To start off, I felt like this second chapter of Boice had a lot of useful practical advice that I could employ in both my teaching as well as in my own studies. While I was reading his section of ten "Stepwise Exercises for Facilitating Imagination," I couldn't help but think about the long, arduous process of writing comps in just a few short years. Is it weird that these steps made me feel less nervous? I felt like they were all really applicable and smart ways to engage with the crazy amounts of reading that we will do. These steps also got me thinking about possible creative venues to "engage in a writerly conversation with yourself" (56), "readying yourself to join the conversation of your genre" (55), and "alternate prewriting with prose writing to avoid the danger of staying in prewriting too long." During my MFA, several PhD student friends decided to start blogs while they were studying for their comps and/or writing their dissertations. They posted reflective, engaging pieces after they read a book or article, and while I often didn't read these posts, I would sometimes scan them and notice that colleagues would post comments or ask questions that deepened the blogger's exploration of this reflection. I remember thinking I should keep this in mind for when I get to that stage of my own academic career. Likewise, I wonder if I could use blogging in my class to get students thinking about their readings (such as we're doing now!). I want to teach a composition class with a first unit that centers on poetry, and I think blogging about poems the students read could be a cool way to get them to think about them a little deeper. I feel like overall, blogging to engage in a dialogue with yourself and others is practical and useful, while also being very low-stake. It gets your thoughts out there in the public with low consequences if you don't have it exactly "right" just yet.
In the Rodgers piece, I loved the quote "education is a verb rather than a noun," defined by John Dewey (846). I think this concept fits in nicely with Unit I, since we are using an open-form and asking our students to take risks they wouldn't ordinarily take. I did my first day of conferences today, and I was pleased to see that several of my students concluded their papers with more of a question of what's to come versus summing everything up in a nice, neat little bow (which I always steer them away from). A lot of them recognized that their writing careers are just beginning, and they were self-aware enough to know that this journey was going to continue to develop and progress both positively and negatively throughout their college careers. I think it's great that we start out with an open-form assignment, because, after all, so much of our job as comp teachers is to "un-teach" all of those rules and regulations they learned in high school. Most of them, so far, seem definitely willing to break away.
Anne, I like the idea of doing a first unit centering on poetry. I wonder if I could do a similar unit on fiction, looking at short stories? Or even prose poems/flash fiction like Jamaica Cincade. It would be a good easy transition into the class, since many of my students have conceded to "enjoying" open-form writing, but that coming from high school, they're more familiar with academic closed-form papers.
ReplyDeleteIt's so interesting -- when we discussed how they approached their first informal assignment, which was an open-form manifesto-type piece, one student said that the lack of guidelines made her "very anxious," but that once she started writing the assignment she really liked that there weren't as many "rules."