The force of those dire arms, or, if it’s tough, make it easy

December 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I was just appalled when I read about this “translation” of Paradise Lost. What’s next – Shakespeare? Perhaps students one day will be quoting “Should I kill myself or not? That’s what I want to know.” I really don’t understand the stated purpose of this project. Milton is too hard — even for scholars, so let’s make it easier? that way they can still get Milton in their diet? How does changing a poet’s words completely “free the reader”? I mean, I guess it frees him to not have to deal with Milton’s syntax; but then, why bother with Milton at all? Really, at this point, what is the point?

Filed Under: Language, Literacy, literature Tagged With: ,

A Picture is Worth…

October 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

In my teaching I have found that students can sometimes be surprisingly credulous about what is being communicated to them by images, whether it’s conveyed by a doctored photo or in the nonverbal message sent by a carefully selected image accompanying a story.   Even my friends who should know better do not always think as critically about images as they might about text.

Here’s an example.  As soon as Sarah Palin got selected as McCain’s running mate, I started getting emails circulating this photo of her:

My first thought was, “how can a middle-aged woman who’s borne several children look that good in a bikini?!”  The people who forwarded this were trustworthy enough, but I knew you can’t always believe what you see, when it comes to online images.  So, I did a little digging and came up with this original, on the blog ‘Urban Legends‘:

The blog author notes that “the resulting montage was obviously intended to satirize Sarah Palin’s image as a ‘gun-toting beauty queen.’” It was an early entry in the contest to come up with the funniest sendup of this suddenly buzz-worthy candidate, though it was soon trumped by the Tina Fey imitations, which used video to even greater effect.

I have used this type of Photoshopped image to help students recognize that they should be cautious about the source and substance of material they find online, including images, and just because they agree with the politics of the sender does not absolve them of the need to think critically.  The not-too-difficult search for the origin of the image also makes a useful, topical lesson for students in how we can use the vast amount of chat, data, news, and info online to check facts against many reliable sources until we come up with something close to ‘the truth.’

Now I have to sign off and go catch up on the news, from my favorite hard news source, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

Filed Under: Literacy, Media, Pedagogy, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Teaching Writing Intensively (and Often)

September 19, 2008 By 7 Comments

It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material—whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance—and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many a “good” teacher is not necessarily helping their students to be good learners, and often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in classes like literature where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and others less frequently express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not writing intensive.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Higher Education, Literacy, Low-Stakes Writing, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

The Dangers of Online Reading?

September 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I just read an interesting article by Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle about how students’ approaches to reading and interacting with information online seem to be hindering their ability to read and learn from texts in more traditional settings.  Specifically, he contends that:

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

This brings up a lot of interesting questions as educators are increasingly trying to incorporate some of these technologies into the classroom and publishers are pushing textbook content into more profitable eBooks.  Are we actually helping students by doing all of this?  Some initial studies of middle and high school students suggest that technology-intensive curricula do not improve student achievement.

Bauerlein has many interesting points in the article and makes a good case for “unplugging” some aspects of teaching and learning.  However, in my opinion, the question of whether or not technology in general improves/impairs student learning is not that interesting.  Instead, we should be focusing our assessments on understanding which technologies can be usefully employed in which aspects of the curricula.  Finding pedagogical fit for relevant technologies seems to be what we are striving towards at BLSCI.  Thus, as an institute, we undoubtedly have much to contribute to this important discussion.

Filed Under: Assessment, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Literacy, Pedagogy, Technology

Navigating the Messages at the Ballpark

June 19, 2008 By 4 Comments

A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always something special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half your view of the field was obstructed.

Behind Home

Tiger Stadium Creative Commons License photo credit: hassgocubs

I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.

So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.

Comerica Park / Detroit Skyline HDR
Comerica Park Creative Commons License photo credit: kw111786

As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.

Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.

Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.

The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.

17.jpg
Comerica Park Scoreboard Creative Commons License photo credit: McPhloyd

One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.

At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.

Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.

At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.

The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.

Filed Under: Baseball, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Literacy, Politics, Technology

How and when do we begin learning about plagiarism? Why don’t we always learn?

April 4, 2008 By 2 Comments

In the past several months I’ve been a volunteer tutor for an eighth grader whose homework assignments often involve looking up terms and concepts on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com.  For her most recent project she needs to provide visual images to illustrate her points; these images are also found online.  While working on her project, my student often has an IM window open on her screen; she clicks on it every time I turn away.  The computer screen thus becomes a single entity containing the private chat and information resources. 

Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?  

Filed Under: Literacy, Plagiarism

Digital Learning and The Schwartz Institute: Northern Voice 2008

February 29, 2008 By 2 Comments

collage by injenuity

Earlier this week I returned from my first Northern Voice, a remarkable conference on social media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. (The keynote speaker was none other than Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress, the open-source blogging platform we have started to use here at Baruch, but that’s for another post.) I spent most of my time at NV around a great group of Canadian and American edubloggers and instructional technologists who have channeled their energies towards exploring how the technologies and media that facilitate all manner of social interaction online might be harnessed to transform teaching and learning. Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Jen Jones, Bill Fitzgerald, and our old friend Jim Groom made me feel welcome at NV and helped me gain invaluable insight into some of the IT projects we’ve taken on at the Schwartz Communication Institute. Most of all, they helped facilitate my thinking through of some of the more salient work we’ve been undertaking lately as well as new directions in which we might move .

For the last 10 years, we have described what we’re trying to do at the Schwartz Institute as “infusing oral, written and computer mediated communication-intensive activities” into Baruch’s undergraduate curriculum. What exactly we mean by the terms in italics above has mutated and evolved over the years as we’ve experimented with new pedagogies and played around with our ideas of what it means to communicate purposefully and effectively.

What we mean when we talk about “computer-mediated communication” has changed most in meaning. At first it was just a way of modifying “written communication”: writing but on computers, mostly email and asynchronous chat via Blackboard. It merely acknowledged the generic differences between the kinds of writing our students did that ended up on paper and those which were both transmitted electronically and read on a screen. This included a limited notion of blogging as simply an occasion for writing and not so much of interacting within any broader community of knowledge producers.

Since our engagement with the key ideas that inform the conversations at Northern Voice, what we mean by “computer mediated communication” has changed to the point that “mediated” is no longer appropriate or especially useful (even “computer” seems limiting). It’s not mediated, it’s facilitated, even transformed by the tools we use. (Medium=Message, etc. etc.) What we’re concerned with now is not just writing with a computer but something much more complex, nuanced, and more exciting: something social. And it no longer involves just writing but other media as well. We have started to encourage faculty to allow students to compose not only in words but also with sound, images, moving and still, and all manner of found objects from the vast vast universe that is the internet. We have started to play around with ways of aggregating the knowledge students produce and encouraging them to offer it up to other community members while maintaining a sense of ownership and of responsibility for their own work.

Kathy Davidson’s distinction between Instructional Technology and Digital Learning has been helpful in illuminating where the Institute has been and where we’re going with electronic media in the work we do with students and faculty. Davidson says:

IT is usually institutionalized from the top down whereas digital learning is shared, contributory, collective, collaborative, customizable. With IT, teachers or, even more typically, administrators propose and implement and often require other teachers and students to use a particular new instructional tool in a certain way and to certain ends. In digital media and learning, the outcomes are less clear, the teachers have less of a determining role, and technology isn’t something delivered to others but is intrinsic to the larger learning project. Its building and application are part of the collective learning experience. The purpose of IT is to facilitate instruction. Digital learning can happen in school–but is as likely to take place at recess or in the lunch room as in the classroom. . . . Digital learning enhances and takes advantage of all the various ways we do things on line, allows us to customize and remix and repurpose online tools, communities, games, and other media, and, wherever possible, also makes us think about the implications and applications of the technologies we use so that we can learn, think, and act better together.

Facilitating digital learning is where we’re headed and I thank everyone I spoke to at NV for helping me get my head around that and showing me some of key tools and approaches that will become indispensable to our work.

Creative Commons License photo credits: injenuity and penmachine

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Conferences, ESL, Higher Education, Literacy, northernvoice, nv08, Pedagogy, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing Instruction

Finding New Contexts for the CPE Exam

February 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Is there room for the CPE exam in humanities and social sciences classrooms? Should there be room?

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general. 

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Literacy, Resources, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

How Can We Best Support ESL and Remedial Students?

September 24, 2007 By 6 Comments

I was an undergraduate student at Queens College in the late 1990s when remedial instruction was eliminated in four-year CUNY colleges.  One measure to alleviate the rigidity of the new policy was Prelude to Success, the program that allowed students needing remediation to be conditionally admitted to four-year schools.  These students’ determination to succeed in their first crucial semester at Queens was truly admirable.  Working closely with such students, I saw a vast majority of them, ESL or not, successfully exiting remediation and becoming full-time students at Queens. 

