Scott Garbacz's blog

A Canvas Tutorial, or, How Not To Enforce the Digital Divide

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 02:28:11 +0000

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Scott Garbacz

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In my E314 course, I need to teach a wide array of skills, ranging from academic research to close reading, from composition to the Oxford English Dictionary. Balancing these priorities against each other, and all of the skills against the need to provide students with a basic background for some demanding books, makes for an interesting challenge. Yet after a few semesters of teaching similar courses, which provided me with plenty of opportunities for fine-tuning my organization, I was surprised to hear one student make a rather basic observation to another:

“You’ve got to click, like, a lot if you want to see the comments on your paper.”

It was a bit of a revelatory moment for me. As someone who’s been using various forms of commenting software for the last decade or so, I never thought that the Canvas course management system posed any difficulties for students. I’d even prized myself on making a rather extensive and well-organized private course site, with various assignments, explanations of grading rubrics, links to important resources, and helpful hints tied together and always just a click or two away. But when I looked at what students actually had to do to see my comments, forcing myself to forget the basic assumptions I’ve internalized over the years, I realized—yeah. Maybe Canvas could be more easy to operate.

Or, more to the point, maybe I should be more proactive in providing my students with the tutorials and information they need to succeed in my class, rather than making it an impromptu computer-science flunk out class.

Below, I’m posting a series of images (along with comments, in a purposefully informal style that matches my classroom ethos) that walk through the process of accessing marginal comments in Canvas from a student’s perspective. I’d love these images to be shared; the more students are familiar with how to view their annotations, the better, and I’d like to think my effort provides benefit for more than just my students. In short, please adopt and adapt this tutorial at will.

But I also hope that the tutorial replicated below can give us a chance to think about the role of technology—and digital literacy—within classes that don’t have any particular digital focus. It’s tempting to blame students for failing to meet our arbitrary standards for technical proficiency. Yet leaving students without crucial instructions (even for tasks I find to be second-nature, and that seem to draw on a rather basic level of digital know-how) seems a betrayal of my role as an educator. Indeed, considering our growing awareness of the ways that the “digital divide” involves not just sheer access to web-based resources, but also an array of soft skills that may be disproportionally distributed among our students, it is crucial that we maintain awareness of our technology’s ability to throw unnecessary hurdles in the way of otherwise promising students. If we don’t consider the usability of our classroom technologies, we really are just policing the already problematic digital divide.

Looking at the Comments on Your Paper

I am a fan of Canvas. Unfortunately, sometimes their userface can be a bit ... disorientating. Here, therefore, is your Official Guide to Seeing the Comments I Gave To Your Paper(TM)!

Step 1: when your paper is graded, the course homepage should look something like this. Click on the link in the green circle (I expect you already knew this.)

Step 2: Click on the "View Feedback" tab circled in GREEN. Not the friendly-looking link to your paper that seems so inviting and linkish. (Yeah, Canvas's UI could probably be better here.) Note that it is circled in red. Do not click it. It will not help you.

You will also see overall comments on the right of your screen.

Step 3: Here things get a bit tricky. Some parts of your paper will be highlighted. There will be dotted lines going off into the right margin (circled in yellow). You also might see some comments at the end of your paper, and you will still see the general feedback on the right (both circled in blue). However, here you need to click on the minus sign (circled in green) a couple of times to get my many specific comments on your paper!

Step 4: Now you can see all of my comments (especially the ones circled in blue)! Congratulations! This will really help you in revisions.

Graphing Empathy

Scott Garbacz — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 11:20:32 +0000

Author:

Scott Garbacz

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Survey created in Canvas.

This semester, I taught a Banned Books class focusing on the ways that authors deploy empathy. One cornerstone of the class was a series of daily surveys. Each discussion was preceded by a survey (pictured above) in which students gave an informal ranking of their empathetic response to the main character(s) featured in the day’s readings. My goal was to help students theorize their own responses to stories, but I also ended up generating some unexpected revelations.

The surveys about The Satanic Verses went as I expected, but not as my students expected, which provided a valuable learning opportunity. Initially, the novel’s two Indian protagonists were too alien for students to initially identify with them. As a result, student empathy with both characters increased as they found themselves capable of projecting their own identities into Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta. Halfway through the book, however, they were surprised to find their ability to empathize with the characters to be dramatically undercut. My general conclusion is that this dropoff was caused when the details of Rushdie’s novel began to violate students’ expectations of the character. The students own responses, however subjective or imprecise, allowed me to introduce the concept of “false empathy,” where a deep sense of empathic connection actually serves to blind students to the realities of these characters. The temporary drop in students’ empathy, then, might actually reflect better reading practices, as they deconstruct false images of the character and began to grapple with the unfamiliarity of the characters. This in turn lead to better, perhaps less false, empathy. Most students ended up reporting their strongest connections with the characters as they concluded the novel.

The graph for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, unfortunately, was less enlightening—probably because I chose the wrong character. I had my students rate their connection not with the traumatized Pecola, but with the book’s primary narrator, Claudia. Since her character was not particularly dynamic, students quickly built up empathy for her and stayed quite empathetic. In fact, the only point of interest was a related poll I did on students reactions to the aged child molester who appears later in the book; those results, however, are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Huckleberry Finn generated the most interesting results, managing to truly surprise me. This was true not in the overall graph, but in the details. Generally, Huck followed a similar sine-curve pattern to Gibreel and Saladin, while the less complex (and more passive) escaped slave Jim consistently gained empathy in a linear pattern close to that of Claudia. Yet on the day that students read about Huck’s climactic decision to free Jim even if it meant embracing a life of wickedness, something interesting happened.

