Just as there are different kinds of elephants. Indian with small ears and African with large ears there are different kinds of tensions in two-year colleges. As a long-time adjunct in rhetoric and composition. I have seen a lot of these tensions and have wondered how much of my job required resolving them. This year as an adjunct in two very different systems. I have discovered part of the answer.
College 1 where I have been an adjunct for six years is in a fairly affluent neighborhood. The students are usually from middle class or upper middle class homes and school systems with about a fifth being the first to attend college in their families. Despite the socioeconomics of the area many of my students are single parents who are trying to go to school while working and caring for their families.
College 2 where I have been an adjunct only this semester is in a lower socioeconomic area. Ninety-five percent are first generation college students. Just last week while we were in class a woman across the street was murdered in the parking lot. It is neither a safe nor a hopeful neighborhood. And yet the students there many of them also parents and working full-time are attempting to make a change for a better future.
Both colleges have built computer labs where the students can work. I teach all my classes at both colleges in computer-equipped classrooms. But College 2 requires that the students be introduced to the computer in freshman composition and that the teacher provide proof that this has been done. I was told this proof is for SACS which is concerned that general education requirements are actually doing what they are said to be doing. “We don’t want to have our accreditation downgraded over this like Texas Tech’s was. They’re on probation,” my chair told me.
The proof is not the issue here though I am glad it was necessary. It will help fill my portfolio. That’s a recommendation made to me by College 2’s chair. “Keep documentation of student learning and student outcomes. File it. When you are applying for full-time positions you already have it at hand.”
What made a difference in my classroom however was the requirement that the students be introduced to the computer. As a new teacher on campus as an adjunct with colleagues who were strangers. I did not know what this meant. As the wife of a computer programmer. I may have taken the requirement a little farther than it was intended to go. But doing so brought the students into full use of the computers in a way they never had imagined before my class.
At College 1 even the first-generation college students have MySpace and Facebook pages. They surf the net with consummate ease and text each other in class just to see how often I can catch them. I sometimes think. They type just as fast as I do and I made my living as a secretary for a while. They know how to google what blogs are and they are comfortable on the net.
My College 2 students are not like that. I have one student who has never typed anything in his life before my class. I have one student out of 75 on MySpace. I have one student who has a blog. None of them are on Facebook. These students have to be taught how to use Microsoft Word not exactly what I envisioned freshman composition to be doing although College 1 had difficulty with this also when we updated the software. So when the school mandated teaching computer use. I decided that the students needed to show competencies that were the equivalent to what my other students at College 1 might show.
I began with a discussion of search engines. We surfed the net for images to go with our readings on art in the textbook. We surfed for the advertisements discussed in our text. We looked up the answers to questions that were generated by other readings. “Why do women wear high heels?” and “Why should anyone study art?”
I wrote up what I found and created a new blog www davisenglish com. I introduced the students to it showing them the additional information I had added to what we had discussed in class and defined a blog as a site that contains information created by a person or group that is frequently updated and often personal. That was the beginning.
Then I went online and found several candidate quizzes. It is a presidential election year and I thought that the students ought to know who was running even if they chose not to vote. This was before most of the candidates had dropped out of the race. The students took the quizzes to find out which candidates they most closely agreed with.
They were surprised. So was I. A student who likes to say he is radical matched with Huckabee. Some students’ top picks were on opposite sides of the political fence. Thus began our politics paper which was a compare/contrast with sources.
To bring them up to speed on blogs the students checked out Carnegie Mellon’s list of 100 must read blogs http://www cs cmu edu/~jure/blogs/. We divided the list up in each class so that each student looked up two different blogs. At this point they were attempting to determine which blogs were still active and which blogs might be posting about politics. As classes we examined the blogging list.
The students were a little disgusted actually by some of those Carnegie Mellon said were must reads. “This is a cat blog!” was one student’s protest. Several of the blogs were no longer functioning or did not consider anything remotely political.
Regardless of what they found or how they felt about it the students now had a list of what someone who ought to know considered good blogs. And they had seen at least two that were functioning a requirement I added when I found that some of the blogs were already defunct.
After that they were told to find six good sources off the internet. They were to find three blog sources each on two candidate and those candidates’ positions on something the student cared about. They could refer back to the quizzes if they didn’t remember what the different issues were but most of them had no trouble remembering and identifying a topic that was relevant to them.
Using those sources the students then composed a compare/contrast paper that examined the two candidates’ positions on the issue. These papers were substantive. The students were not always great writers but they had chosen a topic they cared about and they are new to the privilege of voting. Most of them were interested in what the candidates had to say. So the compare/contrast paper was relevant to them.
In addition because they were all writing on similar topics there was a lot of conversation before and after class about the issues. When the students did not understand something they came to me. It was the first time I felt like I was teaching political science but it was fascinating. And thankfully several of my students who had not been registered went in and registered in time to vote in the primaries. (I had announced the last day to register in the syllabus and in class.) They came into class after the primaries were over and said. “I voted.” “We voted.” “Did you vote?” It was exciting to see them get involved in a way they had not considered doing before.
Working on the compare/contrast paper in this way engaged the students not only with each other and with the political process but also with a larger community who are educated about who is running and what they stand for. It included them in a discourse community who not only could talk about politics but did. And it gave them arguments for their opinions that they might not have had previously.
