Blogging Pedagogy - student-teacher rapport

Show Students Your Own Work

Aubrey Plourde — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 19:30:53 +0000

Author:

Aubri Plourde

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The best thing I did last semester was to show my students some of my own shitty writing. Previously, I had avoiding putting up any of my own work, not out of some kind of fear of student reactions, but because I didn't want to make the class all about me.

Still, about halfway through last semester, I got the impression my students were feeling all downtrodden and dismal about their writing. I wanted them to see that even though we grade "final" drafts, none of us, their teachers, think about writing purely in terms of product, either.

I'm a big fan of Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts," like Rhiannon, and of Theodore Cheney's Getting the Words Right. Cheney's book has been invaluable for teaching revision. So often, I lacked a vocabulary or even examples for the kinds of changes I wanted my students to make. Cheney provides all of that and more.

Several years ago, I performed an exercise Cheney suggests, which is to reduce the redundancies and weak constructions in my writing. I wanted my students to see that clarity is ruined by extraneous words. So, I sent them a few paragraphs of Cheney's prose, and I met them in class with a PowerPoint full of my own shitty paragraphs.

The first one went like this:

Original (164 words)

This advice, found in a letter Sarah Orne Jewett wrote to Willa Cather in 1908, defines Jewett’s purpose and style as an author. The quotation followed Jewett’s suggestion that Cather change the sex of a dying woman’s lover from male to female, but the piece of advice designed for Cather’s story also applies to Jewett’s fiction. The phrase “done it as yourself” suggests self-sufficiency and capability, both in the general sense and on the specific part of women in love. Jewett’s reference to a woman’s capability to love in a “protecting way,” a way most often assigned to men, illuminates her belief that women could love in a traditionally masculine manner. However, the implication of a woman that both protects and nurtures (“[cares] enough”) implies that a woman may not only love as a man loves but can love simultaneously as both genders. Jewett’s resulting work shows women performing both gender roles not in a muddled androgynous manner, but as stronger, more well-rounded women.

The following slide held a screen shot of my self-comments, labeling each instance of wordiness: redundancy, repetition, weak construction, unnecessary modifiers, and so on. I walked them through each instance, reading the sentence aloud and poking fun at myself and my undergraduate writing.

The revised version slide looked like this:

Revised (119 words)

This advice, written to Willa Cather in 1908, describes Jewett as an author. The quotation followed Jewett’s suggestion that Cather change the sex of a dying woman’s lover to female, but the advice designed for Cather’s story also applies to Jewett’s fiction. The phrase “done it as yourself” reveals the self-sufficiency and capability of women in love. Jewett’s reference to women loving in a “protecting way,” often assigned to men, illuminates her belief that women can love in traditionally masculine ways. The idea that women simultaneously protect and nurture (“[care] enough”) implies that women not only love as men love but can love simultaneously as both genders. Jewett’s work shows women performing gender roles not halfway, but androgynously.

No brilliance here, but the content isn't important so much as the sentence-level revisions. It also modeled a thesis statement that isn't a graduate-level argument, but is of upper-division undergraduate level.

I was struck, upon receiving my evaluations, that many of my students expressed their enthusiasm for seeing my own writing. I probably would have forgotten about it, honestly, but as I think back at their revision goals, I do think modeling revision for them worked far better than talking to them about revision. It feels uncomfortable, sure. You'll never catch me showing them part of a dissertation. And there's always this fear that they'll go, "She's not that good..." Ultimately, though, it cost me very little to humanize myself--a smill victory--and to demystify the process of writing for them--a much bigger one.

6 Tips for Making the Most of Your Class Blog

Dustin Hixenbaugh — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:23:20 +0000

Author:

Dustin Hixenbaugh

Image Credit:

Taro Yamamoto

For several semesters I have had students engage in digital conversations using discussion boards on class management sites such as Blackboard and Canvas. This semester, wondering if writing for a public audience would increase their investment in participating in these kinds of digital conversations, I decided to set up a class blog. Since I have been pleased with the results, I thought I would share a few recommendations with other teachers who are either interested in starting a class blog or looking for ways to make more of one that’s already in use.

As previous Blogging Pedagogy writers have noted, there are many benefits to having students blog. Regularly posting their thoughts to a public site builds students' confidence in their voices. It gives them practice expressing arguments in reader-friendly language, and the comments they receive help them understand how effectively (or not) they have conveyed their ideas. These are experiences that students are bound to find helpful, whatever their major or career interests.

Blogging can also positively impact classroom culture. For example, Lisa Gulessarian observed that sharing a blog helped her students treat one another with greater empathy. As she reflected after one semester operating the blog, “The camaraderie in my class is one that I would like to recreate in my future classes." Tekla Hawkins learned through her students' posts what they found challenging about her lessons, leading her to make productive changes to her instruction.

