Tomorrow will be my first day of the semester, which is why I haven’t blogged much lately: been busy overhauling the syllabus and the assignments, testing readings, attending meetings, getting weblogs set up, and the like. Here’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow.
After the usual first-day business, students will start with paired introductions to one another: interview your partner, and — based on your interview — write up a brief introduction of your partner to the class, including — at the end — a judgment about what type of person she is. (“Jane is a Democrat with Republican parents, she squeezes toothpaste from the end not the middle, she likes cats and menthol cigarettes, and she would never spit out a window. From this information, I might conclude that she could never make it at Harvard, and that’s why she’s here at UMass.”) Go around, read the introductions out loud. Discuss, briefly.
On your own, go back to your computers and type up a paragraph that addresses the misperceptions and the most important omissions in your partner’s introduction of you. Conclude with a general statement about what people often get wrong about you, what they often get right, and why.
Next, pair up with your partner again. Exchange zip codes. (If you’re not from the US, it’s fine to choose a place in the US where you think you might want to live, and find its zip code; or you can use 01002 or 01060 or some of the other towns around here.) Go to MSN’s Neighborhood Finder site and enter your partner’s zip code. Browse through the information that comes up, and then click through the “PRIZM Neigborhood Types” links and try to find the description that seems most applicable to your partner, paying particular attention to “Lifestyle Preferences”. What kind of a person is your partner? Write another brief paragraph about your partner, revising your characterization.
Discuss as a class. How does MSN get it wrong and get it right? How important are people’s perceptions of you based on where you’re from and what you buy? (It may be useful here to bring up the connection of schools and property taxes in the United States, since this will later on connect to the readings themed around education, and ask students about what sorts of schools they came from and how they characterized students from other schools.)
Ask students to do private writing again (in the early sessions of the semester, I always find the back-and-forth between interaction and introspection to be helpful; it sets the tone for the course’s ideas about public and private writing, or Peter Elbow’s journey out and journey back, but it’s also the best way I’ve found to deal with the social needs of a diverse classroom of first-semester freshmen), this time on the place where they shop back home, and what types of members of their peer groups shop there as well, and also on a place where they very consciously don’t shop, and who the types of people are who shop there.
Conclude with a discussion of their high school communities versus the new campus community in which they find themselves: who, from high school, went to work, went to the military, went to jail, went to college? What types of work, what types of college? Here, at UMass Amherst, what other sorts of people do they see? What sorts of people do they not see? Who are they in this context versus who they were in the context of their high schools, and how are they seen?
Homework: first, get off campus. Take the free bus to Amherst, or Northampton, or to the mall in Hadley, or to South Hadley over by Mt. Holyoke. As a freshman, it’s way too easy to make your universe the world between the dining hall, the dorms, class, and the Greek houses. Go with the intention to shop, or pretending to shop, for something. Take a notebook and a pen. What sorts of people do you see? What sort of a place is it? Write up a couple of paragraphs of sociological observations.
Next, read either Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “The Science of Shopping” or David Guterson’s essay “Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured.” (on the Mall of America, in the August 1993 Harper’s). What perspectives might Gladwell or Guterson offer you regarding your peers’ perception of you, your perception of yourself, and the ways those shift between here and home? How might they inform they way you perceive other people, both here and at home? Write an early draft of an essay that addresses those questions, and that also serves as a way for you to introduce yourself, via your writing, to your peers in the class. Incorporate at least one point from what you’ve read (what your partner wrote to introduce you, the MSN stuff, the Gladwell or Guterson) via quotation or paraphrase to extend, revise, complicate, or work against your own conclusions.
