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I believe that students grow intellectually and individually from hands-on experience and the belief that they can succeed. I also believe that if I can show students how the course subject matter relates to their lives and goals, then they will leave my classroom with both greater critical thinking & writing skills and a willingness to question. To accomplish these objectives, I design a student centered classroom in which students share the responsibility for learning to think and write critically. Consequently, I plan assignments and evaluation procedures to promote the same ends.
My composition classroom's student centered atmosphere changes my role from lecturer to a facilitator. I design assignments that provide students with opportunities for active learning and that guide them to successful writing. I construct short, preliminary assignments that isolate important skills (such as argument or counter-argument) necessary for a unit project's higher levels of thinking and writing. Whether I teach the conventions for writing as a journalist, a scientist, a social scientist, or a humanist, the assignment sequences gradually build long-term critical thinking and writing skills. Furthermore, students in my current composition class engage in on-line freewriting and peer review forums to which they post their papers and receive criticism from a group member. These freshmen are also in the process of creating an on-line psychology-film web site and will create an Art History site linked with the Ackland Art Museum.
Daily writing workshops present activities and strategies that guide students towards designated writing goals. For example, during the early stages of composing, I have spurred critical thinking by having students brainstorm, engage in free-writing, and discuss their findings and insights with group members. However, during subsequent workshops, I have asked students to consider global organization strategies by literally cutting their papers into paragraphs and then asking a peer to reconstruct the paragraphs into a coherent and increasingly persuasive argument. Students who initially have difficulty understanding the concept of global organization quickly realize how to use key ideas and transitions to organize an argument. I employ a similar strategy to help students learn effective paragraph construction. Most recently, I have rewritten popular songs into passive voice and then asked students to re-write them in active voice. This activity finally leads students to recognize the awkwardness of passive voice and to understand how to eliminate it. Offering students such carefully designed activities allows me build upon their skills while simultaneously urging then to discuss strategies, to make decisions, and to take responsibility for their writing. For sample draft workshops, please consult my Draft Workshop Index.
I also enjoy the challenge of creating cohesive, semester-long literature sequences that speak to student interests, but challenge their assumptions about literature. For example, rather than taking a chronological approach in "American Experiences through Stories and Storytelling," I paired authors (Crevecoeur and Emerson; Whitman and Hughes, Twain and Morrison, Wharton and Hurston, Cather and Tan, Disney and Erdrich) who consciously or unconsciously "talk" to each other. I arranged them so that each subsequent pair built upon previous pairs to produce a perpetual concatenation and re-examination of narrative techniques and themes. For example, students explored how images of the American "orphan" in Crevecouer, Emerson, Twain, Morrison, Wharton, and Hurston change based upon racial, gender, economic and social forces. What students initially view as oddly mis-matched pairs gives way to a recognition not only of each work's importance, but of the complex interdependence of these literary works. Students – particularly my female and minority students – have stated that they enjoy reading and listening to the different voices I include on my syllabus especially when they finally hear authors who speak to their own experiences. (Link to other literature courses.)
In addition to facilitating discussions about the texts themselves, I require my literature students to actively analyze texts from various perspectives. Small groups summarize scholarly and theoretical articles, discuss their strengths and weakness, and frame questions for class discussion. Furthermore, I include activities which ask students to consider how cultural artifacts such as historical and legal documents, domestic conduct literature, art, music, film, etc. not only expose a work's complexity, but also reveal its interdependence on other disciplines. Finally, groups move from reading and analyzing these diverse literary, critical, and cultural works to fashioning their own texts by engaging in creative projects such as transforming Whitman's linguistic collages into pictorial collages and staging tableau vivants to demonstrate the silence/voice dichotomy in Jane Eyre. By analyzing the works through such hands-on activities, students gain new and increasingly complex interpretative and analytical skills, begin to approach the literature with more interest and enthusiasm, and re-evaluate their relationship to this art form.
