I'm building a new weblog called THE POPULAR UNCANNY. It's a supplement of sorts for my upcoming non-fiction title from Guide Dog Books by the same name.

The book is a critical study of theories of the Uncanny/"das Unheimliche" as they appear in advertising, film, bestsellers, and online. Chapters include examinations of such topics as the icon of the dismembered hand in the history of horror cinema, and a treatment of the advertising world's "Doublemint Twins" as uncanny doppelgangers. (The Popular Uncanny, btw, was originally my doctoral dissertation at the University of Oregon.)

While the entries in the new blog will tend to lean toward the "academic" side and may refer to theories not all readers will be familiar with, my hope is that the blog will keep my research fresh and fun while also giving me a place to muse about the weirdness in pop culture -- in addition to raising awareness about theories of the Uncanny. As a horror writer as well as a scholar of the horror genre, I think the blog will also help me merge these two interests in new ways. The site design and structure is still under construction, but posts have already been released on such things as the "gaze" in The Ring and the uncanny in a new 'singing robot' art exhibit by Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne. Comments and recommendations are always welcome.

Pedablogue, of course, will continue. I'll post news here about the book when its publication is imminent in Spring 2009. For now, I invite you to come on by the new weblog, anytime.

[See also: "Uncanny Teaching"]

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"Student Outcomes" is a new, ongoing series of interviews with my former students who are now living life after college. Considering how much of our work is based on the assumption that "learning outcomes" will be met, I thought it would be a good way to catch up with them and to see what sort of impact college has had on their lives in the long term. Past students interested in participating should e-mail me. Comments, as always, are appreciated. -- Michael Arnzen

Karissa Kilgore, Seton Hill U class of 2007

Start with a brief bio that tells us first where you are now, then what your status was in college (e.g. "Creative Writing major, Volleyball player, Tetris fan, whatever.) Let your personality show.

I am currently pursuing my master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), but I will also be starting as a full-time technical writer at Bechtel Plant Machinery, Inc. this summer.

I graduated in May 2007 from Seton Hill University (SHU) with a B.A. in English literature as well as minors in creative writing and new media journalism. I was the Literary Editor for Eye Contact, the literary/art magazine at SHU, and published several creative pieces in the magazine. I also wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Setonian.

Most notably, perhaps regrettably, were my experiences on crutches—having broken my left foot twice between the beginning of my junior and senior years, it seemed like I was always crutching around campus. Beyond that, I would like to think that I was a jovial, thriving, active member of the student community and especially of the Class of 2007.

Tell us where you thought you'd be now, back when you were a college freshman.

I initially thought that I wanted to teach high school… but that changed after the completion of my freshman year. As I continued my studies at SHU, I eventually discovered the splendor of composition, writing, and the English language, and decided I would continue my education in hopes of some day teaching ESL or writing at the college level or running a writing center.

Describe your college experience in one word. Then elaborate in no more than five sentences.

Networking. I met the most wonderful people during my college years and I am still in contact with the ones who are most dear to me. They are more than just friends, though; I have true resources and mentors within my human network. Opportunities and encouragement alike have come from my network. But more than these, I value the personal connections I’ve made.

Describe one very specific lesson from the college classroom that you'll never forget. Give us concrete details. Tell us not only what it taught you, but also how and why it worked.

In my senior year I took a figure drawing class. The teacher loved that I wasn’t an art major. (He told me my lines and strokes were poetic and lyrical. “Very Matisse,” he said.) It was a three-hour studio course, so the pace was rather relaxed, but the teacher gave periodic lessons about using guides to draw symmetrically, noticing nuances in light and shape, and including or ignoring detail.

When I drew, I saw shapes and light but at first I tried to draw everything. It was frustrating and when the model changed poses I usually hadn’t even finished one drawing. The teacher saw this and reminded me to notice what is there, but also to notice what is not there. He suggested that in my next drawing I shade in the shadows and voids before focusing on the physical matter. I tried it and loved it. My drawing wasn’t something you’ll find in the Met, but it taught me about my own way of seeing. Learning that I had a choice to recognize details changed my perspective of a variety of things in my life, including writing.

What do you know now that you wish someone would have taught you in school? How might that lesson best be taught?

In general, I wish that Compassion 101 was a subject in schools… the world could use it. But for myself, I wish someone taught me more about real studying and note taking. My middle school years were plagued by notebooks filled with Exactly What the Teacher Wrote on the Board, and my high school years were spent experimenting with my own methods. Eventually I found things that worked for me, but I don’t feel like I ever knew how to study.

