Composition Examples and Ideas
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Teaching Philosophy
As an instructor, my role is to help students learn critically and actively (Gee, 2004) so that they acquire knowledge and skills in order to communicate and participate in different contexts—academically, professionally, and socially—in rhetorically appropriate, cognizant, and effective ways. Literacy, what Gee (2001, 2004, 2011) defines as the ability to control a secondary Discourse—a Discourse we acquire fluently to the extent that we are given access to different institutions and allowed apprenticeships within them (2004, p. 527), unlike our primary Discourse, which is not acquired by overt instruction—is acquired through social interaction and immersion within specific secondary discourses. With that in mind, my learning objectives for students include the ability to acknowledge, understand, incorporate, and apply multiple literacies, including those that they bring with them to academia.
My goal is to help students become aware of the assumptions, affordances, constraints, and rhetorical implications of different literacies and modes of communication as well as the kinds of knowledge and skills needed in different contexts. By helping students become cognizant and reflective producers and consumers of many kinds of information, knowledge, skills, and texts, I aim to help them become better students, professionals, and global citizens. I employ pedagogical techniques to help students become both active and critical learners, and, thus, better producers and consumers—better communicators, students, employees, and citizens.
To engage students in more social kinds of learning, I prefer project-oriented assignments that are connected to a specific context and, further, afford students the opportunity to maintain agency regarding their learning. Acknowledging that students belong to different affinity groups (Gee, 2004) is particularly important when teaching a general writing class comprised of students from varying disciplines. For example, when teaching a research writing class, I encourage students to choose topics in which they are personally invested when conducting their own primary research. In the past, students have conducted polls to ascertain what genre of music college students are listening to on their iPods; they have also created surveys to determine how much college students know about the punk rock movement, open source software, or violence in hockey. Students have approached me a number of times to express their appreciation for allowing them to choose their own research topics. In a reflective letter, one student wrote, “Your style of teaching encourages self-responsibility instead of relying on an instructor for every inch of the assignment. That is a very useful thing to learn while you have a teacher that cares.”
Because active and critical learning are social and dialogic, incorporating collaborative learning is paramount to good teaching. Along with including small group discussions to help facilitate whole class discussions and project ideas, I also include collaborative workshops as a type of formative assessment that allows students to receive feedback from their peers before turning in more polished projects. Specifically, I incorporate separate content and editing workshops that occur in different class sessions to address the need to read written texts first for substance and then for errors because reading for both simultaneously is impossible (Williams, 1981). Content workshops are effective in terms of learning because feedback is contextualized and comments do not correct but offer descriptive reactions to and questions about projects, which enable students to think about their work in new ways. After discussing content, editing workshops allow students to look for formatting errors as well as punctuation, spelling, and grammatical mistakes.
Another way I incorporate active and critical learning in the classroom is through digital media and Web 2.0 technology. Many students today are “always on” (Baron, 2010), seemingly always connected to some kind of media. Whether they’re texting, “tweeting” messages on Twitter, or uploading videos to YouTube, many students read, write, and compose much more than any generation before (Gee & Hayes, 2011). Of course, the kinds of texts these students are reading and composing has changed but that doesn’t suggest that technology is “ruining language” or creating some sort of cognitive deficiency (Haas & Takayoshi, 2011). To the contrary, technology can be harnessed for pedagogical purposes, explaining abstract concepts, capturing and maintaining student attention, and allowing instructors to enjoy creative agency. For example, when teaching an interviewing project, I incorporate YouTube videos of famous interviewers (e.g., Larry King, James Lipton, Nancy Grace), asking students to critique what those individuals do well and what could be improved. I also drive-home important points by supplementing my class with short clips I create using Web 2.0 technologies. One two-minute video that students seem to enjoy, in particular, is an Xtranormal (www.xtranomal.com) video, depicting an avatar in my likeness recounting the reasons for moving beyond writing a five-paragraph theme essay to a disgruntled college student. Watching this video reminds students of previous discussions and allows them to assess their progress and application of the previous lesson and discussion.
