Category Archives: Teaching

Teaching Writing

Dennis Jerz announces a position in writing instruction at Seton Hill University.

Seton Hill University seeks specialist in Composition/Writing Studies for tenure-track, Assistant Professor of English, beginning fall 2010. The faculty member will teach composition and related courses in the Undergraduate Writing Program, with additional generalist responsibilities in English. 4/4 course load. A Ph.D. in Composition/Rhetoric is required. Additional experience in literature desired. Background in writing program administration, assessment, and/or writing in the disciplines favored.

Precision

I’ve been looking for the right word to describe the evaluation of problem solving processes. Today, while struggling with some evaluative language, it hit me: disassemble. That’s it.

We apply problem solving processes daily, even when we lose the keys. Ah, backtrack. We follow processes, but do we do enough to evaluate them when one aspect of work has been completed and implementation begins. Typically, implementation gets in the way because people are now working on implementation. This doesn’t seem quite right to me, as once implementation happens certain insights about how decisions were made might be lost and could influence engagements to come.

The above is a little cold and general. We should, I think, disassemble our thinking especially when we’re trying to learn something long term and reconsider processes.

Work

It’s been a long and short semester. Lots of evaluations yet to get through. But it’s also somewhat sad to see the semester go. My commitments to our Ability-based teaching and learning system have come to formal close, as chair of the team that developed, put into place, then revised, and again put into place over the past five years or so. Now it’s time to apply and put most of my time into developing our new New Media Communication program, which should see formal approvals in the fall. I’ll be coordinating the program.

Our prep students have taught us a lot about what to do and what not to do. And the work John and I do external to the college feeds the ideas and keeps us thinking freshly on digital subjects. We’re looking forward to interesting projects with Nathan Matias and others. We’re thinking about film, interactive fiction, hypertext, and code, but we’re also thinking about how to inject all this into curricula that can change quickly but also stay in touch with fundamentals.

Students in the new media area, where we’ve been paying most attention, have been very smart, fast, and amenable to the new but still need more background, background, such as the range of works encompassed by hypertext and computed artifacts, that’s difficult to generate when that material has not been covered seriously in their educations. They enter courses with lots of experience with digital tools. These tools simply exist, like those browning bananas you have in the kitchen. But they still haven’t read a lot of relevant texts, other than what they’ve either generated as content on social networks or on cameras or cell phone ephemera. It’s interesting that the history of the network is absent in their experience, in the very screens they consume.

A lot of our work has to do with understanding and conveying context. A weblog, for example, is a connection to . . . what . . . as Blake is a connection to . . . well . . . what? Like architecture, the forms are just there, always have been, like that red-brick apartment on the corner where you grew up, and thus they need revealing.

Here’s to the new media students. It’s been a blast.

Teaching Philosophy

From what I remember of my younger days, I used to consider myself a “teacher.” I was someone who “instructed” students in the arcane arts of reading, writing, literature and history. I grew up a medievalist and nurtured the image of the dusty scholar in his library professing on Beowulf.

Academics call themselves by many names, such as educator, professor, teacher, and so forth. It’s a jumble. And it’s not really that important how one perceives oneself in a job, unless that perception grows dangerous, whatever that might mean. In any event, I see myself now as simply being in a position to offer opportunities for people to learn a particular framework or set of methods or ideas. These opportunities are dressed in assignments assessed after completion by standards of evaluation in a particular “course” of study.

I don’t worry so much anymore about whether students want to learn, care about the work, or even do the work, as the opportunities are offered and left at that. Students will jump in and get wet or stay out of the water and find something else to do. Those who are excited about the work dig and in and go to work. Over the years, I’ve learned that my own worries matter little to a person who isn’t interested. I can’t make people like or be interested in something. This can be tricky, as it may sound like indifference.

Here’s a case. Sometimes we show examples of new media to people and they get excited about it. But when the work comes, people turn away, wanting to jump right into the “creating” part: how do I animate a ball; how do I make that kind of film; how do I do that cool stuff to photographs? They don’t want to know about the real work and some don’t care about knowing it. Those that do care are “students.” Both kinds of people want to do the cool stuff the authors or teams of authors of which have gone through thousands of hours of academic or self-study to create. The “student” is willing to be patient. That’s why we like those people who will work for hours on a problem and rarely show evidence of conceding.

Second case. I still find “new media” a useful rubric to describe web work, games, world simulations, film, electronic literature, digital graphic design, and programming. “New media” as the rubric describes a host of human concerns–methods, concepts, and objects–that have found fruition in the digital. We develop plans, evaluate those plans, prototype, follow disciplined production, and evaluate, fix, then try something else. For me, “new media” describes a method of work, a describable tool set and vocabulary, a community, an ecology, and an economy. New media as an ecology is a set of concepts and structural apparatus. Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson captured, I think, the basic ethos and ecology of new media in their conceptual flourishes. Facebook’s TOS issues are a good example of an ecology in action: thousands of years of law, communication, machines, and human discourse.

