This week's readings have me thinking deeply about how I will change the way I teach my EN 254 "Writing and Communities" course in coming semesters. While I absolutely fell into Gruchow's "Rosewood Township" and was even sad to see the chapter coming to a close, the projects that KCAC offers on their website and the evidence of community involvement in LeeAnn Lands' essay are pretty motivational.
The five themes that KCAC teachers use for their classes, reclaiming displaced heritages, cultivating homelands, educating for citizenship, building cities, and shifting landscapes, converging peoples, are unique enough that teachers who select one or more theme for their course inevitably make a marked impact on their student learners. However, I am skeptical about the practicality of how this would work-- in light of the obvious trouble of our "public" education and the expectation of assessment and proof of individual development toward a particular goal. I suppose in some way I am especially grateful that I get to teach college students-- at least I'm not preparing them for a state or national assessment exam. Instead, I am tasked with meeting a set of ACE requirements or, in my mind, a set of personal goals that I have for them as a teacher.
Among the strands that KCAC teachers use as themes for their classrooms, I think I find "Educating for Citizenship" and "Shifting Landscapes, Converging Peoples" to be the two themes I would most likely teach with. My goal for students this semester is for them to re-examine their beliefs about the uses and values in their community and the communities of others. I've forced them to slog through Freire, and despite a few comments about the leftist nature of his writing, I felt like I got a few good points thrown out there-- but I don't think I really made the point about social literacy-- about engaging the local community, about learning and thinking in a way that supports independent (and group, more importantly) thought to spur community action. Hmmm....
My other preoccupation as a teacher is asking my students to examine difference and, particularly since we're in Nebraska, which under other circumstances might be a significantly smaller state, re-evaluate what and how they know. Maybe by focusing on "Shifting Landscapes, Converging People" I could ask my students to see their own local space (the way Gruchow did) and look at the way it has changed over a century, and how communities have evolved and changed with new people and cultures moving in. I think students who are local to Lincoln would be able to discuss this at length, as would students who are from areas like Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
In the classroom resources for KCAC, I found a number of lessons that I would have eagerly done with my eighth graders, and there are a handful that I can see myself using this semester, and in future semesters with UNL students. More than anything though, as I'm about to really draft out the Service Learning component for my students final project, I'm thinking of new ways to get them to think about the communities they might go out and engage in.
Kelly: I am looking forward to seeing how you & your students will design the service learning portion of your Writing in Communities course! Your third paragraph above certainly raises the question of sequence on these kinds of themes/activities -- do we first have our students "slog through Friere" (as you put it) and then guide them to enact a project like that in our community? or do we reverse that, and first immerse them in a community project and then back out of that into "theory" for what they are doing, like Friere's? I think Lee Ann Lands' teaching really does something like the second -- she immerses them in the lynching photo archive and the project of designing a museum space, and that immersion backs into the understanding of the wider issues.
ReplyDeleteWhat I can't ever predict, for a given set of students, is which approach to take. Some classes seem to design really good community projects after they've done some theory, but other classes get hung up on the leftist agenda and shut down. Alternatively, some classes find engagement in an interesting project leads them to ponder accounts of why we do such things deeply, while other classes don't find the project I set up for them all that interesting. Ideally, the community project and the theory go on at the same time. (We face this every year in figuring out the writing exchange between my preservice education course and local schools -- which you and Sally are experiencing for the first time this year.)
My office mate in graduate school, lo these decades ago, used to say "we always design this year's class for last year's students -- but this year's class is this year's students." Dexter saw this as a terminable design flaw in even the best teaching practice -- which is why he also claimed teaching at best is always an improvisational art.
~Robert
First, Kelly, I want to respond to a question you asked me last week in response to my post. (I wish you could tag people in these posts like on facebook, so that others would know when you are "talking" to them). You pondered what might happen to the first girl featured in the last NETV segment on Albion high school students. How funny you should pick her out to ask about because I can tell you what she's doing now! She's my best friend's cousin and I've sat on the top of the very same grain bin from which the opening aerial shot of the farm was taken! God bless Nebraska, where you can't even take online class in Lincoln and watch a 5 year old video from the web, without stumbling into someone you know! Anyway, to answer your question, Laura (the girl) is now married and living in Iowa (for her husband's job) working in ag marketing, while they "make enough money to come back to Nebraska and buy their own farm someday." Her brother, the one with the twins, now farms with her dad full time and the farm will be his when Dad retires. She's one of the rare few who is sticking in out in family farming. Nonetheless, I see your point about the take over industrial farming and the drastic shift in agriculture toward "agribuisness." While they used to have a fairly diverse herd of livestock and variety of crops, they now farm mostly corn and beans and have only hogs because the big farms make it impossible for them to keep their dairy herd and make any money. Anyway, I just thought it was fun that I could actually answer your preponderance.
ReplyDeleteAs for this week's post, first I' want to say "Amen!" to Robert's comments, particularly the trouble of teaching this years students based on last year's. I also agree with you about the applicability "Educating for Citizenship" and "Shifting Landscapes, Converging Peoples" threads. The ideas you have about how to intigrate these into your classroom seem very "doable." They remind me of a project I did in middle school in which 10 or so, of us students were selected to a photography project of Omaha to document its change over the years. We took a day off school and went to take photos all over the city of areas that we thought might look very different in 5 years. The idea had been that we would then gather again as seniors in high school and revisit the same places and write about and compile a booklet about the changes we'd seen. As it turned out we weren't able to regather ourselves as seniors, but the middle school took another group of eighth graders to take photos of the same places we had 5 years earlier. In the end we all got a copy of the book that was created. I remember this as being the first time I was really made aware of urban sprawl and the good and the bad of "progress." It was a fairly juvenile activity, but I wonder how we might do something similar and more "advanced" with our older students.
Tag for Nicole:
ReplyDeleteHow grand that you know Laura, and what she's doing now! I think it says more about the small pool of active family farmers in NE than NE itself. I wish her & husband luck in earning enough to buy their own spread.
Kelly, your post made me think of discussions I've had with my 254 students. You write that one of your goals is to encourage students to "re-evaluate what and how they know." I like the way you phrase that. I'm hoping that the projects in 254 will (re)focus how the students think about what they know. Dr. Brooke posted a cool project idea on my blog last week (Thanks, Dr. Brooke) that incorporates pictures in his "What's Just About to Vanish" project.
ReplyDeleteBut, like you, I see the difficulty in trying to design projects that appeal to different groups of students. Even in a really great class discussion there seems to always be a couple of blank stares or inattentive faces. What do they need to get engaged in these important issues?