So that’s Essay 1, for which the assignment title is (tentatively) “Personal Experiences, Community Contexts, Public Perceptions.” We’ll do some drafting, some more written and spoken peer response once they get their drafts more solid, then some copyediting and proofreading exercises with the handbook and the 20 most common errors, and that’ll be it: a publication draft. Yes, it’s a bit cultural studies-y, and there’s a bit of an agenda to it, but I also think that most students should have no problems writing authoritatively about themselves, and also writing authoritatively about consumption. Like the rest of us, they’re good at it, and they’ve got some sharp perspectives. My syllabus is themed around links between education and consumption, which — while I know it’s kind of tacky to put your research interests into your pedagogy — also feels like a sufficiently broad theme that it should be relatively accessible. I mean, they’re in an educational institution; how bad can it be to pay close attention to some of the assumptions that come with the institution? (I write this paragraph somewhat expecting — and hoping for — a bit of a critique from John and others.)
Essay 2 is “Reading and Writing Difficult Texts, Part I,” and it’s kind of in the mode of the Mariolina Salvatori “difficulty” exercise or the Ways of Reading move that asks students to grapple with texts they may find intimidating. (My Writing Program sometimes calls it “The Text-Wrestling Essay.”) I ask students to read Linda Brodkey’s “Writing on the Bias” (College English 56.5, September 1994, pages 527-547), and we read the first several pages slowly, together and out loud, with frequent stops to ask students to write down impressions and associations, ideas about the author and where the text is going. It’s not an essay I unreservedly like: even today, I have my own troubles with it, my own difficulties and disagreements. It’s an essay about reading and writing, about class and education, about home and school, and — yes — about bias. After our first slow reading, I ask students to go home and re-read it. I ask them: what’s Brodkey so concerned about? Why did she write this essay? What’s on her mind? Now: look back at your Essay 1. What’s on your mind? What concerns you? How does your background affect that? Write the early draft of an essay that filters Brodkey’s perspective through your perspective, that extends and complicates both perspectives, that uses Brodkey to interrogate your assertions, and that uses your experience to interrogate Brodkey’s assertions. For this essay, we’ll only go through an early draft and a middle draft, rather than the full early draft / middle draft / solid draft / clean draft cycle.
Essay 3 extends Essay 2 into “Reading and Writing Difficult Texts, Part II,” and it again asks students to perform the simultaneously hermeneutic and deconstructive moves suggested by Mariolina Salvatori in her pedagogical essays “Conversations with Texts” and “Towards a Hermeneutics of Difficulty.” I ask students to read Jean Anyon’s “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work and Glen Smith’s brief “Schools and the Dilemma over Social Class” (no cite, sorry), and then re-filter Essay 2 and Essay 1 through their own experiences and through Smith’s and Anyon’s perspectives. You’ll need to carefully analyze their perspectives, I tell students, before you can do careful work using your own experience and conclusions to work with or against the ones they offer, and to extend and complicate a compelling argument about the production and consumption of education (your own and others’) in our contemporary school system. It’s fine to cut and paste chunks of your Essays 1 and 2, if you’re so inclined, as long as you do good work contextualizing them, and as long as you cite them properly. Essay 3, like every other essay except for Essay 2, goes through the full four drafts.
We’ll start Essay 4, “Researching Subjects,” with some library and citation work, familiarizing students with database searches and using the catalog, and finally focusing on the “Search by Subject” aspect of the catalog. I’ll point them towards possible subject headings for the essays we’ve already read and ask them to come up with more, and then I’ll ask them: get together with a partner and come up with a complete list of subjects for each other’s essays. From the list your partner offers, choose the combination of subjects that most appeals to you, and then — going back and forth between Amazon and the library catalog — restrict the list so that you get a manageable range of texts. Go to the library and check them out; look at their bibliographies, and scan the index for keywords. Come up with a final list of four to six articles or chapters to read, oriented towards a spin on those subjects that you’re happy with. Do a rhetorical analysis of those articles or chapters, paying attention to audience, to exclusion, to argument, to content and context, and then come to a conclusion about the subject that addresses the diversity of opinion, recommends an ideal rhetorical stance and audience, and takes a side. This essay is largely a digest and analysis of what’s been said and how and why, followed by a carefully analytical and opinionated (in other words, not impartial) conclusion.
