I believe that the curriculum and the execution of English 101 has limited a great number of “traditional” adversities that are present in standard courses at an institution like Western. Of course, there exists the usual difficulty between teacher and student when it comes to homework and authority-but because the curriculum is permitting students to follow passions and personal narratives and then shows them how these experiences relate to academic success, I feel that the tensions that I’ve had to deal with in past teaching experiences are not materializing.

In the past, I’ve taught very firm curriculums where the topic of study in the class is extremely rigid, I decide all the readings and lectures that we do while in the class, and ultimately the agency of my students is drastically reduced. While this type of instruction does in some ways present successes, it denies students the opportunity to fashion a curriculum that supports them and the styles of learning that they find most successful. I have found that I find myself most “at odds” with my students when I’m trying to adapt them to the curriculum, instead of the curriculum to the individual.

However, there are still issues that arise when students are permitted to dictate the activities that take up the class time-I had a day where I let students vote on a particular teaching style/activity that they would prefer I utilize to share the information of the curriculum with them. It was decided that they preferred a more autonomous type of learning, but when it came time to let them run free with the assignment, they all completed it poorly and quickly, and spent the rest of the time on their phones. While this might be the method that they preferred to utilize, it wasn’t necessarily the best way to complete the assignment, and therefore I think that permitting tensions to exist between student and teacher in these types of situations might be best for the overall classroom environment. I believe that acknowledging the efforts to teach in along the pedagogical lines of “multiliteracies” is important, but when doing this we must not, as Dolmage states, “reproduce old exclusions.” In a sense, I think that there needs to be a melding of agency and direction-which this curriculum, in my eyes, is. While I believe it is best to give students a project concept and then permit them to make it their own, there still needs to be compromise or instruction on the teacher’s end that then permits the students to build forth from a framework that is both accessible and relevant to them.