Monthly Archive for September, 2009

“Can you believe he just called me an Oriental?” @$%#!

Published
by
Zohra
on September 30, 2009
in Language and Politics
. 5 Comments

mandarin-oriental-washington-dcWe’ve all heard it before, its tough being brown/yellow/olive/black in the nooks and crannies of America, but I will repeat this first-gen immi (my nickname for immigrants) refrain!

*sigh*

It was tough growing up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn as one of the first Asians (not Asian families since my family could pass as White or as AmerIndian depending on which side of the Eur-Asian the gene pool favored when it came to our face — and my face came out all yellow olive skin and jet black hair). I was the first in line and until Linda Tam happily rescued me, and stood in line in front of me, in second grade. I remember the “ching chong” jokes and the buck teeth gestures. Things I did not understand until one day, Mrs Teacher made me stand in front of class and pointed to me and said, “Zohra is oriental and I will not tolerate anyone making fun of orientals in my classroom!”  Thanks, I thought, I think… for some reason that word, even at that age had an odd feel when it was used. But I didn’t know where I was from myself to be able to correct it (I also did not know enough English to counter anyone at that point).

Fast forward to age 19. I am at my first student protest and we are angry at tuition hikes, fare hikes, and whatever other hikes Guiliani was proposing at the time.  I was called “oriental” again. This time all the rage I channeled into activism surfaced and I yelled for this well-meaning woman to never call me an “oriental”. A Korean American project coordinator chimed in “Yeah, don’t you know that’s just wrong lady!” We were so self-righteous that we could even be bothered with the rest of what she had to say. Calling us oriental shut down our ability to communicate with her. It created a rift between us even if our cause was the same. We bullied this lady back into a corner. Then afterwards, I remember both of us “don’t call us orientals” drinking coffee and wondering why exactly we were offended by the term when Asian was just as vague and nondescript as the term Oriental.

Well, it wasn’t until much later that I learned from the Asian American Sociologist, Setsuko Nishi, (who had been put into the Japanese American internment camps during WWII) that using the term Oriental meant that we would be forever foreign. There is no hyphenation to express the American side. It was also offensive because of the history that had permeated that term and how vague it was — everyone from North Africa to the Pacific Islands were considered “oriental”.  Although, I suppose oriental is better than the police officer forms my friend filled out that asked if she was: Mongoloid, Negroid or Caucasoid. She was confused since she was Pakistani American!

September 8, 2009, Governor Paterson banned the use of the term “Oriental” when it came to describing Asian Americans.

The term “Oriental” is widely considered to be a disparaging term, but has been used in some forms and preprinted documents issued by state government and municipalities.

WROC TV

Hell yeah, it’s a disparaging term! Finally, I don’t have to write anymore polite (but cold) emails to colleagues who think that saying Oriental meant East Asians and Asian meant browner Asians.  Finally, I can stop hissing, “Oriental is for carpets!” And I can stop cramming Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, down my students’ throats each year in my obsession with terms, respect terms in addressing the brown, the yellow, the olive and the angry! (Well, no, I won’t stop cramming Said down my students’ throats!)

Finally, a legal recognition to ban an obsolete word that shut down communication between some very well-meaning people. Thanks Governor Paterson!

Against Grades and Grading

Published
by
Michael
on September 29, 2009
in Assessment, BLSCI, Grading, Pedagogy, To Ponder and What if . . .
. 5 Comments

The majority of students from the Business school who come to the Schwartz Institute to rehearse their company or industry analysis powerpoint presentations seem to look at the rehearsal process as an opportunity to improve a necessary skill. This has been one of the most rewarding aspects for me of my work as a Communication Fellow: the students are always grateful for the help in improving their public-speaking skills. They are motivated by the idea that they are helping themselves. I like that I do not have to grade their work for them to see it as important.

