http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/are-college-lectures-unfair.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0
Sep 132015
Sep 082015
In our discussion last class we all noted our desire to use the new paradigm and how our efforts sometimes fall short. As many stated in their pre-class posts, we need a model in order to leave the old paradigm behind.
Hairston notes that part of the reason this paradigm shift is slow (and therefore slow in providing us models) is because of the attitude towards freshman writing courses. Many view writing as a service or a skill. Such a view “ignores that importance of writing as a basic method of learning, taking away any incentive for the writing teacher to grow professionally. People who teach skills and provide services are traditionally less respected and rewarded than those who teach theory, and hiring hordes of adjuncts and temporary instructors and assigning them to compositions courses reinforces this value system. Consequently there is no external pressure to find a better way to teach writing.” Hiring these particular kinds of instructors only further fuels the idea that their jobs/courses are less respected and since these positions don’t receive respect, they’ll continue to be filled by non-theorists. Can we break this cycle? Such a task seems difficult as more and more programs place graduate students in the classroom as instructors.
However, Hairston remains optimistic, identifying a handful of promising signs that change is occurring. One of which relates to the classes we have to take: “graduate assistants who are in traditional literary programs rather than rhetoric programs are getting their in-service training from the rhetoric and composition specialists in their departments.” He concludes that due to this kind of training, GTAs will most likely pick up and use the new paradigm. This made me think back to our discussion of IORs. Ultimately, GTAs would benefit from having an IOR who teaches first year composition courses (I have trouble understanding why this isn’t the case for the program at FAU). So maybe things are changing, but more can be done to offer instructors the tools and models needed to follow the new paradigm. Which brings me to my final thought: If our current system were to change (as we discussed in class Friday), wouldn’t we be moving farther away from the progress Hairston envisions?
Sep 082015
Hello all.
When I was doing my undergrad work in Hawaii, I took a course called Comp Studies that covered a lot of the issues we addressed as a class on Friday. I wrote this paper about Creative and Academic writing, the divide between the two, and ultimately how they cannot be separated because ALL writing is inherently “creative” writing.
After reading Freire and hearing what everyone else in the class had to say, I felt myself drifting back toward that same notion. At first I wanted to side with Freire – his ideas are compelling in the beginning. But as I read on, I just couldn’t get on board with the polarization of the two schools of thought. Freire wants to get rid of this “banking method” of teaching and embrace this “problem-posing” model. We figured out in class (I think) that he looks at students, the learners, as these receptacles for knowledge and completely dehumanizes the individual.
The idea is that each individual learns by having an understanding of BOTH his/her own background, upbringing, interactions with the world AND an understanding of the fundamental tools (historical methods) for writing, rhetoric, etc. Once these two understandings happen, the individual can then create.
And ultimately, that is what we are asking students/writers to do from the onset: create something new on paper. The parameters of which are defined by these historical methods. So my question would be, how can we tell students to create something, but not be creative when doing it?
In Hawaii, the schism between academic/creative writing is HUGE because nearly all teachers on the island are white and come from a Western cannon, while all the students are either Filipino, Native Hawaiian, hapa-haole, Micronesian, etc. There is this idea that “non-white” learners need the fundamental knowledge so badly that creativity is virtually non-existent. The result of this however, is a complete disinterest in the fundamental knowledge and therefore no learning or progress whatsoever when it comes to expressing argument/ideas on paper. As I said before, this is a prime example for how the two schools of thinking are imperative to successfully teaching.
In a practical sense, I think we can encourage creativity in lesson plans, writing prompts, reading responses, and just general class discussion. I say “encourage creativity” because I truly believe that, no matter what we do as teachers, the creative mind is active at some level in every thinking being. Figuring out how to utilize that idea is the job of the instructor/program.
I encourage everyone to watch Ken Robinson’s TED Talks on Creativity if you haven’t already.
Also, I hope this is what these posts are supposed to look like…
Sep 082015
In this New Yorker article, “What is College Worth?” John Cassidy considers the value of higher ed. Proponents of expanded access to higher education have often championed its role in meeting overall civic goals — more clergy, more doctors, “better citizens,” — rather than its mere benefits to the individual. Today we often hear about bolstering the economy, boosting productivity by educating the workforce, etc. It’s good for the individual, but we really want to improve the U.S. economy as a whole.
Economist Kenneth Arrow proposed the “screening model” of education that posits college as a sorting or filtering system that provides a series of hurdles a student must pass in order to demonstrate a certain minimum level of mental fitness, the ability to accomplish assigned tasks and sociability.
Certainly there are common assumptions that a college degree 1) is necessary and 2) is a somewhat magical guarantor of future happiness and prosperity. People with college degrees do earn more on average than those without, but why, asks the article, are there so many highly educated adults taking jobs that do not require higher education?
“Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, and Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.”
It seems like a depressing article, but he actually ends on an interesting note:
“Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families and politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education.”
There’s a lot to this article and it’s certainly worth a read.
Sep 062015
Preemptive apology: It’s late. I’m tired. My grammar here may (probably will) suck. Please don’t send me to the you-know-what.
So, I guess it is somewhat funny that I name-dropped an anarchist (Joseph Déjacque, strictly due to Paulo Freire’s usage of the word “libertarian” (2)) into a conversation about an author who was a Marxist (as I believe was stated during class; however, I did the big no-no and looked him up on Wikipedia to discover that he was a Marxist humanist). It’s also somewhat embarrassing. However, this shows how effective propaganda can be when used correctly.
