After taking several contemporary pedagogy courses, some general graduate-level education classes and some specific to the discipline of composition, I have learned the value of disrupting standard, age-worn pedagogical approaches, static classroom setups, rigid barriers between student and teacher, and stagnant values inherent within the field of writing and writing education.
I spend the great majority of both semesters of freshman composition reviewing the facets of rhetoric, or the art of public discourse. This is not to be confused with public speaking; my students only engage in oral presentations once per semester. However, they are required to learn how to critically analyze given texts/videos/visuals for their inherent rhetorical methods of persuasion-- mainly, they must identify and explain appeals to ethos, pathos, and/or logos. They are also required to define the purpose, exigence, intended audience, and constraints of each text, video, and/or visual. The basic expectation is for the students to deconstruct a given artifact, identify each part, explain how it works on its own, and then explain how each of the parts works together to achieve the author's purpose.
My students don't typically perform well on their first rhetorical analysis paper. They are so caught up in the jargon of rhetoric- exigence, ethos, pathos, logos, constraints-- that they dedicate more effort on using these terms at all rather than ensuring that they are using them correctly. In future classes, I plan to disrupt this way of thinking about rhetorical appeals by simplifying these terms and making them feel less like complicated and intimidating jargon to my students. For example, rather than calling appeals to fact logos appeals, I will refer to them as "factual appeals" or "appeals to data, statistics, logic, or reasoning." Instead of using the term "constraints," I will ask students to consider what challenges the author faced when writing this text or what barriers they had to contend with during composition.
Tanya Sasser suggests numerous ways that college composition teachers can disrupt the pedagogy of writing in her Remixing College English blog, specifically in her entry entitled Disrupting the First-Year Composition Course. Sasser explains that her methods of disrupting freshman composition include: questioning the efficacy and function of thesis statements, problematizing the research process, re-thinking what determines whether or not a source is reliable, and adapting citation styles for writers composing in digital spaces. While these are all approaches I plan to apply in my next course plan, I particularly enjoyed the emphasis she placed on JiTT, or "Just in Time Teaching." This is a pedagogical strategy that relies on student feedback; essentially, students do the necessary homework and complete a pre-class assignment (freewrite or forum). The instructor reads over these assignments and allows student input to shape the class and determine what subjects need to be emphasized over others. Ideally, the instructor uses student feedback and answers from the pre-class assignment to foster class discussion. Sasser explains that "students tend to experience a deeper change in knowledge about writing methods when they are asked to access resources and receive instruction on skills as they are needed." Next time I teach research methods or rhetorical analysis, I can use the JiTT approach; rather than structuring a rigid "knowledge banking" course plan that starts with "the basics" and escalates into "the hard stuff," I can structure my lessons around the knowledge the students need at the time that they actually need it and can apply it.
Sasser includes a link to a Google Doc that encapsulates some of the practical ideas she gleaned from Mill's Kelly's session on disruptive pedagogy for THATcamp. Some of the ideas from this document I am actively applying to my next course plan/ my ever-evolving pedagogical approach include:
- Having my students recognize their audience, describe the members in detail, then write against them. This will emphasize the importance of audience awareness.
- Assigning a freewrite that requires students to write in purposefully unclear and confusing ways. This will ideally make them a little more aware of syntax, sentence structure, and clarity problems in their own writing.
- Likewise, assigning prompts for entirely plagiarized papers or papers that are fraught with grammatical, syntactical, spelling, stylistic and mechanical errors. In order to execute this properly, they have to comprehend the basic rules and guidelines for each of these categories.
- Encouraging students to argue why a topic is insignificant or irrelevant. This will encourage them to critically analyze whether an argument or a piece of evidence is appropriate, interesting, effective, or relevant.
- Requiring students to prepare the worst possible presentation ever. This requires them to recognize and internalize good presentation skills-- they will have to know what constitutes a good presentation to make a bad one.
