The Audience Project: Writing for readers rather than writing for teachers Research Question: Students are used to producing writing that will be evaluated by a teacher or other authority figure. My research design focuses on altering student perspective on writing by focusing on audience and response. Bluntly: Can focusing on audience help students free their […]
Author: meyerj9
Finale Slush Pile
Since I’ve done every other blog post, I’m going to write some of the leftover stuff I haven’t posted yet, or never got a chance to post. The Peter Elbow drinking game – drink anytime he is referenced – we would all be dead by now The great shift in education over the past thirty […]
Troubling Research
Citation: Jacobs, Gloria E. “Troubling Research: A Field Journey through Methodological Decision Making.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research, Hampton Press, 2012, Print. 331-347. Summary: In this research study, Gloria Jacobs offers a first person account of a researcher attempting to carry out an ethically responsible methodology. Jacobs tries to eschew […]
Putting the audience in the spotlight
Topic speculation Do students tailor what they write for different audiences? My research will seek to answer how audience plays a role in student compositions in English 101. I think that students generally write for the same audience in all of their classes – the authority figure. Despite telling them that they should carefully consider […]
Knowing is half the battle
Being an adversary does not mean being an enemy. I rarely have an adversarial relationship with students that is long term and related to rigor, but I have taken classes where the teacher uses this conceit to great effect. I recall a Shakespeare professor from college who was a master of playing devil’s advocate during […]
The taste of a poison paradise
I think my ecosystem is fairly healthy at this point in the term. The only toxic problems are a couple of partnerships that have more or less needed marriage counseling. In the past, I have seen toxic classrooms that stem from a total lack of respect between students and their teacher. My first year teaching […]
The Big C
This is based on Student C’s short essay: Hello C-Train, I really enjoyed reading your response to Rose’s article. You seem to be finding a way to maintain your unique voice when you’re writing. I especially enjoyed the way you reflected on the difficulties you have had adjusting to a second language. The line “I […]
Jenny from the block
I feel like I’m spinning my wheels a bit retelling this anecdote, since I’ve written about it in my journal, but my students really got into the roles of the writer as written by Betty Flowers. My brother uses this to help train his staff on how to write legal documents – he found it […]
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Articulation
From what I’ve witnessed in my classroom, the main struggle comes down to a lack of vocabulary [defined as broadly as possible]. My students have ideas in their head of what they want to say, but they struggle with the transformation of ideas to text. This problem manifested itself in a different way with the […]
O Captain, my Captain!
Didn’t John Keating – Robin Williams’s character in Dead Poet Society – inspire a generation of teachers who believe that they’re sole purpose is to free students from the conformist bonds of the classroom? Who are we to say that a teacher can’t inspire? And boiling teaching down to a transactional, capitalist enterprise of toil […]
Wild World
My students, from what I see, don’t have much of a coherent worldview. They’re more instinctively curious than I would expect – when they see or hear something different, like the man in Red Square proclaiming the world to be flat, they wonder why that person thinks that. I assume that person is seeking attention, […]
Differences
For one thing, I am older than they are. I have lots of life experience that they don’t have. If need be, I think I could write a very long list of the cultural and historical changes I have witnessed in my lifetime that my students take for granted as the way things are and […]
The Teacher Ethos
Citation: Gregory, Marshall. “Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos.” Pedagogy, vol. 1, no. 1, Jan. 2001, pp. 69–90, Web. Summary: In this article from the first issue of Pedagogy, Marshall Gregory lays out his belief that university faculty members must consider pedagogy as equally important to curriculum development. Gregory starts the article by challenging the assumption […]
A Teacher Prepares
In An Actor Prepares, Konstantin Stanislavski describes actors as having to earn the right to the stage. Because of the structure of the theater and the expectations of the genre, the audience will automatically give actors a grace period – in other words, they assume the actor knows what they’re doing because they are on […]
Creative Nonfiction
Citation: Mays, Chris. “‘You Can’t Make This Stuff Up’: Complexity, Facts, and Creative Nonfiction.” College English, vol. 80, no. 4, March 2018, pp. 319-340, Web. Summary: Through the lens of genre theory, Chris Mays posits that creative nonfiction is a complex genre that can only be properly understood and contextualized by acknowledging the inherent selection […]
Matchmaker, matchmaker…
When someone says “there are no disabled students in my class,” this is a map of fear, perhaps (access Vidali). But it is also voicing a desire. There is a fear of the presence of disability and a desire for its opposite: its eradication and exclusion. I have said this many times, and I could […]
Um… I think “Hell Night” is a bad thing
I suppose English 101 at Western is an introduction to college itself and to the skills that one needs to navigate four years in a university. The class, as the curriculum currently stands, doesn’t necessarily fit the definition that Crowley applies to historical conceptions of 101. I’m not sure how Crowley would react to our […]
They Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage
The chapter “Reading and Writing Are Not Connected” by Ellen Carillo argues that reading and writing are “connected practices… and the best way to teach them is together.” Carillo complains that writing has been separated from reading in unhelpful ways, especially at the college level. The college writing course, she argues, has become a place […]
Playing in the Band
My class is a band, and my room is our performance space. Sometimes I’m the conductor, sometimes the road manager, but rarely a performer. I want my students to play the instruments. Some are more skilled than others. A few may be picking up their instruments for the first time. One or two have a […]
In and Out of Time
Some of the following strategies, though moderately time-intensive the first time you try them, produce materials that can be reused for years. (Bean 291) My first thought in response to this prompt centered on the video art installation “The Clock” by Christian Marclay. “The Clock” is a video timepiece. Synchronized to real time, it runs […]