15.i.08 A Breakthrough

I've been agonizing about Foundations of Verbal Communications and our proposal of a writing center. I spent I guess about six hours yesterday thinking and writing about student topics, persisting stubbornly in a certain line of thought.

What I need to realize, and make really firm, is that FVC is about

listening
speaking
reading
writing

And not MY listening speaking reading writing but about STUDENTS' listening speaking reading writing.

A student oral comment on the first day of class stung because it was so true: on glancing over the assignments, she said, "this is so lame."

***

Last week I borrowed a copy of "Born Into Brothels" from the college library. I watched the movie Thursday night and was absolutely blown away. With minimal equipment and minimal "teaching", Zana Briski positively transforms not only her photography students, but, in large part, herself, her film-making partner Ross Kauffman, and those who, like myself, are ready to receive the messages of the film.

Then this morning I was reading Connors and Glenn's The New St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 1999), specifically an article from 1974 by Roger H. Garrison entitled "One-to-One: Tutorial Instruction in Freshman Composition" (357-379). I was, again, completely blown away. Garrison identifies with clarity and obvious direct knowledge the flaws of the traditional slog-through-the-student-paper-line-by-line approach (like the instructor spending four times as much effort as the student: who is the learner here?), and then, again with great clarity, identifies a more effective method.

I'm sure someone will ask for evidence of results showing effectiveness, and Garrison does not provide this. But I think it is clear that at this point I at least in teaching FVC am flailing about and it would not be amiss to consider a change in method.

So, I see here a possibility for positive change. I have already asked the students for topics, and on this blog the interested reader can find those topics; they have great potential, but we can now move to greater specificity. The stronger writers (based on my experience of them last semester) are already writing out topics with greater specificity than the weaker writers, who struggled for fifteen minutes or so to come up with topics like "Christianity" or "psychology". These are far too general to generate a meaningful essay. So, we are not ready to move on to composition of theses... the topics must be narrowed.

Last semester I made the mistake (as I see it now) of telling the students what their topic should be. Had I been teaching a different course, this might have been fine. I don't think most of the students "bought" my thesis that literacy and liberation are connected; most of them certainly did not find their own liberation through literacy!

Today I will be meeting with the Deans to discuss the possibilities -- strategically and budgetarily -- of a writing center. Before that happens, I must summarize Garrison's article and think about how I will employ it in my class. I must also work out an assignment for PHL 202: Ethics. So, I have my work cut out for the next hour or so.