Third case. “New Media” has very little in the way of pedagogical history. There are lots of programming text books. These books are good for tracing pedagogical history. But “New Media” is hard to capture in a text book. Rather, it’s a collection of nodes: from the writings at A List Apart to books published by O’Reilly to the work done at the hundreds of labs around the world and by software developers and engineers, librarians and artists, and the archivists of emulators. That list also includes architects who plan for media and data; city planners who embed computing into their street lights; and researchers who dig into the potentials of nanotech. Our friend Ted Mikulski is a “new media” person because he works with Second Life and connects that work to architecture, design, and communication tools; in his work, he uses multiple systems and evaluates problems for fixing (such as SL’s method of human scaling). But he’s also a painter “New Media” pedagogies are, therefore, related to the traditions of communication and architecture.

If I want to have deep discussion with students on the subject of e-literature, then what’s the prerequisite? Lots of literature courses? That takes time. Some coverage of the “memex”? How does one have a conversation about linking when a person may not have a lot of experience with poetry in the first place? What will the added aesthetic burdens mean? Here’s an example. In our Digital Narrative course at the college, a student asked me what I meant by analyzing 253 for a project he’s working on. I asked him if he’d had any literature courses and he answered no. Thus I learn. We’re developing the course and we need to know what proper prerequisites to add to the course. But is literature a proper prerequisite? In an ideal situation, a student taking digital narrative would have an intro to programming course, a design course, some history and literature courses, a creative writing course, a math course, and an intro to computer graphics course. Wow, that’s a lot of prerequisites. But the list makes a case for the ideal “new media” student: a student involved in a multi-disciplinary, inter-dsciplinary way of looking at the world.

Tools vs Concepts
In our new media approach at the college, we don’t emphasize tools, though we introduce students to them. We want to provide students opportunity to think and make decisions in new media contexts that require problem solving, literacy, and collaboration. Given this problem, what’s the right tool or collection of them? In this context, comparison comes from some amount of practice with a number of tools and their “intrinsic” functionality. I had a student ask: can I animate an image in Tinderbox? I said no. Flash is our animation tool, but you can also animate with (fill in the blank). Why animate when you should be thinking about link effects? But it’s a good question, whose better answer will come when the student has a range of “projects” under his belt (and lots of additional courses). But the question: what’s the best tool for the job at hand is a problem for “every professional” and every “carpenter.” Our process, therefore, takes universals seriously.

We want students to respond positively to a range of problems and to work and life solutions through on paper or in the proper software, then seek out the answers by finding the right set of relationships. We don’t want them to be experts at Photoshop.

Rabble

An interesting and significant dialogue on the relationship between Denis Rancourt and the University of Ottawa

JF: Why is it important to you to not grade your students?

DR: With grades students learn to guess the professor’s mind and to obey. It is a very sophisticated machinery, whereby the natural desire to learn, the intrinsic motivation to want to learn something because you are interested in the thing itself, is destroyed. Grades are the carrot and stick that shape obedient employees and that prepare students for the higher level indoctrinations of graduate and professional schools. The only way to develop independent thinking in the classroom is to give freedom, to break the power relationship by removing the instrument of power.

Fluency

I’m deep into Maryanne Wolf at the moment. Her distillation of neuroscience and learning stages requires stepping back and pondering. I’ve been interested for many years in the physical/physiological apparatus of confusing, slippery things: memory, for example, consciousness. Much of memory is described in fiction and poetry, but what does the lamp inside the skull look like when we see a spider? How does the brain reproduce an old wound?

One idea that stands out in Wolf’s book is the idea of reading speed. This is not intended to mean “speed reading” but the amount of time required by the brain to process an encounter, with a spider or with a new word, its automaticity. “The fluent comprehender’s brain doesn’t need to expend as much effort, because its regions of specialization have learned to represent the important visual, phonological, and semantic information and to retrieve this information at lightning speed” (142). Wolf’s frame of reference focuses on young, learning readers, and how their brains operate during the course of learning. There are links between the time required to process a word and the brain’s ability to swiftly interpret the meaning of “footsteps in the dark” or “why that lion is drooling in my direction.”

The swifter the process of decoding and relational thinking, the more time the brain has for associative and creative thinking once the technical and physical ability have been mastered. In lots of ways, what Wolf identifies in brain processing matches pretty well with ancient and medieval views of the intellectual journey. Decoding equates to “literal or ‘implicit’ understanding” and so forth up the learning chain. Wolf’s technical description of the learning timeline and its saccades is an interesting generalization of the neuro-process and reminds me of Weinberg’s as applied to the big bang.

Staying with the text and mashing its implicit meaning is one stage in the process toward mastery or, what I would call, applied skill. Critical to fluency is attention, the amount of time we ponder over the text and the amount of time the brain function as an attending tool, blocking out the enemies of distraction. Wolf writes, “Our interpretive response to what we read has a depth that, as often as not, takes us in new directions from where the author’s thinking left us” (156). But this ability comes from, what Stafford called a “‘quality of attention.'” Interestingly enough, I began a series on reading hypertext with this very notion of attending to the surface, which takes immersive practice and, perhaps more, skill application because of the added layer of the link.

Wolf’s brain function timeline is an interesting generalization.

