Blogging Pedagogy - digital classrooms

How to Outsource Your Grading and Look (and Feel) Good Doing It

Beck Wise — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 22:09:43 +0000

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"Crowdsurfing at the Tocotronic show". Photo: daspunkt.

Or, The Power of Crowdsourcing Assessment.

Like a lot of instructors at UT, I have required presentations in my classes and over the years, these presentations have taken a lot of different forms, from three solid days of argumentative presentations to close out the semester in my first-year writing class, to having students introduce a critical section of the text and lead discussion in my current literature class. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the way I assess presentations. Which is to say: I don't.

This isn't to say that presentations aren't assessed, though. Whether course grades are determined by the instructor, in the traditional mode, or argued for by students in the Learning Record, I consider it critical that students receive concrete feedback on their various achievements within their presentations -- and further, that this feedback come from more than just the instructor.

Peer review for writing assignments gives students the opportunity to receive criticism and guidance from others in the class as they move through their writing process towards complete drafts, but it's tough to think of an equivalent opportunity for presentations. While you do write and rewrite in preparation, the nature of a classroom speech is essentially one and done. It's rare for students to present more than once in any single time-strapped college course, and there's certainly no way to revise and resubmit! The best a student can hope for is substantive feedback on their presentation that's specific to that class but generic enough to apply to the presentations they'll have to make later in their careers.

However, you can bring in more voices through peer assessment. Whenever I require presentations of my students, I also require that they provide feedback to each of their peers and that they record the grade the speaker has earnt. The grade isn't the important bit, so I won't spend time here on the various ways I've handled those in the past. But receiving written feedback from 20 or so peers on a single piece of work is the single most effective way I've found of letting students self-identify things to work on. Instead of yet another professor insisting that they speak slower, they get 15 classmates noting that the speed of the presentation made it tough to understand: they see the pattern and can act accordingly. In addition, students gain practice listening critically and assessing performance--and they tend to like the idea that their comments and assessments matter.

I can't deal with reams of paper anymore, so instead of handing out paper comment cards or the like, I use Google Forms to administer these presentation assessments, using the computers in my current networked classroom or, in non-digital spaces, having students bring their own devices and having a few paper worksheets on hand for those who don't have or prefer not to use web-capable tech in class. Google Forms--online questionaires whose responses automatically populate a spreadsheet on your Google Drive--have several affordances that make them well-suited to this kind of exercise:

Students can fill them in anonymously, with no sign-in required (or the possibility that their handwriting will be recognised by their peer), but I can still ask them to self-identify alongside their feedback; this lets me monitor the process to ensure that everyone is participating fully and seriously, and helps make sure the process doesn't further prove the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
You can set up questions with a variety of answer types, from multiple choice (with one or more possible answers) to checkboxes to short open responses to paragraphs to drop-downs. I use short answer questions to collect the presenter's and reviewer's names, multiple choice questions to assess the specific goals of the presentation ("Did the presenter clearly identify important features of their excerpt?" "Yes" - "Sometimes / kind of" - "No"), an open paragraph box for detailed feedback, and a final multiple choice question for the assessed grade. You can also select which questions are compulsory
You can copy and paste the detailed feedback straight from that column in the spreadsheet into another document to be provided to the student--it's quick and painless
You can embed the form into your class website for easy access; if you don't have one, a URL shortener will be your friend

I was tempted, in composing this blog post, to title it 'Many Hands'--but as we all know, many hands can as easily make a big damn mess as they can make light work. And having students offer peer feedback doesn't abnegate your responsibility as an instructor to offer feedback--the document I give students after presentations includes an average two pages of peer feedback plus a paragraph or two of my own comments, of the length I would give even without peer feedback. (This semester I'm also including graphs of the responses to the multiple-choice questions.) This process in no way saves me time--but by automating the process in this way, it adds maybe a minute to the time I spend writing feedback, while ensuring my students get far more information about their performance. That's a trade-off I can get behind.

The Medium is the Mentor: How Failing With an LMS Altered My Teaching Ethos

Casey Sloan — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:39:55 +0000

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Casey Sloan

Image Credit:

Ervins Strauhmanis

It took me a while to accept that I can never have all the answers. It took even longer for me to realize that this is a wonderful, fortunate fact. As an instructor, a tenacious part of me clung to the fantasy of a future of flawless knowledge and perfect leadership. Sure, I’d tell myself, I flail about now and again in front of my students, bewildered by a question or flummoxed by a comment I wasn’t expected, but that’s just because I’m relatively new to my course materials, to this emerging technology, to [insert convenient excuse here]. I liked to think that someday I’d be completely comfortable fielding any and all student issues and problems. I’m letting go of that idealized notion of myself as a pedagogue chiseled out of marble while embracing the teaching potential of uncertainty. I’ll tell you why.