What teaching method(s) were you subjected to that never made a dent on your learning?

I’m going to answer this one from a different (and perhaps more positive) angle…

I recognize that my teachers used a great deal of scaffolding within (specifically) the English courses that I took. I trusted that I would be able to get a grip on what we were studying before stepping into unknown territory and that always gave me confidence. Courses that did not build up to acquisition and use of new knowledge proved to be frustrating from start to finish.

I appreciated when teachers allowed students to take leadership roles in the classroom. Leading discussions, teaching a lesson, and giving notes helped me remember (and apply) the things I was learning. Lecture is okay, but in measured doses. I don’t recall having many long lectures, but perhaps that’s because they didn’t make an impression on me. When the classroom was student-centered and student-driven, I was a satisfied student.

What college experience did you find most displeasing at the time, but now recognize as an important contribution to your learning?

Ugh, I got a B. It was horrible because I was an A student all my life. It wasn’t that I thought I knew it all or always deserved the very best grade; my perfectionism was getting the best of me. I recognize now that getting that B helped me loosen up a little and see coursework as real learning and not just a competition or a conduit to a pristine grade point average.

What habits -- good and bad -- did you pick up in school, that you still continue to apply?

The good habits:

• Planning ahead
• Writing every day
• Reading something for yourself (and not just for class)
• Trying to see the positive in every situation (no matter how grim)
• Having realistic expectations of others
• Reaching outside your comfort zone
• Considering different points of view than your own

The bad habits:

• Planning ahead (sometimes to the point of absurdity)
• Relying on technology too much
• Forgoing food or sleep to focus on work
• Not making enough time for myself to “live”

What do you miss about the college classroom, if anything?

I don’t miss much at all, really, because I’m still in the college classroom! I’m just at a different level now, so of course it is not exactly the same as my undergrad experience.

If there was one suggestion you would make to college teachers everywhere, what would it be?

Get to know your students. Having a personal connection with someone whenever possible helps me in innumerable ways, and I know I can’t be the only person who feels this! The best experiences through all my years of schooling have been with teachers who loved not only their subject material and their jobs, but also their students.

THANK YOU, Karissa! Great reflection and advice!

***
Read more "Student Outcomes"!

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The forums over at Teacher Magazine have a great conversation going on right now about the advantages and disadvantages of reading text aloud to students in the classroom. Apparently a high school teacher was given a hard time by his administrators, who overheard him and felt he was talking down to the students by treating them like they were in elementary school.

This surprised me, because every literature professor I ever had when I was an English major would recite passages of text to the class and myself have been doing if for years. I had never considered that it might be a "bad" way to teach, because utterance brings a printed text to life in a way that silence usually does not. Some students may very well be "aural" learners. And in my experience students seem to respond well when I read text aloud to the class, because I am -- to be unabashedly cocky -- probably the best reader in the room. All teachers probably are. Why be shy? We usually know the text we're reading to the class inside-and-out, so we can probably do a good job it. As an English prof, I am an experienced reader who has been visited by many fictional voices across a lifetime, and I know how to inflect and read prose and poetry with a dramatic cadence. I even have the audacity to read my own writing to the class sometimes, because this is what creative writers do professionally. I'm not saying I'm the best oral interpreter on the planet, but in my classroom, chances are very good that I am the most qualified person in the room to do it. And so is any teacher.

The counter-argument, of course, is based on the assumption that students who are already literate don't want to be "talked down" to. It harkens back to the parent-child relationship, infantalizing students. It reduces the adult classroom to something akin to a preschool-level children's library, and participates in what critics call "the crayola curriculum," contributing to the "dumbing down" of American students. It impedes the flow of speedy learning that people who can read for themselves might experience. And if a teacher is a boring, turgid reader, it risks killing the class dynamic -- or can lead to student mockery, disappointment or other tomfoolery.

But all things considered, it depends on how you do it, and what your motives really are. Sometimes the "Crayola Curriculum" can be employed in productive, reflective, or simply tension-relieving ways (as my SHU colleague Dennis Jerz attempts to do when he reads a children's book to his English majors at the end of a stressful term). I would say that, on balance, reading aloud is a good strategy. As Candy Blessing points out in "Reading to Students Who Are Old Enough to Shave", research supports the argument that "reading to kids boosts their reading comprehension, increases their vocabularies, and helps them become better writers. In fact, students who are read to are more motivated to read themselves—increasing the likelihood that they will one day become independent, lifelong readers." Clearly knowing how printed words and sentences and poetic lines and so forth should "sound" in our heads when we read them can only help us comprehend them, and teachers can and should model these sounds for students. This is something that Language teachers have employed forever.

