Teaching: Devising a Pedagogy-of-Activity

Over the course of my first years in the English Department, I have been fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to devise a series of new writing courses for undergraduates (majors and non-majors alike) at Rhode Island College. During the 2009/2010 school year, with the generous assistance of both the Department Chair and numerous members of the Department, I undertook to design two new courses at the 300-level: ENGL 378: Studies in Composition and ENGL 379: Studies in Rhetoric. During the 2010/2011 school year, again with considerable help from my colleagues and in collaboration with other writing faculty, I undertook a redesign of the writing minor (renaming it the Rhetoric and Writing minor), revised two existing courses (ENGL 230: Writing for Professional Settings and ENGL 231: Writing for Digital and Multimedia Settings), added two new courses (ENGL 232: Writing for the Public Sphere and ENGL 477: Internship in Rhetoric and Writing), and re-engineered the sequence of instruction within the minor. During the 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 school years, along with the director of First-Year Writing, Becky Caouette, I have, via these new courses and this new curriculum, begun the exciting work of introducing RIC English majors to the knowledge and practices of the field of composition/rhetoric, thus expanding their opportunities for learning about writing and about the full range of areas of specialization within the field of English studies.

Since arriving at RIC, my teaching, always focused on activities typical of writing classrooms (e.g.  explicit instruction in pre-writing, drafting, and revision strategies; peer- and large-group writing workshops; one-on-one student conferences, etc.) has turned increasingly towards a pedagogy focused on facilitating or orchestrating student activity. Even as I begin to embrace the opportunity to teach English students the content of my field, I resist the traditional orientation of many college faculty--that of content-deliverers of declarative knowledge (the what of learning)--and find myself drawn to more procedural matters (the how of learning). Of course, it's impossible to separate these two aspects of teaching and learning and silly to privilege one over the other, but I find, in my conversations with faculty across the disciplines, that I perhaps err on the side of procedural learning more than my peers. This may stem from the very activity-focused nature of my scholarly area of interest (writing) and it may stem from other factors, such as the two two-hour-per-week learning blocks that structure English classes and which force faculty to get creative in finding ways to keep students engaged over extended periods of time. In sum, I find that I spend most of my time in the classroom facilitating student activity--devising a set of experiences and activities that provide students with learning opportunities and the motivation to take advantage of them.

devising tasks and creating online environments in which those tasks can be carried out, modeling how tasks should be carried out, monitoring task-engagement (in the room, on the screen), and reflecting with both individual students and entire classes, in both written and spoken language, on the learning that the tasks were designed to bring about.

My evolving pedagogy--a pedagogy-of-activity, if you will--is built upon a series of beliefs or values that I have come to hold about teaching and learning:

1. Frequent student-to-student collaboration enhances student learning and builds classroom community. While the principal classroom collaboration is often thought to be that of faculty and student, informal and frequent student-to-student collaboration produces meaningful opportunities for learning and a stronger sense of community among students.
2. Communication technologies are tools for strengthening student engagement. Technological platforms (Blackboard, Google, Facebook, etc.) are not distractions from the work of learning; increasingly the seas in which we and our students live and work, they are, ideally, important locations where learning takes place.
3. Frequent low-stakes, usually public, write-to-learn (WTL) activities facilitate increased understanding. In many college classrooms, writing functions as yet another means of assessment, but it's most powerful use is epistemic--WTL activities are important tools that enable students to try on new ways of thinking, acting, talking, and being.
4. Frequent informal dialogue with individual students leads to increased learning and participation in learning. Dialogue with individual students often takes place, if it takes place at all, before or after class or in the margins of student papers. But frequent individual dialogue via one-to-one conferences and/or response to writing (i.e. via blog posts, discussion boards, etc.) is critical to both learning and building relationships which support learning.
5. Flexible assignments which encourage choice and ownership usually lead to better student work. Much, if not all, of the content students are exposed to in college courses originates outside of themselves. Providing opportunities for students to use that content for their own purposes and projects (within the scope of the work of the class) will lead to stronger end-products.
6. Opportunities for reflection should be built into the fabric of the semester's work. College courses often utilize the coverage-and-test model, thus leaving out the experience of the learner. If faculty don't build explicit so-called "taking-stock" moments into the semester's calendar and make these moments "count" towards students' grades, metacognition--thinking about one's thinking in relation to some endeavor--may not happen. Without metacognition, learning is rarely meaningful.
7. Organizing a semester, in part, around a significant project and sequencing the work of the term as a series of steps towards the completion of that project produces effective learning outcomes. College syllabi are typically organized according to a coverage-and-test or coverage-and-paper model. A different approach might be to embed the content one wishes to cover within some larger undertaking, thus more closely linking the acquisition of knowledge (i.e. what should I know?) with its application (i.e. what can I do with what I know?). 

