Blogging Pedagogy - first-year writing

Using Meditation in the (Digital) Classroom

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 17:49:40 +0000

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I decided to bring meditation practice into my Rhetoric and Writing class against the firm advice of nearly everyone I’d talked to about it. Most of my friends and colleagues said it sounded like a nice idea, but, “would you really want to be that teacher?” In other words, they wondered if my students would take me seriously. These are sensible concerns, but, in the curious and compensatorily over-confident spirit of teaching this class for the first time—and in a digital classroom to boot—I went for it anyway.

Each Monday and Wednesday, for the first few minutes of class, I lead the group of fourteen undergraduates through a mindfulness meditation. I base it on a practice called the Three-Minute Breathing Space. Basically, students sit in silence, eyes closed, and I ask them to focus their attention on their breathing. I vary it week to week, but usually I suggest that they become aware of the state of their physical body, their thoughts, and their current emotions. Sometimes I use the ambient noise in the room—it’s a windowless, basement classroom equipped with about thirty Mac desktops and a projector, so it has an audible hum—and draw their attention to the sounds and other background conditions that they might usually ignore. Often I refer to specifics that seem relevant on the day: the weather, the energy level in the room, the time in the semester, or even the week’s workload. It’s different every time, and some days, when I feel especially in need of a minute to collect myself before teaching a class, I play a recorded mindfulness meditation over the classroom speakers and join them.

Meditation has become an integral part of my life over the last few months. I find it helpful for overcoming anxiety, improving concentration, and finding a deliberate, accepting approach to daily experience. Because it’s been so useful to me, I thought it would be a good tool for my students to have as they approach their own anxieties about writing. I did a little research before the fall semester and discovered that mindfulness meditation has been proven to raise exam scores and improve concentration and focus in high school students, and it is used more and more frequently to create calm, attentive classroom environments. Many professors have begun to incorporate what's called contemplative pedagogy into their innovative teaching practices at the college level to encourage creativity and reduce stress. Not only that, but David Lynch is a huge fan; the image above, from his foundation's website, illustrates how unexpected it might look to have students close their eyes and sit still during class. But, recalling how exhausted and overwhelmed I tended to be during college, I figured if nothing else meditation couldn’t hurt my group of sophomores and juniors.

So far, I’ve been impressed with the results. I notice a marked difference in the way students engage with me and with one another on days when we start class by meditating. They look at me when I speak. They look at one another when they speak. The few times we haven’t meditated, the class has felt especially inattentive to me—many of them unsubtly check their phones under the table or just zone out. The omnipresent smart phone phenomenon is especially perplexing to me as an instructor in a digital classroom. It seems baldy contradictory to prohibit their access to technology when I’m also encouraging its use and promoting digital resources throughout the semester.

During one meditation, I decided to try calling their attention to their phones. As an example of feelings they might currently be experiencing, I brought up that persistent, gnawing sense of distress—mental, physical, and emotional—that they might feel when they can’t easily see or access their phones, even for the few minutes that their eyes are closed to meditate. I mentioned that they didn’t need to change this feeling, or judge it, but simply notice it if it was there. That day, not a single person in class picked up their phone for the full seventy-five minutes. I didn’t ask them not to, but calling their awareness to their own reliance on it seemed to pose some sort of challenge to them.

I’ll readily admit that this is an ongoing experiment. Teaching a class for the first time is experimental in myriad ways. I look forward to getting some mid-semester feedback from the students to hear if our daily meditation sessions are something they like or find useful. But, for now, I’m pleased with the conscientious quality of attention I have in class.

If you’re interested in using mindfulness meditation in the classroom, UT’s Center for Mental Health has a number of great resources and classes available in person and online (they offer recorded meditations online here). In addition to theirs, I like to use this downloadable set of recordings from UCLA. For my part, I’m going to continue thinking about ways that meditation can enhance learning, even though to some it might not seem like a “productive” use of time—I have a feeling that deep investments in the myth of incessant productivity (perhaps a result of late capitalist anxieties and the ensuing impact of corporate approaches to learning on the college campus?) are at the root of these unsubstantiated suspicions.

Social Writing: Done with the One-on-One

Cole Wehrle — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 05:00:00 +0000

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Cole Wehrle

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Photo by Corand Poirier via Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (reference #P48,S1,P23104)

It’s been a few months since we had Criterion co-founder and innovator extraordinaire, Bob Stein, on campus, and since his visit I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the things he had the say. For those of you who missed it, Stein was showcasing a few new projects related to the future of the book, centered on the idea of social reading (you can hear Zeugma’s great interview with him here. Essentially, he argued that our understanding of reading is stuck in the 19-century and that technology has opened up new avenues for all kinds of new reading practices that could transform education. He wasn’t just talking about distribution modes like ebooks either. Instead, he was suggesting ways in which the book could be read and discussed community: discussions would flow beyond the classroom and a student would never have to face a difficult text alone. While, the technology that enables this kind of seamless discussion isn’t quite ready yet, I’ve been thinking about the concepts behind Stein’s idea. How did it apply to my teaching practice? Were there ways in which I could test some of these notions out in a first-year rhetoric and writing course (RHE 306)?

