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: 

Experiments in Making: The "Identity Is" Project

Readers might be curious about the "Bayan Professor" part of this blog's URL. Bayan is Tagalog, a Filipino dialect, for town or municipality. Bayan also connotes family, home - the beloved community. It's the name me and my teaching partner chose for our linked classes, the Bayan Learning Community.

My partner teaches the Personal Development component of our paired classes, the first-year college colloquium, the "how to be a college student" class. I'm the English professor. While Bayan does special outreach to Filipino and Filipino American students, Bayan Scholars don't have to be Filipino. They must, however, be willing to engage Filipino American themes to master Personal Development and English skills.

My co-teacher and I layout our learning objectives and, considering the shared themes, look for intersections, moments where we can leverage the overlaps. We want students to experience how different disciplines actually complement each other, how classes feed into the other. We're also committed to "making,", i.e., having students create as much as they consume. We want our students to see themselves as producers of knowledge, not merely passively taking in information. The "Identity Is" Project was our most ambitious unit this semester.