What is andragogy, and how might the approach help in teaching FYC?

Andragogy is the theory and practice around teaching adult learners. It focuses more on student-driven learning and evaluation than traditional pedagogy. According to the principles of Malcolm Knowles, adults need to know why they are learning something. Relevance has more importance, according to him, in adult comprehension and retention than it does with child learners.

Personally, I am teaching a mixture of adults and “children,” though even the youngest among them seems to benefit from finding relevance and connection to the material. Legally, they are all adults, but in one section I have quite a few students who are well into their late 20s and up to 40. These students have different motivations (to improve their career prospects, to right some wrong, to truly learn a new craft) than my freshmen who are generally more angled toward having the “college experience.” In this way, the older students actively seek to understand why they are learning something. While the idea of relevance is helpful when teaching my younger students, they are still accustomed to learning-because-my-teacher-says-so. They are straddling the divide of secondary education, where grades were the goal over knowledge and even skill. But this doesn’t mean relevance is any less valuable in teaching them, only that the approach is different.

I’m interested, then, in how to bridge this gap. Traditionally, a classroom would not have such a broad range of ages. While their needs are the same, their methods of acquiring knowledge and patience with the material are vastly different. For example, this past week in class I showed a commercial involving a Brady Bunch reference. There was a big discrepancy in the analysis of the commercial based on the generational gap, and what I noticed was that my adult learners were interested in discussing the importance of time-relevant advertising and age-appropriate references, but my younger students would barely engage. Even the conversation about the conversation was not relevant to them. I noticed that the younger they are, the less they think age will come. Would this happen in a classroom of all freshmen? Or, conversely, of all people in their 40s? What connects students, age or stage of life (which are not the same thing)?

Andragogy certainly addresses the immediacy of non-traditional learning needs, the fact that adults have a different perspective on learning because they have a wider perspective on life. This is why it surprises me that much of the scholarship around andragogy focuses on the need for relevance, where I often think that adult learners are more able to see the scope of relevance as wider. They can find their connection to the material without quite so much guidance from the teacher.

Regardless of these inquiries, I’m definitely invested in the idea of student-driven learning. I think it’s one of the most important skills taught at the undergraduate level. One’s education becomes one’s own responsibility, and that’s invaluable at any age, in any classroom.

Teaching Philosophy

“Go ahead and know thyself, but be warned: such knowledge means that battle has commenced.”

- Anthony Lane

The work of teaching is the work of shaping society. The craft of teaching English, particularly literature and creative writing, demands dedication to the idea of education as a form of justice. What could be more equalizing than education? It offers students not only knowledge but opportunity. This is particularly true with literature. As Susan Sontag said, “I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art and literature - a truth in which its opposite is also true.” This notion is liberating for students, especially when they have existed in a secondary education system which consistently values “answers” over conversation.

With all this in consideration, I do not seek to offer my students “answers” or “truth” but rather to let them settle into the life of an intellectual, one in which they can feel comfortable operating from a place of negative capability. I am committed to using literature as a vehicle for helping students erase their preconceived contexts and ill-formed identities and, from that place, they can work to create fresh, engaged, thoughtful literature of their own.

Most of the wonderful, devoted writers I know had an English teacher somewhere along the way say you might be good at this. The best teachers are not only instructive, I believe. They are not merely someone who has information you have yet to access. They are a lens, a filter through which to see your own aptitudes. I approach my teaching with the hope that I will offer students not only knowledge, but how best to process and then share their knowledge. I am particularly inspired by the teaching philosophy of the poet Carolyn Forche, who writes:

“I recognize teaching as my implication in a network of obligation, 

without orientation toward the quest for autonomy which underwrites 

the privileging of the teacher's authority, the student's consumerist choice, 

or the knowledge to be transmitted. I am dedicated to holding the classroom 

open as a space for critical and creative thought.”

When I walked into my first day of teaching at the college level, I had little to no pedagogical preparation. The structure of my Ph.D. was such that I would be studying pedagogic theory concurrently with teaching, not prior to it. My teeth chattered a little. I worried about my outfit. But as soon as I met my students - the real, human situation before me - the nerves subsided. I stared out at a room of faces that mimicked blankness but were actually hungry for me. The effortful pose of freshmen disengagement barely contained their frenzy, their excitement, their notion that college is a place where All Is Possible. Even if they didn’t see it, I could see it. I was already the lens.

The beauty of teaching composition - or any writing course - is that you can easily and subtly offer students information behind the information. The goal of composition, in particular, is to create better readers, better thinkers, who will then naturally become better communicators and - ultimately - citizens. It’s a chain reaction of critical thinking. What I’ve learned as a teacher of composition is that we cannot divorce critical thought from creativity. They are natural sisters in that they both exist to address and reframe reality.

