I was conscripted to teach English composition courses this academic year, and (trite assessment alert) I've learned some stuff:
It's not easy to come up with classroom flipping techniques for writing-based courses. There are plenty out there, but I sincerely think that some of them are created for alien college students who come to class utterly prepared, capable of college level reading comprehension right out of the gate, with extraordinary attention spans and dogged commitments to staying on task.
I don't meet too many of those people.
The ones I know - here and at home - hate reading so much that I'm convinced that the text could be soap opera trash, or a really bad Dan Brown-like drama, and the complaint would still be: FIFTEEN whole pages, I have to read? GAH!
The designer of the English comp courses I'm teaching understands this reality. He's only met those people too. So for the 102 level course, he compiled a list of articles for students to read that are all about popular culture topics. I was jazzed about this kind of thinking and spent way too much time digging up more articles of a similar slant: about "cli-fi" films (yes - Sharknado!) and their heroic characters, zombies and fast food, reality tv shows, rock music covers. Juicy stuff that still had an academic slant applied to it, because that's what we do...in academia, y'know.
The point of this enterprise - in case you were thinking that we are trying to educate college students to become experts in pop culture - is not to become experts on these topics. The topics are secondary - if not tertiary - to the analysis of how an author constructs an argument with research. The topics are simply bait for the less-than-inclined-to-read reader.
The designer assured all of the English comp instructors that students love to talk about pop culture. Students love to read about pop culture. The business of paper writing will be much easier if they are encouraged to to deal with these kinds of topics. After all, it's what they consume every day.
Confident that the forthcoming drills - involving reading and discussing these pop culture articles one or two days ahead of class days devoted to crafting outlines and inspired in-class essays on the topics - would go well, I sailed into class on the day the first article was supposed to have been read and found frowny faces and rolling eyes.
They didn't like the topic. They didn't like the length of the article. They didn't like the way that the academic author took pains to support his arguments with several, well-explained examples.
"He's saying the same thing over and over again."
"Some of this didn't even make sense."
"He could have said this in half the space. Or less."
In reality, these things weren't completely true. The assessments I heard were born of quickly executed reading that didn't catch nuanced arguments or argument development. The average scores on the little, multiple-choice online quizzes I assigned (classroom flipping technique #1: to determine if they prepared ahead of time, issue online quizzes on basic information from the assigned material that they take before the class intended for discussion of said reading) for them to take in advance of article discussion days confirmed this. Multiple choice questions. Easy-peasy. Just basic means for determining whether they had read...or not. But they'd read, they insisted.
Yet, it seemed that they had not digested much.
So we struggled through this part of the course.
We are now in the latter phase of the course, in which students slog away on their big research papers. They asked - the way a child asks if she has to eat the broccoli - if they had to write about popular culture topics. I said no. All I cared about was receiving GOOD papers - about anything.
Relieved, they have been coming to me with their ideas and topic development. With every one-on-one consultation, I am learning what they are learning about the following topics:
Fracking and its effects on people, livestock and real estate.
Ways to combat global warming (two people are taking very different approaches to this)
The victimization of women in the (online) gaming community (as players, I gather).
Ethics in business impacted by social movements.
Net neutrality.
Legal equality for homosexuals.
Superhero films and their affirmation of (negatively) traditional male stereotypes.
Social activism and social media.
The threat of personal drones on privacy.
Prescription opioid abuse.
The continued legalization of bullfighting (yes! you read that correctly).
The application of tech solutions to lessen or prevent bloodshed in school shootings.
Dear readers, here is what I want you to know.
It's nothing you didn't already know, possibly.
But it's important to share this little slice of college freshmen paper topics with you anyway, because while you're worried that they aren't developing any sensitivity to their environment, or that they are pursuing a life of empty-headed consumerism, or that they are maturing to become soulless 'bots in a deteriorating world...
They want to save that world. They're WORRIED about it. And even if that world isn't one you necessarily can endorse (I didn't see the angle on the bullfighting topic coming, honestly, but I'm ready to be convinced by a Central American with the preservation of tradition on his mind), it matters to them.
They come from all over the place: Egypt, Russia, Armenia, Germany, Panama, Syria, Canada, the U.S. and Italy.
They could be privileged. They could also not be able to go home (or have a home to go home to, if you noticed at least one country on that list). Even if some of them don't know strife, it is a certainty that their older family members might. And what they do or where they come from doesn't necessarily dictate what they will go on to DO.
Whatever the case, they are delving into the seriousness that is the world they have to live in, one resource, one sentence, one paragraph, and (heaven help us all) one thesis statement at a time.
We all know that paper writing isn't where the world gets saved. And it becomes even more complicated when your English composition professor is urging you to acknowledge opposing arguments, arrange an argument into a linear order, and challenging your 'there's nothing out there on this topic' statements (there almost always is something in the way of scholarly research out there, and they are hugely stressed out when I'm right about that...I often think that any basic research methods course should contain a substantial unit on pure tenacity). Tackling something you're personally passionate about is actually a lot harder than working with a less consequential topic.
I'm not sure that this fact has dawned on them. They are, instead, keen on saving their worlds.
Trying to truly put your hands and your brain around a position worth defending is an important beginning.
I can't tell you what they will become, or what worlds might be saved by any of them, but I can tell you that right here, right now, they are on missions. And the view from my position in all of this - as the pushy enforcer of the clear construction of ideas and persuasive words in meaningful order and context - is pretty damned compelling.