After that with the students more comfortable with computers. I solicited their areas of expertise and interest. First. I asked them to write down twenty things they were good at. In the beginning there was some confusion but I explained that this could be anything. I told them they didn’t even have to enjoy it if they were good at it. I gave them as an example the information that I am quite good at doing laundry. I don’t like it but I’m good at it.
When I made clear that the competencies did not have to be academic they got busy. Some of the students filled a two-column page with things they were good at. One of the advantages to doing this exercise was that the students saw that I valued their abilities. I didn’t ask them if they had competencies; I assumed they did and asked them to tell me what those competencies were.
After everyone had time to write. I asked the students to go through and mark those items they were interested in writing about. These. I informed them were the brainstorming parts of our prewriting for our next assignment.
That is where I left it that day. When I took up the lists though. I was surprised by both the number of items and the variation of expertise even within a single list. Students listed competencies that included personal professional and academic skills. They mentioned caring for children assisting the disabled and interaction with others. They listed typing sales and purchasing knowledge. They said they were good at writing essays taking history tests and using the library.
Another advantage to this exercise was it let them see their whole life as integrated. I wasn’t looking at them only as students but as parents and employees as children and friends. They responded very positively to creating this list. They told me later that they were encouraged by this and they responded well to my expectations by coming up with multiple areas of expertise.
From the lists they composed. I asked them to pick an area of expertise that they did enjoy. I suggested this might be what family members requested their advice on. Or what the courts said were their strengths. I suggested strongly that they choose something they knew about and enjoyed or something they were very interested in. Then I had them search out good links on the net over those subjects.
I gave them a few guidelines. They needed to have at least six websites on a single topic. They were to collect the web addresses of those sites which are called links and email those to an account they could access from school. Because I said they needed at least six links everyone only had six links. If I had suggested higher grades for higher numbers of links they would have found more. (How do I know? I had offered the option of more work for more points before on other assignments.)
I also said they must choose their links off multiple pages of the search engine. “Do not take the first six sites that come up on Google.” Most of them listened. One used a different search engine and appeared to have thought that using Yahoo instead of Google meant he had permission to pick the first six sites. I was very careful to explain that was not an accurate understanding of the assignment.
They had five days to come up with those six links. We had already discussed web addresses also known as URLs the meaning of the word link and ad links. Then we had a short introduction to HTML. I explained to them that being able to say they had used HTML would let employers know they had more than surfing ability on the net. The reason I was teaching it to them was that I wanted them to be able to put the links in with their own titles. When they realized that the newer version of Wordpress which I used for a classroom-related blog created hyperlinks most of them opted out of the use of HTML. Some of them though tried it. Regardless of whether they used it or not all of them were introduced to it.
I explained that when they came back to class they would be creating a post a composition for the internet. It would consist of a title of their choosing clearly related to their topic the six links and two to three sentence descriptions of the information found in each link. I had created link posts for my literature course with good sources on Gulliver’s Travels and for Technical Writing on writing manuals and procedures. I showed these to the students as examples and they were posted on the blog so the students could refer to them at need.
This assignment was the hardest post that I assigned. I told the students that up front. Once they jumped this hurdle the other posts would be easier.
Why did I start with the hardest? There were many reasons. I wanted them to know they could do something different and difficult. If there were a lot of difficulties. I would have time to work through them. This was the first post all but two of my students had ever created. I wanted to have time to discuss both the quality of the links and the quality of the descriptions they wrote to identify the links if there was need. Also as it was nearing the end of the semester. I wanted the work to get easier when other classes typically crammed.
Fortunately the students were overall very clear on what a links post should look like; it could have been because of their earlier searches or the samples available on the website or the clarity of my directions (I would certainly hope for that). The post was a relatively trouble free project in terms of teacher preparation and remediation especially considering the level of previous computer fluency among the student population in my classes.
With these posts I made clear an expectation of shared discourse. I told the students to look at other people’s posts and be prepared to comment on them. I asked for substantive comments not simply one-word notes. I mentioned in an offhand way that the language and content should be appropriate for a college assignment. We did discuss the level of formality for the comments defining those as being less circumscribed than an essay. The students were happy to be able to ply their contractions with impunity.
The second post which the students created was a commentary post. This post was supposed to be on a subject they knew a lot about and felt comfortable writing about. I suggested that their compare/contrast paper on the political stance of candidates or their research paper arguing for one side of a controversial issue could be fodder for the post.
To ensure that everyone brought those papers with them to use as a reference in case they were stuck. I gave that as an assignment and counted it as a quiz grade. Every student brought their papers. I am fairly sure it was the easiest quiz grade they earned from me all semester.
I did not assign a topic for the commentary post but most of the students chose to compose the post using their papers as starting points. I did not ask the students why they chose those topics. It may be that they felt more fluent in these areas since two versions of those papers had already been created or they may have felt those would be safe topics. I do not mean safe in terms of approval since I said almost anything would be acceptable as long as it was not X-rated. Instead I mean that they may have felt a certain level of articulation would be expected and since they had already created compositions on those topics it acted as a prewriting exercise thus requiring less work for a suitable level of complexity. That was the reason I suggested bringing the earlier papers; I wanted the students to know they could write because they already had. We were just going to use a new medium here.
We finished up the class writing short blog posts such as the six-word autobiography and an explanation and the six-word epitaph with explanation and commenting on each other’s posts. They enjoyed this and the facility with which they composed their posts and comments let me know that the introduction to the computer had been successful.
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Related article:
http://www.teachingcollegeenglish.com/2008/11/05/an-informal-discussion-of-how-computer-use-can-be-made-accessible/
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