Although I did a fair amount of workplace training throughout the years I worked in marketing, I did not begin teaching formally—in a college classroom environment—until I became a part of the MA program in English here at UNLV in Fall 2006. During my first semester as a graduate assistant, I was responsible for teaching one section of ENG 101 Composition I. (I served the other part of my department commitment in an administrative capacity as the Composition Coordinator, otherwise I would have been assigned to teach two sections of ENG 101.) Looking back on my first semester teaching from the vantage point of three-and-a-half years later, I feel like I made a number of significant mistakes that, perhaps, I could have avoided had circumstances (i.e. my training, mentoring, prior experience, etc.) been even just a little different.
As I have written elsewhere, one thing I did that first semester of teaching that benefitted neither me nor any of my students was taking an entirely negative and overly prescriptive approach to grading and commenting on the essays my students turned in for evaluation. Without even realizing it, I fell—all-too easily—into the trap of feeling like it was my job to point out every single little thing that was wrong with my students’ papers. In red ink, no less. It was exhausting work, of course, but I felt I had little choice given how “bad” I thought the papers were. And I thought I was doing the right thing by them by being so anal-retentive about their work. But I was taken aback—and hurt, too, if truth be told—when one of my students commented on his/her teaching evaluation (and on RateMyProfessor—which, after reading about myself at that site, I could not bring myself to look at it again; and still haven’t looked at since the end of fall term 2006) that I was the kind of professor who was never happy with anything. Reading that, I realized that was not how I wanted to be, or to be perceived as, as far as my teaching is concerned.
When I came across an article on facilitative versus directive response on student essays that I had to read as part of the ENG 791 seminar, it was, for all intents and purposes, too late for me to make any changes that would make any difference in the first college composition course I taught, at least as far as how I was responding to my students’ essays. But that article stood out in my mind because it—unlike the minimal mentoring and training I had received in teaching college composition—showed me that there was another way to evaluate student essays that would, hopefully, encourage them to produce substantive revisions and without making them feel like I was unhappy with everything I saw in their writing and that their work would never be up to my, or any other professor’s, par.
I did not teach again until fall term 2008 because, beginning in spring 2007, I moved into administration as the Composition Coordinator for the entirety of my graduate assistantship (i.e. the full 20 hours a week work requirement). In fall 2008, I did teach two sections of ENG 101, and I felt I had a much, much better experience teaching that time around than I did when I first taught ENG 101. I incorporated the use of more facilitative responses on my students’ essays and did my best to avoid making prescriptive and negative comments altogether. I want to think I was pretty successful at this avoidance, and that both me and my students enjoyed those two sections of ENG 101 far more than me and my students from 2006. Not incidentally, teaching ENG 101 again in fall 2008 was when I realized—after I relaxed a bit as a teacher and stopped holding myself and my students to such impossibly high standards—I liked reading my students’ essays and seeing where they were in terms of knowledge as human beings. And that was a very cool feeling.
In spring of 2009, I taught two sections of ENG 102 Composition II for the first time, in a computer classroom (CBC C311). Even after working for two years in the department as the Composition Coordinator with Dr. Brown, Carol, Elaine, and Ruby, and after having gone through ENG 791 and after having taught a few sections of ENG 101, I feel I (and I suspect most of my first-time-teaching-102 colleagues, as well) was woefully unprepared to teach ENG 102. The goal of ENG 102 here at UNLV is to teach students how to produce a fairly substantial research paper; so it is a very different course from ENG 101 where the goal is to introduce students to various types of generic expository writing in such forms as narrative, definition, process analysis, evaluation, and problem-solution essays.
With ENG 102, I was given, basically, a shell of a syllabus, a textbook, and my section assignments . . . and then thrown into the deep end of the pool. I was left to my own devices as far as figuring out how best to divvy up the required readings from the textbook, how best to approach assigning and teaching the four essays ENG 102 students are required to write, how best to incorporate the technology of a computer classroom into the course . . . and in a way my students would truly benefit from (as opposed to just coming to class twice a week to play on Facebook or something along those lines), and how best to teach the process of beginning, executing, and completing a research paper. There was no mentoring or oversight. Needless to say, I don’t feel I was all that successful at teaching ENG 102 my first time out.