This semester I am teaching a version of 309K and I decided to switch to Canvas for my classroom learning management system. Not only did I choose to make the great migration away from Blackboard, but I made the resolution that I would go totally digital for the first time. Papers, peer review, grading, syllabus, all of it, everything, online. Over this past summer I watched countless videos on how to run a class through Canvas, determined to be an expert by the time I asked my students to use the LMS. Of course, the first time I asked my students to conduct a peer review through Canvas, we hit a few snags. My students bombarded me with concerns I hadn’t preemptively thought through. “The prompt doesn’t say how we should use the highlighter. What do we strike through? Do we download the original document? Can we track changes?” Uh oh. I felt any control I thought I had over the experience slipping away. My teaching ethos suffered for it, and I could sense myself getting uncomfortable. That’s when one of my students asked me if he could use Word to conduct his review so that he could track his changes. “You know how to do that?” I asked. “Sure.” He responded.

That’s when I basically turned my students lose, and the results were fantastic. I asked them to mess around with the available tools, admitted that I couldn't be muc help, and encouraged them to experiment. I’m going to ask each student to give a brief presentation on the method she/he developed for her/his own peer review. Some used Word, some stuck with the Canvas layout. By letting them know that they had room to explore an unfamiliar system, without me there to tell them precisely how to use it, we were collectively able to generate a variety of ways to approach one lesson plan. When a few of my students had basic functionality issues with the site, I encouraged them to think about how, instead of asking me for the answer, they might go about answering their own questions using internet tools at their disposal.

Effectively, I’m now trying to think of digital resources as landscapes to explore, not as tools that come with definitive instructions. I’m also trying with newfound determination to foster a learning community where the members can lean on one another (and on themselves) instead of me.

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.

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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.

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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.

Collaboration and Chaos

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 16:46:08 +0000

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Cole Wehrle

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Cole Wehrle

As long as I’ve had the pleasure of teaching in one of the DWRL class rooms I’ve flirted with the idea of using Google Docs in a classroom setting. In-class writing assignments are certainly nothing new, but Google Docs made it possible to transform what was a space for quiet reflection into one that demanded open collaboration.

At least, it was theoretically possible. While useful for all kinds of list-making and brainstorming, the promise of Google Docs, as a productive space for real-time collaboration seems largely illusory. As anyone who has ever tried to write a CFP at the same time knows, what results is mostly frustration and confusion. It might be easier to have everyone shouting over a laptop.

So I tabled the idea until, a few weeks ago, I found myself reading about the idea of the “flipped-classroom,” which had become the pedagogical-tactic-of-the-month and was generating lots of buzz on various blogs and op-ed pages. For those who missed the wave (or have yet to catch it), the idea is simple and counterintuitive. Teachers, usually working in small groups, record all of the classroom lectures and send them to students so they can stream them at home. Then, when the students come to class the next day, the teacher will help them with their homework. This has been applied to subjects as diverse as algebra and American history, and many teachers are finding that the “flipped-classroom” has allowed them to tailor their class to the needs of individual students without sacrificing content.

I was intrigued by the concept but was unsure how to apply it to a writing class. When I was a journalism student we routinely had to produce short articles in the space of a 75 minute lab class, but it was a demanding experience and seemed unfair to give it to students in a basic writing class. About that time I realized that Google Docs might provide the answer. If it was too much to ask a single student to produce a research summary in a 75 minute class, perhaps it was somewhat more reasonable to ask it of a group.

Before the class I asked my students to look over two sample research summaries, one very good and the other very bad. Then, during the next class period we began by coming up with two lists of what qualities made the good research summary good and the bad example bad. I then played a short video, passed out a transcript, and asked each group of 3-4 students to produce a good research summary using Google Docs on that video. After a few minutes, when they had set everything up, I casually mentioned that they had to turn it in by the end of class. No late assignments would be accepted.