At Baruch, ESL students receive strong support in handling the curriculum of English and literature courses.  There are now several sections of Composition and Intro. to Literature courses (2100 and 2150) designed specifically for ESL students who attend a one-hour tutorial every week as a part of their class.  It was interesting and extremely rewarding for me to lead these tutorials as a Writing Center Consultant last semester.  This current semester I learned about the existence of 2800 “T” (Great Works of Literature with a Tutorial).  In fact, a big part of my Writing Fellow work now is 1 ½ – hour weekly meetings with 2800 “T” students.  Even though the population of this class can hardly be called ESL – there has been a registration glitch, and many students who don’t need the tutorial rushed to get into this section because it was open.  In my next post(s), I’ll gladly share my difficulties and pleasures in leading this unusual tutorial.  For now, I want to dwell on the place of ESL students in classes across disciplines. 

Transfer students from foreign schools who “fall through the cracks” and enroll in regular English and other courses with intensive reading and writing; freshmen who struggle in exhausting summer Immersion classes; continuing students who are making gradual progress in learning English – they all find their way into classrooms where they want to “sound American” and eliminate all grammar problems that prevent them from succeeding academically and socially.  They may be afraid to speak in class; they may want to get rid of their accents in speech and writing; they often simplify their thoughts because they can’t find the right words to articulate the full complexity of their thinking. They receive papers with many corrections and sadly agree that they don’t deserve to get above “B” because their “grammar is bad.” They run to the Writing Center or SACC for help, often hoping to get their papers cleaned up and polished.  They are used to hearing “Could you say that again?” or “I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ….”. 

Whether we set out to teach these students in our classrooms or lead workshops for them, we can’t overlook these interconnected issues.   I hope we can all exchange some constructive approaches to dealing with ESL writers and speakers.  I just want to share a few strategies that I found particularly useful: finding and praising a strong point in the writer’s/speaker’s thinking, resisting the urge to eliminate original formulations that do not “sound American,” and finally helping students see that the abundance of red marks in their papers does not mean that they make an abundant number of mistakes — it simply means they make a few recurrent ones. In my work as a tutor, I found it very useful to use a particular color for each type of error.  This way the student knew that he/she had 2 or 3 problem areas and not 20 or 30. 

One particular article has been especially helpful in my work with ESL students: “Editing Line by Line” by Cynthia Linville (ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.  Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2004.  84-93.).  Linville explains that there are “[s]ix error types that are treatable and are often frequent or serious in ESL college compositions”; these include subject-verb agreement, verb tense, verb form, singular/plural noun endings, word form, sentence structure.  When we focus on what’s treatable and teachable, we will help students to learn English more efficiently, build their confidence and preserve their unique voices. 

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Literacy

Syncretism and Web 2.0

April 18, 2007 By 4 Comments

Next academic year, we hope to help students produce more broadly through the Web, particularly via videos and audio podcasts. The Web is replete with “one-world” examples of cultural syncretism, and the word “mashup” is itself a product of Web 2.0. Here’s an example I stumbled upon while surfing last night. This video features the Dvinks Clan, a parkour/free running group based, I think, in Latvia. Parkour was invented in the French suburbs, and inspired by the moves in 1970s Kung Fu flicks. This video echoes French New Wave cinema, draws upon the California skater videos of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and uses French hip-hop as its soundtrack.


This video, beyond showing off the amazing ability of practitioners of parkour, also reflects the multiple literacies of its producers and their familiarity with a variety of cultural forms. It was produced with practically no budget. We all are concerned about the writing and speaking ability of our students, and we should be. But we also, I think, should realize that students have other languages through which they can express themselves and generate knowledge, and most of them don’t think that they’re allowed to draw upon these forms at college. I think they should be, as long as it’s in the right pedagogical setting. We can help make this happen. I’d love to see Baruch students use the aural and the visual to explore themselves and each other, and to present their explorations to a broader audience. I have no doubt we’d all be impressed with the product. That, to me, is what teaching through Web 2.0 is all about, and it’s the perfect use of these new technologies at the most culturally diverse college in the country.

Filed Under: Literacy, Technology, Web 2.0
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »