Citation: Takayoshi, Pamela, Tomlinson, Elizabeth, and Castillo, Jennifer. “The Construction of Research Problems and Methods.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research. Hampton Press, 2012. 97-121. Summary: Takayoshi, Tomlinson and Castillo begin this essay by identifying, or perhaps constructing, an opening or gap in our understanding about writing research. They have noticed […]
Author: griffi30
Joey’s Discovery Draft For Pedagogical Research OR Discovering How Convoluted I Can Truly Sound
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 […]
Imaginary Adversaries
I haven’t had many (or any?) adversarial interactions with students here or in other contexts (at least as far as I can tell) so it’s a little hard to define from the perspective of being the instructor. I guess a connotation of adversary is more or less competitor, so if I took that as a […]
Smogulous Smoke & Gluppity Glup: Toxic Behavior as a Classroom Pollutant
Thinking about toxicity within some sort of taxonomy seems to evoke a sort of parasite, or bacteria, or general pathogen that introduces a disease which then blooms outward from its singular point of entry or origin. More literally, this would be one instance of toxic behavior in a classroom that is sufficiently damaging so as […]
Student A: Champion of the World!
Feedback Dear Student A, The following includes my feedback on your “Writing Emotions” assignment and also some more general thoughts about how we develop our writing practice and habits. As is always the case, please let me know if you would like me to clarify any of my thoughts. Your descriptions of feeling apprehenzled created […]
Thinking Thoughts ‘Bout Writing
My students, excluding maybe one or two, told me that they were average, or mediocre, or middle of the road writers. Most of them told me that good writing, or the metric with which to evaluate writing depends on sentence structure, or coherence, or generally grammar. When pushed to examine our writing class alongside this […]
The Lonely Road of Struggle
I think of two types of struggle when considering the student experience in my class. One type of struggle I would consider unproductive and constraining, while the other I would say is an almost necessary condition for any deep, lasting learning. Shaughnessy’s line about “written anguish” as an alternative “English” felt like an apt characterization […]
A Wise Chef Once Told Me: “Everything needs salt, especially your English 101 pedagogical ideals”
It’s funny timing to ask about the ideal outcome of this class right around conferences. In my meetings with students they’ve given me a better picture of how 101 fits into their lives, but this window undermines any perfect world scenarios I could dream up. I don’t think that this class is really blowing open […]
Beans: Spilled & Withheld
I think my students, like me, are selectively aware and unaware of the goings on of the world around us. I think they also, (like I do in my relationship with them) selectively (or strategically) let on how aware they are. On one of the first days of class I asked them if they knew […]
Authenticity & the Other
Citation: Pruitt, John. “Heterosexual Readers in Search of Queer Authenticity through Self-Selected LGBT Novels.” Teaching English in the Two Year College. Vol. 42, No. 4, May 2015, pp. 359-374. Summary: John Pruitt describes the semester long descriptive research experiment in which he observes a group of self-identified heterosexual students read and discuss different books by […]
Nugget Extraction
I don’t have a very specific mantra or central belief system within my writing classroom. I maybe did coming into the quarter but I also remember mentally instructing myself to remove my expectations and preconceived notions of what I would be doing. For the most part any persisting ideology about writing instruction that was present […]
“The Social Dimension of the Community College Classroom” Ruth Kiefson
Citation: 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. Summary: Ruth Kiefson explains throughout her essay how building a positive learning environment and choosing activities that facilitate student metacognition will provide students with the motivation, resources and engagement to […]
Tossing the Pigskin
I read the Dolmage and McRuer excerpts shortly after I watched a rowdy game of Monday Night Football, between the San Francisco 49’s and the Green Bay Packers. For the spectator, the corporeality of a professional football game takes a central position, it practically stiff arms the viewer in the face. Bodies and skulls slam […]
Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose
I don’t have insight at this point into how English 101 is meant to function for Western. It follows a writing across the curriculum model so there must be some notion about preparing students for the rest of college in the administration’s brain. I don’t understand how administrative decisions are made at universities in general, […]
Rhetoric, Fallacies & Some Dusty Old Bois
I chose to read Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech by Partricia Roberts-Miller and Students Should Learn About the Logical Fallacies by Daniel Bommarito. I chose these two excerpts largely because their titles track with claims I encountered with varying regularity in my experience studying philosophy as an undergraduate. It behooves a student of philosophy […]
Worms!
Right outside of my house stands a green box. This box has four legs, and a spigot at the bottom, is split into several vertical tiers, and is filled with worms. More specifically it is filled with red wiggler worms, alternatively called Eisenia Foetida, worms excellent for composting. My relationship to these worms is […]
What am I even hoping for?
I think when I pictured teaching 101 prior to being in the classroom I had three general classifications of expectations. The first classification I’ll call fearful anticipation. These sorts of thoughts mostly centered on how I would, in one way or another, mess up. Would I totally boondoggle my schedule and miss class? Would I […]