As I’ve stated, he work of teaching is the work of creating society.  Within this framework, I adhere to a strict observance of grammar rules. Many of my students in that first class enjoyed taking a stance against proper English, clear communication, and certainly against engaging with literature on a deeper level. All of this is fear-based identity-creation. I brought in poems each week to prove to them they could understand the all-elusive poetry. We talked about the difference between rhetoric and simple information. If two people are saying, essentially, the same thing, why is one so much more moving? It took me a few weeks to convince them how easily accessed the inaccessible could be, how deeply they could connect with a text if they were flexible in their approach to it. The art of writing is the art of interaction, of emotion, of the intuitions out past basic communication. If we do not have a clear foundation for that, then our most valuable thoughts end up obscured or, worse, lost completely. Another conversation I tend to engage them in is the rupture of language. It is okay to be playful with grammar and spelling and syntax to make a point, but one must understand the origins of something (the English language) in order to effectively toy with it.

As I move on to teach creative writing courses, I would hope to structure my classes such that we would be actively engaged with all kinds of texts (creative, academic, and journalistic) each week in order to fuel our own creative work. I think language needs to butt up against itself, that poets should read technical writing and speechwriters should be reading short stories. Of course it is important in any creative writing course to focus on understanding the genre at hand, but I would be sure to introduce at least a few other genres and encourage my students to find the beauty in them and use them as inspiration for their own work.

I’d start the course with craft discussions about the fear of literature and of poetry in particular. The first chapter of Muriel Rukeyser’s book The Life of Poetry beautifully dissects the “fear of poetry” that many students have, even when they might feel drawn to it, and the excuses many make to distance ourselves from it. I’d love to start the course with a discussion of this essay so that students feel immediately liberated from the confines of poetry as riddle to be solved, as archaic form, as an abstraction. From there, I would assign them to write a poem about fear and obscurity. I think students are more comfortable, when starting out, writing about themselves. It is their own best subject. The discussion of their identities in a broader world context, as citizens, can spring from that. As Rukeyser says, “The angry things that have been said about our poetry have also been said about our time. They are both ‘confused,’ ‘chaotic,’ ‘violent,’ ‘obscure.’” One of the goals of writing is to make sense of reality, to communicate an intuition. And what more interesting place to begin than fear?

Each week would be devoted half to craft discussions like these and half to workshop. There are many different modes of workshop. I plan to structure mine as follows: students send work out at least one week prior to workshop. In class, another student reads the workshoppee’s poem aloud to let the author hear how his or her words sound to a non-authorial ear. Then the class discussion would begin by defining what is literally happening in the poem, moving into what’s working and what needs improvement. The workshopee would be allowed, at the end, to respond briefly and ask any remaining questions he or she might have about the piece. In my experience, this structure is the most beneficial to both the work and the critiquers, because it emphasizes process over criticism.

We’d also have a mid-semester course devoted entirely to revision techniques, one in which I’d emphasize that the generative qualities of revision are as explosive and exciting as the “lightning bolt” of the original poem draft. For example, my teacher Catherine Barnett once had us reformat our poems removing every article and conjunction. The meanings of words are only in relativity to the words around them, and this kind of concision was extremely exciting. We’d also work, in her revision seminar, with anaphora and they way cyclical, repetitive language can lend an air of chant or mantra to a poem that is struggling with finding its central rhythm. I find that often students are too willing to abandon a draft if it seems problematic or their peers are not excited about it in workshop, and a session devoted to revision would help them to be free of this notion, to get as excited about their subsequent drafts as they were about their first.

I also believe in a social-epistemic model of teaching. Obviously this is inherent to the idea of workshop, but I’d take it a step further in requiring my students to engage with each other. I’d have them do an exercise where they send each other postcards throughout the semester with a poem that fills the entire left square. I think this is a fun, challenging way to establish intimacy in the classroom, which fosters better communication. Also, writing does not exist in a vacuum. Every text is in conversation with preceding texts. I want my students to be part of the greater writing world, to continue their discussion of literature outside of the confines of a classroom once or twice a week. I’m also interested in integrating social media into the coursework because I feel that to ignore it is to ignore current modes of reality. As the poet G.C. Waldrep said, “One of the glories of 21st-century human civilization is that the arts have provided a variety of texts, sounds, and images to which one can turn—in love as well as terror, in the face of life as well as death.” I’d take it a step further than this and say that 21st-century human civilization has also provided us with a wealth of media in which to share these texts, sounds, and images.

