Critical Learning

The concept of writerly teaching has been featured in this space on several occasions and will most likely be again in the future, but that’s not going to stop me now…

All of this talking and writing that I’ve been doing about writerliness would seem to be vulnerable to one or two objections, one of which might be a question along the lines of “How is this any different than simply teaching critical reading skills?”

The difference I see is that when instructors teach critical or analytical reading (and writing), we teach students to apply those skills to all of the texts they encounter save one—the text of our own teaching.

Writerly teaching takes that last step, perhaps the most important step of all.

Making Teaching a Writerly Text

I’ve written here before on Roland Barthes’s concept of writerly texts. There are several theorists I could have chosen to borrow vocabulary from to define my work; however, I ultimately chose Barthes’s language because of the power of its conceptual imagery. The idea of students writing their learning and understanding would seem to have a much higher potential to gain footage in educational practice than the vocabulary of those other writers.

Yet what attracts me most to Barthes’s vocabulary of the “writerly” is that I believe that virtually every course, whatever its intended focus and content, should also be designed to build skills that are vital to academic and professional success, of which writing could be said to be the most important.

Writing, reading, and thinking are intimately related activities that all involve the construction of meaning, and the better students can learn to process and organize new information, the better they will be able to integrate it with their own accumulated experience, and thus to translate any text into a meaningful experience, into an opportunity to construct (or write) their own new meanings.

The purpose of education should always be to help students become better readers and writers, not only of their textbooks and lessons, but of all manifestations of the language that shapes the world around them.

A Look Back at Last Fall

Since this past Fall was my first semester at USA, I thought it would be useful and appropriate to look back at the things that PETAL was able to accomplish last semester. In addition to our five New Faculty Seminar sessions, which were very successful, we had good response to our PETAL Brown Bag Lunches and Faculty Roundtable Discussions. The Roundtables included Dr. Richard Wood’s session on Writing for Publication, which provided some of our new faculty with a great deal of valuable information on the publication process.

The other Roundtable last Fall, on Teaching First-Year College Students, was led by Dr. Nicole Carr. This event was so well attended that we had to redo our seating arrangement at the last minute, and the discussion was so lively that the session had to be extended 30 minutes. We also continued the discussion online on the PETAL blog.

The PETAL Brown Bag Lunch series began the semester with Dr. Zohair Husain’s excellent presentation on Student Oral Reports. Dr. Husain testified to the many advantages of having students give oral presentations in class and provided several tips on how to maximize their effectiveness.

The second Brown Bag Lunch featured Dr. William Young on Writing as an Assessment Strategy, which looked at how all disciplines can make better use of writing courses to not only assess their students’ writing abilities, but to also ensure that all graduates of USA are competent writers.

The final Brown Bag of the semester had Dr. Jack Dempsey and Ms. Dawn Wright discussing the advantages of Reusable Learning Materials, with particular attention paid to efforts that the College of Education is taking to design a repository of such learning objects for future use by all USA faculty.

The PETAL Technology Workshops were also well received, including Clicker workshops which were particularly popular, and sessions on using PowerPoint and Dreamweaver in the classroom were also well attended.

Overall, it was a wonderful first semester, but we are looking forward to making things even better this Spring and in the future.

Welcome Back!

I hope you are all having a great New Year! This blog is going to be a little haphazard, but there is a lot going on that needs to be talked about (but aren’t blogs supposed to be a little haphazard?).

I have written here and in the PETAL newsletter about CommentPress, which is a blogging software that allows context-specific textual interactivity. I am very excited that I was able to secure some sever space this week so that I can actually test CommentPress with the British Literature course I am teaching this semester. I will be sure to keep you all posted on how it works. You can check it out by clicking here.

I have also been able to install my own instance of MediaWiki, which is the software used to run Wikipedia. I am also going to be piloting a wiki project with my class this semester. You can check it out by clicking here. It is my hope that I’ll be able to offer all USA faculty blogging and wiki software in the near future.

Finally, we are still tinkering with the design of the new online PETAL newsletter, so it will be a little late this month. However, we should have it ready before our official PETAL activities start up in a couple of weeks.

What Is Teaching and Learning?

I have written a few times in this space about how my dissertation applies Roland Barthes’s concept of “writerly” texts to teaching and learning. In my dissertation, I focus on online courses, partly because it is an easier for people to grasp the theory applied to fixed online course materials than a live classroom, but I feel very strongly that the advantages of writerliness can apply equally well to both environments. That my PhD is in Instructional Technology also played a part in my online focus.

What attracts me most to Barthes’s vocabulary of the “writerly” is that I believe that virtually every course, whatever its intended focus and content, should also be designed to build skills that are vital to academic and professional success, of which writing could be said to be the most important.

However, writing, reading, and thinking are intimately related activities that all involve the construction of meaning, and the better students can learn to process and organize new information, the better they will be able to integrate it with their own accumulated experience, and thus to translate any text into a meaningful experience, into an opportunity to construct (or write) their own new meanings.

The purpose of education should always be to help students become better readers and writers, not only of their textbooks and lessons, but of all manifestations of the language that shapes the world around them.

Dissertation News

This should have been a slow week, and I had expected to do a good bit of blogging, but it didn't work out. The best part of the week, though, is that I submitted my dissertation. I should be defending in the next couple of weeks.

Let's hope that works out okay!

Teaching First-Year Students

Dr. Nicole Carr (Sociology) led a wonderful roundtable discussion today on Teaching First-Year College Students. Over a dozen USA faculty participated in the discussion, covering a variety of issues from attendance to strategies for identifying at-risk students to determining where to draw the line between nurturing and nannying.

The best indicator (to me) that things were going well was that the time for the session to end came and went, but the discussion never lost steam. About fifteen minutes later, one person got up to leave and another followed, but the conversation still continued for at least another five minutes.

As the organizer of the event, I kept wondering if I should announce that regrettably our time was up, and that we must now end this wonderful discussion. But instead I decided that this useful and valuable conversation should not be thwarted by something so mundane and artificial as a clock. I also decided that after it did come to an end, that I would use this space to try to continue the conversation.

Teaching first-year students is very important to the success of this (or any) university, and it is an important conversation that needs to involve more than the dozen or so faculty members whose schedules allowed them to attend this particular session.

Therefore I invite anyone who reads this post to reply using the comment button below and then return later and view others’ comments and possibly even respond to them. And who knows, we might even be able to start a larger conversation that will help us all improve our success with first-year students.