After teaching ENG 102 in spring 2009, I moved into teaching ENG 231 World Literature I. So I have not had a chance to get back into the ENG 102 classroom where I could begin to refine my approach to teaching that course based on what I learned that semester I first taught that class. Given that we are in a seminar on Contemporary Composition Theory, I don’t want to spend any more time on my World Literature teaching experiences—even though those include assigning essays to my students in those classes. That being the case, some of the questions/items that intrigue me as far as possible research topics on composition include:
· What is the best way to respond to student writing? Using a directive/prescriptive approach? Using a facilitative approach? Which creates true student involvement learning and encourages writing beyond the composition classroom?
· How can I best teach my students to do substantive—rather than superficial editing of their essays? In other words, how can I best teach my students to be able to rely on themselves rather than me as their teacher or their student colleagues as peer reviewers in order to improve their essays?
· Given that, here at UNLV, we teach Composition I by having students produce various kinds of generic writing (i.e. narrative, process analysis, evaluation, and problem solution), I am left to wonder if there aren’t more relevant (to the lives our students actually lead in today’s world) genres we could use to teach them writing . . . and would doing so be beneficial?
· How much modeling of the research paper process should I be doing as the professor of Composition II?
· Should I let students in Composition II research on whatever topic interest them? Or should I be more directive and limit the class to one topic that they (and I) can focus on for the entire semester?
· Is there a way to make the research students do in Composition II—with the end being the production of a substantial paper—relevant to the lives our students lead as denizens of 21st century America/Nevada?
As intrigued as I am by the above questions (all of which I feel I am going to need to address in some form as my career continues), I am even more compelled by the idea of how to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom? For me, such an inquiry raises other questions and issues. These include (for starters):
· Just because I am a gay man, does that mean I have the right to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom?
· By the same token (because I am a gay man), don’t I have the obligation (to myself and other GLBQT people everywhere) to incorporate Queer Theory into my composition classroom?
· Is outing myself to undergraduates and colleagues a path I really want to follow?
· Can teaching composition from a queer perspective be beneficial to my students? To me as their professor?
· Does Queer Theory have a place in the composition classroom?
For me, at this particular moment, the idea of incorporating Queer Theory into my composition pedagogy is where I feel the strongest sense of dissonance . . . and possibility.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is very rich reflection that leads you to raise many questions about how to teach mostly ENG 102, ENG 101, ENG 232. Then you shift gears toward the end to focus more on your personal interest in queer theory. Any of these topics would be appropriate, of course. We've already discussed briefly alternative forms that could be taught in 101. We have not discussed yet how to teach researched writing, but there is a lot out there on the subject. You could even find articles on "how to teach literature with writing" or "how to teach literature writing" (notice the slightly different emphases). As for queer theory, I think it is very interesting and relevant, as we discussed in class, generally falls under the topic of cultural studies approaches to composition. I went to Comppile and used the keyword "queer" and it turned up 59 records. As we already mentioned Kopelson, I noticed a few articles by Jonathan Alexander that look noteworthy, including Alexander, Jonathan; Michelle Gibson, “Queer composition(s): Queer theory in the writing classroom” (2004, Journal of Advanced Composition). That journal, JAC, tends to focus more on capital T "Theory" and cultural studies-type theory and pedagogy. Here's another: Monson, Connie; Jacqueline Rhodes, “Risking queer: Pedagogy, performativity, and desire in writing classrooms” ( 2004 JAC). Obviously you are still in the exploratory phase with a question along the lines of "What are the possibilities of queer theory in the writing classroom?" which can be narrowed more with some research and reading. Sounds like a good project.
ReplyDelete