The institution of grading students on an A through F scale has done a horrible disservice to education. It has falsely given the impression to generations of students that the teacher or the professor has some ultimate authority over the value of their work, as if their own assessment of what they were doing was somehow secondary. The result of this institution is a division among most students into two groups — a group motivated by competition and the drive for the teacher’s approval, and a group lacking in motivation with little interest in the teacher’s assessment. What is missing all too often among students in both of these groups is the sense that their education is their own.

I have found several methods of correcting this problem that work within the extant system. By far the best of these methods is to ask students to write self-evaluations. All teachers who have ever taught a graded course know that students approach them to apologize for not having completed an assignment — the proverbial “my dog ate my homework” moment. The self-evaluation taps into the students’ innate authority over their work which is too often evident only in their apologies. If you ask students to write about how they have approached the assignments of the class and you ask them to write about their own perceptions of their strengths and weaknesses, they very quickly begin to realize their own agency in the learning process and to begin take responsibility for their own education.

Of course the best thing, I think, would simply be to do away with grades and grading altogether. I know that for many people this suggestion amounts to advocating “mere anarchy.” Without the carrot and stick, there would be no motivation anywhere among students, no assessment, no accountability. It’s true that in all likelihood, the students who come to me to rehearse their powerpoint presentation are not motivated purely by their own desire to improve. Their presentations are graded and they want to get a good grade. Well, perhaps this is true. But in a time when the movement for standards has taken over every level of education, I find some comfort in recollecting a different ideal.

Computers Invade the Writing Classroom

Published
by
Talia
on September 28, 2009
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), literature, Pedagogy, Technology, Uncategorized and Writing Instruction
. 5 Comments

Today I ran a writing workshop in a Great Works literature class, and I was surprised to find the class is held in a computer lab.

Classic Work Day - School

Creative Commons License photo credit: ·júbilo·haku·

Don’t get me wrong: I heart the web.  My students and I blog together and exchange links, and I’ve been a longtime Blackboard defender.  But computers in my actual classroom?  I’m not so sure.

For the first five to ten minutes of the class, as I introduced myself and gave an overview of our objectives for the day, I was interrupted by thirty deafening renditions of the little tonal song Microsoft has chosen to indicate “Windows is starting up!!”  Then, when I put the students into groups, the long, u-shaped computer tables forced them to sit in awkward rows, and I found it difficult to rove from group to group to answer questions.  By the end of the workshop, I could see that some students were dividing their attention between me and the screens in front of them.

Rather than simply conclude that computers don’t work in a discussion-based classroom, I’m seeking some suggestions for how to make them work.  How could we use computers to keep students focused on content, rather than making content compete with the computers?

Developing Professionally

Published
by
MichaelJ
on September 25, 2009
in CUNY, Faculty Development and Pedagogy
. 1 Comment

Lately I’ve been helping to organize a professional development event for CUNY Writing Fellows and have been thinking about the concept of professional development for educators in a university setting. While we have managed to find enough Fellows and faculty members to sit on the panel and to conduct workshops, I’ve been surprised by the number of experienced people who don’t feel they have much to offer.

It occurs to me that this may be symptomatic of a broader set of ideas about professional development itself. First I suspect that at least some people (wrongly or rightly) associate professional development with “climbing the ladder” or as tools for furthering one’s career without actually doing anything substantive. In this case it seems pretty obvious why people who take teaching seriously might be skeptical. Then there’s the problem of verbalizing our practice. This is a much more interesting issue to me as I often find it so difficult. How do we explain the nuances of communicating with our students or represent the complexity of understanding their needs in a few Power Point slides? Can the experience of years of teaching be easily written up in a technical assistance manual or condensed into a 45-minute workshop (despite the free coffee)?

