The question I’m interested pursuing goes something like this:

Will students report increased preparedness for interdisciplinary writing and cross-genre work after working within a curriculum informed by Place Based Education (PBE) principles and participating in lessons geared towards increasing reading comprehension?

Dang! That’s a pretty confusing sentence. I’ll try to unpack that a little more here:

I think that I could probably locate three separate questions/topics within the question above and I think listing them will help me articulate a more coherent idea than what I’ve got so far. The first question could be: Will a curriculum that uses reading as an avenue to study genre and revision increase students’ capacity to move between/work within multiple genres?

The second question might sound like: Will a curriculum that emphasizes PBE principles increase student engagement? Will it empower students to take ownership over their own learning? Will it help create a more student centered vibe/atmosphere/classroom environment?

The last question is: How much crossover will I find between these two topics?

Motivations:

Why do I think it’s important to incorporate more reading into the curriculum? Well, one pretty clear motivation is that my students told me after project one that they wished we have lingered a little longer on the Deborah Brandt reading. This may be partly because it took them a long time to read, and we unfortunately breezed through our classroom discussion (my fault). I also have a hunch that they mined some relevant concepts and questions from the reading, while simultaneously (or alternatively) struggled to comprehend large sections of it.

I also want to investigate this question because students will be reading across a wide variety of genres after their first few quarters at Western. They might have to write a scientific abstract, or a grant proposal, or a collection of sonnets, or an environmental case study, but before that they’ll almost certainly have to read one of these and break it down. If they have practiced reading with the explicit purpose of extracting genre conventions they’ll hopefully be able to apply this practice when they have to write in a new genre down the line.

We do this to a degree already in our curriculum, but I guess I’m interested in making these sorts of assignments more explicit, more robust and more frequent next quarter.

Another motivation: I’m hoping that students habituate themselves into breaking down the form, structure, sentences etc. of different readings, then they might be more prepared to break down their own writing when revising.

Place based education might require a little more explanation. Here’s a quote by David Sobel from his book Place Based Education: Connecting Classroom and Community:

“Place-based education is the process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum. Emphasizing hands-on, real-world learning experiences, this approach to education increases academic achievement, helps students develop stronger ties to their community, enhances students; appreciation for the natural world, and creates a heightened commitment to serving as active, contributing citizens.”

We already have some elements of this outlook in our curriculum, honestly more than I anticipated before I started teaching 101. The moments when students head out of the classroom to investigate their own, self-generated questions about the campus experiences of their peers, the fact that we require them to do hands on research, feels very place-based to me.

However, we still hang out in the classroom for the large majority of our time. We encourage students to go out into the community or the campus, but only sort of follow that maxim while teaching. I’m not interested in holding class outside, I’m interested in creating more scavenger hunts, posing more problems, or asking more questions that force students to walk around and explore the environment/world/habitat they inhabit.

Why do this? Well, a lot of the motivation is present in that David Sobel quote → stronger ties to the community, appreciation for the natural world, fosters active citizenship etc.

I also want to do this because it’s what I have done in the past. PBE shows up in a lot of outdoor education contexts and trainings. Whenever I crafted an effective lesson based on PBE principles, it was way more fun, and students took away a lot more from the lesson.

Where is the opportunity for overlap?

Well I’m not totally sure. I think there’s potential in the amount of pattern recognition that both of these practices would require. Techniques for reading comprehension would almost certainly ask students to look for patterns in texts, but also patterns in their own way of thinking. PBE lessons would ask students to head out and start by looking for patterns in the world.

I also think there’s a lot of potential for both practices to emphasize the student experience. Questions we might ask could include: What is your experience like when you read? What is your experience like in your community? What sorts of books, readings, texts do you love and value? What aspects of a place do you love and value?

What would my research methods be?

Perhaps appropriately, the first possibly research methods I think of are similar to what my students have been using in 101. I could survey them at the end of the quarter, or at multiple points in the quarter, asking targeted questions that get at the research question above.

Or I could conduct some sort of cross quarter observational study where I create some observable metric for ability to work across genres and engagement with material. However, I’m really not sure what this would look like. 

Measuring reading comprehension wouldn’t be too hard. I think I could at different points in the quarter offer students a passage to read, and have them answer a series of multiple choice questions about this. However, in order to answer my questions, this would have to be different readings from different genres.

I think a surveys and observational studies might be a more effective way to measure student engagement as they work through lessons informed by PBE principles. However, I’m not quite sure what these lessons would look like at this point. Most of the stuff I’ve done in the past involved tromping around a outdoor space and building/collecting/observing stuff within the context of middle school science/natural history. I think some of that is transferable, and like I said earlier I think there’s a lot of tangible aspects of the current curriculum that are already using ideas aligned with PBE stuff. At this point, I am in a sort of I know where I want to go but not quite how to get there type of situation. 

In general. I’m a little at a loss for creative data collection methods.

Possible Sources:

All of the potential background sources here are pulled from our class RAB (one is my own RAB reading). It appears that many of us in 513 are at least a little bit interested in including more reading work into the curriculum. A lot of these readings offer activities and practical actions to meet particular reading goals.

I’ve listed David Sobel’s book on Place Based Education largely because he is a educator whose pedagogical philosophy I have implemented and tested in the past. I’ve found his descriptions and analysis of PBE very useful, however, most of his studies reference preschool to middle school age students. While I believe this work is still relevant, it isn’t sufficient for college level pedagogy. The other piece of background research on this topic is from a former Western Master’s student, that uses on campus resources to test out PBE practices with college students. I’m a little wary of using a master’s thesis as scholarship here, but it seems too immediately applicable to my situation to pass up.

Possible Sources:

Carillo, Ellen C. “Engaging Sources through Reading-Writing Connections Across the Disciplines.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 13, no. 2, July 2016, p. 19.

Farber, Jerry. “On Not Betraying Poetry.” Pedagogy: Critical approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 213-232, Web.

Hallstead, Tracy, and Glenda Pritchett. “Reading: The Bridge to Everywhere.” Double Helix, vol. 1, 2013, pp. 1-12

Kearsley, Paul, et al. Program Development at the Outback : Exploring Place-Based Experiential Education through a Campus Farm. Western Washington University, 2017.

Kiefson, Ruth. “The Social Dimension of the Community College Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Vol. 46, no. 1, September 2018, pp. 56-69.

Sobel, David. Place-Based Education : Connecting Classrooms &Amp; Communities. 2nd ed., Orion Society, 2005.