Moreover, we're not just modeling how to read that particular text. We're modeling how to read in public, how to recite in general, and also teaching communication and listening skills. Listening to a teacher recite has its analogue in many civic functions: hearing politicans speak, or priests and preachers, and so forth. Students can learn what we might call "audience literacy": how to be a good, attentive, ethical listener.

I would toss in, however, that the method can create a teacher-centered environment in the classroom, and that one shouldn't dominate the class or treat it as their own private rehersal hall. A lector's reading aloud should be counter-balanced by having the students read -- in fact, they should read more often than the teacher. Having students read aloud is often better because not only does everyone get to practice, but everyone also gets the "stage" for a moment. Everyone has a voice and students always benefit from participating fully in the class. When they listen to each other, they engage with one another. (I have even seen students correct each other and offer advice to each other, workshopping their recitation without any input from me!). You can see it in their eyes. Reading is not just absorbing through the eyes or ears -- it is reacting, responding, voicing, and more.

I would also add that not only should teachers be wary of producing a teacher-centered environment, but also that the textbook-dominated one. Even in a literature course, it might be good to have students read aloud from their own writing. Or, optionally, to have the teacher read student writing to the class. I do this quite often. In classes where I collect daily journals, I will often begin the hour by reading one of my favorite entries. It not only rewards the students who put their energy into the journal writing, but it also provides a great transition from the previous class into the next one.

Another trick, of course, is to bring in an audio CD or DVD, or to bring in the writer as a guest, so that students can hear authors read their own work aloud. They're often surprised by how the author sounds -- how different they sound than they expected -- and sometimes even how much better it sounded in their own heads when they read it off the page themselves.

I suppose all of these tactics are relatively obvious, and that there are myriad other strategies for employing oral recitiation in the classroom. I've really only scratched the surface. But I think just hearing that some administrators think this is a bad idea makes me realize that we need to talk about these things we take for granted more often...so that others won't take their own assumptions -- usually ones that originate in their own experiences in the classroom as a kid and carried forward into adulthood -- for granted, too.

Visit the forum at Teacher Magazine to find more methods, arguments, and research about this topic.

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I adored reading Christian Long's recent article, "Mapping Literary Highlights, Highlighting Literary Maps" at think:lab yesterday. In it, he talks about adopting a class rule that students write in the margins of their books:

Nothing says, "Yes, English class rocks!", than the early-in-the-year lesson on highlighting our books. Like a good family Bible passed down through the generations, books we read should show highlighter scar tissue on every page. Every page.

Long goes on to mention how he plans to spot-check student books (turn to page 83!) for highlighting and marginal scribbles, and then cites some really fascinating "etch-a-sketch" research about tracking stylistics and patterns in classic novels. Great stuff.

I definitely agree with his notion that writing in a book while you read it is the best way to "process" the ideas and to find them later. I'll never forget the first time I saw marginal notes in one of my mother's old college textbooks. I was just a kid, curious about the things on my parents bookshelf, and I started pulling titles off the shelf, browsing around for something that would be as fun to read as the stuff I was reading at the local children's library. I don't recall what book it was -- possibly a lit anthology -- but I found scribbling in the margins. This was contrary to all the times I'd been told not to write in library books, so I thought a sin had been committed and I ran to my mom to let her know what I'd found. When she told me it was HER writing, and that it helped her to learn, I was dumbstruck.

I saw it again, when I was in the Army. I caught a fellow PFC reading Newsweek magazine when he was on a break, underlining things over and over again. I asked him why he did this, because I never fancied the guy was a big reader, let alone scholar, and I noticed he was reading the business pages -- something I presumed only a business person would find worth underlining. He said he was teaching himself new words. He explained to me that he underlined all the words he didn't know, then -- after reading the article -- copied them into a little book he carried with him -- and looked them up later. "Words, my friend," he said in his Brooklyn accent, "are like money."

I didn't adopt his method of vocabulary-building, but I did start marking up magazines more and more. (Though I do highlight vocab sometimes: whether book or magazine, when I read something I'm preparing to teach, I'll put a box around terms I think I may need to define for the class when we discuss a particular passage.) My method throughout college was to photocopy anything I found in the library that I thought I might possibly want to cite in a paper of my own...and then write ALL OVER them. I have boxes filled with file folders stuffed with these marked up articles from journals and chapters from books in my field, and I have returned to them often for my own research. And my textbooks from college? Fuhgeddaboudit. I could wring pink and yellow and blue ink from the pages. As I tell my students nowadays, reading with a pen in your hand means you're writing as much as reading -- it's the most natural way to engage in a 'conversation' with the text. (For me, it's more like arguments than conversations... see my article "Question-storming!" for more on my methods).