Once you commit to having your students blog, you will want to spend a few hours setting it up. Our previous writers have also made recommendations concerning the preliminary decisions you will be making, and I will refer you to them if you want help selecting a platform, discussing the differences between academic and internet writing, or encouraging students to incorporate images in their posts.

My six tips take a longer view on student blogging. Although some of them suggest actions you might take within the first few days of the semester, my hope is that they will ultimately help you maintain--rather than simply begin--your class blog. If I have learned nothing else this semester, it is that blogging is an activity that is only spontanous in appearance. In fact, a successful blog requires thoughtful planning and a fair amount of energy and inspiration that must be sustained throughout the semester.

#1. Start by writing author biographies. This is an excellent ice-breaker. You and your students will learn a lot about each other from the information you share, and if you include pictures, you will also shorten the amount of time it takes for everyone to learn each other's names. Moreover, writing biographies helps students take their role as contributors seriously. From the beginning, they will appreciate that blogging is an exercise in developing an online persona and that they should write posts that make them proud and do not disclose details they are uncomfortable making public. (Note that biographies should never include FERPA-protected information such as students' grades.)

#2. Give students the freedom to select their own topics. Asking students to answer specific questions in their posts can hold them accountable for doing their homework and improve their participation in class. However, blogging can be more fun and even more rigorous when students determine their own topics. This semester, I gave the students in my "Rhetoric of Country Music" class free reign, and I am consistently impressed to see them taking on issues that are more personal and certainly more timely than anything I would have selected for them. My friend Beck Wise, who is teaching an English course on "Feminist Speculative Fictions," strikes what I think is a good balance, giving her students both structured and "free topic" blogging assignments.

#3. Stagger the deadlines. The joy as well as the misery of having students blog is that they can generate a lot of writing. Your students will benefit from writing several blog posts a week, but you will become overwhelmed trying to read--let alone grade--all of them. I decided to have my students write three posts of at least 400 words each. (They may write more, but not for class credit.) When I introduced the assignment, I distributed a sign-up sheet giving students the chance to select their own deadlines. They are happy because they chose deadlines that suit their schedules. I am happy because I have a manageable stream of 6-8 posts per week instead of an overwhelming flood.

#4. Stagger the publication. I allow my students the freedom to choose their topics, but I take control for determining when their posts are published. Usually, I receive 6-8 posts on Tuesday, which I then schedule to appear over the course of the week--ideally one per day. This is important for two reasons: First, releasing posts daily respects the habits of the typical Internet reader, who prefers a steady stream of content over an overwhelming weekly dump. Second, it ensures that none of my students' posts gets buried beneath the others. In effect, each student can count on being the class's featured writer for three days over the course of the semester.

A technical note: If you are using Wordpress, you can schedule the date and time a post will appear from either the "edit" or "quick edit" screens. You can also schedule posts to reappear at a later time if your students accidentally publish them themselves.

#5. Walk students through the posting process. This is an obvious step that I forgot to take this semester and that has caused my students more setbacks than anything else. After spending so much time setting up my class blog, the Wordpress platform that I chose began to feel so obvious that I made the assumption that my students would be able to figure it out for themselves. In fact, many of them had to email me for help with such "obvious" tasks as locating the log-in button. Next semester, I plan to resolve this problem by having my students write their first posts as Word documents that will all be due on the same day. As a class, we will go through the process of transferring the documents to posts that includes images, hyperlinks, categories, and tags.

#6. Give students grades for their comments. The single best way to keep students invested in writing engaging, thoughtful blog posts is to ensure that every one initiates a conversation between students. (As a contributor Blogging Pedagogy and other sites where readers hardly ever leave comments, I know well how disappointing it can feel to spend time writing posts that generate no feedback.) This semester, I am requiring that my students write at least ten comments to their classmates' posts. My expectation is that each comment will be at least 100 words in length so that students can compliment each other's work ("I wish I had thought to write this post!") as well as contribute their own insight, story, or question. While I always enjoy the posts that my students write, the truth is that it is the conversations that are carried on the comments that lead to the most class participation and eventual student learning.

Self Disclosure in the Classroom

Laura Wallace — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:10:11 +0000

Author:

Laura Wallace

Image Credit:

bighappyfunhouse.com

Full disclosure: this blog post may include some self-disclosure.

Although my Rhetoric 309K course, Rhetoric of Confession, obviously revolved around public self-disclosures, I did not require any public self-disclosures of my students beyond whatever they chose to reveal in their Learning Record self-assessments and self-designed assignments. Nevertheless, when I tell people about the course, usually the first thing they want to know is whether any students confessed "anything weird." They seem to assume, perhaps from reading my academic work and my Tumblr, that my classroom would be a kind of group therapy session with feelings flying and uncomfortable revelations spilling out all over the place. In actuality, only a few students ever made their own confessions, and most of those happened on paper, only seen by myself and a few classmates. I told my Confession students almost nothing about myself.