Essay 5, “Documenting an Argument,” takes the conclusion you ended essay 4 with, and uses further library research to turn it into an essay-length documented argument that contends to a specific and identifiable audience, Here’s What Needs to Be Done, and Why, ending with a set of explicit action-based instructions to your audience. This, and Essay 4, is where we get all the practice citing research.
Privately, I like to steal a title from Tony Hoagland and call Essay 6 “What Narcissism Means to Me,” but that’s not very nice to my students, so maybe I’ll stick with “Bringing It All Back Home.” Essay 6 is the often-used concluding move of the first-year composition course, wherein students are asked to reflect in writing upon the writing they’ve done over the course of the semester. I’ll start with some peer portfolio review, but then, just to initiate a little controversy, I’ll ask students to read Mark Edmundson’s popular essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education” and take some sides: how does Edmundson represent you? Are you like Edmundson’s UVA student, or more like an Amherst College or Holyoke Community College student? Why? What does Edmundson say about shopping, class, research, motivation, and education? How is he biased? Use evidence from your writings this semester (quote and paraphrase) to support an argument extending, critiquing, slandering, agreeing, complicating, or denying Edmundson, but that ultimately takes a certain perspective on Edmundson in order to arrive at some final conclusions and ideas about future directions for your own writing.
Now: time to go iron my shirt and pants. As with the start of every teaching semester, I know I’ll not get much sleep tonight.
And I’m happy, happy, happy to be teaching again. Hooray!
Mike, this syllabus plan looks amazing. I love how you’ve taken a freshman’s preoccupation with figuring out who she/he is and built it into a challenging set of assignments.
By the way, I checked my neighborhood on MSN. So, it turns out that I live in an Urban Inner City, with an average income of $10,000. AND twenty percent of the population have graduate degrees.
Great opening assignment, Mike. I’ve never thought about that neighborhood demographic info as a trigger to self-analysis, as well as contrasting with a colleague. And some will realize they are not typical of their zip code, an important lesson about the nature of sociological generalizations (they always include outriders and exceptions).
I’m also glad you posted the whole plan for the term. I’ve had my courses up on the web this way for several years now. It would be nice if we could promote a kind of Open Source movement on syllabi, especially writing assignments and sequences.
Your second assignment is similar to my movement from Self to Other, though I keep that assignment embodied in students’ personal experiences. They do have hooks and Krakauer’s account of Chris McCandless to use as textual “Others”. I guess I’d like to see more choice than just the Brodkey piece, but I’m sure it will work.
The bus assignment is great as another way of “de-centering” the students. Might even have them do it in pairs (at least the bus ride, and wander on their own, and then talk on the bus ride back). Anyway, I think you’ve got good stuff here, well thought out.
So let’s call out all the Open Source advocates in comp blogging to put out their writing assignment sequences.
And my demographic is what I expected: 20% Elite, 26% Wealthy, 22% Affluent, 16% Upper Middle. 98% graduate high school, over 70% have 4-year degrees or more, and the median house purchase was $997,548. All of that explains why we are one of the most marketed zip codes in the country. Tellingly, the one statistic below the national average was class size per teacher and students per counselor. For all the talk about valuing education, even this very wealthy community has realtively large classes.
Rita — wow. Those are some remarkable statistics. Would it be pushing things to ask what PRIZM Neighborhood Type you most line up with? (For what it’s worth, the closest group in my zip code is Greenbelt Families, although that’s not very close.)
John — I like to think of the Brodkey piece as a first step in revising their perceptions of the first essay, and then the Anyon and Smith essays as opportunities for students to open up arguments that extend their opinions beyond the bounds of the Brodkey piece. So perhaps a sequential rather than a simultaneous scaffolding of reactions. And, actually, I’d planned to ask them to do the field trip with partners — it definitely tends to make things go easier — so, yes, great minds thinking alike, and all that?
