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Teaching Methodologies
Maintaining an active, experiential teaching environment does not involve simply turning the classroom over to my students. On the contrary, there is a lot of work and planning that goes into creating a foundation that is strong enough for students—undergraduates or graduate TAs—to build upon. I am therefore highly organized in my class planning, responsive to student needs, and flexible in the teaching strategies I employ from day-to-day. I try to anticipate the different paths that students may take through the same material, teach on several levels at once, and recognize when we as a class need to shift gears. I structure my classes so that students learn as a community at the same time as they learn how literature and writing are produced and received by communities. Although I may occasionally have to lead them through material related to technique or historical context, students are entrusted with a large portion of their own learning. In our lives beyond the academy most of our really valuable education takes place when we are unaware that we are indeed learning; this is the situation I try to replicate within the classroom.
All my classes involve extensive use of audio-visual materials (overheads, videos, music, computer-generated presentations) to excite and intrigue students and to present abstract issues in ways with which they can identify. Audio-visual aids often serve as the material for debate or discussion carried out in small groups or amongst the class as a whole. These activities are usually preparatory to a number of writing activities that range from brainstorming ideas on large sheets of butcher paper, through journals and reading responses to interactive activities (peer-review, for example) geared toward the production of formal essays. What links my emphasis upon the audio-visual and the written is a concern that students practice interpretative skills required by various rhetorical practices and the domains in which they appear, that they begin to interrogate these practices and manipulate them to their own ends.
My classes also make extensive use of interactive web sites, class discussion lists and computer labs to both extend and shape classroom discussion, and to dramatize for my students their ability to learn from each other as much as from me. Most importantly, these class components help to improve their analytical and expressive skills. These technologies are not presented as a passive alternative to "real" classroom activities, but are integrated with those activities. Hence the discussion that takes place on our listservs is highly structured—albeit no less spontaneous for that—and often serves as the starting point for classroom activities. Likewise the class website becomes the focus of activities that involve us moving into computer labs, working with resources available on the site, and then expanding to consider additional web-based resources relevant to the thematic concerns of the class.
My students sometimes complain about being made to work hard and being faced with tough intellectual problems and challenging alternative perspectives but I have learned that if you do not provide these things they will never forgive you. And as my teaching evaluations demonstrate, if students can see that there is a reason for the difficulty then their complaints soon translate into appreciation for having had a teacher believe in their capabilities.