Returning to the literature classroom this fall after two years of rhetoric, I was assigned to teach E314V: Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture. Talking to professors and other graduate students who have taught identity-based courses, I heard over and over again the idea that "it's all about the text"--that we should discourage discussion of personal experience because student discussions should be grounded in the assigned texts. Focusing on the text is important for a number of reasons, but for me, the most important may be that while the text's accessibility may vary from reader to reader, if everyone in the room has read the same text, it's the object from which the discussion springs (I'll save the literary theory for another day). The text is the closest thing we have to common ground in the literature classroom. I don't want personal experience to be a bar to discussing it, nor do I want anyone to feel put on the spot because of personal experience they do or do not have. We can all read the texts and interpret them: let's start there. This is what I told my students on the first day.

I also told them I would never ask them to declare any identity labels for themselves, and that anyone in the class could be gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or..?, anyone could be trans or cis, etc. etc. and obviously those identities inform our readings, but such disclosures are not required.

Then I told them I was going to break my own rule for two minutes. I acknowledged that, in the LGBTQ studies classroom (and other identity-based classrooms), instructors often don't explicitly identify themselves or their investments, often because they assume students will read them in certain ways. However some things aren't visible and sometimes it feels important to use our words. So I used mine, and came out as bisexual. Then I segued into some jokes and I also told them a bit about my academic work.

When I decided to come out to my students I thought I was doing it for my own comfort. At DWRL orientation, I told a friend/colleague I was planning to do it and she encouraged me, pointing out that probably most of my students have never heard someone in authority come out as bi and that it would mean something if I did. Which made it not (just) about my own comfort or credibility, but about setting a tone and creating a space. Which seems to have worked.

Although quite probably they would have anyway, several students came out in funny ways, in their info sheets on the first day, like the student who wrote "I'm also Jewish :)" or the one who just wrote, in the section where I ask if there's anything else I should know, "LGBT" with an arrow pointing to the G. A few students directly mentioned my statements, stating that they were coming out to me because I had come out to them.

Personal experience/identity has also come up in classroom discussions, with mixed results. A few examples: a student came out as straight in order to excuse her own ignorance of queer politics (and plead for enlightenment). Another student who rarely spoke in class wrote an impassioned blog post about Cherríe Moraga and the student's own experience of being Mexican American, which led her to share in class an anecdote about a friend who she believes is in the closet. Other students had opinions about this (why did she assume he was gay? because he was effeminate? etc.), which led to an interesting discussion about visibility and safety, which led us directly back to Moraga's essay, “La Güera,” which itself is a work of theory that could also be described as confessional. While at times personal anecdotes derail our conversations, and force me to ask the class, "what does this have to do with the reading?," for the most part, I've found that judicious self-disclosures by both instructor and students have made our discussions richer, helping us recognize each other as complex humans and reminding us of why we are in this classroom in the first place.

Technological Nostalgia and the Academic Year to Come

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:13:30 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Randall Munroe

I feel so out of touch when it comes to video games.

During my time in the Digital Writing and Research Lab, I've worked to incorporate new technologies and media into my scholarship and pedagogy: I've published webtexts, rhetoric podcasts, and--as you might have guessed--blog posts about pedagogy. I've had students in my classes record podcasts of their own, collaborate on wikis, and use digital platforms to create visuals. But despite their vast array of pedagogical possibilities, I've yet to bring video games into the classroom. After all, the most recent gaming console I own is the eight-year-old (eight years old?!) Nintendo Wii, which--let's be honest--I mostly use to watch Netflix.

Except, that is, for a few months last fall when I got my hands on a Wii Classic Controller.

wii classic.jpg

image via Amazon.com

This controller is not exactly a groundbreaking piece of technology. In fact, it's decidedly backwards, a way of retrofitting the Wii's more innovative controller so you can use the console to play games from past platforms. In my case, the game in question was Mario Kart 64, an eighteen-year-old game (EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD?!) and the only multiplayer game at which I've ever been any good. As I lack both the hand-eye coordination required by many newer games and the funds required to purchase newer consoles, Mario Kart 64 still represents--alongside the halcyon days I invested in the Final Fantasy games released for the first-generation PlayStation--the pinnacle of my gamerly achievements. So, following my accomplishment of a key graduate-school achievement, I used the classic controller to descend into a few days of '90s nostalgia. With my good friend Toad, I sped across 64-bit beaches, turnpikes, and boardwalks. I won gold cups and blasted my competitors with heat-seeking turtle shells. I drove, I raced, I karted. And then, eventually, I felt the pull of responsibility, put down the controller, and picked up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's The ~~Racing~~ Writing of the Disaster. Done with krashing karts, I returned to the various spin-outs of scholarly writing.

yahooooo.jpg

image via Fanpop

Which is to say that it's all too tempting for me to shake my head at undergraduates these days, what with their fourth-generation PlayStations, eighth-generation Mario Kart games, Steam accounts, and Flappy Bird victories. Soon, Beloit College will release their "mindset list" for the class of 2018 and surely give those of us who teach them--whether we're 27 or 72--plenty more excuses to panic about students' cultural touchstones.