I’m definitely in favor of calling out the open source advocates for sharing teaching resources, but the thought also gives me pause, particularly given the immense disparity of the zip code statistics you and Rita offer: the three of us are talking about very, very different institutions, and one worry might be that assignments might not travel well between such institutions.
Now, yes, it’s foolish to cite that as a reason for not sharing information. But when I was at RSA, I had a wonderful extended and thoughtful chat over lunch with a former mentor, whose scholarship and ideas have done quite a bit to shape my own perspective. Her concern was that in composition, there’s a power and prestige differential between capital-s Scholarship and the sharing of pedagogical Lore (to use Stephen North’s term), and that differential contributes to the ongoing de-valuing of pedagogy as scholarship. In other words, trading teaching ideas without attribution while our discipline continues to privilege published scholarship when making tenure decisions can only contribute to the further marginalization of teaching.
I’m not sure I agree with her there, but I’m having a hard time formulating an adequate counterargument, partly because of my immense respect for her. Such a counterargument would necessarily invoke concerns of scarcity and ownership, and contend that the widespread dissemination of knowledge can actually serve to increase value, but beyond that, I’m not sure where to go.
Thoughts?
Hmm, if faculty publish their assignments on web pages and blogs, there’s attribution unless someone decides to do it pseudonymously.
Let’s just consider this in practical terms. CCCC has fewer than 10,000 members. The comp profession is much larger than that. What tiny percentage of that group gets material published in refereed journals each year? All NCTE journals are now on-line. How long will it be before the prestige factor of appearing in the print journal declines? Ten years?
In the meantime, faculty who start sharing practices on the web are creating a conversation that pretty much doesn’t exist now. I think the scholarship/pedagogical distinction is artificial anyway. If one hundred comp teachers from a whole range of zip codes published their FYC syllabi, someone would have the material for a great dissertation–or a journal article.
Publishing has never been something I’ve had to do for promotion or even status–many CC faculty are suspicious of colleagues who publish so I don’t have the same perspective as those of you working in institutions where those concerns are much more central, and can affect your daily bread.
When I served recently on the Professor of the Year review committee (Carnegie Foundation), I was blown away by how much I learned from reading about the teaching practices of these great exemplars from around the country. I wish there was a way to publish those nominating materials.
I obviously don’t know your mentor/friend but there’s an element of patronization in the view you report. I think having a sympathetic, critical audience for your teaching materials would be of far more value than any “status” concerns.
“calling out the open source advocates”
and then the heavy duty open source advocates will call you out to share your syllabi *and* your classroom blogs *and* be using open source software to do it 😉
at least, that’s what i’ve been doing for the last several years. i usually wait until a few weeks into the semester, though, until my students get established, the calendar is hardened, and the site has some student content.
btw: maybe i’ve misinterpreted your comment about zip codes, mike, but i’m not sure that i agree. the communication of practitioner lore often happens across geographical and institutional boundaries. even if assignments don’t “travel well between institutions” that doesn’t mean that we don’t learn from them. or at least my perspective on the value of sharing syllabi goes beyond just the intent of borrowing each other’s assignments.
kudos to you for putting up your assignments!
noticed a problem when i came back to see if there was any reply. wouldn’t it better enable teachers to use your assignments if you allowed derivative works with your CC license? with your license, all anyone is able to do is copy verbatim what you have; they cannot repurpose it for their own use.
plus, you can’t really call out open source types when you don’t use an open source license yourself 😉
Hey, Charlie, somehow I thought my crack about “open source types” would get a response from you.
I agree that the basic ethic of open exchange of information and ideas is one we should each promote within our own institutions and within our disciplinary organizations and journals.
I agree that the value in viewing another’s assignments lies in seeing the thinking underlying the choices and sequences. You might not take a specific assignment, but you might pick up some ideas about course architecture.