Obviously there are more and less effective ways of accomplishing this but I’m not sure it’s ever effortless and certainly not perfectly generalizable. And, as difficult as this can be, it also seems necessary. Maybe another problem is the assumption that in order to facilitate a workshop or any other professional development activity we must speak from a position of authority. Yet this actually seems counter to the pedagogical approach that many of us have worked so hard to implement. When it comes to running a workshop so many of us (myself included) feel a certain amount of anxiety about telling others how they should teach. Of course, no one ever said professional development has to follow this authoritative model. Some of the best workshops and trainings I’ve attended have made use of the experience and skill in the room rather than starting with the omniscience of the facilitator who pretends to impart the one right way of teaching. (I’ve experienced this with training and professional development for community-based organizations as well) Now everyone sitting around in a room sharing their teaching experiences could come off as a little too warm and fuzzy, but I’m not arguing against specificity or structure. That said, I think there is something really valuable about hearing the problems that others face in the classroom and some of the solutions they have tried, whether successful or not.

Freshbloggers

Published
by
Luke
on September 24, 2009
in Baruch College, Higher Education, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Syndicated Content and Web 2.0
. 10 Comments

This semester, we’re managing our largest lift on Blogs@Baruch yet. In addition to an increasing variety of projects that I’ll blog about in the coming weeks, every Freshman Seminar at Baruch currently is blogging. That’s roughly 60 sections, populated by over 1200 students.

Baruch Freshmen at Convocation, September 2009. Click to see photo in its original location.

Yowser.

Each Seminar is directed by a Peer Mentor, a talented upper level Baruch student responsible for helping newcomers adjust to life at Baruch. The seminars meet every other week, and Freshpersons are required to attend lectures, panels, exhibits, seminars, and trainings, distributed across six “enrichment” areas over the course of the term. Then they’re supposed to blog about their experiences, and discuss them when they meet with their classmates.

Launching the project was a bit of bear, as we had to create the blogs, get the users registered, tie the whole deal together, and give some training to the Peer Mentors, who are crucial to the project. Ultimately, I created a custom theme (built on Carrington Blog), with certain core components to which each section would have access– a List of Seminars and Peer Mentors, a Guide to Blogging for Freshmen (produced by the Office of Student Affairs, who directs FRO), a description of the six enrichment areas, and a Google Calendar that displays upcoming events. I then created a Mother Blog, which syndicates posts from across the sixty sections of FRO, using the FeedWordPress plugin. The Mother Blog collects and stores all of the posts in one place, allowing faculty and administrators to look in on the writing that’s happening in FRO. Students are thus contributing to small discussions in their seminars, and also to a broader discussion among all Freshmen.

fro

Thus far, they’ve been writing quite willingly. In the fewer than three weeks since this thing was launched, we’ve aggregated about 900 posts; at the pace we’re going, we should reach well more than 4000 unique posts by the end of the semester. That doesn’t even begin to address the commenting, which has varied in intensity across the individual blogs. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to mirror comments between the original location of the post and the space where it is republished… if we did, and we hope to be able to do that soon, the level of dynamism would increase.

Needless to say, we’re looking at an awful lot of writing, and we’re trying to make sense of it in a few ways. We’ve created categories on the Mother Blog for each of the six enrichment areas so that posts directly pertaining to them can be easily sorted. This will allow the two administrators who oversee FRO– Mark Spergel, the Director of Student Orientation and Freshman Year Incentive, and Shadia Sachedina, the Associate Director of Student Life– to get student perspectives on the wide range of extra-curricular programs the school offers. Further, simple searches will allow certain segments of the Baruch community to see what students are saying about them. For instance, many of the early posts offered student perspective on tours of the library. Our librarians have already begun searching for “library” and “library tour” on the FRO blog to read student responses. Several blog posts have engaged Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, the Freshman text.

Other searches hold the potential to help identify students with like interests: “photography,” “history,” and “football” all offer returns. Such a use of the FRO Mother Blog suggests another function that this project can play, perhaps more effectively in future iterations: social networking. As a commuter campus, we constantly struggle to help our students see themselves as part of a community, and FRO attempts to address that tension. Integrating Blogs@Baruch into FRO makes that attempt much stronger, as students can more easily find, connect, and engage with their classmates through our platform. Next year, I’d love to get BuddyPress working in this project to foreground the social networking component… but, one step at a time.

