Last week Diana and I ran our first faculty development workshop of the semester. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it was on helping students develop thesis statements. We both are pretty content with the turnout as well as the level of engagement. We found it especially helpful to keep the content of the workshop limited to a few major points and as many hands-on exercises as possible. In a workshop last semester we were so eager to give as much information about high-stakes writing as we could that we ended up overwhelming our participants a little. This time we decided to focus on one very specific but important issue (thesis statements) and go into more depth with it. First, we presented the faculty with examples of good and weak thesis statements and asked them to formulate essay questions that would generate each example. Then, we worked with their existing assignments by asking them what would be a good thesis statement that they would like to read in students’ papers and how they can revise their questions to generate that statement. We were all quite engaged in the exercises and even had fun.
Next one is on responding to students’ writing. Any suggestions?
Diana and I are preparing our first faculty workshop of the semester. Our topic is “Helping students construct a thesis statement”. We are thinking about ways of getting students to understand the concept, identify thesis statements in assigned readings, and generate theses themselves. We wonder if faculty (all social scientists) will be interested. What if they think that it is not their job to teach writing, hence don’t show up? We need to emphasize that what we mean by a thesis statement is actually the answer to questions in their assignments: It is the research question (and the answer) in ethnography; the stance taken in an argumentative essay; or the explanation of a phenomenon in expository writing. Teaching to construct a thesis statement is more about teaching how to think than it is about teaching how to write. Maybe we should call it something other than “thesis statement”, something that doesn’t sound in the realm of composition studies?
I would like to hear from other fellows who have done similar workshops as well as faculty who participated in them. How can we stress the relevance of such a workshop for the work of faculty members? How can we make it more interesting and helpful?
I’m reading Natalie Angier’s 1999 book “Woman: An Intimate Geography”, a review of biological research on women’s bodies that challenge evolutionary explanations for gender stereotypes. Angier is a journalist who writes science pieces for the New York Times. I am fascinated by the ease with which she is writing about phenomena as complex as, for example, “apoptosis”:
“The millions of eggs that we women begin with are cleanly destroyed through an innate cell program called apoptosis. The eggs do not simply die -they commit suicide. Their membranes ruffle up like petticoats whipped by the wind and they break into the hearts of neighboring cells. By graciously and melodramatically getting out of the way, the sacrificial eggs leave their sisters plenty of hatching room. I love the word apoptosis, the onomatopoeia of it: a-POP-tosis. The eggs pop apart like poked soap bubbles, a brief flash of taut, refracted light and then, ka-ping!”
Scientific terminology explained in everyday language (let’s disregard “onomato-WHAT?”) and imagery in such an engaging way and with a natural authority. Isn’t this the whole point of WAC/WID? I often wonder how I can best solve the tension between “Use your own words” and “Learn the disciplinary vocabulary” when I see students use disciplinary terminology in sentences to show that they are aware of its existence, with no evidence of a real understanding of the concepts. In his well-known piece David Bartholomae talked about our expectations of students to “invent the university”, that is, to adopt the discourses of particular disciplines in which they are writing. But we want them to do this in a way that shows that they actually grasped the significance of those discourses. Of course we don’t foolishly expect them all to be Natalie Angier. But I wonder to what extent we expose students to this kind of “beautiful” scientific writing. Any examples from the syllabi you are working with?
Last week Diana Rickard and I organized a luncheon in the Sociology and Anthropology department to meet with faculty and talk about their concerns with students’ writing, and generate ideas for the faculty development seminars we plan to run later in the semester. Once Diana skillfully moved the conversation beyond the frustrations around having to teach grammar to college students we typically hear in these meetings, it became clear how engaged our participants, mostly full- and part-time junior faculty, were with students’ writing, and how creative some were in designing assignments to increase participation. I especially appreciated the fact that talk about the “problems” of CUNY students regarding oral and written communication was kept to a minimum. In fact, the Chair explicitly stated that his colleagues in elite schools frequently mention dealing with similar issues. While it is true that the diversity in the academic backgrounds of CUNY students pose real challenges, it is important to keep in mind that our students do not come from a different planet. Does anybody else think that sometimes, in our efforts to understand and be sensitive to the needs of our students, we border on pathologizing them?