Above, you can see a more detailed breakdown of student’s responses before and after they read Chapter 31. Before, most students felt a sense of “moderate emotional connection” with Huck. That is, they felt emotionally tied to Huck Finn’s fate, but they didn’t identify with him on a deep level. After Chapter 31, the class polarized. A narrow majority, as I suspected, responded to Huck’s troubled theological and ethical musings by doubling down on their emotional investment in the character, reporting a newfound “strong emotional character.” But a very significant portion of the classroom found the chapter distancing. They reported being able to “see where he [Huck Finn] was coming from” intellectually, but they lost (at least temporarily) their ability to empathize with Huck.

Charting empathy using an online survey at the beginning of class turned out to be not only a great teaching opportunity, but a great learning opportunity. It certainly didn’t provide rigorous data, and I would be hesitant to make any firm claims based on such an informal series of surveys, but it did provide something valuable: a new way of thinking about how students read, and a series of talking points allowing students to reconsider the nature of their empathic connections with fictional characters.

The Convenience of Teaching Difficult Texts

Scott Garbacz — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:58:50 +0000

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Scott Garbacz is a doctoral candidate in medieval literature. His dissertation looks at how medieval students were taught to conceptualize and create literature, using many insights from contemporary cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Image Credit:

Jimmy Brown (jumpingjimmyjava) at Flickr.

My classroom tends to feature a lot of group and class discussion. This semester's first novel was Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a 576-page tome full of complex allusions to recent Indian politics, the foundation of Islam, and the Western literary canon. The second book is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a slim 216-page novel dealing with Jim Crow era America. Unexpectly, I'm finding that Rushdie, not Morrison, most encourages classroom discussion.

The contrast is counterintuitive, especially since my students preferred Morrison's work and (as demonstrated through in-class polls) found it much easier to relate to Morrison's characters. Where students could immediately understand Morrison's goal of depicting the self-loathing created by a racist culture, Rushdie's celebration of the immigrant experience of hybridity, impurity, and transformations was much harder for students to wrap their minds around. Morrison's realistic style allowed students to think about the experience of others, whereas Rushdie's magical realist aesthetic often perplexed students. Topping it all off was the religious element; Morrison's depiction of the role of Christianity in American culture felt infinitely more familiar to students than Rushdie's complex intimacy with and antagonism towards a form of Islam most students have experienced only through the lens of action movies and news reports.

Yet if Rushdie alienated students in a number of ways, I was surprised at one feature that kept drawing students into a richer appreciation of his work. Again and again, Rushdie questions the foundations of his own position, performing a sort of postmodern self-deconstruction. Students recognized echoes of Rushdie's own experience in figures ranging from the rich atheist who joins reluctantly in Ayesha's magical pilgrimage to the poet Baal who mocks the prophet Mohommad. Yet they also saw that each of these figures was interrogated by the text itself. The rich atheist offers to fly people on their pilgrimage to Mecca--but only a few, because he can't afford to take everyone. The prophet Baal writes beautiful, irreverent, and human verses--but in the face of despotism, he retreats away from political verse and writes nearly-meaningless love stories. When students saw that Rushdie was willing to criticize himself, it opened up class discussion; if the author himself was willing to argue both sides of a complex issue, why shouldn't students join in the fray?

Toni Morrison, on the other hand, is easier to understand but much, much harder to criticize. My mostly white students follow her depiction of black culture in Lorain, Ohio during the 1940's and can recognize both the horrors and consolations that such a life can provide, but they have neither the knowledge nor the life experiences to challenge Morrison's portrayal. Similarly, they can recognize (especially after my leading questions and mini-lectures) Morrison's ubiquitous theme of the importance of recognizing fellow human faces and resisting dehumanizing narratives, but Morrison’s arguments are so powerful that students feel they can do nothing but assent to her claims, at least for the purposes of this class. The book presents an odd paradox. Students seem to legitimately enjoy it, following its emotional twists and turns and working hard to understand its diverse cast of characters. Students even seem to be capable of understanding Morrison’s depiction of the relationship between stories we take in passively and attitudes that can drive out lives. Yet, in a way that wasn’t true of The Satanic Verses, students find it difficult to talk about The Bluest Eye—that is, to express the sort of varying opinions that brought Rushdie’s work to life in the classroom.

The afterward to The Bluest Eye may provide some antidote to this difficulty, though I haven’t introduced it to my students yet in order to preserve their sense of surprise at the story's development. In the afterward, Toni Morrison does dramatize some of the difficult decisions she has to make as an author, and in particular some issues around her complicated and deeply considered representation of sexual violence. Yet of course that conversation brings its own landmines, and so I try to at least limit the amount of time spent discussing such sensitive issues. In the meantime, the two books stand as an important reminder of a counterintuitive truth: that works which students find easy to understand are not necessarily easy to discuss, and that sometimes works that seem to be immensely challenging may, in the classroom, be far easier to teach than we would immediately think.