Words have power. This is indisputable. Teaching creative writing demands commitment to the creation and appreciation of that power, and the acknowledgment of the responsibility that comes with being able to wield it. My teaching seeks to develop students’ sense of their own identity and place in society through active engagement with literature and each other. I believe that students can better understand texts when they are creating their own, and I believe that critical thinking is a function of creativity. The classroom should be a fearless space in which students learn to be forthcoming but also mindful, incisive but also tender. The creative writing classroom should always be a vehicle for change, and the best teachers of writing should also be teaching citizenship.

Based on your teaching philosophy (which may change over time), what are types of assignments you would include in a FYC syllabus?

My main goal in teaching a FYC course would be to emphasize critical thinking and its relationship to reading and writing. I would hope for the format to be recursive and based more in invention and communication than research. Thus my primary assignments would involve personal response papers, collaborative writing, and revision.

I think the main problem students face in any FYC course is a lack of critical reading skills, which results in the inability to format critical responses. I would have us read and discuss multiple texts in class - both as a full class and in small groups - so that they begin to understand why certain texts make them emote. Are they angry at a polemic? Why? Are they moved by a love poem? What did the author do to move them? Why do we laugh, cry, glaze over at different kinds of writing and how did the writer accomplish that? Even in my limited experience teaching 1301 here at Tech, this kind of discussion is always lively and sets a good foundation for further critical thinking.

I would then assign them texts that were different but similar in tone and style to what we discussed in class. I usually think Op-Ed articles are an excellent place to start because students can take a stance (agree/disagree). Once their critical minds start working then we can move further into analysis, which is much more difficult than basic response. At this point in the course, I'd assign short stories and poems that engage the students on an emotional level, helping them to familiarize themselves with literature and feel that it is not some distant, dull genre. They'd have to write reports on rhetorical aspects of these pieces (hearkening back to our in-class discussions of why they feel the way they feel after reading a text and how the author achieved that).

I would also like to allow them to write creatively at this point in the course. I've noticed in many of their BA1s that multiple students indicated an interest in creative expression but felt they were not good enough writers to do so. I think creative writing is an excellent developer for imagination, discussion, and critical thinking skills, so I would allow them the choice between crafting a poem or a flash fiction piece and introduce them to the workshop format. I think workshop is another way to develop critical thinking and discussion skills while also teaching revision skills, kindness in feedback, and community.

The final assignment would be a longer essay on a topic of their choosing, to be selected from the texts we've used in class. They would be able to write a more scholarly paper on one of the Op-Eds we wrote or they could choose a deeper analysis of one of the creative pieces assigned. The ultimate focus would be on their revision of their first drafts (Did they incorporate the feedback intelligently?) and on their ability to be clear. 

Lastly, the course would have a consistent focus on grammar. I believe one cannot effectively communicate if the foundations of that communication are ruptured. We would do at least one grammar exercise per class and have grammar quizzes. I think students are resistant to this because of the nature of modern-day communication (texting, Twitter, valuing visual-over-written-communication) but I believe that they actually want to be well-spoken, especially as they move out into the world and the job force.

Blog Post #2

What is the most difficult thing about teaching writing, and how do you go about teaching that?

I find the most difficult thing about teaching writing to be convincing students of its inherent value. Many of my students think that bare communication is all that matters - as long as they get their point across, the beauty or precision of the method is not interesting. Especially in today’s digital world where students are constantly “writing” via text, email, and social media, it seems they have assimilated the idea of transmission but not literature. Particularly with students who are pursuing finance or engineering, it’s as if it’s “cooler” to be a stilted communicator. What they miss, then, is the profound world of true interaction, of using words to genuinely persuade, incite, and connect. Because they think the surface of the lake is earth, that the snow is hard when they go to step on it and are suddenly buried up to the hips.

How do I teach my students how important writing is? So far, I’ve been working to remind them about times they were moved by words. Even if it takes a minute, I have been able to get them to dig in and figure out what makes them feel, what changes their mind, what makes them attach. For some of them that has been music and film (which leads to an interesting discussion about images and melody and how they connect with words) whereas with others it’s been books - everything from The Fault in Our Stars to Twilight to the Bible. Once I remind them that they have been more influenced by literature than they might even realize, it is easier to get them excited to create their own. I also use an old yoga maxim that a great yoga teacher of mine once used: “You’re already here, in this room, for an hour and a half. Why not do the best you can do?”

Beyond that, I appeal to their sense of vanity and professionalism to some extent. Who wants to be the adult who cannot effectively communicate? I show them various tweets and emails and we discuss how the people come of, how even text language can be a rhetorical choice (trying to look as if one does not care, etc.). We talk about what’s appropriate and not, and instances in their lives (legal matters, job interviews) when precise, intelligent writing would be necessary.

I’m also always asking them why. Why do we read? Why are books banned more often than films, songs, and other media? Why are they, as students, resistant to things that make them feel uncomfortable or challenged? This conversation is always interesting, even when it veers into territory I do not expect.