I structure discussions, themes, assignments, and activities to enable good development and reflective learning—each section develops from prior assignments, which, upon reflection, allows students to distinguish how their learning and thinking has progressed from one project to the next. Attesting to this, one student commented in her reflective essay, “Having one project lead into the other really ended up helping a lot.” For example, I use music as a theme for college writing to engage students with their writing assignments and incorporate a sequence of assignments that encourages the acquisition of academic English as a secondary Discourse. In this class, I structure writing assignments so that students begin with personal narrative (an essay explaining their personal “theme song”) and move on to reflecting and analyzing their own narratives (an essay explaining their personal “soundtrack” and patterns or themes among the songs) before writing more critical essays dealing with defining their generation and musical genres as well as an essay that requires students to consider the ways ethos, logos, and pathos are used among one song’s lyrics, music, and video. Each assignment is structured so that students move from informal, personal writing to formal, academic writing.
Further, each student project requires a cover letter, which is a short letter where students explain their rhetorical choices and draw my attention to specific portions of their projects that they feel are particularly strong or in need of revision. This allows students to remain aware of their own learning processes, abilities, and choices, while drawing my attention to their personal concerns. Rather than collecting hard copies of essays and projects, I prefer to collect assignment electronically, timely and efficiently using “track changes” in Microsoft Word to allow me to highlight specific areas and pose questions. I choose to leave extensive feedback and allow students to revise their work, when possible, because real, active, critical learning occurs when students are encouraged and able to rethink and revise. Learning is recursive and iterative, not linear. One student wrote the following in his reflective essay: “I really liked the fact that you gave a chance for revision, and I also appreciated how you didn’t just give a grade, you left feedback.”
Students and teachers must reflect on their performances in the classroom. In order to help students become better, more mindful and thoughtful students, professionals, and citizens, I provide them with opportunities to reflect not only on their rhetorical choices and projects but on their entire class performance, as well as my own. Writing reflective essays at the end of a semester, for example, allows students to consider their performance holistically. Additionally, this reflection allows me to assess my pedagogy for that particular course and semester. Critical self-reflection affords me the opportunity to consider which assignments and instructional techniques worked well and which might be improved. As an instructor, I act, interact, plan, and change my plans according to my own personal assessment as well as my students’ reflections. My pedagogy and, thus, my theory of teaching remain reflective and changing—and that is a good thing.
References
Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gee, J. P. (2011). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. New York: Routledge.
Gee, J. P. (2004). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gee, J. P. (2001). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction and what is literacy? In Cushman, E., Kintgen, E. R.,
Kroll, B. M., & Rose, M. (Eds.), Literacy: A critical sourcebook (525-544). Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s.
Gee, J. P. & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and Learning in the Digital Age. Routledge: New York.
Haas, C., & Takayoshi, P. (2011). Young people’s everyday literacies: The language features of instant messaging. Research
in the Teaching of English, 45(4), 378-404.
Williams, J. (1981). The phenomenology of error. College Composition and Communication, 32, 152-68.
My goal is to help students become aware of the assumptions, affordances, constraints, and rhetorical implications of different literacies and modes of communication as well as the kinds of knowledge and skills needed in different contexts. By helping students become cognizant and reflective producers and consumers of many kinds of information, knowledge, skills, and texts, I aim to help them become better students, professionals, and global citizens. I employ pedagogical techniques to help students become both active and critical learners, and, thus, better producers and consumers—better communicators, students, employees, and citizens.
To engage students in more social kinds of learning, I prefer project-oriented assignments that are connected to a specific context and, further, afford students the opportunity to maintain agency regarding their learning. Acknowledging that students belong to different affinity groups (Gee, 2004) is particularly important when teaching a general writing class comprised of students from varying disciplines. For example, when teaching a research writing class, I encourage students to choose topics in which they are personally invested when conducting their own primary research. In the past, students have conducted polls to ascertain what genre of music college students are listening to on their iPods; they have also created surveys to determine how much college students know about the punk rock movement, open source software, or violence in hockey. Students have approached me a number of times to express their appreciation for allowing them to choose their own research topics. In a reflective letter, one student wrote, “Your style of teaching encourages self-responsibility instead of relying on an instructor for every inch of the assignment. That is a very useful thing to learn while you have a teacher that cares.”
Because active and critical learning are social and dialogic, incorporating collaborative learning is paramount to good teaching. Along with including small group discussions to help facilitate whole class discussions and project ideas, I also include collaborative workshops as a type of formative assessment that allows students to receive feedback from their peers before turning in more polished projects. Specifically, I incorporate separate content and editing workshops that occur in different class sessions to address the need to read written texts first for substance and then for errors because reading for both simultaneously is impossible (Williams, 1981). Content workshops are effective in terms of learning because feedback is contextualized and comments do not correct but offer descriptive reactions to and questions about projects, which enable students to think about their work in new ways. After discussing content, editing workshops allow students to look for formatting errors as well as punctuation, spelling, and grammatical mistakes.
