Gulessarian's blog

Hidden Collaboration: The Internet, Syllabi-Making, Assignment-Planning, & YOU!

Gulessarian — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:34:00 +0000

Author:

Lisa Gulesserian

Image Credit:

"Hidden Fire" by Azi-Isobel on DeviantArt

We’re a few weeks into the fall semester now, and I’ve just finished hammering out my assignments for E 314L: “Banned Books” using lots of in-person feedback from my peers and my teaching mentor, along with tons of help from resources on the internet. While talking about assignments and syllabi over a hot beverage with friends and colleagues is my cup of tea, the online resources I used were absolutely indispensible for coming up with the specifics of my assignments. As I planned my course, I was floored by the sheer number of pedagogical resources posted online—my post today is about this hidden collaboration amongst instructors and professors who use the internet to share and borrow lesson plans, syllabi, and pedagogical advice. In my post, I’m going to talk about my own experience in the “hidden collaboration” realm by sharing a few of my favorite sites— the English Department’s eFiles collection, the DWRL’s Lesson Plans site, and a smattering of personal instructor sites and outside-of-UT webpages.

Since eFiles is the site that we’re directed to from the very beginning of our time at UT, I won’t discuss it in detail. I’ll only say that it’s full of fantastic advice contributed by faculty, teaching assistants, and assistant instructors over the years. I used eFiles to get a feel for how much reading and how many major assignments I could feasibly assign to my students. Try it! I searched for “close reading” and I got 21 pages of results! Filtering, by course or by resource type, is the only way to navigate the site to get pertinent resources. I ended up filtering for only those results that were marked as syllabi to get an idea of how previous instructors structured their courses. After looking at the 28 contributions, I knew I could assign at least five novels to read and two essays to write. I was able to confidently move on to planning my assignments with help from instructors of years past (some whose names I didn’t recognize because they’d left the halls of UT before I was even admitted to the graduate program here!). Without even knowing it, these instructors were integral to my course’s development.

Of course, the instructors who post innovative and exciting lesson plans on the DWRL’s Lesson Plans site have helped me just as much. After a swanky redesign and the addition of archived materials from the old LP site, the new site is more user-friendly and searchable than ever. You can browse plans by type of assignment—whether it’s an in-class activity, a semester-long project, or a unit-long writing assignment—and by lesson plan content—ranging from analysis to writing process. I found it most helpful when I searched for general terms under “lesson plan content.” Under “Literature,” for instance, I found plans on blogging close readings, historical approaches to literary criticism using Internet Archive videos, and collaborative annotated bibliographies. I ended up tweaking a few of these lesson plans to create my own close reading and annotated bibliography blog post assignments (which will soon be posted on the Lesson Plans site!). I know without Pearl’s detailed explanation of the steps necessary for close reading a passage or Emily’s instructions for collaboratively writing an annotated bibliography on PBworks, my assignments this semester would have been haphazard experiments that would have taken at least another semester to hone and perfect. With the help of lesson plans posted by instructors in the DWRL (who don’t know who they will help once the assignment is posted online), I was guided through the process of creating two assignments.

Along with eFiles and the DWRL Lesson Plans site, I made use of many academic sites all over North America. At the beginning of my assignment planning, I Googled for terms like “Annotated Bibliography Assignment” and “Close Reading Paper.” Through my many searches, I found useful instructor sites and departmental resources from universities (and some high schools). The “Writing Resources” page at Harvard’s Writing Center site was one source I used to give my students practical style advice. I navigated to the University of Toronto’s Writing site to get advice for summarizing sources while identifying arguments. And of course, I used the Purdue OWL to provide students with sample MLA citations on their assignment sheets. But, surprisingly, I received a good amount of help by visiting the course sites of many instructors. From an instructor at Seton Hill University, I learned how to articulate what kinds of passages merit close reading. From a professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, I was introduced to books that were criticized for their historical imaginings (and which I promptly read and decided to assign in my current course). And from UPenn’s TeachWeb (a site that compiles teaching resources for English and Comparative Literature instructors), I learned about integrating peer review into my writing assignments. Without the help of savvy instructors in far-flung areas of North America, I would not have been able to craft my assignments.

Unbeknownst to the instructors that posted their lesson plans and syllabi online at the English Department’s eFiles collection, the DWRL’s Lesson Plans site, and academic sites outside of UT, I have benefitted from the information that they so freely shared. I hope that you—instructors at the University of Texas and beyond—will use and contribute just as much advice as I have!

Having Fun with Technology in the Classroom

Gulessarian — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:03:02 +0000

Author:

Lisa Gulesserian

Image Credit:

Stetson University

As instructors, we all know how haggard most students look on the day that a paper is due—the sunken cheeks, the bleary eyes, the undaunted yawns all signal to me that heady material isn’t going to be as quickly (or as enthusiastically) received as usual. So, many of us make it a point to have some sort of fun activity on the day that a paper is due. We all know the kind of activity I’m talking about—the kind where students don’t have to have read or prepare prior to coming to class. I’ve been experimenting lately with making fun, paper-due-date activities using the technologies available to us in the DWRL computer classrooms. My most recent experiment, when my students turned in Paper 2, was to see what happened if I asked my students to make 30-second long videos about their favorite city using iMovie. I was quite surprised with the results.

Whenever I introduce a novel activity like the iMovie workshop, I initially encounter some resistance. As I’m walking around the class to check on how my students are doing, I often notice that a few of my students are visibly frustrated with the new and unfamiliar program. Some of my students documented their discomfort in their Learning Record observations last week, and I learned that, for a couple students, the activity “was somewhat frustrating initially” and “interesting but very overwhelming at first.” Reading these types of observations reminds me that not all students are as tech-savvy as I assume they are.