At the end of the term, we’ll have, easily collected and archived, multiple writing samples from the majority of incoming students. With some more thinking and organization, this holds great potential for assessment, integration into writing instruction, early intervention, and assistance for ESL students. Ultimately, this project allows us the opportunity to further the core missions of Blogs@Baruch: increasing the amount and variety of writing that our students do, and nurturing critical thinking about the use of digital tools throughout the Baruch College community. Given the hectic nature of our launch this year, we weren’t able to spend enough time thinking collectively about the general education opportunities embedded in this project. I had argued that we should do a pilot with 20% of the sections so that we could be sure to more closely support our users and think more intensively about the implications of what we’re doing, but for various reasons, a small-scale pilot wasn’t feasible. But when we do this again, we know that the canvas works, what the challenges are in the mechanics of the thing, and how to improve our planning. We’ll be able to make a more significant investment in helping the Peer Mentors better understand the possibilities and implications of doing college work on the open web, crucial knowledge that they can then pass on to all Freshpersons.

Workshop on how to deal with source material

Published
by
Hyewon
on September 17, 2009
in Process and Writing Instruction
. 4 Comments

Last Friday, the Writing Fellows had our first CUNY-wide meeting of this academic year. After attending the orientation in the morning, I went to one of four concurrent afternoon workshops, titled as “Source Use and Writing with Authority” led by Professor Sean O’Toole of Baruch College.

The workshop was designed to inform us about how to teach students to engage with secondary sources in many different ways other than just to support or back up an argument. For example, sources can be used “as a primary focus of analysis, to establish a problem or question worth addressing, to supply context, background, or information, to provide key terms or concepts, and to grapple with another opinion or interpretation.”

We had two brief exercises: first, we read an article (Stanley Cohen’s “Folk Devil and Moral Panics”) to identify the ways in which the author uses his sources; second, we drew a diagram illustrating our strategies to handle the secondary materials that we use in our own writing project, the technique introduced by Mark Gaipa. Gaipa’s article (Pedagogy 4.3, 2004) suggests a variety of strategies that are illustrated with cartoons: picking a fight, ass kissing, piggybacking, leapfrogging, playing peacemaker, acting paranoid, dropping out, and crossbreeding.  I found that the drawing exercise indeed helped me relieve my anxiety dealing with sources, so I am thinking of using it as an office-hour exercise for my students. It might also be helpful for those of us who are writing a dissertation and having a hard time handling source materials, oftentimes feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. I knew drawing was often used in therapy, but I’d never realized its power before I had the exercise in the workshop.

Simply amusing?

Published
by
Diana
on September 16, 2009
in Pedagogy
. 5 Comments
I very much enjoyed these excerpts from freshman history papers, and hope that cacophony readers will as well.

Here’s a favorite:

An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. Theologically, Luthar was into reorientation mutation. Calvinism was the most convenient religion since the days of the ancients. Anabaptist services tended to be migratory. The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic.

However, this is not the first such compilation that I have seen, and I was wondering what purpose they serve. The editors of this entry suggest that the professor was perhaps motivated by vengeance. What other motives do we have for sharing such stories? Do pieces like these offer any opportunities for educators to improve their own teaching techniques?

True, they amuse. But they also allow the reader to feel superior and self-satisfied. As those who know me are aware, I myself been known to tell “amusing” anecdotes showcasing students’ mistakes or limitations. I’m afraid to say that more often than not these anecdotes result in mirthful eye-rolling, rather than in improved practice on my part.

