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").