My hope for myself, though, as I begin academic year 2014-15, is that I can resist such allergic reactions to students' cultural and technological habits. Following the suggestions of John Warner, I'd hope to avoid projecting my own anxieties about and lack of discipline with digital technologies onto my students--at least not without first asking after my students' relationships with technologies new and old. This strikes me as one of the many tensions teachers--perhaps especially teachers of rhetoric, writing, and composition--must constantly balance: Resisting the urge to fume at and dismiss technologies with which we're unfamiliar while also resisting the urge to celebrate technologies about which we know very little for the sake of novelty alone or as part of some dream about the inevitable march of progress.

What excites me about the digital rhetoric classroom--the reason that maybe I should work harder to plug post-millennial video games into my classroom, and that I'm excited about the work the DWRL's new Video/Games group will undertake in the coming year--is how fruitful a place it can be for negotiating and questioning this tension. With any new technology--even the most seemingly ubiquitous--at least a few students in any given class are going to be disoriented by it. And at the very least, perhaps we as teachers will be disoriented by it (or, in the spirit of dissoi logoi, we can pretend to be). The digital rhetoric course, in short, can be a place not for socializing students back into old forms of composition, nor for naturalizing new technologies into institutional structures, but for denaturalizing both our own and our students' expectations about and approaches to various technologies, forms of communication, and ways of being--from the ancient art of Mario Kart 64, to the crystallized realms of academic English, to the technological relations that may only come into existence in the courses we teach this fall and in the future.

Teaching to a Hostile Audience, Or, When Your Revolution Class is Full of Counterrevolutionaries

Regina Mills — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Author:

Regina Marie Mills

Image Credit:

publicspeakingsuperpowers.com

This semester has been interesting, particularly because I am always comparing my Fall course on revolution to my summer course on the same topic. My perception of my summer class can be boiled down to one line: “if Communists were fighting for equal rights for women, the end of child labor, and against exploitation of the poor, then why is it so bad to call yourself a Communist?” This line (remembered to the best of my ability) came from a summer semester student and showed the open-mindedness and general willingness to see the inequality, poverty, and contradictions in the US and the world. Of course, we discussed after this sentiment how the history of practiced/attempted communism must make one question the theory, but the ability for my summer students to read sympathetically, first trying to understand the argument then offering criticism, has generally set apart my summer students from the fall.

However, the composition of students in my courses between summer and fall have also been staggering. The majority of my summer class was composed of first-generation college students from low-income or rural areas, and only a few students were white. In my fall class, only a few students are not white. Only 3 claim to have come from impoverished families. I am unsure how many are first-generation college students. In addition, the number of students in my class who are libertarian or staunchly conservative is staggering. I often wonder if they misread my class as “Rhetoric of the Ron Paul Revolution.”

It has taken a while for my students to learn to read generously, since, despite my best efforts, finding conservative/counterrevolutionary texts has been difficult. They are either too long to excerpt, too difficult (particularly since many have older language), or merely newspaper editorials, without the same history or rigor as many revolutionary texts. I have stuck to Locke, the Declaration of Independence, the Confederacy secession documents, and the Second Vermont Republic’s manifestos. However, the list of radical or leftist manifestos seems never-ending, and the class definitely skews to that side.

Teaching to a hostile audience has thus been even harder because I know what teaching to a sympathetic one is. However, it has also been helpful. It has helped me realize that many colleges are full of conservative people (just like my undergrad alma mater was), those who fight for the status quo (or “tradition” as it is affectionately called) either actively or through attitudes of apathy, and those who fight for change I don't agree with. But this mirrors the current world we live in. It is more realistic that those of us who want change will be faced with hostility, and it requires me to up my teaching game, which I think I have, as I have gotten more comfortable with my students and experimented with different teaching methods. For example, I just facilitated a student-led discussion of Tavis Smiley and Cornel West’s “The Poverty Manifesto.” Students brought in the questions, and I merely picked some to help them guide their conversations. I was not allowed to respond, and the students had to talk to each other, not me. I will admit, it was incredibly difficult to stay silent, but I heard from students who I had only heard from a few times (if any) this semester.