In its March 10, 2006 issue The Chronicle of Higher Education published a survey of nearly 2000 high-school teachers and college faculty members on their perceptions of students’ preparedness for college. A major finding is that there is a large gap between what teachers and faculty think about students’ academic skills. Eighty four percent of faculty as opposed to 65% of teachers said that high-school graduates are not adequately prepared for college education. The gap is especially apparent in writing and math skills. Only 6% of professors as opposed to 36% of teachers think that students are very well prepared in writing (similar figures are reported for perceptions of math skills). The Chronicle devoted that issue to the role of colleges and universities in improving high-school education. The suggestion is that higher education institutions could cooperate with high-schools and take part in the education-reform efforts instead of spending billions of dollars on remedial work for unprepared students. Several states have established programs to this end, such as the Early College Initiative in Georgia or the K-16 Partnership for Teaching and Learning in Maryland, that bring together colleges and schools around the table. I don’t know if similar programs exist in New York or not. In any case, do you think there is a role for the Bernard L. Schwartz Institute, or similar institutions, in bringing City schools and colleges together to have a discussion about colleges’ expectations for first-year students and how these expectations could be met in high-schools?
One of the courses I support as a writing fellow requires students to work in teams of 4 to 5 and write a literature review. The instructor asked me if I could do a workshop on how to work in groups, so I began outlining a presentation. I would explain why teamwork is good, then talk about the kind of problems groups might face while doing the work, and finally describe the ways in which students could make the best out it. Once I had most of my entries in place, I realized that I listed more problems with teamwork than benefits. Flashbacks of disastrous team meetings from my college days (with some members literally crying) rushed to my mind, and I remembered how much I hated it. Then, of course, I also remembered that there was no way I could have completed those assignments without the help of my teammates. Hence, in an attempt to fight my own bias, I decided to focus more on how conflicts in project groups could be solved. There are many online sources on teamwork in general and conflict resolution in study groups in particular, and some are quite helpful, but most don’t do a lot more than preaching respect and understanding for one another. Does anybody know any books, articles, websites that provide a more hands-on approach to solving conflicts in study groups?
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.
The “Education Life” supplement of the New York Times on November 6 had a short article about the use of iPods as instructional technology in American colleges. Podcasting lectures, that is, audio-recording lectures for students to download on their iPods, or other portable players is becoming increasingly common in universities nationwide, starting with the well publicized case of Duke University. Last year, Duke gave its entering students free iPods with which they could listen to lectures whenever and wherever… that is, not in the classroom.
One of the main arguments in favor of podcasting in academia is that it makes it easier for students to just listen to the lecture and participate without getting frantic about taking good notes. However, it is also feared that students will increasingly desert the classroom if they have auditory access to what is going on in the classroom. Podcasting does not seem radically different from lower forms of technology college students and faculty have been using for decades, such as tape recording lectures, or more recently, posting lecture notes on Blackboard. All these practices aim to facilitate learning. However, I wonder to what extent making learning “effortless” leads to better learning. There are already online debates about the use of podcasting in college in several blogs expressing different opinions about how this tool could be most effectively used. While I see great value in these aids, especially for students with disabilities or for those juggling college with a number of other responsibilities such as parenthood, full time work, etc., I also see the risk of mass producing higher education. For our purposes, I wonder how it would affect what we are trying to accomplish as writing and communication fellows as it changes the nature of classroom interaction.
Because it is a recent development in instructional technology, I did not see many evaluations of its impact on learning. Duke published an evaluation of its iPod initiative in June 2005. While it seems like students just loved using their iPods, the evaluators admitted that “the extent to which having access to lecture recordings improves student performance, impacts class attendance, or enhances students’ course experiences remains unknown.” That is, we don’t know if it actually does what it is intended to do.
Well, this might be the cynicism of a technophobe who never made the move from a Discman to an mp3 or an iPod… Does anybody know any research evaluating the impact of podcasting or similar technologies on learning?
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