Breaking out of the “Prison House of Self”

While many points of the reading this week were interesting, the new taxonomy of significant learning and the three “interest-killing approaches—the technical, the judgmental, and the documentary—” inspired the most reflective thought for me this week. I saw much overlap with works we have previously read this semester and conversations in which we have engaged. For example, Fink’s “significant learning” sounds quite similar in many ways to “learning transfer,” both as end goals for course designs and student learning. Also, many of the pieces were either implicitly or explicitly promoting a metacognitive approach to the classroom and the learning process.

I found Fink’s piece rather idealistic in his discussion of change as the absolute assessment tool for significant learning, and maybe it is the mere adjective significant that warrants such a grandiose claim as “No change, no learning.” Maybe I am just extra cynical in my fourth quarter state of exhaustion, but this maxim seems to belittle much of what we as teachers do on a daily basis. I am not naive enough to think that every single day with be life-changing for all students, and we have already discussed how the entire educational system does need an overhaul.

However, statements such as the following place a tremendous amount of pressure upon us as instructors as we strive for perfection in our course designs: “significant learning requires that there be some kind of lasting change that is important in terms of the learner’s life” (3). In some ways, I read this text and see Fink as calling for a version of the Multiliteracies’ “Transformed Practice” as the goal. That seems doable; we provide multiple contexts for learning so that students can practice adapting the knowledge and skills they are gleaning. In other ways, as I look to his concluding thoughts, his ideas seem more encompassing; anything from “application learning” to “foundational knowledge” can be significant learning, and that leaves me asking what’s so new about this taxonomy anyway?

The Morson text, on the other hand, had me nodding in agreement throughout its entirety. I kept saying, “Yes, my students need this! They have no empathy and position themselves as the victims on a daily basis!” Yet, by the end of the article, my reflection turned inward and I had to acknowledge my own tendencies to dismiss literature for any one of the three approaches mentioned: technical, judgmental, or documentary. I appreciated this reminder: “To teach anything well, you have to place yourself in the position of the learner who does not already know the basics and has to be persuaded that the subject is worth studying.” What an excellent prompt for reflective practice! I am currently teaching Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to my sophomores. You can imagine how excited they are in April about Elizabethan drama. If I take the time at the start of each unit I teach to re-situate myself as learner alongside my students, much as Freire encourages, the students and I can dialogically seek persuasion for validity of Shakespearean studies.

There were so many points within this article that I highlighted and could expound upon reflectively; however, I leave you with just one more thought-provoking quote: “We grow wiser, and we understand ourselves better, if we can put ourselves in the position of those who think differently.” In our current culture of exaggerated differences and hostility in nearly all arenas, how great a gift we possess in literature’s capacity to allow us the chance to enter another’s shoes and to invite our students to the same right along with us. To more shoe swapping!

Writing Centers & Writing Assessment: Out with the Old??

 

How much have we changed? Stephen North poses a question worth reflecting upon even now in our technological era. As a discipline, we claim to be ever-changing as we cross boundaries and engage new technologies. However, in thinking about my own secondary classroom, seemingly much has changed in even the eight years I have been teaching. All students have either an iPad or laptop now and nearly all assignments are submitted digitally. But are the assignments and the lessons actually different? For our school at least, not so much. They are largely the same assignments, just on a new platform. Huot stated similar concerns about the way in which we assess writing and discuss writing assessment: it hasn’t changed. We still haven’t merged theory and practice.

But then again, why are we so quick to desire the new as a replacement for the old? After all, isn’t it the old that has gotten us this far? I love Royster’s discussion in Traces of a Stream in which she continuously points to the new identities of the African American women writers: a fusion of both old and new identities. Within our own discipline, many scholars have recently written about our field as undefined or lacking in a clear identity. We have become a type of hodge-podge field of eclectic students and scholars, but does that mean we have lost our identity? I would argue, like Royster, that the old has fused with the new. Much like our classrooms in which we are engaging new technologies and even new pedagogical practices and approaches, we are still instructing within the boundaries of literacy skills, as we should be. The old isn’t always a bad thing!

Now, I know that isn’t exactly what North was arguing against. Then, as now even, writing centers were relegated to second-class amongst the academy at large and the faculty-ascribed perceptions that were being spread across campuses were of one-stop fix-it shops. I found his “Revisit” opening with the key scenes from Dead Poet’s Society interesting in light of this discussion of old and new. Robin Williams’ character would undoubtedly represent the new, the change against the stuffy traditionalist approach to classroom instruction and learning. However, North reacts against that portrayal calling it unrealistic in expectations. And while I do agree with him as far as expectations go, isn’t that part of the problem inherent in his claim that we as a department haven’t changed at all? We balk at change most often as reading and writing are some of the most basic skills imbued with traditional instructional methods.

Students still need the same things to a large degree. They need caring adults both inside and outside of the classroom who believe that they can learn. They need a safe learning environment. They need their basic needs met before they can begin to give a damn about rhetorical writing and research. Yet it is the little things that North and Huot mention that make the difference many times. It is seeing each student as a unique writer rather than a piece of writing to be fixed or graded. It is the balance of praise and constructive feedback specific to each student writer’s giftings and learning needs. Ultimately, writing assessment and writing tutoring have one thing in common: they are moving targets. We as teachers and tutors can not become formulaic in our interactions with students or student texts. As we forge ahead in our constant search for new and seek to merge theory and practice, may we as teacher-scholars never forget our civic rhetoric: the students we teach.