teach naked

in minnesota there's a program open to teachers for the past decade called the center for teaching and learning. teachers join circles of other teachers, usually from other disciplines, to research and discuss elements of good teaching and how to make them better. I've done a lot of these circles over the years at different schools and I've always found them beneficial if sometimes a bit full of themselves. it's good to have the opportunity to sit with your peers and talk about the state of the field, the things you do that work, and especially the things that don't. that contributing teachers were also paid a small stipend didn't hurt either.

you know where I'm going with this. naturally the office of the center for teaching and learning has been closed. this is its final semester. I've been a part of one that's met, unlike most which are face to face, primarily online, which is appropriate because it was on new technology and its use specifically in writing classes. it was good to get together because it's good to know there are other people who take the same things seriously as you do (perhaps more seriously but that's also sometimes a good thing). I will miss those opportunities.

below is my final report for my final teaching circle.

My students are often astonished if I tell them my first thesis was banged out on a typewriter and that I wrote it twenty years ago. That’s absolutely antediluvian in their view, before some of them were even born. If I go to the effort of showing them the library listing for it, they look at it the same way I sometimes look at objects my Older Testament instructor uses in her Power Points (itself now almost Bronze Age as a communication method).

Until a year and a half ago I’d have considered myself squarely a Luddite in my teaching philosophy; I had learned to write using a minimum of technologies and was certain my students were doing well that way too. But over January 2010 I took a course devoted to using media in worship at my seminary and over the weeks I gradually came to recognize the way computer technology had gradually sneaked up and overtaken me. Like with almost all important moments, it came as an epiphany one morning. I was attending a Sunday service at the UU church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and I noticed at the other end of the pew a 14-year old girl attending with her mother, who I knew slightly. While her mother and I were listening to the sermon, which was a pretty good one about history and the way it overtakes us without our noticing, she was completely enrapt in something in her hands, a Blackberry or a Gameboy, something electronic. She got up and sat down with the rest of us, but she was only there in body.

The next day I asked Jan, my instructor, “How do we reach someone like that? How do we draw her into community and make what we’re saying relevant to her?” Jan’s response was, “Do that.” I came up with the first of several sermon-based online auxiliaries that used multimedia as a way of bridging the gaps between her generation and mine.

It was months later before I made the connection between 14-year olds in church and the late teen students in my classes. Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information, and particularly Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, I saw that we are on the cusp of an incredible moment in our students’ lives, the time when the way we used to do things—for instance, the way we used to teach writing—is in such incredible flux that people like myself, taught in the methods that worked for generations and based on skills that had held sway for centuries is simply being overpowered by a new way that we can’t even begin to get a handle on let alone understand.

Here, for instance, is a part of my syllabus from a year ago:

SYLLABUS FOR ENG 1108—75
COMPOSITION I
Spring 2010

Prerequisite: Placement

MN Transfer Curriculum Qualified
WRIT Qualified (see below) Office Hours: S 1:00-2:00

• Course Description: You will read and discuss many published essays and write and improve on your own writing through class and instructor instruction.
• Texts:
1. In Brief edited by Judith Kitchen; Norton Publishers; ISBN 0393319075
2. Woe is I by Patricia O’Connor; Riverhead Publishers; ISBN 1594480060
3. Writing and Research Skills DVD

• Goals: At the end of this course you will be capable of reading, evaluating and writing four types of academic expository writing: narrative, descriptive, comparison and contrast and persuasive. You will be a more critical and discerning reader. You will be alert to your intent in writing and capable of evaluating how well you or someone else has achieved it.
• Objectives: You will have met the above goals by demonstrating the following: you read the assigned texts; you wrote assigned essays; you participated in class discussions, class projects and class evaluations; you created a portfolio of your short essays to present to me at the end of the semester.
• Evaluation: You are credited and graded on the following: your attendance; your participation; your assigned writing; and your portfolio. Each segment is assigned points, based on 100, judging how well you completed it. Grading will be judged as follows:

A—800+ points.
B—700-799 points.
C—600-699 points.
D—Below 600 points.
F—Usually reserved for people who don’t come to class.