How do these values or beliefs play out in my teaching? I'd like to provide several examples or scenarios to dramatize it.

Day 1: Organizing Class Discussion (200/300-level course)
Day 2: Organizing Peer-Group Workshops (100/200 level course)
Day 3: Work Days (?)

Example 1: Discussion of Course Content

In what follows, I take an exemplary class meeting from a section of ENGL 230: Writing for Professional Settings (spring 2012) in order to try to illustrate the significance of these three items and their interaction during a typical class meeting.

Activity 1: Daily Plan. A typical day begins with me asking students to power up their computers and login to the course LMS. In each of my courses, I post a document called Daily Plans which maps out activity for each class meeting. This document is posted as a link within the LMS and thus, is always live and interactive. Once the students are all assembled, I pull up the Daily Plans document on the screen at the front of the room and the students open it on their computers and together we preview the outline of the day's work. I have found that students appreciate having access to this "itinerary" because it provides them with a sense of what to expect prior to and during class. It serves as a reference point, connecting each class meeting to the one before it and the one to follow. Reviewing the Daily Plan usually takes no more than 5-10 minutes.

Activity 2: Quiz. On many days, there is some kind of assigned reading that students are asked to complete ahead of class. On each day that a reading is assigned, class begins with a short quiz, which students take in the LMS, using the "Test" function. The quizzes always consist of ten true/false questions and can be completed within a matter of minutes. Once they have finished the quiz, the LMS provides students with immediate results and a grade. We then take a few minutes to discuss questions or problems with the quiz. I think of the daily quiz as our first attempt to get into the day's reading and learning. Over the course of a typical class period, I try to bring students back to the assigned text in several different ways, at several different times. The quiz is the first such attempt. They usually take no more than 10-15 minutes.

Activity 3: Small Group Work. Once students have completed the quiz, we shift gears. On a typical day, I have constructed a set of tasks in regard to the day's reading that I want students to complete in groups. These tasks are contained within a google document that students can access and interact within (write in). There are usually about 4-5 different sets of tasks, one for each small group (the students pick their groups). The google doc is a wiki that allows multiple users to all write within one document (picture 20 people writing in a MS Word doc simultaneously, all having access to what the others are writing). Links to the day's google doc are contained within the LMS. As such, these docs become a kind of archive or record of our thinking during each class and a resource for later discussions and activities.

The tasks I ask students to complete usually consist of two kinds of work: summarizing/explaining key concepts and ideas and posing questions. So, for example, during one early class meeting in ENGL 230 we discussed Deborah Brandt's article "Literacy and the Knowledge Economy." The discussion of this article was spread out over two days with the first day devoted to an overview of the study itself and the second day devoted to an examination of Brandt's findings and conclusions. I assigned one of Brandt's findings to each of the small groups, asking them to do three things: 1) re-read the passage with their finding, 2) explain the finding in their own words (using 2-3 passages from the text as support or illustration), 3) pose two questions for the class to discuss in regards to their assigned section/finding. Students access or re-access the article itself within the LMS and then get to work in teams of 3-4. This activity represents a second attempt to focus carefully on the day's reading. I allocate 30-45 minutes, on average, for this kind of activity. Students read and then write together in the google doc. I move around the room asking and answering questions or sit at my computer, monitoring the development of the document and using the "Insert Comment" function to "talk" to the students in real-time about what they are writing (I praise them, re-direct, pose questions, ask for elaboration, ask for greater specificity, request that they edit particular sentences, etc., all of which can be seen on the screen behind me and which they can see on their monitor).

Activity 4: Large-Group Discussion.

Activity 5: Looking Ahead

Example 2: Writing Workshop