Because teaching composition has taught me that students learn by writing, my literature students also build critical reading and analytical skills through writing assignments. Students begin by salient feature or journal responses on an issue of their choice (Sample assignments from "Children's Battles"). these short papers build analytical skills and enable me to gauge each student's level of understanding and to identify – early in the semester – students who have difficulty with writing and analysis. I respond to each assignment by asking questions to spur thought on content /analysis, and I call attention to problematic writing skills. The student evaluations confirm that the practice they gain while writing these short papers, as well as longer arguments, helps them to improve their writing skills.
However, these short assignments also serve as bridges to increasingly complex writing assignments. When I ask students to write the extended, close textual analysis, they have already had practice writing short analyses. The close textual reading in conjunction with the diverse in-class discussions, inter-disciplinary, theoretical, and scholarly resources help students to write their theorized, original paper. By semester's end, students can write a theorized, original research paper, as evidenced by my student whose work on Beloved was accepted for the National Undergraduate Literature Conference and three of my students whose edited articles appear in The International Journal for Teachers of English Writing Skills (September 1996). The latter also suggests that while I hold my students to a high standard of excellence, they rise to the challenge. Sample student papers by my NCSU freshmen.
Finally, because computers further the student centered nature of my classroom, I have experimented with different ways of using e-mail and web resources in my classes to facilitate interactive learning. I designed a project which required students from my American Survey course to create the framework for a web site based on the authors' we read. In both the post-colonial novels and "Journeys of Self (Discovery)" classes, students "posted" their papers to the class list-serve and wrote two peer responses per unit. In "Major American Authors," I urged students to participate in on-line discussions because I find that this medium offers them additional opportunities to pose questions, to expand upon class discussion, and to share new ideas. This forum also offers shy students an excellent forum through which to express their ideas and it provides all students with another opportunity to practice effective written communication. Furthermore, by continuing discussion outside of class time, students realize that literature and writing extend beyond a specific time of day, a particular room, or a limited audience.
Objectively evaluating students, whom I know have worked hard all semester, is sometimes a challenge, despite the fact that we create rubrics to evaluate performance (sample writing rubric). However, since my composition students write nine papers and my literature students engage in so many activities (salient features/ journals; mid-terms and finals; short and long papers; individual and group presentations; creative projects; e-mail discussions; and individual conferences), they have several opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and to succeed. I, in turn, have a wealth of materials upon which to gauge and evaluate (through traditional grading, holistic scoring, or portfolios) their progress.
My literature students will confirm that while I am no "softy," I am fair, even on exams. I design "student centered" exams because I think that part of performing successfully comes from understanding the rationale behind the exam. Throughout the semester, we discuss the difference between questions that require recalling factual information and those which require higher-level thinking skills such as integration, analysis, and application. These activities teach students how to formulate argumentative questions and serve as opportunities to make connections between the literary works. I use their questions as the basis for exam questions, usually adding information to encourage argument (sample mid-term). In the fall of 1994, I experimented with making the cumulative section of the final exam into take-home group essay and this format successfully prompted students to move away from "exam regurgitation syndrome."
Perhaps individual conferences are one of the best tools I use to measure a student's intellectual growth. I require both literature and composition students to see me in conferences several times during the course of a semester. I use conferences to get to know my students, to discuss individual progress and concerns, and to work on writing. When a student needs help with an assignment, we read through his / her paper together and then discuss problems and solutions. By asking questions rather than giving directive comments, the student learns to make observations on his/her own and consequently becomes a better critic and writing diagnostician. As my student evaluations suggest, I devote an extensive amount to time to office hours and individual appointments. I think it is time well spent.
Student evaluations reveal that they enjoy not only the materials I teach, but also how I teach them. I become excited when students say that my class challenges them and causes them to think. Equally exciting is that fact that students challenge me and lead me to re-evaluate my thinking and my values. I suspect and expect, therefore, that my teaching strategies will continue to evolve as my students and I take risks in an active learning environment. Link to on-line student evaluations (please consult my job packet to obtain the password).