A Sense of Doubt blog post #3066 - Pedagogy & Rhetoric: Giving Students Agency and Voice
Here's something I wrote on my guiding principles as a teacher.
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First-year composition: some of the guiding principles that shape your curriculum and teaching practices within the discipline of composition.
My number one guiding principle is forging strong relationships with students.
The rhetoric that we ask our students to practice we should practice ourselves, and so, that’s my first claim, for which I have evidence.
- Conferences
- getting to know them
- showing that I care
- trying to foster their agency and the development of their voice in what they write and what they choose to write about
- If I show them that I am on their side, that I care, that I have empathy, then this rapport usually happens organically.
That said, my guiding principles are to practice what I preach (and I do preach; I am zealot), to practice kindness and empathy, to model effective communication and negotiation with students, and to constantly re-evaluate my practices to improve and to best meet the needs of students.
Next claim, Teachers of writing should be actively writing themselves. I have always prided myself on being a working and publishing writer and apply my experiences gained as a writer to the class room. I have worked to bust that old chestnut adage that those who do, they do, and those who can’t, they teach. I hate that one. I have written professionally and published for many years. I currently publish a blog, which sometimes has original writing of my own in it, and I draw from those experiences as I teach. Like many faculty here at LCC, both in Lang & Lit and college wide, I literally practice the skills I preach and teach.
Because I change my approach and am constantly re-evaluating every aspect of my pedagogy, I have been on a journey as an educator that has evolved the more I learn and experience.
In attempting to practice what I preach from the start of my career as a graduate assistant teaching grammar, I was very much a prescriptivist, which fed my OCD tendency for things being just so. There are rules and so follow them, dammit. However, soon I became swayed to the Dark Side and felt the lure of descriptivism, as I could see language evolving and some of the evolution I really liked (I was a big fan of the verb “dis” as in disrespect).
These dual mindsets were soon at war with my attempt to practice my own writing methods and philosophies as I began to teach writing. I like rules (fewer and less, the Oxford Comma) and yet I liked dynamic change and creativity, fluidity, uncontrolled self-expression. I agree that many (all?) aspects of our “Standard American Academic English” are white supremacist in origin, and this is something about which I have done much self-discovery in the ways these origins have impacted my teaching.
As for prescriptivism vs descriptivism, when I discovered Peter Elbow and Donald Murray, and I felt that a new term defined my pedagogy: expressivist. I adopted freewriting, revision, and peer response methods as well as a conference system to have discussions with writers to learn their aims, their feelings, their obstacles. I liked the “anti-textbook” counter-culture movement to the traditional paradigm touted heavily by my graduate school professors. I drew ideas from Elbow’s book Writing Without Teachers, such as the process of writing like cooking (48-76) and the idea of the emerging center of gravity (35-37) - MORE NOTES HERE.
These were methods from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. I added multi-stepped process approaches in assignments, journal systems for free-writing and exploration, grouped communities of writers, self-reflection on process and product, and many of methods to allow students to discover their own voices and to grow as writers.
Knowing my path from prescriptivism to descriptivism to expressivism informs my journey of adaptation, becoming an instructor who constantly evaluates and revises his courses, much like the mantra I preach to students: “writing is never done, it’s just due.” After years of instruction in pre-college courses and online for profit schools with dubious standards, I moved to Washington and was hired at LCC in 2018. Never before have I felt like such a fish out of water. Though I constantly sought to improve my pedagogy, I felt like I knew this job, I knew composition, I knew rhetoric well enough (though as a life long learner I knew I could always learn more). But LCC was a new experience for me. Suddenly, I was welcomed to a department that worked together, valued all voices, and invited adjuncts to join in the process. Suddenly, I felt like an imposter, as if I knew nothing, as I gobbled up all that I could in learning from my new colleagues. And that’s when I decided to join two other instructors in throwing out grades and adopting the anti-racist assessment ecology of Labor-Based Grading for my English 101 course.
And so,
- prescriptivism to descriptivism to expressivism and beyond (more to find and learn)
- My current colleagues have helped me to grow and change more than ever before in my career
– I believe in student agency, communication, empathy, relationships
- Learning over grades, learning over earning “points”
- GROWTH MINDSET
- Life long learner - inspire others to be the same
- CRITICAL THINKING - helping students to learn how to think critically as the central skill in all that I do.
SOURCES
Google - Expressivists Writing
Google - Peter Elbow
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2307.11 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2930 days ago
- Days ago = 2930 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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