Confronting Tom Cruise in the Classroom

Published
by
David Parsons
on September 15, 2009
in Low-Stakes Writing and Pedagogy
. 5 Comments

The Cruiser
Creative Commons License photo credit: xrrr

My course on the history of the Vietnam War necessarily contains a great deal of visual media, most often in the form of newsreel footage and clips from documentaries. However, since the Vietnam War has inspired dozens of fictional Hollywood films, I also have students watch clips from several of the most canonical films on the subject.  As any instructor knows, showing a “movie” in class has its advantages and pitfalls, the latter most often expressed in a sort of collective disengagement from an academic mindset, as students naturally fall into the more passive role of viewer.  How do we break through that passivity and get students to engage critically when watching a form of media that they are accustomed to consuming as entertainment?

Oliver Stone‘s 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July often ends up being a critical text in my course, simply because the narrative (and the ways that director Oliver Stone presents that narrative) engages some of the war’s most fundamental historical issues. The film also, however, stars Tom Cruise, a celebrity with a considerable amount of pop cultural baggage whose name often elicits rounds of giggling from students.  Since my goal is to avoid having them fall into the passive receiver role of pop culture consumers, I find it is useful to play along with the jokes for a bit before subtly steering the discussion into more “academic” areas.  In a matter of  five minutes, a joke about Cruise jumping on the couch on Oprah can become a conversation about  American male celebrities, which leads us to John Wayne, which leads into issues of American masculinity and directly into the critical aspects of the film we are about to watch.

Despite these pre-watching efforts though, students often can’t help but get caught up in what they are watching, particularly when it takes the form, essentially, of an action film.  This is why I think it is vital to avoid turning on the movie and letting it run for more than five minutes at a time.  After all, if you are asking students to consume this text in a different way than they are used to,  it is important that you present the text in a different way.  One way that I found effective is to break the film up into tiny clips that are watched and then written about (or discussed) in low stakes exercises.  This way, students are constantly forced out of the role of viewer and back into their role as critical thinkers approaching a text.  Even if that text includes Tom Cruise and machine guns.

Here’s a quick clip from another Oliver Stone film, Platoon (1986), followed by an example of the kind of free writing prompt that I have found useful for stimulating discussion and leading into more complex writing assignments.  By limiting the viewing experience to this short scene, one that has been selected carefully for its density of critical material, I hope to focus the students’ attention on just a few important elements.  As you can see from watching the clip and reading the prompt below, assignments like this contain more than enough historical, sociological, and ethical issues to keep everyone busy and, more importantly, to demonstrate how to begin unpacking the complex mechanics underlying popular culture:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_dNxlnFKA&feature=related[/youtube]

Exercise

The character Barnes is presented as the ultimate cynical warrior, immune even to death, and his character is contrasted with Taylor and Elias, who are ostensibly “good” warriors.  What makes a soldier “good” or “bad” in the context of this scene?

Barnes’ statement “there’s the way things ought to be, and the way things are” seems to apply to the Vietnam War and history in general.  Do you agree with his attitude?  Why or why not?

“VOCAT!” she said….

Published
by
Szidonia
on September 14, 2009
in Baruch College and Technology
. 0 Comments

Last week I made my first introductory presentation in a CIS (Computer Information Systems) course. So far, I have been supporting Accounting and BPL courses, so this other capstone course was a new experience.

I walked into the classroom not expecting the student ratio: 99% male, with one female student in the class. Of course, I thought afterwards, after all I am not in my usual Humanities environment where you have the exact opposite scenario with women outnumbering men in most cases. I sensed a mild dismissal throughout my presentation, nothing major, but I did not feel like I really “got them.” I think, after years spent in the classroom, you develop a radar-like sensitivity when it comes to students. And then there was this one moment when I held their attention: I told them about VOCAT at the Institute and how it would make it possible for them not only to access their presentations online, but also to copy and save those presentations and include them into their portfolios when they apply for various job positions in the future. I also suggested that, if their group wants me to record not just their rehearsal but also the “real thing,” their actual in-class presentation, I would be happy to come to class as well. (I started doing this for a BPL course last semester, and I found it really useful pedagogically. It was the professor’s request that I would do two recordings for his students, so they can see their improvement in between the rehearsal and the presentation proper. He also wanted his students to receive CD copies of the final presentation. That was when Tom stepped in with VOCAT and saved both me and the professor a lot of coming and going with VOCAT allowing students online access to the recordings.