Another thing I have learned from teaching a class of counterrevolutionaries is that I don’t need to hide my beliefs, bite my tongue, and allow the sanctification of “neutrality” and “objectivity” to be an excuse I hide behind to not speak up to opinions that hurt the classroom dynamic and go against my ethics. After all, my students don’t. I am a person, too, not a teaching robot. This issue is particularly hard for me, having so recently taught in a public high school where you are constantly required to pretend to be neutral and act like you feel passionately about nothing, giving the idea that all ideas are equally valid (when this is clearly not the case). However, as one of my good friends discussed with me when writing this post, public school and university are not the same. Students pay for the privilege of college and the opportunity to hear the thoughts marinated upon by motivated students and scholars, so I don’t need to succumb to “neutrality.”

Of course, I also have to be careful about the power that comes with the title “instructor” and work to show my students that though I have opinions, those opinions will not lead to lower grades for those who don’t hold the same opinions. I think my move to the Learning Record next semester will help this. I would talk more about the scourge of “neutrality” but I think my colleague Meredith’s recent post will suffice.

The last thing I have learned from teaching to a hostile audience is that the strategies we teach in rhetoric matter. It is true what I tell my students: we grow from having our ideas challenged, by defending our ideas, and by having the humility to realize when some of our arguments fall short. As my students begin to compile their manifestos on topics as varied as when/if a country has a responsibility to respond to genocide, fighting rape culture in India, gun rights, and reforming the tax system, I hope that I see their arguments targeted towards convincing a hostile audience. Then they’ll finally know what it’s felt like for me since August 28th.

Engaging Different Types of Students

Jay Voss — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 06:08:45 +0000

Author:

Jay Voss

Image Credit:

Dave Eggers

At this point in the semester we’re all sizing up our latest batch of students. Not every student is the student who quietly does all her reading and eagerly contributes to class discussion. In fact, I’ve found that students like the one I just described can sometimes be the least stimulating. What’s fun or interesting about a student who hangs on our every word, and who repeats for us exactly what we want them to say? For those of us who teach reading and writing courses, one goal of our pedagogy will inevitably be imploring our students to think critically about their place in the world. If our students merely do what we say, to what extent can we ever consider ourselves successful? From a more selfish perspective, what fun would education be if we didn’t learn things from our students? I learned rather quickly my first semester of teaching that one of the easiest ways I can destroy my credibility as an instructor is to pretend that I know everything, that my students have nothing to teach me. The pretension is exactly what the student hanging on my every word wants.

But of course we all know students on the opposite extreme, the students who challenge us in various ways. These come in many guises. They can sometimes think they know everything, and try to correct us whenever they think we’re wrong or whenever we misspeak. They can be the student who is rather vocal about not liking several days’ reading in a row, and thus provide us instructors with the anxiety that class morale might be dipping on account of a few contagious sour patches. They can be the students who are only in our courses for the requirement or a top mark. They can be the students who contribute nothing except for a blank stare at their electronic media. These types of students are often the ones who have most to gain from a basic reading and writing course, and more often than not they’re the students we’re likely to remember years later.

For the student who thinks they know everything, it’s important that we listen what they have to say. For the student who’s vocal about not liking much of the reading, it’s important that we press them on what exactly they didn’t like, which moments in the text caused particular friction, and to encourage them to articulate their opinions in more exciting ways. For the student who’s only concerned about their grade, we can assign reading that discusses how many tech entrepreneurs dropped out of university. For the student who’s recedes into their computing device or phone, we can encourage them to find their own voice based on experience, and to take pride in that voice while listening to the other voices around them.

I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seems important that we don’t hold students accountable for issues that likely aren’t their fault. Just as soon as we treat our students like anybody else we’ll encounter in our short lives, it’ll immediately become apparent just how much they have to teach us.

Negotiating Student-Instructor Relationships on Facebook

Michael Roberts — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 02:03:51 +0000

Author:

Michael Roberts

Image Credit:

"facebook" by pshab on flickr

All young instructors know it: that dreaded moment when a student, former or current, adds you as a "friend" on Facebook. We encourage students to call us by our first names, and cultivate a sense of informal comfort in the classroom. As young people closer in age to our students than our advisors, we also realize that Facebook has become a near-universal social networking outlet, filled not only with friends but cousins, colleagues, and (gulp) parents. But besides the obvious privacy issues, the friend request from the student brings up another social negotiation: is it appropriate, or desirable, to become friends with a former student, in any sense of the word?

