One strategy that I [attempted to] adopt in my classroom was that we are all, including myself, engaged in a communal form of learning. One way I did this was by creating assigned groups for the semester, so that students had a small group of people to rely on and engage with on an individual level, in addition to the community of the classroom. In all honesty, one reason I adopted this approach is because I am fully aware that I could easily pass as a college freshmen. When reflecting on Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” I suppose that I am using his ideas as a cautionary tale, so that I know how to navigate the fine line of fully immersing my students into the format of academia. Rather than having them invent the university, I imagine that we are integrating ourselves into it together, or rather, we are inventing a mini university within the classroom.
I continuously reinforce the ideas that what they are doing in class is much like what academics do, and that the things they are learning in this class will relate to their upper division discipline courses and their future careers. For example, I like to bring up the fact that even PhD’s rely on peer review, and after counting attendance and a reflection paper at the EGSS conference for extra credit, I saw many of my students begin to internalize this idea. They were baffled by the audience members’ abilities to ask questions after listening to a 15 minute paper, so I used it as an opportunity to discuss the value in our own paper discussions. I also reinforce the fact that our academic community includes our classmates and myself, therefore they should not fall into the traps of using the thesaurus or constructing long, complicated sentences. Whether or not my strategy is effective in avoiding the conflicts that Bartholomae proposes is difficult to determine, but I would argue that my students appreciate the way I have framed the class.