Kuglemass on Undergraduate Curricula

While I think that Joseph Kuglemass generalizes on Aristotle and Critical Thinking in this article at Inside Higher Ed, it’s well worth the read. He writes:

From the middle of the last century until fairly recently, the idea that the purpose of undergraduate education is to foster “critical thinking” has had a virtual monopoly in both academic and popular circles. This goal has been institutionalized around the globe, wherever students are tested on “critical reasoning” skills.

It is an answer I myself have given on many occasions, and it holds up well for an old chestnut. It is a difficult code to enforce in a humanities classroom. It is a concept best suited to the inspection of evidence. Education researcher Lion Gardiner described critical reasoning as “the capacity to evaluate skillfully and fairly the quality of evidence and detect error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias.” Unfortunately, presented with something like a Max Ernst painting or a Martin Luther King speech, students will be hard-pressed to find error, hypocrisy, or bias. Critical reasoning will not help them to “unpack” the text, as we say in the humanities, though it may help when they are called upon to construct a rigorous argument.

The article originally appeared at The Valve.

Here’s where I think the major generalization happens:

Teaching a class too much in this mode produces an unhappily smug series of field trips through “our stupid popular culture,” “our stupid political landscape,” and so on, along with the depressing feeling that nobody, the instructor included, will follow through in practice on the overwhelmingly negative evaluations of culture that the “critical thinking” method produces.

Maybe in some cases “the negative evaluations” come as a result of a semester’s practice, but how is this an imperative of a whole?

Hard Work

An excellent post by Tim O’Reilly on hard work. This follows the theme in my last post on semester observations.

There’s a long arc in computing that teaches us how much we gain through advances in ease-of-use, with the iPhone being the latest breakthrough success. But it’s important to remember how much we lose when we think that ease of use is everything. Many things worth doing are hard, requiring a great deal of practice before you achieve mastery.

and

People who can go from novice to expert with books are actually quite rare. It doesn’t seem like they are rare to O’Reilly since these are the types of people you’ve been selling to all along. However, if you’ve ever taught at a University you know that maybe 2% of the students you teach can learn themselves from nothing but a book. It’s not that this other 98% are dumb it’s that they haven’t learned how to learn a skill like programming or mathematics and have to be motivated to do kind of work they need to do to learn. Unfortunately, in most courses students do the minimum amount of actual practice that they can get away with because it’s not been made available in a form that gives them *ownership* over the process.

Semester Observations

It was a short, busy semester, with lots of revision work to the College’s General Education model, lots of talks, meetings, and out-of-classroom work, and a lot of preparation for the Spring already. I still don’t know how to get all the required work done, especially given the break when no one heeds their email.

I taught two writing courses, one research-based, this semester and amidst them rose water both high and low. (New media and World Literature, also.) I wanted to make some general observations and conclusions based on my experience.

Generally, students are reading well. But what to do with the reading: That’s becoming an issue. Partly, this has to do with a student’s ability to take a position and sustain it through a set of arguments, react to a variety of ideas or conclusions with more than just a perfunctory response, and to take other ideas and grow them beyond their original context, and to find something significant beyond the observations, arguments, and conclusions of another thinker. Moreover, it has to do with developing special habits in school, work, and with friends and family. I don’t sense that the majority of students have lived a life where questions, disputation, examination, and critical thought are common expectations (see final paragraph).

This is not true of all my students and this doesn’t even mean that every student in my two writing courses could not have risen to the final entries in their portfolios. As is typical, older, more experiences students, even those in and around the age twenty but who have returned to school from other endeavors, have more of a handle on problem solving and with the development of ideas and cases using written and spoken language. I saw shades of excellence in many of them, but excellence is diminishing. More practice with sustained critical thought will serve them well (why they haven’t had this before is a mystery). Over the years, as the younger and less exposed students gain experience, I’m sure they’ll develop better habits: longer hours over problems, more engagement with materials, more patience with the unfamiliar, perhaps more engagement with new modes of thought, and more serious consideration of directions and formal presentation.

On the language management end, I’m stymied. All students are coming into college with at least 10 years of formative education, yet very few of my students have a competent linguistic, orthographic, or rhetorical sense from which to begin a course of study in frosh composition. In many cases students behave as if the language is something of a mystery, from the sentence level all the way up to the lemon dressing, as if writing on a subject with certain purpose is something new or surprising. This I don’t buy or understand. Composition is about making structure and ideas with the language, not about proper grammar or diacritical notation. While these can be strengthened and must be applied, they are a distraction in composition, even for frosh.

The above leads to my final observation. Even with more reading on the web, my students have not read and practiced with the language enough, which prohibits self teaching and learning. Many argue that strong writing requires strong reading and the other way around. This is neither true nor false. One may need to both. Writing teachers want both. The relationship is more about the habit of mind. But there is a deep problem here and this has to do with the fundamental structures that language produces, from magazine articles to hypertext fiction. Having a sense of language structure–knowing when a sentence and a paragraph make sense and hence are complete or leading and why–comes from experience with forms. And this is where students are most lacking.

But they are wonderful people nonetheless, and I had a great time with all of them.