On yet another side note, I also have to add that the best student presentation I have ever seen so far and the one that got a straight A without any questions, occurred in that BPL class. The students had a stellar PowerPoint put together, and they were on top of the game! They were also part of an Honors class where, as the professor told me in advance, there was a healthy sense of competition, but still, I was thoroughly impressed. The thing that made their performance even more remarkable for me was the fact that, based upon their rehearsal, I really did not expect too much from them. They out-performed my expectations, and the only way I could really appreciate their work was by comparing the rehearsal recording with the recording of the in-class presentation. My only sorrow was that the professor himself would not have had time to watch both recordings and see the improvement himself. As a teacher, my highest appreciation goes with what I refer to as “sweat,” or effort and work. I like to see genius in action, of course, but what really gets me is a student’s deep desire and true attempt to do her best amidst any circumstances.)

Aha, I said to myself at the end of my introductory notes in the CIS class, so if I did not catch them this time, VOCAT will! Maybe one should give up competing with technology after all….

A Paean to Print Media

Published
by
Lauren
on September 9, 2009
in Media, Technology and To Ponder
. 2 Comments

Paper Massacre
Creative Commons License photo credit: Vanessa Roanhorse

I recently moved from a brownstone to a large multi-story apartment building. One of the casualties of this move was my apparently unrealistic expectation that when you get a newspaper delivered to you daily, you will always have a blue-plastic wrapped paper lovingly waiting for you when you wake up in the morning and put some pants and flip-flops on to retrieve it. After three days in a row of having my paper poached by some unscrupulous new neighbor, I did what any self-respecting thirty-something graduate student would do: I griped about it on Facebook. (Well, after calling the paper for re-delivery, that is).

While many people have expressed sympathy about the paper-poaching, some people I’ve complained to, both virtually and face-to-face, have also expressed surprise that I get the newspaper delivered to me daily. The expense of daily delivery is one aspect of the surprise (to which my reply is: bourgie habits die hard), but some are also amazed that I actually read the paper in print form. “Why don’t you just read it online?” they ask.

So, I’ve been trying to articulate why I prefer to read my paper in 3-D rather than online. Here are just three reasons:

  • It’s part of my morning ritual. Every morning, 7 days a week, I like to sit at my kitchen table and read the paper while I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. If I read it online, I’d have to bring my laptop to the kitchen, or bring my breakfast to my desk, which is a personal boundary I shall not cross. (And don’t even think about suggesting I scroll through the headlines on my iPod in between sips of coffee and bites of granola).
  • The sensory experience. Feeling newsprint between your fingers, smelling traces of ink, hearing the scratch of paper as you turn pages: you lose the tactile experience when you read online.  Perhaps it is my history as a former zinester that led me to appreciate the allure of physical paper. Analog rules.
  • The reading experience. I read differently when the copy is printed on a page in my hands as opposed to appearing on a screen in front of me. I like being able to visually scan a large page, or easily flip to another page, rather than having to (primarily) scroll vertically and click on links. The content and quantity of my reading also changes depending on format. The printed paper is curated differently from the online version, leading to a different cumulative narrative of headlines and stories. When I read a physical paper, I tend to look at every page, scanning all headlines and reading what appeals to me. When I read the paper online, my eye gravitates to what is on top and in the middle and in large print, rarely scrolling down to read or click on the smaller headlines. My attention span wanders. I veer off to read other sites. I end up reading less, and being less informed.

I know, I know, despite my preference for print, the newspaper industry is dying. But what do other people think about print versus online? Do you read print newspapers, or are you primarily an online reader? What are your reasons either way?