Another way I incorporate active and critical learning in the classroom is through digital media and Web 2.0 technology. Many students today are “always on” (Baron, 2010), seemingly always connected to some kind of media. Whether they’re texting, “tweeting” messages on Twitter, or uploading videos to YouTube, many students read, write, and compose much more than any generation before (Gee & Hayes, 2011). Of course, the kinds of texts these students are reading and composing has changed but that doesn’t suggest that technology is “ruining language” or creating some sort of cognitive deficiency (Haas & Takayoshi, 2011). To the contrary, technology can be harnessed for pedagogical purposes, explaining abstract concepts, capturing and maintaining student attention, and allowing instructors to enjoy creative agency. For example, when teaching an interviewing project, I incorporate YouTube videos of famous interviewers (e.g., Larry King, James Lipton, Nancy Grace), asking students to critique what those individuals do well and what could be improved. I also drive-home important points by supplementing my class with short clips I create using Web 2.0 technologies. One two-minute video that students seem to enjoy, in particular, is an Xtranormal (www.xtranomal.com) video, depicting an avatar in my likeness recounting the reasons for moving beyond writing a five-paragraph theme essay to a disgruntled college student. Watching this video reminds students of previous discussions and allows them to assess their progress and application of the previous lesson and discussion.
I structure discussions, themes, assignments, and activities to enable good development and reflective learning—each section develops from prior assignments, which, upon reflection, allows students to distinguish how their learning and thinking has progressed from one project to the next. Attesting to this, one student commented in her reflective essay, “Having one project lead into the other really ended up helping a lot.” For example, I use music as a theme for college writing to engage students with their writing assignments and incorporate a sequence of assignments that encourages the acquisition of academic English as a secondary Discourse. In this class, I structure writing assignments so that students begin with personal narrative (an essay explaining their personal “theme song”) and move on to reflecting and analyzing their own narratives (an essay explaining their personal “soundtrack” and patterns or themes among the songs) before writing more critical essays dealing with defining their generation and musical genres as well as an essay that requires students to consider the ways ethos, logos, and pathos are used among one song’s lyrics, music, and video. Each assignment is structured so that students move from informal, personal writing to formal, academic writing.
Further, each student project requires a cover letter, which is a short letter where students explain their rhetorical choices and draw my attention to specific portions of their projects that they feel are particularly strong or in need of revision. This allows students to remain aware of their own learning processes, abilities, and choices, while drawing my attention to their personal concerns. Rather than collecting hard copies of essays and projects, I prefer to collect assignment electronically, timely and efficiently using “track changes” in Microsoft Word to allow me to highlight specific areas and pose questions. I choose to leave extensive feedback and allow students to revise their work, when possible, because real, active, critical learning occurs when students are encouraged and able to rethink and revise. Learning is recursive and iterative, not linear. One student wrote the following in his reflective essay: “I really liked the fact that you gave a chance for revision, and I also appreciated how you didn’t just give a grade, you left feedback.”
Students and teachers must reflect on their performances in the classroom. In order to help students become better, more mindful and thoughtful students, professionals, and citizens, I provide them with opportunities to reflect not only on their rhetorical choices and projects but on their entire class performance, as well as my own. Writing reflective essays at the end of a semester, for example, allows students to consider their performance holistically. Additionally, this reflection allows me to assess my pedagogy for that particular course and semester. Critical self-reflection affords me the opportunity to consider which assignments and instructional techniques worked well and which might be improved. As an instructor, I act, interact, plan, and change my plans according to my own personal assessment as well as my students’ reflections. My pedagogy and, thus, my theory of teaching remain reflective and changing—and that is a good thing.
References
Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gee, J. P. (2011). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. New York: Routledge.
Gee, J. P. (2004). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gee, J. P. (2001). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction and what is literacy? In Cushman, E., Kintgen, E. R.,
Kroll, B. M., & Rose, M. (Eds.), Literacy: A critical sourcebook (525-544). Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s.
Gee, J. P. & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and Learning in the Digital Age. Routledge: New York.
Haas, C., & Takayoshi, P. (2011). Young people’s everyday literacies: The language features of instant messaging. Research
in the Teaching of English, 45(4), 378-404.
Williams, J. (1981). The phenomenology of error. College Composition and Communication, 32, 152-68.