My first thought was writing itself. In 306 I spend a lot of time talking to students about their experience typing. It never takes long for the horror stories to come out: the all-nighters, the embarrassing typos, the misunderstood prompts, and, perhaps above all, the terrible blank page, ticking clock, and languishing page requirement. Of course, all of these problems are “student problems” and, though the isolation of writing is critical to its mastery, there are also ways in which the structure of 306 feeds into its less-than-welcoming appearance. In most courses a student’s work is a private affair, graded under cover of night (well, for most of us) and then discussed with hushed voices in tiny cubicles. But maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. This spring I began instituting formal writing groups in my 306. I borrowed this from my experience in Journalism School. Instead of one-on-ones, I decided to block longer meetings with small groups of between four and five students. Every student would have to read all of the other papers in their group and be prepared to share a comment on their writing. Praise doesn’t count. This sounds a little mean, but it’s not hard to keep it in the spirit of good fun. There’s a bad writer in all of us and the best way to root him out is to acknowledge his existence. I usually started meetings by finding terrible sentences that I had written in my own undergraduate papers. We would laugh together and then diligently pick apart the writing. Then, one student at a time, we would look at awkwardly phrased sentences, silly typos, and all kinds of convoluted language with that same care. At first this can be a little off-putting, but the slight embarrassment and knowledge that other people, your peers, will be reading your work, can be a very helpful motivator, and its not hard to keep things light-hearted when you have that much material. These meetings have proven so useful that I began to work them into the in-class peer-review workshops and my grading methods. On a recent paper I decided that instead of providing any marginal comments I would write each student a letter about their work, offering general instructions for improvement but without any specific prescription. Then, in the peer workshop I sat my students in a large circle and instructed them to take out an extra copy of their paper. Some students had expressed anxieties about their own proofreading, so I decided to help them defamiliarize their own writing. We began a “rapid line edit.” I had each student pass their paper to the person on their left then check for one thing about the paper. On the first pass they circled every main verb (and emphasized weak verbs with sad faces or extra circles). On the second pass they found the longest sentence and the shortest sentence in the paper. On the next pass they looked for thesis statements, then topic sentences, then transitions, et cetera. In each case classroom discussion flowed naturally from the exercise and, perhaps because of the open environment that we had built in our small meetings, students seemed comfortable asking questions like “What exactly is a main verb?” or “What is the difference between a Topic Sentence and a Thesis?”. And, as I clarified my terms and taught short lessons on grammar students cheerfully volunteered broken and beautiful passages alike. At the end of class I handed back my letters to each student with their grade and they went home with my comments, and a copy of their paper filled with all kinds of zany marginalia that could guide their revisions.

First-Year Writing and the Learning Record: At Midterm

Kendall Gerdes — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:44:53 +0000

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Kendall Gerdes

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Adapted from Openclipart

It’s just past midterm and my students in first-year rhetoric and writing (RHE 306) have just submitted Learning Record portfolios. I adopted the Learning Record model as developed by UT’s own Peg Syverson, outlined at http://www.learningrecord.org.

I have thoroughly enjoyed giving comments on student writing without having to weigh it carefully on the letter grade scale. Once at the midterm, and once again at the final, students will be asked to write short arguments citing evidence from other parts of their Learning Record portfolios. They may cite interviews they conducted with someone close to them on the topic of their own literacies; they may cite a journal of observations they’ve been keeping throughout the semester on what they learn from class and course work; they may cite comments I’ve given or that they have received in peer review; finally, they may cite their own work, comparing early drafts and revisions, to show evidence of specific improvement.

I asked students to organize the evidence they select in terms of the goal-domains of our course: rhetoric, the writing process, research, presentation and digital literacy. And, I ask them to analyze this evidence in terms of several dimensions of learning (from Syverson’s framework, http://www.learningrecord.org/dimensions.html): skills and strategies, knowledge and understanding, use of prior and emerging knowledge, reflection, and creativity and imagination. I showed my students an exhaustive sample focused on a single course strand and asked them to be much more highly selective than the sample: only choose to include the most persuasive analyses in your work.

On the basis of their evidence and analysis, students must request from me a single grade (not a range), making reference to a set of evaluation criteria that describe student performance in each letter grade range. Students are permitted to mix criteria and ask for plus/minus grades, and I think this gives them a chance to see how their strengths and weaknesses span several grade levels. It points out what they are already good at, what they ought to work on, and what seems to be holding them back. I also ask them to include a plan for improving their performance in the remainder of the semester.

The first blush of grade requests are fascinating. Students have tended not to blow up their self-evaluations; most are honest and modest about their own performance. I encouraged them to think of honesty as an appeal to ethos, designed to get me to trust their judgment. Though some requests offered minimal justifications in terms of the evaluation criteria for the course, most were extremely careful. Even students whose writing has been unsatisfactory, and who have displayed frustration trying to understand my comments, produced insightful reflections on their own performance that illustrate a capacity to write arguments that certainly exceeds the capacity portrayed in earlier papers.

I’m excited to sift through them all and write my responses to students because I believe that the midterm exercise is equipping them with rhetorical skills that will pay dividends on their remaining assignments. I also believe that most students have succeeded at diagnosing their own challenges and articulating both a desire and a plan for improvement. They are learning to think about their course work rhetorically, as arguments toward their final grade. And best of all, they’re learning to think of their grades as directly related to what they learn about rhetoric and writing—not as the subjective result of a soft or harsh teacher, but as the earned product of their own best efforts and estimations.