, do a course blog, or have students write their own. I’m thinking of this as a baby step, I suppose. Anyone have any thoughts they’d like to share?