Blogging Pedagogy - reading

The Convenience of Teaching Difficult Texts

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

Author:

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.

Administering What All Students Dread: Reading Quizzes

Regina Mills — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Regina Marie Mills

Image Credit:

Melanie Fejeran

I have spent a lot of time this semester thinking about how to best encourage my students to do the reading, in addition to how to prep them for class discussion of the material. I have decided upon reading quizzes/prep assignments during the first 10 minutes of class. I came to this conclusion after a few student evaluations and some colleagues told me about how successful this technique is for ensuring more students are ready to add to the conversation. Since my discussions have been fruitful and have consistently included a variety of student voices, I don’t intend to stop doing them. However, the best format of this strange genre of formative assessment has eluded me.

Since I teach in a computer classroom, in which all students have access to their own Mac computer, I have been trying to balance using these tools, not because I feel I always have to, but in order to challenge myself and my students to use unfamiliar tools (like Storify) or to learn new things about old tools (like how to add page numbers in the header using Microsoft Word). Thus, I have also experimented with how I might use the computer to administer my reading quizzes. I have tried 3 different ways so far and will elaborate on these methods, with their pros and cons, in addition to throwing out a few other ideas that I may try (or that you could try and give me feedback on!).

1. Blackboard Test Function

What is it? Blackboard is like Canvas or Sakai or any other on-line class management system. The test function allows you to create on-line quizzes and tests (from test banks or with a create-your-own-question function) which allows all aspects of the quiz (the administration and grading) to happen on-line.

Pros: No paper (go green!), no need to move grades from the paper or another system to the grade book. Easy to read the answers, since it avoids the student handwriting issue. Allows you to leave feedback or to give automatic feedback depending on whether or not the answer is right or wrong (ex. you can write in where the student could have found the answer as an automatic feedback response to an incorrect answer). Great for multiple-choice, True/False, and fill-in-the-blank. You can stop students from backtracking and cut them off after a certain amount of time. Answer choices and the questions can be randomized to prevent students from copying each other’s answers.

Cons: Creating the test is time-consuming and has way too many steps. Much faster to make it on Word. You can’t reuse questions or quizzes for different courses (or if you can, it is not clear how). Doesn’t really save you time on grading short-answer questions. Possibility that you will lose connection or have an error that makes the student lose all of their answers and/or the submission. Takes awhile to log-in to computers, so students who come in right when class starts (or worse, late) have much less time to write.

2. Blackboard Discussion Board

What is it? A forum for the class within the Blackboard course management system. The threads and replies are viewable by the entire class and instructors.

Pros: No paper. Submission and grades all happen in one place. Students can copy and paste quotes easier (so they don’t need to waste time re-writing quotes from a text). Allows students to browse each other’s answers later. Great for freewriting. Can still set a time for the forum to close. Professor can respond publicly to each post. Creating the forum is quick and painless and you have some good options to make sure that students can’t edit their posts after submission (to reduce cheating based on skimming others’ answers). Allows more writing space.

Cons: Possibility that you will lose connection or have an error that makes the student lose their submission. Replying to the students’ post is clunky. Grading the posts is not quite as simple as grading through the test/quiz function. Only suitable for short-essay responses, not multiple-choice or other more specific test questions. Takes awhile to log-in to computers, so students who come in right when class starts or late have much less time to write.

3. Quiz on paper

What is it? The class paper-and-pen/cil assessment. You have the choice of allowing students access to only printed materials and notes or letting them use the computer to access texts from the course management system.

Pros: No issue with submissions. Students don’t need to juggle windows so much. Not dependent on typing speed. Students are used to it this way. No time wasted on logging in to computers and getting to the right screen. Tardy students can get started right away (unless they need the computer for the readings). Nice to hand them something physical back.

Cons: Instructor can lose it easier. Need to transfer grades from sheet to gradebook. Requires you to use paper and ink. Student handwriting can be hard to read, as can teacher feedback (disclaimer: I have bad handwriting). Need to be a bit pushy on the time-limit. Harder to prevent cheating in smaller classrooms. Annoying to have to re-write quotes from the text.

My ideas for the future:

1. Partner with someone and co-write an answer to a complex question related to the reading (gets discussion started right away and no excuse to not share, but allows students who didn’t read to lean on the well-prepared student)

2. Use a class wiki and have students respond/comment on questions

3. Have students add comments to a class Google Doc, or create their own Google Doc, which must be shared with intructor or a link posted to the class discussion board/forum

4. Have them turn in homework questions/activities (the danger here is that students might have cheated or copied answers)

These are my reflections on administering the Reading Quiz/Prep Assignment in class. Feel free to use them and definitely leave any comments or suggestions that could help me be a better teacher to my students.