I don't know if, as Chris Ortiz y Prentice suggests, “you could describe the entire social apparatus of modern-day public schools... as the protection of the adults from the students' sexualities, and vice versa,” but a certain amount of anxiety lingers regarding student-teacher interaction, even at the college level. Even as we encourage an egalitarian camaraderie among our students, we work to maintain a clear distinction between instructor and student. We dress the part, we present strict-sounding policy statements, and we speak with authority even we discussion ventures into unsure territory. Unfortunately, it is all the more important for women and young instructors to maintain this authority. If students see the instructor as a friend, mother, or object of lust, the educational relationship could become confused or compromised, which could create problems for both teacher and student. Most instructors I know are therefore (sometimes painfully aware) of the negotiations involved in creating a classroom ethos. Be informal but professional; encourage participation but not over-sharing; be available to discuss coursework but not ex-girlfriends; be friendly but not a friend.

In terms of negotiating social relationships, though, Facebook is the Wild West. The near-universality of the website also brings with it serious confusion as to its role in the social lives of its users. Some people use Facebook as a professional networking tool, while others use it as a venue to publish their most intimate thoughts and feelings. So what does it mean when a student friends an instructor on Facebook? Is she trying to make a professional contact similar to networking sites like LinkedIn? Is he curious about the instructor's private life, and wanting to start and informal friendship? Is the “friending” the beginning of a flirtation or romantic courtship? It could mean any of these, and additional, more complicated possibilities abound. “Friending” on Facebook is an interesting topic of cultural semantics; the relative novelty of the interface means that the significance of the act is still in flux in our culture, and has diversely rich meanings for different user communities. While interesting, though, this cultural confusion is dangerous for student-teacher relationships, and most of my colleagues wisely avoid Facebook friendships with students.

This social networking issue gained particular relevance for me last year, though, when I taught Rhetoric 309K: The Rhetoric of Facebook. In the class we studied some of the social issues I describe above, as well as issues of privacy, accessibility, and marketability that arise on the website. Not only did the class use Facebook as its object of study; we also used Facebook as the medium through which much of the class was conducted. Each student created a new class-only Facebook profile, and friended class profile as well as each other. They had to update their profiles week by week, updating research, posting screen shots and analysis, and commenting on their classmates' progress. In general this ad-hoc Facebook network worked so much better than my previous forays into class blogging or discussion boards; the students were already fluent with the technologies of writing, sharing, and commenting, and could focus more on the content of the class, which happened to be rhetorical analysis of those very technologies.

The Facebook networking of our class had unintended social consequences, however. The students had to write at least one Facebook post a week, but were free to share more if they chose to. Some students did, and their posts were not always related to the coursework. Some would invite the class to their a capella concerts or basketball games; others would post their articles in The Daily Texan. When a student had a birthday, many of her classmates wrote on her Facebook wall wishing her a good one. A few students even posted funny videos that were borderline inappropriate for a college classroom. In short, some students used Facebook like their audience was their friend group.

The student interactions with me also became more and more informal. Since I distributed assignment updates on Facebook, most of my students contacted me via Facebook message instead of email. These messages were, predictably, often less than formal, and occasionally used the misspellings and abbreviations common to text messages. In fact, many of them were probably sent from smart phones. Embracing the technology, I held office hours on Facebook chat from my usual office in Parlin. I had record numbers of students ask questions on the chat program, but the interactions also veered into the personal, funny, or inappropriate in ways that had never happened in face-to-face conversations. In short, I was delighted at how comfortable my students with communicating with me in this novel format, but also a little concerned about maintaining the distance and authority required to conduct the class.

I addressed these issues by bringing them to the forefront of our in-class discussion. Both semesters, in the second unit on rhetorical analysis, I discussed both my classroom ethos and their interactions with me and each other. I chuckled at a few anonymous students' misspelled messages, but then moved on to how the technologies might affect their self-presentation even in the classroom. These conversations were very productive, and did not shut down student participation. By the end of the year, most of my students had a pretty sophisticated understanding of what the social and rhetorical stakes of Facebook actions are, including posting, liking, and, of course, friending.

That said, I still do not accept friend requests from students, current, or former. In my class on Facebook, we had the time to discuss the nuanced social jockeying that accompanies the Facebook friendship. In my previous and subsequent teaching experience, I have had neither the time nor the inclination to discuss the implications of social networking. And frankly, some things are better left private.

Trust Me, I'm a Teacher: Some Reflections on Teacher-Student Power Relations

Eric Detweiler — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:43:50 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Randall Monroe

Let me immediately note that I’m not intending to demonstrate universal truths with the following anecdotes. My intent is just to share a couple of particular rhetorical situations and the reflections to which they’ve led.

I was 22 years old on my first day as a college instructor, wearing a tie for the first time in years and resigned to the fact that I looked maybe 18 in the right light. I was excited as well as nervous, probably breaking a state record with how fast I covered the syllabus before asking the students if they had any questions. And right out of the gate I got this inquiry, asked dryly and pointedly:

“How does it make you feel that some of your students are the same age as you?”

