Blogging Pedagogy

Whatever our politics, whether we had a good election or a bad last week, that we had an election to get excited about at all is due in large part to the millions who have served in our nation's Armed Forces. We honor the 653,000 who have given their lives in defense of our country on Memorial Day. Today, Veteran's Day, is our day to honor the nearly 24 million who came home to us alive: our nation's Veterans.

A colleague and I are developing a training workshop for teachers (GTAs) at our university interested in teaching our Composition classes online. We have each taught online ourselves, with the benefit of the College's brief introductory training in my case, and we feel that additional preparation is utterly crucial. To get there from here, we need to secure funding, and to get the funding we need information from other institutions/programs.

The thoughts below meander a bit. They're mostly aimed at those who teach First-year Composition, but may be useful to instructors in other disciplines. I was inspired to cast this bit of prose out into the blogosphere by the realization that the writers I saw in class were not the writers who were composing many of the papers I was reading. No, I'm not talking about plagiarism. What I mean is that I have come to see something of a split consciousness apparent in many of my students' approaches to writing.

In the spring, I am helping to pilot a visual rhetoric textbook for the 2nd semester of the First-year Comp sequence. In the past, this course has focused on formal argument via the Toulmin Model and the Rhetorical Triangle. I'd like to maintain as much as I can of the rhetorical focus while bringing visuals into the mix--not as contingent to the verbal, but in synergy; and not purely as objects of analysis, but also as possible inventive/expressive strategies. If anyone has attempted/accomplished this in hir own classes, I'd love to hear how that worked for both teacher and student writers.

This isn't so much about pedagogy I have enacted, but rather that I have experienced, and which was profoundly affective. I'm still trying to process it, and determine what, if any, value Sirc's disruptive Happening pedagogy might serve in my First-year pedagogy. If a group of dedicated and frequently brilliant grad students only barely handled it (and some didn't quite do) how might First-years respond?

Today was profoundly frustrating in two of my three First-year Composition classes. Backstory: we spent all last week participating in student-led group discussions of a handful of essays that my student writers are about to use to construct an essay about the academic discourse community. We've been working all semester with the terms for Discourse Community Analysis provided by James Paul Gee's discussion of discourse identities: language, actions, tools/symbols, and values.