Truthiness and Consequences: Balancing the Content-Driven Rhetoric Classroom

Aaron Mercier — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:07:37 +0000

Author:

Aaron Mercier

Image Credit:

Photo by Webrageous, Captions by Aaron Mercier

When I decided to make my rhetoric and writing course about “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert defines it—something that “feels true,” without needing to rely on pesky facts—I thought I knew what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to be in a networked computer classroom, to break down the barriers between the classroom and the homework. I wanted a course blog so students could practice writing in a variety of modes, and have the chance to see what their classmates were doing and thinking, and to establish more connections between classroom and individual learning.

I wanted the course readings to be timely, to be engaged with the issues of the week, so students would start to develop a sense of urgency around the skills I was teaching. I wanted to focus heavily on research and reading skills, and use the resources of the university and the web at large in conversational real time. No more blank silences when I ask a question, I wanted to hear the gentle rattle-and-click of focused research being carried out on all those fancy computers; I wanted to harry my students into developing a habitual curiosity as a result of unfamiliarity.

And it’s overall going pretty great. My students, more than any other group I’ve taught, are asking serious, thoughtful questions about not only the work that they’re doing in here but the world at large. They’re engaged at a theoretical and intellectual-historical level with many of the most challenging readings I’m assigning, from media theory to political science to...well, okay. De Certeau was not a hit. But conversations in class are energetic and productive. I see students taking notes on what their peers are saying. There’s chatting before and after class.

That’s a bunch of the good stuff that’s happening. But in the middle of all this rapturous success, I got the first major writing assignment back. Now, I had been teaching from Everything's an Argument, giving a fair amount of class time to the basic concepts: what is rhetorical analysis, what are the goals of doing it, who are the players in a given rhetorical exchange and how do we talk about persuasive tactics, their deployment by authors and their reception by audiences. It was immediately apparent, however, that something hadn’t clicked. I found myself writing “topical” in too many margins. In all the margins, really. Nearly all my students seemed to think that the goal was to create a report on an issue, rather than an account of a controversy.

See, I taught some lessons on rhetoric and analysis, but my idea going into the course, the idea that gave me all those goals that led to everybody having fun, is that you need to have something to say before you can write well. I still think that. But I’m learning to adjust the balance a little. In the middle of grading that first batch of papers, I assigned a blog post, asking my students to self-report their progress in the course so far and then to talk about what in the course had been most and least productive for them. The blog and De Certeau were the big losers. Class conversations and clips of Colbert were the big winners. Well, okay. That’s the student take.

Meanwhile, back in the Land of Always Grading, my take was that the goals of analysis were not clear. Audience and how to talk about it was still a hazy concept. What to do with ideas like ethos, pathos, logos, etc. was kind of a mystery to half the class. People were writing analytical summaries that were somewhere between a checklist of rhetoric class jargon and a paraphrase of their source. Ironies were missed, arguments flattened. I’m a pretty efficient grader but I was spending a half-hour per 7-page paper, even while consciously hurrying.

So the day after I finished that round of assignments, the reading was the Logos chapter from Everything is an Argument. I went through the usual rigamarole—“logos isn’t information, but refers to ways of using information persuasively”—and wasn’t getting much from them. Well, in situations like that, it’s nice to have an escape hatch more productive than “class dismissed” so I usually have a germaine youtube clip or two in mind. Stephen Colbert had interviewed Jim Garlow, a pastor leading the charge on the Pulpit Freedom Sunday movement. We watched a 3 minute clip and I asked “well what do you think” and they were off and running. All I had to do, was steer things away from the topical and into the analytical. Students were taking notes from each other again. We ran out of time so I assigned the whole segment that I took the clip from as reading for the next class, and set some guidelines about how to watch it. My entire lesson for that Thursday basically consisted of crowdsourcing an analytical summary. I’ll be posting that plan in the Lesson Plans section, but as a teaser on the results, less than a week on, every interaction I’ve had with a student I’ve seen them consciously, and quite productively reformulating their understanding of the course, its jargon, my goals, and their goals as a reader and writer.

What I learned from this is that you can’t chicken-and-egg the hard questions about teaching writing. You have to assume that the chicken and the egg coalesced in a moment of autochthnous primal simultanaeity and if they did it, so can you. In other words, what I’m learning this semester is the balance between teaching theory and teaching practice, between content and form, global and local, between facilitating conversations and intervening in them. I also learned that sometimes, when a conversation isn’t going well, saying “screw it” and showing them a funny video is the best thing you can possibly do.

Digital Romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and "Radiant Textuality" in the classroom

Ptacek — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:38:20 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

Image Credit:

Andrew @ epicdoesn'tbegintodescribe

I’m teaching E 314L: “Reading Poetry” this semester, with a fantastic set of students of all levels of proficiency who really like to dig into the big issues motivating our poems. Early in the semester when we read Donne and other metaphysical poets, our classroom discussions often coalesced around two or three centers of gravity for each poem. Though opinions and readings about what the poems are up to might be divergent, we could normally, as a class, agree on a few choice passages as the cruxes for making meaning.