I decided, as an experiment, to reread “The “Banking” Concept of Education” and highlight every instance where the words “reactionary” (or any word closely related, i.e., “reaction”) or “revolutionary” (or any word closely related) were used. The first time I stumbled across the word “oppression” (Freire 1), I decided to highlight any employment of that word (and any word closely related to it), as well. Needless to say, by the end of the second page, I realized that this task was going to be quite large. I also started highlighting additional words as I continued reading (I’ll do a small list at the end).
What this task taught me was two-fold. First, while I’ve always understood the power of words, and the importance of repetition with key words, I don’t believe I had a full understanding of how powerful they actually can be. As I stated in my previous post, by the end of the article, I had visions of barricades in my head. I had originally thought that this was simply a part of my character. While there can be no doubt that my own personal feelings played a part in this, I now understand that this was Freire’s intention. By appealing to my emotions, especially as they were already highly sympathetic to Freire, Freire transformed me from a simple radical into one of his “revolutionary educators” (3).
The second thing I learned was far simpler. I have way too much free time.
Words/Ideas (with number of appearances)*, in no particular order: Alienated (8), Oppression/Suppression/Subordination/Repression (28), Freedom/Liberty (12), Domination (8), Dehumanization/Domestication (5), Revolution/Revolutionary (11), Reaction/Reactionary (2, but I probably missed some), Solidarity (3). *I did all of this with a physical copy, so I know that I probably missed quite a few words.
Sep 042015
So, I had the start of this thought after our very first class, and it expanded/continued into our second session: what does Rhet/Comp look like outside the U.S. and U.S. academia? Does it exist? Is it called something else? Is it seen as something with inherent value? In class this week Trina/Robin both made a good point re: my Freire response: that Brazil and other countries have very different teacher-student dynamics than the U.S. does. Since international students seem to be more and more the norm at U.S. institutions, it seems like this is all the more relevant to us as freshman composition instructors; before we start talking theses, topic sentences, and the value of written argument, are there cultural bridges we need to cross to introduce students to the concept of it all?
Anecdotally, I’ve had international friends and teacher friends tell me that there are cultures where people don’t tend to communicate in a linear way–particularly when they’re trying to persuade or move someone to action–so the idea of a linear, written argument doesn’t make much sense in that context. Along with that, oral argument/storytelling/communication/history (vs. written) seems to have been the norm for (sweeping claim) most of the world for most of its history. More questions: Is Rhet/Comp a mostly European/American thing? Is Rhet/Comp, or something similar, present in other parts of the world? What does it look like? Are there cultural nuances to it? Or would we find our standard superimposed on other culture’s education systems? Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.
Sep 042015
Who feels, for better or worse, that Freire is a Marxist?
Sep 042015
To begin, I feel I must admit that I am highly biased in favor of Paulo Freire. The introduction, where readers are told both that Freire worked for the pre-coup Chilean government of Salvador Allende and that he went into exile following Augusto Pinochet’s coup, created a sense of sympathy within me that probably made me immediately more supportive of the ideas presented within “The “Banking” Concept of Education”. Additionally, this idea of an “authoritarian” (Freire 7) style of teaching, that Freire labels as being “reactionary” (7), versus a “libertarian” (Freire 2) style of teaching (think more Joseph Dejacque and less Rand/Ron Paul with this term), which Freire defines as “revolutionary” (4), made me imagine a fictional world filled with desk-barricades. Needless to say, I am highly biased.
However, I feel that, in certain areas of teaching, a certain amount of “authoritarianism” (Freire 7) is necessary. For example, when teachers are discussing in-text citations. While there are multiple ways in which a student can acknowledge an author within the sentence itself, the author must but acknowledged. Additionally, there is only one acceptable location for a page/line number (seriously, this is bolded for emphasis). There can be no argument here, as it is either right, and the student is fine, or wrong, and we are forced to send the student to the Grammar Gu… I probably shouldn’t go there.
Sep 042015
Reports have been coming in from AP’s Italy desk about a famous vowel that was hospitalized in Rome with life-threatening injuries. Though not named in the wires, ‘u’ is said to be on Vacation in Rome after wrapping up a series of speaking engagements with ‘y’ in Slovakia.
Sep 042015
I find that Freire and Hairston’s concerns about teaching come down to the same general anxiety: in the power struggle of educating, how do we allow students to be in control of their own learning? I personally had an interesting introduction to Freire; I had to read and write a paper on his theories for a sophomore composition course. Although I found it interesting, the teacher of the course seemed to take Freire’s words seriously. He was incredibly hands off in the teaching of writing – almost to a fault. Other than this one class, my experiences of being taught writing have been much more of the “old paradigm.” Typical examples include the use of fill in the blank bubble outlines, formulaic styles of paper development, and overly critical grammar Nazis who mark everywhere on your paper with little explanation.
My concern as a new GTA becomes, then, how do I take these theoretical frameworks of shifting towards the new paradigms put forward by Freire and Hairston and put them into practical application? Hairston uses the phrase “untrained teaching assistant” (79) and teachers who feel “insecure and angry because they know they are teaching badly” (81). This describes me perfectly, but without external pressures to change this system, I don’t see how there can be a full shift away from the old paradigm. As a confused teaching assistant with little guidance in the practical application of teaching writing, am I not doomed to a) fail at my attempts to follow a paradigm that I don’t have experience learning from, and/or b) fall back on the old paradigm because it is the only one I know how to apply in the classroom, therefore pass these bad practices onto my students and the next generation of confused teachers?