These observations also help me think about ways to boost my students’ confidence and skills in the workshop environment. On my rounds, I often make a beeline for those struggling students and show them simple things on iMovie that have impressive effects (like adding text over the images that they imported into the program, or transitioning between images, or incorporating a map). With a small amount of confidence in their video editing skills, students let go of their inhibitions and start experimenting with the program’s many effects. In other observations, I learned that students “never realized all of the things you could do with [iMovie], from adding effects, to music, to words and sounds,” and that, for one student, “playing with iMovie on the computers during class was the highlight of my day!” These moments of confidence and skill-building are great results from such a low-stakes, unstructured, and fun activity.

Since the final project for my course, Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums, is a group video, the iMovie workshop isn’t just an unrelated activity for the goals of my course. Students gain familiarity and a few skills in importing, editing, and exporting. Many students also end up reflecting on their own habits, such as one student who observed that “it was interesting to try a new program that I see everyday, but never open. It made me think about all the programs that are unused on my computer, sitting there, but never used. All it takes is a click to try something new, and it adds to my knowledge!” Another student stressed that “This quick tutorial showed me how to edit videos and slide shows in addition to adding effects. I'll definitely be able to use this skill in the future!” My main goal for this activity is to allow students to de-stress after a paper. Yet, sneakily, I’m preparing them for their final project, too.

I hope to continue experimenting with these low-stakes, high-fun classroom activities using new programs. After Friday’s wonderful AVRG workshop on “Using Video in the Literature and Rhetoric Classrooms,” I’m inspired to come up with other activities (such as the suggested classroom activity of juxtaposing recorded poems and images) for the day that Paper 1 is due in my literature class next semester…

Blogging in the Classroom: Peer Review Plus Camaraderie!

Gulessarian — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:45:41 +0000

Author:

Lisa Gulessarian

Image Credit:

Lisa Gulessarian

As a student myself in Dr. Lester Faigley’s Visual Rhetoric class four years ago, we used Blackboard’s “Forum” feature to initiate online discussions about our readings while sitting in front of computers in the same classroom. I remember how invigorating it was to respond to my classmates’ posts as they wrote them. I also found that having a written record of my thoughts on the readings served as great review for when I wanted to refer to theories from these readings later in the course. In Dr. Faigley’s course, our class forum was a way for a shy, novice graduate student (i.e. ME!) to contribute to the discussion without feeling overwhelmed.

Now, years later, I’m experimenting with a course blog in my Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums class. I’m already quite happy with the results.

At first, I envisioned the blog as a place for students to share their research with other students, but after a few days of mulling over using a new pedagogical tool in my class, I quickly realized that the blog could do much more than function as a mini-version of Facebook’s “Share a link” feature. Not only could I get students to share their research with their peers—with a blog, I could get them to work on their writing!

After their initial blog post where they introduced themselves (and became familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Wordpress), I’ve had students write two longer blog posts. The first was a rhetorical analysis paragraph (on one appeal from the source that they’d be analyzing in their first paper). The second was a criteria list based on a category of evaluation of their own choosing (related to the source that they’d be evaluating in their second paper). For both blog posts, I’m impressed at the level of engagement and effort that students put into writing and conceptualizing their posts.

I’m equally impressed by the careful and astute comments their peers left them. After each post was due, I asked students to post comments on the posts above and below their own. They wrote these comments in class as I walked around the room listening to their keys clicking and their videos playing (in their posts, many students included the videos or the images that they were going to analyze/evaluate). For each blog post, I asked students to watch for common setbacks, such as not tying audience to the appeal (for the rhetorical analysis post) or coming up with too-broad criteria (for the criteria list post). In both cases, students were able to alert their peers of potential problems with short comments (I asked for 6 sentences). After reading her peer’s criteria post on a music video, one student wrote “You could make [your criteria] clearer by mentioning which of these criteria are specific to which aspect of the video (images, music, lyrics, etc.) since it is a little confusing if you are evaluating a video or a song or the text of the lyrics.” Another student saw a problem in his peer’s too-general criteria and let his peer know that “The criteria of visual elements is also a little vague. Visual elements can range from camera angles to color use to computer generated elements like change is saturation and use of negative, so being specific on exactly what kind of visual elements you are referring to would be helpful.” And another student brought in prior knowledge to help her peer enlarge the scope of his criteria: “Also another thing you could talk about for visual style of a drama is lighting. In a film class I recently took my professor discussed some of the differences between sitcoms and dramas. He felt that sitcoms consist of generally bright lighting. Is this the same for dramas? Or do you think there is contrast with varied lighting techniques? Just something to possibly think about if you feel that you could add more to the explanation of that criterion.”

Of course, with this blog posts, as with any peer review, my students also gained a deeper knowledge of how they should proceed in their own writing. One student, after reading her peer’s criteria list, wrote: “I also like the way you pull direct examples from the show for your blog post (I probably should have done that for mine….oops!).” Another student told her peer that she used his post as a guide in writing her own criteria list post by writing “I actually used yours to write mine! THANKS!” Because I’m using the Learning Record, my students can document the moments that they gained confidence through the comments they both received and left for others.

An added benefit to all this blogging is that my students end up learning about each other. The camaraderie in my class is one that I would like to recreate in my future classes. Now students know about each other’s interests outside of class. After reading a blog post on a specific category of movies, one student exclaimed: “You seem to be very excited about this particular category and I feel like the information you have written just flowed out of you while blogging!” Another student, who especially appreciated her peer’s detailed justifications of her chosen criteria, happily admitted that “The way you wrote about the criteria that you’ll use to evaluate this source is really interesting. Your detailed writing makes me want to see the video now!”

In general, I’ve loved using blogging in my course. I will continue to ask students to compose mini-writing assignments for the blog. But most importantly, I will definitely make sure that they comment on their peers’ posts.