Panic ensued, complaints were levied, but, after they realized that this was not a point for compromise, they began dividing the work and approaching their job systematically. The activity had forced them all into the 11^th hour crunch, but this time both their classmates and I were on-hand to help. Over the next 45 minutes the students bombarded me with concise, earnest questions about phrasing and grammar while helping each other frame and format their citations. By the end of the class every single group had produced a finished research summary and it was likely the best batch of short papers I’ve ever received.

I’m not sure how to apply the activity to a longer paper, but it certainly seems like an avenue worth exploring.

Using Meditation in the (Digital) Classroom

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

Author:

Jenn Shapland

Image Credit:

David Lynch Foundation

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.

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.

The Chicken In the Egg: Theme and Comp in the Truthy Classroom, Revisted

Aaron Mercier — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:17:26 +0000

Author:

Aaron Mercier

Image Credit:

uggoy

I want to revisit my post from last semester today, because it dealt with the lessons of grading the first major assignment in my first advanced composition course, and this week I found myself doing the last class meetings before this semester’s first major assignment deadline.

I put last term’s lessons into practice this time around by revamping the content and sequence of my readings, favoring media criticism and reportage over theoretical material, putting a few more blog assignments in before the first major assignments, and revising the prompts so that they more clearly integrated class conversation and blog work. Last class was devoted mostly to discussion of a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik on Salon.com, about the Shuar tribe’s struggles against international mining interests and the Ecuadorean government.

Also new this semester, for the first time in my 4 ½ years of teaching composition, is the challenge of a truly combative student. Unchecked, this student will casually dismiss the ideas of others, monopolize conversations, and pull hard to chase down every tangent he sees. After the second class meeting in January, I was sweating bullets over this kid. I didn't know how to keep him in hand without outright suppressing his voice, or getting seriously disruptive pushback from him. As it turns out, however, his approach to the material, and to classroom conversation, has become quite a blessing for me in terms of finding ways to teach rhetoric from strongly thematically-oriented readings. For one thing, he will occassionally make some factual claim that just sounds wrong to me, and as a result, without singling this one student out, I've been much more diligent about making sure students are keeping track of what specific claims are made in discussion, and fact-checking in real time. This use of the networked classroom to habituate "research" as the knee-jerk response to controversy is a good deal less disruptive than it sounds, and has provided tons of opportunities to talk about the differences, and the interrelationships, between information and argument as a class. That set of interrelationships, I think, is at the center of my preoccupying anxiety, the anxiety over balancing strong, interesting, valuable thematic readings (and the energetic class discussions that they provoke) and effective, engaging instruction in the principles of rhetoric and academic composition.

On Tuesday, my combative student argued that the premise of the assigned reading for the day was ludicrous. The reading was a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik on Salon.com, about the Shuar tribe’s ongoing struggles against international mining interests and the Ecuadorean government.It's a provocative piece, full of loaded quotations from protestors, scientists, and mining industry reps, evocative descriptions of history, character, and scenery, and engrossing photography. From the title to the last line, it is a well-crafted bit of activist investigative journalism, published with a big budget. My combative student had a problem with a recurring pop-culture reference that helped structure one of the article's lines of argument about international engagement.

In the opening paragraphs, Zaitchik compares the resistance of the Shuar to the rebellion of the N’avi in Avatar, and he repeatedly circles back to develop and interrogate the comparison throughout the piece. My combative student suggested that the likeliest plotline for Avatar 2 is the humans returning to nuke the planet from orbit. The article, he went on, was irresponsible rabble-rousing for a lost cause, that the Shuar could never resist the march of industrial development, and to suggest otherwise actually contributed to their danger by giving them false hope, and making them less likely to compromise somehow. It was little better than incitement to violence.

Well.

I couldn’t have asked for more class participation at that moment. A forest of hands shot up, and I moderated the conversation as nimbly as I could for a couple of minutes while several students debated his point. Things started pretty calmly, and as the passions were escalating, I chose a breathless pause to intervene. I allowed as how there were some interesting and relevant points about the article being made, but said that at the source of the disagreement is a rejection of an argument that Zaitchik isn’t actually making.

While it’s true that the Avatar reference is strange and problematic in a lot of respects, it plays a complex rhetorical role in the article’s subtle account of the situation. The argument my students were having started with one of them taking a passage out of context. You can’t ask for a more teachable moment.

Recently on this blog, my colleague Laura Thain posted an interesting reflection on the controversy model we use to structure lower-division comp courses here at UT, where she talked about the ways in which discussions of popular culture can powerfully engage students and frame effective teachable moments about the relaitonships of the descriptive, analytical, and evaluative modes of reading. Her post struck a chord with me because it offers another way of approaching the concerns I voiced in my last cotribution to BP, and also of thinking about the Avatarargument as well as another recent class discussion.