I don’t remember if I had explicitly stated my age or if this student was conjecturing, but my response ran something like this (the exact quotation was, unfortunately, not recorded for posterity):

“Well, if my qualifications for teaching this class were based on my age, I’d have reason to be concerned. Since those qualifications are presumably based on me having a more thorough knowledge of writing strategies than those of you enrolled in this course, however, I don’t think our relative ages should be a factor."

One more anecdote before I get down to business: Starting with my fourth semester as a teacher, I had the chance to adjunct at a historically black university. I loved the experience and the students, but much of my first semester there teetered on the end of disaster. I had less than 50% attendance on some days, and my students and I frequently talked straight past each other in “discussions” of course readings. On a day when I had especially low attendance, I made an off-the-cuff remark about my intention to crack down in the future to end such disorder. In response, one of my students—a regular visitor to my office hours who rarely hesitated to speak her mind—pointed out something that seems obvious in hindsight: Given America’s history of deeply troubled power relations between white individuals (myself) and black individuals (all but one of my students), perhaps harsher discipline was not what was needed. Indeed, as she noted, such talk on my part could be perceived as deeply offensive if phrased thoughtlessly, only serving to disaffect students even more.

With that revelation ever-present in my mind, my second year at that university went much differently. I found myself constantly working to diffuse and diffract the power inherent in the position of “instructor” back to my students. Of course I still worked within the institutional constraints of grades, assessed student papers, and lectured at times. But I found myself posing more questions in the margins of papers rather than making fixed statements about needed revisions. I waited longer before assuming a class discussion was stalled. This led to a lot of anxious laughter on my students’ parts, but also caused them to take more control over the content and direction of discussions. In general, I tried harder not to presume I knew where my students were coming from.

From the very inception of my teaching career, then, I’ve been faced with and intrigued by the complications inherent in the power relationship(s) between teachers and students. As I’ve dug through the articles and books surrounding composition studies and rhetorical studies, however, I’ve found a dearth of formal materials on the vagaries and variables of that relationship. To be clear, there’s plenty of great material on what we might teach in writing courses (just consider debates between expressivists, current-traditionalists, social-epistemic compositionists, and advocates of rhetorical theory). There’s also a lot of material on how to teach—how directive or nondirective a writing teacher should be, whether or not to provide models, methods of assessing student writing, etc. What I’m interested in is how we position ourselves/are positioned as teachers relative to our students.

This last subject seems only tangentially addressed in scholarly work in the fields of English studies, left primarily to education scholars or left off the page/screen altogether.[1] As two excellent recent posts on this very blog attest—I can say “excellent” since I didn’t write them—addressing college-writing classrooms’ particular power dynamics is often reserved for informal conversations between new instructors (“Using Embarrassment”) or dealt with by isolated instructors coping with specific classroom exigencies (“Learning to Let Go”).

As a result, a lot of discourse on the subject is left to common sense and guesswork. For instance, “As a young instructor, the only way to win my students respect is to be a rigorous taskmaster and swiftly undercut rebellion.” Or, alternatively, “In order to mitigate the potential fallout from the inevitable screw-ups during my first semester of teaching, I’ll be a pushover to grant students as few potential gripes as possible.” Both these positions may have practical merit in particular pedagogical situations, but remain simplistic.

There are two frameworks, one in rhetoric and one in composition, that seem potentially fruitful for thinking the student-teacher relation through more carefully. On the rhetoric side, there’s the concept of “ethos.” Many of us teach ethos every semester. I talk with students about how to analyze its use in argumentative texts and how to construct their own ethos in particular rhetorical situations. We look at politicians’ ethos, journalists’ ethos, situated ethos and invented ethos. But my thinking about my own ethos is often cursory (e.g. should I wear jeans or dress pants to teach in today?), especially after the first few weeks of the semester.

On the composition side, there’s the inherent interest in power relations present in the progeny of social-epistemic pedagogy. If we see the composition classroom as a place to encourage students to become more active and engaged democratic citizens, we may try to make visible naturalized power structures, crafting writing assignments in which students analyze and challenge authoritarian discourses, conventional political wisdom, etc. But what are we reflecting in our own teaching practices? What about the assumptions about authority present in the classroom?

In other words, though the framework for thinking through how we position ourselves as instructors in our classrooms may already be present in our pedagogy, the everyday nature of our relationship to our classrooms and our students may lead us to exempt our own subject positions from critical consideration and analysis. But what better, more readily accessible way to make the content of our pedagogy concrete than to apply it to the situational power structures present in our own classrooms?

