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. 

Brain Dumps, Summaries, and Collaborative Writing

Today in two of my classes, we did a brain dump, where both class went the whiteboard and “dumped” everything they had in their brains about two of the major readings we’ve been analyzing. By “dump" I mean list absolutely everything they knew about our two readings. Half the class worked on Paulo Freire chapter “The ‘Banking Mode’ of Education”. The other focused on Jean Anyon’s “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum.” We’re working on a big writing project based on both readings, and I wanted to do some retrieval practice and to compose summaries - a key element of their essay.

Spotlighting Student Voices Using the Author's Chair

I finally attempted the “author’s chair” activity, something I had experienced at San Diego Area Writing Project. This protocol calls for students to take a seat in the front of the room to read a piece of their writing, typically a work in progress. I never had the nerve to try before. What if no one volunteered? What if students didn’t respond? What if students weren't interested in each others' ideas?

On this particular day, students had completed a mini-essay, a flash draft. I set up the room, explaining the process. I reminded folks about one of our “class agreements”: No apologies! What we write in class are first drafts, sloppy and scribbly, so there’s no need to say “I’m sorry".  I want students to be be okay with the natural imperfections of an early draft. I want them to develop the nerve they need to share works in progress.