A couple of weeks ago, you will recall that Applebee’s had a bit of a "social media meltdown" in the aftermath of Pastor Alois Bell’s theological confrontation with the institution of tipping in American foodservice. When that happened, I acted with the hard-hitting, decisive responsiveness that a course on Truthiness allows—nay, demands!—and assigned them a blog post by R.L. Stollar, an Oregonian journalist who stayed up late the night of that "meltdown," taking screen caps of Applebee’s social media feeds. The reporter offered a fairly trenchant analysis of the rhetorical mistakes Applebee’s social media people made, accounting for their content as well as the fundamentally inept negotiation of Facebook and Twitter, both as communications platforms and as communities. He used the screen caps of the feeds as block quotations, and did it like someone who paid attention in his comp courses. Anyway, that was all the stuff that made me interested in the article. The day that reading was due, I actually had to interrupt the class conversation to start class, and had to do so in a raised voice to be heard. Of course, they were arguing about the substance of the issue: the rights and wrongs of Alois Bells’ notes, of the firing of Chelsey Welch, of Applebee’s PR explosion.

In both these cases, I was able to steer the conversation rhetorically simply by asking a student followup questions about their remarks. With the Stollar article, I had to ask two questions: how are the screen caps like block quotations in a lit paper? How does Stollar use them to stack the argument in his favor? After that, they were off and running. In the case of Zaitchik's article, it took quite a few rounds of Q&A, but I started off asking my combative student exactly what part of the article he was objecting to. When he couldn’t point out a specific passage, I asked him how we could investigate the question of the article’s overarching message, and then opened it up to the class. One person suggested looking for a thesis in the introduction. No such luck: the article begins anecdotally and develops as an overlapping series of historical vignettes, editorial asides, narratives and interviews. Another person suggested we look at the conclusion. The last paragraph was baffling. Someone else said maybe the conclsusion came before the last paragraph, and I suggested that perhaps the conclusion spread across two or more paragraphs.

How had the author structured the article, I asked? Silence. Did anyone make a reverse outline, the way we’d practiced in class? No. Fine, that’s why we have whiteboards and projectors and visualization software, right?

So the rest of the class was spent producing, as a class, just such a reverse outline. We didn’t find anything we were all willing to call the thesis of the article until close to the bell, and not in the first or last two paragraphs. More and more notes got taken as the conversation wore on, and I saw quite a few a-ha moments when we’d take a particularly complicated bit of the text and I’d apply some rhetorical or composition principle to it. The abstract, theoretical language of rhetoric instruction was actually making sense out in the wilds of the reportorial jungle.

Still, though. I remembered seeing those sorts of frownsmile-nods before I got the first crop of major assignments last term, and I remember how many hours of feedback-giving on the subject of rhetorical analysis and what it means, and methodologies suited to its execution ensued. I mean, I expect that’s what every first round of feedback in lower-division comp classes always looks like, but I was trying to limit the number of times I’ll need to repeat myself on the basics this time. So I assigned no reading for Thursday’s class. Instead I gave the whole class over a small-group exercise geared towards building on some visual rhetoric practice exercises and getting them to teach each other discovery and outline tactics. I’ll post that plan on the lesson plans archive soon, but for now, a couple of remarks about how it fits.

With the long articles on Appebee’s and Ecuadorian politics, the students encountered levels of complexity and contingency they didn’t expect to find by lingering in the descriptive mode. Conversations that started off with the evaluative mode holding sway quickly bogged down, getting louder instead of moving forward. They couldn’t help but notice this, and when I showed them that the way out of such dead ends was back through the texts at hand, they followed willingly enough, but we only really had the time to cover the basics. What I did with the following class was present more condensed texts (images), and required the students to generate multiple, and if possible opposed, readings of the same text that incorporated local elements that nuanced a global understanding of the image.

So we teach popular culture, as Laura said, not because of any of the inherent merits or problems in its content, but simply because it’s popular. Popular texts are designed to be accessible, to engage readers, assertively develop audience investment and to communicate their contents clearly and efficiently. As such, they quite deliberately invite, and even cultivate an evaluative mode of engagement from a casual reader, but this is more blessing than curse for the rhetoric teacher, because it means you have plenty of opportunities to defamiliarize your students from a lifetime of over-passive reading habits. When that happens, the student, like the scholars Laura talked about, discovers what we did: that defamiliarization and demystification go hand in hand, that analysis is a productive rather than a destructive activity, and that a critical awareness doesn’t have to mean the death of jouissance.