None of these categories will match up exactly with anyone’s performance, but they will come close. Attempting A-level work on any of the requirements is certain to be reflected in your final grade.
• Always bring a pen and paper to class.
• Attendance: I expect you to be here. I’ll grant you one unexcused absence, but every unexcused absence after that will affect your final grade. To receive an excused absence, all you need to do is call me before the start of class and explain why you’ll miss it. It is as if you were calling in sick at work.

• The Essays: You will write 4 different ones. The essays are short: 500 words or 2 typed double-spaced pages. Each essay will relate to the topic we discussed the previous week. These essays are not graded. I’ll collect them, read and correct them, and return them. At the end of the class, you’ll revise each of them so each is now 750 words long (in other words, you’ll add another 3 to 4 paragraphs). The portfolio is graded.
• Deadlines: In the past I’ve been very lenient concerning deadlines. However, a number of students—a number of them among the worst offenders of that lenient policy—have suggested that they would have done better had they been held to a strict deadline. So I’m revising that practice. When an essay is due, you must turn it in either to me directly or by email on the day it’s due; turn it in a day late and it drops 10 points; two days late, 20 points; and so on. You must turn in every essay. (In the event of illness, call me before class and we’ll set something up.)

Probable Schedule:
January 16—Introduction
January 23—Narration
January 30—Description; Essay 1 due
February 6—Woe is I; Essay 2 due
February 13—Woe is I; Research; No essay due
February 20—Comparison/Contrast
February 27—Definition; Essay 3 due; Essay 4 in class
March 6—Final Class; Portfolio Due

This is the same portion from my current semester’s class:

SYLLABUS FOR ENG 1108—07
WRITING AND RESEARCH SKILLS
Spring 2011

Prerequisite: Placement

MN Transfer Curriculum Qualified

WRIT Qualified (see below) Office Hours: TTh 12-1
NOTE: My office hours will be done both in the library and live online via D2L.

• Course Description: You will read and discuss published essays and write and improve on your own writing through publishing your work and through instruction.
• Text:
NextText, edited by Kress & Winkle. ISBN: 031240106X

• Goals: At the end of this course you will be capable of reading, evaluating and writing academic expository writing. You will have experimented with new technologies including blogging, wiki-ing, hyperlinking, and mashups connected with your writing. You will be a more critical and discerning reader. You will be alert to your intent in writing and capable of evaluating how well you or someone else has achieved it.
• Objectives: You will have met the above goals by demonstrating the following: you read the assigned texts; you wrote and passed assigned essays; you participated in class discussions, class projects and class evaluations.
• Evaluation: You are credited and graded on the following: your attendance; your participation; and your assigned writing. Each segment is assigned points, based on 100, judging how well you completed it. The scored final exit essay is worth 20% of your final grade. If we have a scored midterm essay that will be worth 10% of your final grade. Grading will be judged as follows:

A—550+ points.
B—450-545 points.
C—300-445 points.
D—Below 395 points.
F—Usually reserved for people who don’t come to class.

None of these categories will match up exactly with anyone’s performance, but they will come close. Attempting A-level work on any of the requirements is certain to be reflected in your final grade.
• Attendance: I expect you to be here. I’ll grant you one unexcused absence, but every unexcused absence after that will affect your final grade. To receive an excused absence, all you need to do is call me before the start of class and explain why you’ll miss it. It is as if you were calling in sick at work.

NUTS AND BOLTS
• The Class: Having discovered that I was beginning to teach my 1108 classes on autopilot, I’ve restructured the course to reflect the changes technology is making and demanding in our writing environment. Toward this end, I’m making the emphasis in assignments less on how correct they are grammatically, in punctuation and in spelling, and more in how well they get across their content. The essays now more accurately reflect the way actual writing is done in the writing and working communities and the impact of new technologies. As a result, don’t be surprised if I change the assignments from time to time: this is a work in progress.
• The Blogs: During our second week we will start to set up individual blogs that everyone will have access to through Blogger (only because I know the ins and outs of that host best). You’ll be responsible every other week for blogging something relating to the topic we’re reading.
• The Essays: You will write 6 different ones. The essays are short: 5 will be 500-750 words or 2 typed double-spaced pages. Each essay will relate to the topic we discussed the previous week. These essays are worth 100 points each. I’ll collect them, read and correct them, and return them with suggestions.
• The Research Essay: In the weeks after you return from Spring Break we’ll begin working on the basics of academic research. The Research Essay will be the same length as your other essays, but will need to be on a more specific topic than the others. This will also be worth 100 points. We’ll get more into this the weeks after Spring Break.
• Deadlines: When an essay is due, you must turn it in either to me directly or by email on the day it’s due; turn it in a day late and it drops 10 points; two days late, 20 points; and so on. You must turn in every essay to earn at least a C. (In the event of illness, call me before class and we’ll set something up.)