I don’t think there’s a good literature on the propagation of teaching ideas. Certainly we draw on our experience as students in others’ classes. We draw on the specific course descriptions/outlines adopted at our institution. We draw on ideas we pick up at conferences and reading professional journals. But I suspect we also get ideas from non-academic experiences that trigger connections with our course materials. Having more examples on line might give us real insights into the sources we use to plan our syllabi and assignments.
And if there were a lot of examples from a variety of institutions, WPA’s would have a great resource for training new GTA’s.
LOL. I’m too predicatable 🙂
But not just new GTA’s. The more we share, the more it benefits experienced teachers as well.
I have something I’ll send you by email, John. It’s not quite ready for prime time, but I think you would enjoy seeing it.
Thanks for pointing out the CC license issue, Charlie — I’ve gone and changed it. As for OS software, well, you know where I stand on that, and I’ve got a sandbox install of Drupal that I’m playing with — just scaling the learning curve. Thinking about it now, I shouldn’t have been so quick to echo John’s “calling out”; it’s got loaded implications that aren’t really what I was after. I’m definitely in favor of sharing teaching resources, and am doing my best to do so; I think my concern about how well assignments travel between institutions is more a concern about teacherly attention to pedagogical context. My point, backed up with the zip-code thing, is that teaching never happens in a vacuum, and while we can always learn from one another’s course materials, we shouldn’t commit the error of assuming all aspects of a curriculum are perfectly portable — because that leads to the sort of institutional arrogance John describes, by which folks at Research 1 universities simply assume that whatever pedagogies they design (Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, e.g.) are suitable for everybody. Also, I think John’s example from reading the Carnegie Foundation nominating materials and remark that “I wish there was a way to publish those nominating materials” demonstrates that the circulation of pedagogical lore is valued differently than the circulation of scholarship. Maybe the artificially imposed scarcity of dead-tree publishing, plus its connection to promotion at “prestige” institutions, is primarily responsible why academia seems to problematically value scholarship over teaching. Teaching lore isn’t “scarce”, and its propagation is much more difficult to track than the propagation of print scholarship.
Perhaps “push-button personal publishing” might be one way to explode that artificial scarcity, and thereby begin to remedy the scholarship/pedagogy split. Hmm.
Oh, I know you are playing with open source software 🙂 And I kind of guessed you just hadn’t thought about your license in a long time.
So true about the context, though. But then again, I see the context as not always important if we treat the availability (if it was available) of many teachers’ course assignments and support materials as supporting invention. How nice it would be if, when teaching a new class, we could do a Google search (or better yet, an archive specifically for this purpose), and find a wealth of materials to stimluate ideas. Plus it might prevent the reinventing of the wheel and increase collaboration in producing assignments. I wonder how often we find after the fact that someone else is doing something similar to us; if such materials were publicly available, might save time in thinking through a new course construction. And we might be able to contribute feedback to those already working with similar designs (like your posting here stimulated some like response). From my perspective, it’s such a “10 out of 10” practice that we should be availing ourselves of now that we are now that the ability to post on online has gotten much easier.
Well, speaking of making materials available online, here’s what UMass is doing: a couple years ago, those of us on the resource staff reviewed all the TA-submitted teaching materials, and edited it into an online database, which continues to grow. Now, I haven’t talked to the WP director or the webmaster about copyleft/licensing issues, but that’s definitely an important thought. Given the resources you recently e-mailed me, Charlie, maybe in a couple years the amount of comp stuff available online might be able to reach a sort of critical mass that demands its own online hub or clearinghouse. Hmm. . .
In any case: here’s the link to the UMass database. (Yes, it uses ASP, which I had nothing to do with. 😉
Here’s another online resource for syllabi and assignments, FSU’s Teacher’s Guide. Parts 1 & II contain information on program requirements for each of the two basic first year composition courses, as well as teaching strands. None are CC licensed (and may never be).
(and it’s Drupalized 😉
‘scuse me. parts II and III are the courses and teaching strands.