Taking Their Pulse: Five Weeks In, And Students Are Feeling . . .

One of the key takeaways I’m getting in a professional development program I'm attending is how the subject I’m teaching is more significant than English. 

The real subjects I’m teaching are the humans in the classroom. On a grammatical tip, students are agents, the ones doing the learning, not passive objects. They are people on a journey to resolve the problem of how to express ourselves in written academic discourse, the objective of our class.

So it’s on me to find out who the humans in my classroom are, what’s on their minds and in their hearts - just as it's on me to know the subject matter. A strategy I often use is focused free writes with stems, sentence starters that focus students on a particular topic or theme. 

At the five-week mark, I used sentence stems for a brief class warm-up. These "stretches" are part of an effort to ease students into the day's lesson, using writing and/or partner discussion, to help folks “enter” the classroom. On this day, I provided three sentence stems for students to share in partners or triads: 

Students Curate and Share Examples of Freire's Modes of Education

As students in my composition courses prepare to write essays that take a position on Freire, we spent time collecting images, poems, and quotes. While students basically "get" Freire's ideas, I wanted to assess whether students could find illustrations on their own and if they could explain how those images exemplify Freire's ideas. In other words, do students know what I mean for them to know? 

Students have already read and analyzed a variety of poems and images that illustrate the Banking Concept and Problem Posing Modes of education. Those clips are included on the below Padlet, the ones labeled "Henry A."  For this particular assignment, a student looked for their own resources and had to explain in writing how those resources illustrate Freire's ideas.  

This Padlet task supports the "big essay" assignment on Freire's ideas. Students have two options for the  prompt: "The kind of education I deserve" and "The education that Southwestern College students require to solve our community's problems." Freire's two modes of education serve as our "theoretical framework" to help students articulate their answers, answers they've already been addressing for a few weeks previously (see previous entry titled "Writing as a Pre-Reading Strategy").

Writing as a Pre-Reading Strategy: Thinking like an Education Philosopher

-Dehumanization and schooling is the theme of the first writing project in two of my English Composition courses this semester. 

We will read chapter two from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he outlines the “banking concept” and “problem-posing” modes of education. Instead of diving directly into his prose, I wanted to see how students were already engaged with Freire’s ideas, even without having read his text. 

To do this, we examined several editorial cartoons that depict the banking mode of education and a couple others that point to the possibility of another mode of education.

After discussing what we observed and interpreted, students had the opportunity to talk in pairs about what they experienced in school. How representative were the cartoons of their own experience or observation? 

Using Mentor Texts to Reckon with Nuanced Reactions: Aly Wane's "A (Complicated) Prayer for Kobe"

Aly Wane, Human Rights Worker in Syracuse, New York 

To acquaint students with using the texts they read as mentors for their writing, I chose as our first topic, Kobe Bryant. I wanted to pick a timely topic that would help students work through their complicated reactions to Kobe's death.  I selected what was initially widely disseminated on a Facebook post by Aly Wane, a peace activist living in Syracuse, New York. Published under the title of “A (Complicated) Prayer for Kobe.” Wane’s piece has subsequently been published in the online magazine America: Jesuit Review. 

Wane’s poem enacts a dialogue going back and forth between the narrator’s contradictory feelings about Kobe Bryant and the moment of national mourning. Was Kobe a hero? A villain? To whom? And why? The poem doesn’t definitely land on one side or the other. Instead, Wane asks us to recognize our own messy, imperfect human lives that can’t be reduced to a single moment or action. As Wane points out, “I will hurt and harm the people I love."  

Attending to Affective Domain with Word Clouds

This Wordle captures students' responses on the first day of class.

This semester, I want to do my best to weave in social-emotional learning and affective domain into lessons or activities that engage critical thinking and writing skills. 

We began our first week of school this past Wednesday. I wanted students to reflect on their initial thoughts and ideas about being back in school after a six-week break. So during our first meeting, I asked the class of just under thirty college students to jot down three single words that describe their thoughts and feelings about being in an English class. Then at the end of our second meeting, I asked them about what they were thinking and feeling now that we've met twice. The Wordle above captures the "before" responses, the one below, the "after." The fonts size represents the number of responses. 

Using On-Line Bulletin Boards to Help with Reading

An important skill scholars are supposed to practice in composition is to find meaningful quotes and passages from the texts we read. We expect writers to support their ideas with outside sources. For sure, scholars’ opinions can be rooted in personal observation and experiences. But that isn’t enough; writers need to buttress their positions by quoting other thinkers, “recruiting” other writers’ words and ideas to support their own. 

In addition to finding quotes, developing writers need practice paraphrasing those ideas, rewording those quotes to illustrate how those sources fit into their own arguments. 

To practice finding and paraphrasing quotes, I’ve been experimenting with the bulletin board application Padlet to record and share the intellectual labor students accomplish. My goal was to make the process less solitary and to help the entire class profit from each others’ work. 

After we read and initially discussed chapter two of  Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I divided the class into groups. Each group tackled one of five topics we’d noted during those discussions: banking mode, problem posing, oppression/conformity, freedom/liberation, relevance/real life. I asked students to locate where Freire defined, clarified, or elaborated on those themes, urging them to look for quotes that they thought were especially meaningful or relevant.

Poetry & Pedagogy: Prepping for an In-Class Essay

To prepare students for an upcoming in-class essay, we did a version of “reciprocal teaching.” The essay prompt asks students to use two scholar’s theories to make sense of a phenomenon. In this case, the theorists are Paulo Freire and Jean Anyon, two educational scholars. The object of study is a classroom of their choice - perhaps one they remember from elementary or high school or one they are currently enrolled in here at college.  We’d done multiple “draft readings” and several pre-writing activities to unpack the scholar's ideas, but the “moment of truth” was upon us, and I wanted to them to rehearse.