Blogging is New

Many of my technical writing students -- mostly sophomores -- have never blogged, don't know what a blog is, are a bit leery of this thing called "blogging." We're using a blog, hosted by Blogger, to discuss "Technical Writing in the News," which they find out about by subscribing to Google Alerts (use "technical writing" as the Search Term and "News" as the Type).

This casual, audience-centered forum lets students try out some conversation about information we might be able to chat about if we were in a residential-campus setting: we'd perhaps read similar news items, looking for stories about technical writing, and then chat about them in the cafeteria, hallway, student lounge.

Since we're a commuter campus, I try to make the blog an online space for such chatter: you get a news alert that has "technical writing" in it -- perhaps a job post, a human-interest story, a "jobs going to India" story -- and then post what you think about it on the blog. Classmates can read the same alert and concur/disagree/expand. Students learn about audience, diction, technology, purpose: all technical writing concepts.

I like this assignment, and even though many students are completely new to blogging, they end up liking it, too.

Why has it taken so long for me to find this?

Part of my last-year sabbatical project was to catch up on pedagogy scholarship in three areas: feminist, online, and critical pedagogies.

My dean had heard of the first two, but not the third. I asked, "Maybe you've heard of Paulo Freire? Henry Giroux?" Nope. I was surprised. But one can't know everything, can one?

Now I've discovered an entire website that *I* should have know about last year: The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy. Its home is McGill University, and here's a website excerpt that applies especially to community colleges:

"Housed in the project are the papers of seminal scholars who have contributed to the evolution of Critical Pedagogy. In addition, the project will promote research in Critical Pedagogy and bring together both local and international educators and continue its development globally while highlighting its relevance with marginalized and indigenous peoples" (emphasis added).

If our students and our teaching isn't "marginalized," then I don't know what is. I'm just beginning to explore the site -- I invite others to do so, too.

Students don't realize

In all my courses, I give exams. But these exams must be tailored to every class because my pedagogy requires me to teach the students who appear in my classrooms, not to teach subject matter.

In the liberal arts, my students and I become a community of learners that focuses on something slightly different every semester. This variation is especially common in a composition course because it's a skill-building course, not so-much a "content specific" course.

So this week, I've asked students what they'd like to see on the Midterm Exam because my philosophy of exams is that they're opportunities for students to show me what they've learned. I really want them to do well, to show me their strengths, to tell me what they feel confident that they've understood to this point in the semester.

This conversation often seems like a role reversal for students because when they ask me "What's on the exam? Will you give us a review sheet?," I say, "What would you like me to ask you on the exam? What do you think you've learned so far?"

Eventually, we negotiate a reasonable exam that meets the criteria I have, the learning outcomes I want them to achieve, which include being able to support their own points, as they do in during this negotiation. :-)

But they do not realize how long it will now take me to create the exams: two sections of FYC are getting slightly different exams. The third course will get an exam I create out of whole cloth since we're using new books this semester. All told, I expect to take more than 10 hours to create these exams.

I doubt some of my students spend that much time producing the essays that are also due at midterm, do you?

What's old is new

I found myself in an online article from the Wall Street Journal called "When Lit-Crit Mattered."

I'm not usually a reader of the WSJ, but this link was provided by "Arts & Letters Daily," a helpful, informative online "service of The Chronicle of Higher Education."

The article reviews the book Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, a collection of essays about New Criticism edited by Garrick Davis.

Reading the summary of New Critics' commitments and practices confirmed for me what I've always suspected but didn't quite know: I was trained in New Criticism. I've been a close reader of texts for most of my life, and those skills were honed by literature professors at St. Kate's and Penn State. At the U of M's rhetoric department, close reading became "discourse analysis" as a research method. I was also encouraged to read *everything* using such a method, including non-canonical authors thanks to my professors who practiced if didn't overtly teach feminist and critical theory. So my education didn't suffer from the narrowness-of-canon that New Critics are accused of perpetuating.

Because my grad school experiences were interrupted by child-raising, I missed the intense training in things like the cultural-studies-type of literary theory, structuralism, or deconstruction. Therefore, my classroom activities center around the ways-of-reading I found most effective. I've taught my own students critical reading practices that foreground the text even though students most often want to foreground the authors' lives as a way to understand the text. I've never encouraged that because it seems to take all the power out of an imaginative work, and the human imagination is what we praise in literature, if you ask me, not the life led by the author.

Another book for me to read in my spare time.

As we end

The summer session class meets for the last time tomorrow night. Despite the fact that the syllabus, the calendar, and the class website say our final will be ONLINE, not during the last class meeting, students were surprised last night to find out that the final class meeting would not be an exam.

Just goes to show the power of precedent: the midterm exam was in-class with a short-essay portion that could be taken home and returned online.

The way I set up my courses, students can take either the midterm or the final exam (or take both and the highest score will count). So students who did poorly on the midterm want to take the final; oddly enough, these students are the ones who didn't get that our last class meeting is an *actual class* not the exam.

Just goes to show that the weaker students are weaker in more areas than one: they're not great readers, writers, or planners.

I have one who was going to skip the last class because s/he's working at WE Fest. Another student missed last night and was hoping to miss tomorrow too, in effect taking a 15/16-week literature course in 5 weeks (and using it to substitute for another course at her/his home university where the course would have cost about $2800.00 instead of $450.00).

Hmmm . . . maybe I've got it wrong: maybe these students are very good planners . . . ! At any rate, I've answered four panicked emails today from students who need extensions or something because of their life situations and the grades they've earned this semester. I do wish I could encourage more responsible behavior on the part of students: how do others help students stay current with the course requirements, short of hand-holding and acting like the students' mother? I'm just not interested in that (mis)understanding of so-called "ethic of care" pedagogy.