pedagogically speaking...

My second term as a graduate student I was enrolled in a course taught by Dennis Lynch about rhetoric, literacy, and pedagogy. Pretty much everything back then came back to "well, what does this mean about teaching?" which I guess is what happens when you are a grad student at a teaching school. In fact, we were pretty practical about making the move from theory to practice, transforming the theory language along the way. One of the conversations came down to a response we'd written on personal pedagogy.

I knew at the time that most of my success at teaching came from two places: I was nearly the same age as my students and had a very good sense of what they wanted and needed from the course, and could blend that expertly with what I thought was important as well, and I'd been a karate teacher not all that long before so I could scare the bejezus out of people into complying if need be. Apparently I can look scary. I think I've lost some of that second part over time.

But despite this, I realized I was relying upon youth and ethos alone, and let's face it--those things aren't going to last. Just a year or two in either direction and suddenly the 80s commercials that I was using to show students how rhetoric worked on them as kids wasn't going to be so strong anymore, and it wasn't like I had a whole collections of 90s VHS's of whatever younger kids watched then to fall back on because I had moved beyond wanting to see everything 60 times by that point.

And so I said that I knew I needed to continue developing or I was going to get stuck, but that I wasn't sure where to go from here.

I can't say that's changed much, except the incentive to "do this now" is stronger than ever. I've been able to put it off since so many of my students are older than me at Baker, and because I can rely on my knowledge of the software I'm teaching to muddle through the bad points. But to teach comp and to work at a higher level than teaching a test these people are going to have to take, well, I know I have to do more.

So what is that exactly? This term I'm thinking about some sort of "Designing Language/Composition" approach. I'm wary of "Designing Language" because it sounds like linguistics and linguistics gives me hives, but "Designing Composition" sounds a lot like page layout, and that's not it either by a long shot.

What I do know is that I want a series of assignments that shows the power of words, the power of juxtaposing words, the power of personal experience with language, and how different kinds of writing are related and are accessible through one another. (How personal narratives are tied to short stories are tied to dialogues are tied to essays, for example.) This, in turn, will allow me to lead back eventually into some of my own research and connect back up to it in new ways (though not this term) in that I researched how you can access writing through online instant messaging when students think it's speech, so yeah, this all lines up pretty gosh darned well.

I'd like to do some stuff with mystory, but I'm going to have to spend some time reading first. My earlier pedagogy clings to me like a static-ed sock--it's stuck to my ass until I peel it off. I don't think it's fair to ask students to do something I haven't worked through extensively and well, I'm just starting there. But I can see where this will eventually fit in with what I just mentioned above, and that's pretty cool. I definitely plan on teaching the research process available in via mystory though, so I'll be able to get some of the benefits immediately.

I know I know, I'm running scared right? But I dunno, right now this feels right. This gives me a place to talk about audience and rhetoric and composition and really nifty things you can do with language all at once. This gives me a place to start playing an argumentation boardgame instead of showing old commercials. This gives me a place to think about teaching to multi generational students instead of what I had at MTU--mainly younger ones. And it gives me enough open framework to start blending in theory seamlessly too.

In other words, I feel good till tomorrow when we go to class and I feel dumb again. But hey, that's grad school right?