Most of my comments above are in their nascent stages, and thus may be muddled. To end, then, a few specific questions that might emerge from these considerations:

What unspoken commonplaces underlie the ethos I craft for myself as a teacher (e.g. “teachers should appear professional,” “it’s better to appear too lenient rather than too strict,” etc.)?
Is the traditional teacher-student binary worth challenging? If so, how should/might/do I challenge it in my classes?
Are my comments on student papers intended to be authoritative or dialogic? How are my students reading my comments?
What archetypal relationships bleed over into how I understand my relationship to students (e.g. parent-child, coach-player, sage-disciple, peer-peer)?
What assumptions might my students have about the “proper” roles for college instructors and students, and what might be the origins of their assumptions (e.g. parents, older siblings/friends, popular culture texts, former teachers)?
How might students’ assumptions shift with their perceptions of individual embodied teachers (i.e. how they see the teacher as marked in terms of sex, gender, class privilege, race, age, etc.), and how should we shift/resist shifting our individual ethos in response to such perceptions?
Is my expertise limited to the forms and methods of “composed”/”rhetorical” discourse, or should I also be an expert on particular content(s)?
Can a willingness to give up one’s authority as a teacher result in a paradoxical reclamation of authority based on students’ perception of your confident humility (I’m cribbing from “Using Embarrassment” here)?

What I’ve read is of course limited, and you may know of some eminent scholar whose thoughtful work on this subject renders this post moot. If so, do share!

[1] There are some texts that address this subject—Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers is one controversial example, and there are stray articles like Marshall Gregory’s “Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos” from the seminal issue of Pedagogy. And, of course, there’s Plato’s good old-fashioned Socratic method.

The Many Upsides of the Student Conference

Megan Gianfagna — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:37:42 +0000

Author:

Megan Gianfagna

Image Credit:

via Winter Love

Even for a small class, student conferences take a lot of time and energy. I often hold conferences to discuss a plan for revision of their essays. That means that 6 hours of conferences (15 minutes each x 23 students) usually follow long nights spent grading the essays that are the basis of our discussion. I’ve often left the campus coffee shop after I’ve met with half the class in and felt like I’ve been stuck on repeat—drained from keeping my enthusiasm up during so many different versions of the same basic conversation.

So if the conference process means extra time, extra logistics, and extra pressure to meet tight grading deadlines, why do I continue to do it, semester after semester? It’s not because every student turns out a comprehensive and polished revision of his/her essay as a result of our short meetings. It’s because those brief but focused sessions give me a chance to hear my students talk about their writing process and their experience with the project. For me, it gives the essay a backstory and helps me understand the thought processes behind some of their decisions. It builds a relationship that makes them more comfortable in the classroom and more invested in the work. I also think it makes them more likely to come to office hours or to visit the Undergraduate Writing Center about subsequent assignments. For students accustomed to professors in large lectures knowing them by EID rather than first name, seeing that the instructor is willing to invest the time in their work makes a big difference, at least to some.

I make the first conference of the semester mandatory and all subsequent conferences optional. Because I use the Learning Record as the evaluative framework, student effort and reflection on that effort gets captured and considered in the final grade for the course. As a result, I find that most students sign up for subsequent conference meetings of their own volition. In my current class, Rhetoric of Going Viral, I have mostly sophomores, juniors and seniors. With this group, I’m finding conferences especially productive and energizing. Because we use memes as the objects of our rhetorical inquiry, I get to learn a lot about my students’ personal interests and relationship with online information.

Though the primary purpose of the conference is talk through my comments on their essays and address any questions, I try to talk about something else first. For instance, I like to being by commenting on something I found interesting about a blog post or asking a question about something I noticed in one of their Learning Record observations. This signals to students that I’m there to engage them in conversation and not talk at them about the paper. I’ve found that students use the one-on-one opportunity to ask about how they might apply what they’re learning in class to the kind of writing they do in their majors, to ask about other assignments or class policies, or to tell me how they think I’m strange for letting them interrogate popular texts instead of writing research papers with scholarly sources. I’ll take it. Watching them think about writing in a more expansive way is, for me at least, one of many fulfilling conference benefits.

Even though I build these conferences into the course schedule in addition to peer review and revision workshops, revision can often be an afterthought for students. To help them leave the conference with a concrete plan of action, I like to have them do a brief activity ahead of time. I find it can really help focus our discussion. Some that I’ve used in the past include asking them to rank my comments in what they perceive as the order of importance or having them choose the top three things they think they should focus on in their revision and explain why. I’ve also asked them to write a brief outline of what they would do to the essay if they had more time (to be completed before I send them my comments).

Though not all students are always prepared and some seem like they are ready to basically sprint out the door the second we’ve finished our conversation, I’ve yet to feel like the process wasn’t worth it. I do wonder, though, if other instructors have a very different view of conferences or use more creative strategies to maximize the experience for both teacher and student. I wonder too what will happen when I have to teach more courses in a semester and have to adjust my approach. Individual conferences may not always feasible, so I think I’ll just enjoy the luxury while I have it.