It's not easy to come up with classroom flipping techniques for writing-based courses. There are plenty out there, but I sincerely think that some of them are created for alien college students who come to class utterly prepared, capable of college level reading comprehension right out of the gate, with extraordinary attention spans and dogged commitments to staying on task.
 |
| Here's a classroom flipping technique for guiding students to think consciously about bibliographic information. Divide them into teams. Hand them groupings of cut pieces of paper, upon which are typed a title, an author name, a publisher, a year, and some page numbers. Their job is to discern what they are looking at (a book? an article? a documentary? a website article?) AND to order the information correctly - without looking at a resource for the answers. Far better than lecturing on this issue, demonstrating it a few times in the class FOR them, and hoping that they retain it all, this exercise forces them to think critically, work together, and compete. Just recall those times when you've had to "iron chef" something, and how those experiences were so meaningful because you had to enlist reasonable guesswork, first, and then when the right information became available, it stuck, because it either confirmed or corrected what you already thought you knew. |
I don't meet too many of those people.
The ones I know - here and at home - hate reading so much that I'm convinced that the text could be soap opera trash, or a really bad Dan Brown-like drama, and the complaint would still be: FIFTEEN whole pages, I have to read? GAH!
The designer of the English comp courses I'm teaching understands this reality. He's only met those people too. So for the 102 level course, he compiled a list of articles for students to read that are all about popular culture topics. I was jazzed about this kind of thinking and spent way too much time digging up more articles of a similar slant: about "cli-fi" films (yes - Sharknado!) and their heroic characters, zombies and fast food, reality tv shows, rock music covers. Juicy stuff that still had an academic slant applied to it, because that's what we do...in academia, y'know.
The point of this enterprise - in case you were thinking that we are trying to educate college students to become experts in pop culture - is not to become experts on these topics. The topics are secondary - if not tertiary - to the analysis of how an author constructs an argument with research. The topics are simply bait for the less-than-inclined-to-read reader.
The designer assured all of the English comp instructors that students love to talk about pop culture. Students love to read about pop culture. The business of paper writing will be much easier if they are encouraged to to deal with these kinds of topics. After all, it's what they consume every day.
Confident that the forthcoming drills - involving reading and discussing these pop culture articles one or two days ahead of class days devoted to crafting outlines and inspired in-class essays on the topics - would go well, I sailed into class on the day the first article was supposed to have been read and found frowny faces and rolling eyes.
They didn't like the topic. They didn't like the length of the article. They didn't like the way that the academic author took pains to support his arguments with several, well-explained examples.
"He's saying the same thing over and over again."
"Some of this didn't even make sense."
"He could have said this in half the space. Or less."
In reality, these things weren't completely true. The assessments I heard were born of quickly executed reading that didn't catch nuanced arguments or argument development. The average scores on the little, multiple-choice online quizzes I assigned (classroom flipping technique #1: to determine if they prepared ahead of time, issue online quizzes on basic information from the assigned material that they take before the class intended for discussion of said reading) for them to take in advance of article discussion days confirmed this. Multiple choice questions. Easy-peasy. Just basic means for determining whether they had read...or not. But they'd read, they insisted.
Yet, it seemed that they had not digested much.
So we struggled through this part of the course.
We are now in the latter phase of the course, in which students slog away on their big research papers. They asked - the way a child asks if she has to eat the broccoli - if they had to write about popular culture topics. I said no. All I cared about was receiving GOOD papers - about anything.
Relieved, they have been coming to me with their ideas and topic development. With every one-on-one consultation, I am learning what they are learning about the following topics:
Fracking and its effects on people, livestock and real estate.
Ways to combat global warming (two people are taking very different approaches to this)
The victimization of women in the (online) gaming community (as players, I gather).
Ethics in business impacted by social movements.
Net neutrality.
Legal equality for homosexuals.
Superhero films and their affirmation of (negatively) traditional male stereotypes.
Social activism and social media.
The threat of personal drones on privacy.
Prescription opioid abuse.
The continued legalization of bullfighting (yes! you read that correctly).
The application of tech solutions to lessen or prevent bloodshed in school shootings.
Dear readers, here is what I want you to know.
It's nothing you didn't already know, possibly.
But it's important to share this little slice of college freshmen paper topics with you anyway, because while you're worried that they aren't developing any sensitivity to their environment, or that they are pursuing a life of empty-headed consumerism, or that they are maturing to become soulless 'bots in a deteriorating world...
They want to save that world. They're WORRIED about it. And even if that world isn't one you necessarily can endorse (I didn't see the angle on the bullfighting topic coming, honestly, but I'm ready to be convinced by a Central American with the preservation of tradition on his mind), it matters to them.
They come from all over the place: Egypt, Russia, Armenia, Germany, Panama, Syria, Canada, the U.S. and Italy.
They could be privileged. They could also not be able to go home (or have a home to go home to, if you noticed at least one country on that list). Even if some of them don't know strife, it is a certainty that their older family members might. And what they do or where they come from doesn't necessarily dictate what they will go on to DO.
Whatever the case, they are delving into the seriousness that is the world they have to live in, one resource, one sentence, one paragraph, and (heaven help us all) one thesis statement at a time.
We all know that paper writing isn't where the world gets saved. And it becomes even more complicated when your English composition professor is urging you to acknowledge opposing arguments, arrange an argument into a linear order, and challenging your 'there's nothing out there on this topic' statements (there almost always is something in the way of scholarly research out there, and they are hugely stressed out when I'm right about that...I often think that any basic research methods course should contain a substantial unit on pure tenacity). Tackling something you're personally passionate about is actually a lot harder than working with a less consequential topic.
I'm not sure that this fact has dawned on them. They are, instead, keen on saving their worlds.
Trying to truly put your hands and your brain around a position worth defending is an important beginning.
I can't tell you what they will become, or what worlds might be saved by any of them, but I can tell you that right here, right now, they are on missions. And the view from my position in all of this - as the pushy enforcer of the clear construction of ideas and persuasive words in meaningful order and context - is pretty damned compelling.
Yes!
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