Probable Schedule:
Week of:
January 10—Introduction
January 17—No Class 1-17; Set up Blogs; Chapter 3
January 24—Chapter 3; 1st Blog Entry Due
February 7—No Class 2-8; Chapter 4; 1st Essay Due
February 14—Chapter 4; 2nd Blog Entry Due
February 21—No Class 2-21 & 25; Chapters 4 and 2; 2nd Essay Due
February 28—Chapter 2; 3rd Blog Entry Due
March 7—Spring Break
March 14—Chapter 5; 3rd Essay Due
March 21—Chapter 5; 4th Blog Entry Due
March 28—Research; 4th Essay Due
April 4—No Class 4-8; Research; 5th Blog Entry Due
April 11— Research essay due;
April 18—Chapter 6
April 25— Chapter 6; 6th Blog Entry Due; Chapter 1
May 2—Chapter 1
May 9—Final 6th Essay Due: May 10 10:00

The two won’t match up exactly—the earlier class was one that met for only half a semester and so we were restricted in the amount of essays we could do—but in most of their generalities they’re similar. Except of course that in the first class, for which I was required to include a DVD which had been transferred from video and made reference to word processing and showed computers using the glowing green letters of MSDOS, the emphasis was on styles of writing: narrative, cause and effect, descriptive, etc. (In my full-semester classes we also worked on definition, process analysis, and several other types.)

But in the course of my reading and experimenting online I realized that, outside college, no one writes by style any longer and probably haven’t since I was an undergraduate. Instead, online writing, which is more and more what students read and, more importantly, do themselves, focuses on subject over type. They don’t write narrative essays, they write blog entries about the time their father came home drunk on Christmas. They don’t write a process analysis about baking a pie, they swap recipes in chatrooms that include an explanation for why the pie might taste one way and why it might taste another. Of course, there’s much to be said for the discipline of specific methods—putting the audience in the scene by use of detail and sensory perception, for example—and those have to remain in the instruction, but they are no longer the focus.

In addition there are other important changes—the inclusion of an online office hour, a recognition that most students are only on campus for a limited class period and immediately leave after for work or children; the inclusion of blogging as a way not only of woolgathering and producing a first draft but of having their opinions appear in a public forum complete with response (mine and other students’); as well as the elimination of my old favorite, the portfolio, as students are better capable of keeping their essays online either as posts to their blogs or on their harddrives. These will doubtless also make way for other, more radical changes.
My concern, however, is this: as a class, teachers are well behind the learning curve both in our willingness to learn new ideas (not just new tricks but new ways of thinking, realizing that many of the ways we learned to write are outmoded and might reflect the ways our peers write but not the way everyone else writes or reads) and in our abilities to put them into practice. I count myself as moderately computer-literate, especially for such a recent convert, but I am left far back in the dust when friends working in the business or medical worlds start showing me the technology they use on a daily basis. Many times our institutions, because of budget cuts and declining enrollment and the swift pace of new technology, are laughably outmoded. It’s a vicious circle: We only have Microsoft 2003 available because Microsoft 2003 is what our staff have grown accustomed to and it makes no fiscal sense to update every year or two. Our classrooms still have blackboards and overheads, even if the blackboards are wipeboards now and the overheads can show us objects in 3D. We argue with students about whether or not they should be allowed to have cell phones in class when some of them are actually typing out their assignments, usually for another class, while we lecture.

I’ve got no clue what the answer to this flux might be except that soon there will be a massive wave of new teachers teaching in new ways that, because we have gotten such a late start and because despite our lip service to it change is really too expensive, will still be a generation or two behind the way people actually use the technology and the potential inherent in it.