Finding the Sticking-Place: Take Up New Technologies and Unscrew the Cycle of Fear

Steven LeMieux — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:48:27 +0000

Author:

Steven J. LeMieux

Image Credit:

Eventful Rental

There seems to be a tendency when teaching new technologies to slip into simply teaching the tools. When I’m gearing up to assign my students a multimodal project, rather than teaching students to puzzle over and feel out new technologies, I often—with the semester slipping by—take their hands and rush them through some piece of software. With so few locations of tangible, embodied befuddlement in schools (I hesitantly bracket off conceptual befuddlement as something experienced slightly differently) it’s a real shame to not give students the space to try and fail when the opportunity presents itself. And rather than simply layering new media practices on top of the writing that we’ve been doing for the last semester—attempting a quick bit of transference when everyone is already starting to get a bit worn out—these last few harried weeks of the semester could often be better spent by using the experience of encountering new media tools to open up possible strangeness in otherwise normal environments. The complexity of the tools necessary for new media production—hardware and software both—can be used to remind us how complex the tools (word processors, pens, rhetoric, etc.) that we’ve been using throughout the semester are and that we engage them as embodied subjects.

New media tools, just by virtue of their novelty (their initial, daunting complexity), engage students differently than the old media devices they have been taught to use throughout their schooling. Because they’re new and because they’re full of buttons and layers and unfamiliar work-flows new users have to engage them concretely as things in the world. So they open up a different set of concerns for students. Even if attuned to writing as a process it seems that students look past the material event of writing—the process is built on a series of discrete drafts rather than a long material engagement with texts and tools. When thrown into a new situation, though, there’s the chance that they can begin thinking alongside their materials and tools. If the tools are sticky, if they cause students to slow down and think about their mouse clicks and button presses they can begin to see their products as co-authored. They can think alongside and through the affordances of both the concepts they engage and the tools they use. It is important to spend time with the objects around them, to collaborate with rather than merely use tools and technologies.

I often err on the side of feel-goodery when it comes to new possible engagements with technologies, but it is important to remember that there is a danger here, though. Instead of opening up new possibilities there’s always the danger of getting caught in a rut. What if students, perhaps intimidated by their new tools, learn how to use them just a bit, just enough to get a project whipped up by the end of the semester; they begin to internalize that single constrained relationship. In the move to collaborate with the tools and materials we engage it’s easy to shy away from a fully figured collaboration and instead simply work within the supposed confines of the material. This often arises in the structured or institutionalized creation fostered by the long process of school, and it is made all the more pernicious when those confines are invisible as is often the case with different forms of writing. In my writing classes I often have to coax students (students that have been vigorously taught that there is a ‘good’ writing and that they aren’t doing it) into moving beyond the structures of the five paragraph essay. With something like image manipulation it’s easy to get caught up in flashy effects and basic, layered collage. By not spending enough time teaching my students to engage new technologies I might be sending them down the same path of rote use that is often taken with PowerPoint.

More dangerous than holding a student’s hand through the rocky first brush with new technology is modeling a fear of both failure and possibility. Looking back on the ways that I have been introduced to new technologies in the classroom, I can’t help but notice that fear has been a common thread throughout. I very clearly remember the first time I saw an overhead projector. It was rolled into my kindergarten class one day, brand new to both me and the school. And while we were allowed to draw on the overhead sheets there was a constant refrain of “be careful, don’t touch anything.” Upon reflection, I don’t think that the overhead projector was particularly fragile, but I can see that my teachers were worried more about breaking the machine. When I finally encountered computers there was that same fear, amplified by all the different ways they could fail. These fears can quickly become internalized, and students learn that they might break the machine by pushing too hard, by trying out new things, by playing around, so now there’s fear surrounding both the structural integrity of the thing and its possibilities. I can’t really blame my kindergarten teacher for being afraid, nor my students (maybe not myself, either), because we’ve all been taught to avoid failure at all cost. By squeezing multimodal projects in as a final afterthought, I have done a disservice to my students; I’ve put them in a bind where they aren’t allowed the time to fail. Instead of introducing new tools to students as something they should figure out and produce with, we might trouble the cycle of fear by opening up these concrete technologies as a place to fail and reflect.

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.