For the past few weeks, however, coinciding with our reading of Coleridge and Wordsworth, our discussions have been full of wildly divergent readings, where even coming to a consensus about where the poem’s center of gravity is up for (often exhilarating) debate. Part of this, of course, is my students’ increased confidence in utilizing their close-reading skills and navigating emergent classroom relationships, as well as our focus on some longer texts. But sometimes it seems that they’re not even reading the same texts. And with good reason—they’re not.

I’ve tried assigning “works” (that is, novels, plays or poems) without assigning “texts” (specific editions) before, to mixed success, but this semester’s adventure into something close to Jerome McGann’s radiant textuality was the result of a few happy accidents. The first is that I ordered for the course, sight unseen, a version of Lyrical Ballads that combined a reputable academic publisher with the siren-song of affordability. But when the text arrived it rapidly became apparent to me that this particular version of the text didn’t work for my classroom needs, reprinting only the 1798 poems in their unrevised state, providing little introductory material, no bibliography, and no annotation to help curious students. A fine book for a graduate course, but for an introductory class it simply didn’t suit our needs.

The second happy accident was our good fortune to be using a DWRL classroom equipped with state-of-the-art technology, which meant that I could encourage students to ditch this text while easily disseminating pdfs through our class website. But a funny thing happened to those pdfs—while some students diligently printed out their packets and came to class with the traditional underlined and marked-up text, other students showed up with just laptops, iPads, even Kindles. It quickly became apparent, too, that not everyone was reading from the pdfs I’d posted: some students were simply grabbing the text online from a variety of resources. While this at first made my somewhat-compulsive inner bibliographer cringe at first, in the spirit of adventure I decided to play along, and even to encourage students to look at digital versions or editions of the poems. Overall I think the experience has been salutary, though not without a few pixelated pitfalls. What follows, then, is an initial report on the pleasures and pains of digital reading in the Romantic classroom.

Though McGann confidently argues in Radiant Textuality that physical archives are quickly being replaced by digital ones, in reality the process has been slower and less unilateral than theorists of the 1990s imagined. While there are great hypertext editions of poems here and here (largely overseen by McGann himself), most authors still haven’t received any kind of extended bibliographic treatment as digital texts, despite the obvious power of the internet to assist Anglo-American, and especially genetic and social-text editing. This means of course that caution has to be exercised about the accidentals—misspellings or misprints that creep in through transcription or by utilizing “faulty” editions. The Victorian Web’s “Tinteren Abbey,” for example, is a place unmarked on any map. But more than that, the web—or at least this iteration of browsers—levels out the distinctions between the various iterations of a text, as our class discovered when we read Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge’s poem, of course, exists in at least two quite different forms: the archaic ballad of 1798 and the much-revised poem published in 1834’s Sibylline Leaves. Over the course of 36 years Coleridge modernized the diction, added and removed a subtitle and argument, pruned the poem of some overt gothic material (the hand-of-glory sequence), and added those famous, inscrutable glosses. Online texts aren’t always particularly good at identifying which version one is reading—and the glosses pose a particular problem in a digital layout. For our class a serious downside to reading Ancient Mariner digitally was just this lack of identification, as students would read out line or point to passages that were missing, altered, or renumbered in other versions of the text. At the same time this pandemonium of texts allowed us to talk about revision and problems of “authorial intent” in concrete and specific ways.

But what about relatively stable texts, like “Tintern Abbey”? Our classroom discussion of the poem helped bring home to me the importance of context in constructing meaning. A student confronted with the version presented in the very fine The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, replete with headnotes, author biography, and sound annotation confronts the poem in a very different context than a reader who finds it on, say, the Victorian Web. Even apart from the lamentable (if pardonable) misprint in the poem’s title, by encountering the poem on a website devoted to Victorian literature one gets a very different perspective on the poem’s content and influence. One sequences the poem next to its temporal contemporaries in the useful but arbitrary back-construction of “romanticism,” while the other puts the poem into a constellation that includes Sterne, Tennyson and Hardy—a no less arbitrary placement, but one that reveals different facets of the poem’s meaning and influence. Similarly, a reader who comes across Rime of the Ancient Mariner here can see the poem in dialogue not only with other poems by Coleridge (as in our in-class reading) but with contemporary poets across a wide range of categories.

In all, I’ve been pleased with our attempts to pursue poetry on both a physical and digital front. Though using unspecified digital texts of canonical poetry can cause a bit of confusion that takes precious class time to straighten out, at the same time it can help to break down the monolithic appearance of the canonical text by providing multiple avenues of access and context. Perusing the text online, or in a variety of formats, can help bring back the strangeness and the newness of great works of literature, helping students see them not as dusty urns on a shelf but a vital and living part of our culture, and making students new readers.