Now, thirty years after I first discovered my mother's marginalia, I find myself reorganizing my home library (I'm scanning barcodes from my books into a database on my computer, too, using Readerware!) and I'm seeing just how many books and articles I myself have so sinfully marred up. Paging through these books, I see so many traces of learning...places where I came to new realizations. And lots of questions I raised in the margins that spun me down avenues of research and argument that I'd probably never have taken otherwise. And you know what else? I remember more from those books than I do from the ones I just gently read. I also notice that the books most marked up are the ones I've cited the most often in my scholarship.

It's the "scar tissue" of learning.

All of us who are full-time scholars and writers probably do similar things. My point is that I'm taking to heart Long's commitment to teaching this process in his classes. I've taught marginal notation systems before in my freshman composition courses, and I plan to do it again in the Fall. Students often resist the call to write in books -- either because they feel its a sin that the great librarian in the sky will punish, or because they don't want to ruin the resale value of their books for book-buy-back at the campus store -- but I think it's a learning strategy that they need to be exposed to -- just like I was when I stumbled upon that book my mother had scribbled in when I was a kid. Just seeing that it CAN be done, and just TRYING it once can be a transformative moment in a student's life. It's hard to convince people to deface a book they paid for, but it's perfectly sensible. Another copy can always be bought for posterity, if a person genuinely treasures it.

I'd put this one right up there with the time in high school when a teacher told my class once (and I'm paraphrasing): Don't be afraid to use more than one piece of paper! It's never a waste to write. And the trees will survive if you recycle... for now, you bought that paper to use it, so quit being so timid with your writing ... it's a tool, so USE IT!

I started filling legal pad after legal pad with course notes, once I was given "permission" to do such a simple thing. Class exercises like Long's use of marginalia in class can be breakthrough moments for students, moments where a student is given permission to take charge of their own studies, and to actively learn.

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Are we bending under the oppressive rule of children? Do kids have too much power?

There are days, I think, when every teacher wonders this, even at the college level.

Dennis Jerz posts a good response to this idea, particularly in terms of catholic teaching, as raised by Joseph Epstein in his recent lament about the Millenial generation in the conservative journal, Weekly Standard. It's given me a lot to think about, because I often have mixed emotions about inappropriate student behavior and obvious expressions of immaturity, which sometimes conflicts with my drive to treat all students as adult thinkers and learners.

Epstein grossly broadens this idea to suggest that we're living under a "Kindergarchy." [That's a neologism; as Michael Gilleland points out, the correct term is "paedarchy"]. Epstein has used this term before -- in a Wall St. Journal article celebrating Thanksgiving (because, of course, it is the least kid-centered holiday) -- so I think it's safe to say his suspicion of children is something of a leitmotif for him, if not a future book topic.

He's not alone: Time magazine even did a fascinating cover story on the topic a few years ago, "Do Kids Have Too Much Power?"

And it's an interesting question, though when it comes to college teaching (which both Jerz and Epstein mention in exempla), I think we need to be careful not to fall for such widespread generalizations about "kids today." Kids today are just like kids yesterday, but they have different cultural frames of reference, different ways of reading the world. And even while parents seem to be playing a larger role in the academic life of their offspring, I refuse to think of my students as "children" let alone "kids." (No one old enough to wear a military uniform is a child. A better word would be "initiate"...students are "uninitiated" into our learning communities and undergoing a transformation to join them.)

The adult/child divide is not only an issue of parenting, but -- particularly when pushed into abstractions such as "generation" gaps -- also a power relationship, complicated by fears of aging and the desire for eternally youthful vim. Often what seems to be a "grumpy old teacher" engaging a "hostile youth" is really a status game of some kind. In some classrooms, the assumed power position of wisdom (only earned by years of disciplined brain training) butts heads against the assumed power of the youthful physique (usually unearned, though it can be earned through disciplined body training); the classroom is a bastion of the mind, so I can understand why it makes instructors angry when, say, a student-athlete cops an attitude of superiority and refuses to "play along" with a teacher's classroom work. Yet how many teachers channel and project their hostility about their own aging out on the youthful students they have to contend and spar with? How many dream of eternal youth, aligning themselves with their students rather than owning up to their own aged wisdom and experience? To what degree do such psychological hang-ups and unconscious wishes get in the way of teaching and learning?

While it may be true, as many of my colleagues note, that today's students have a strong sense of unearned "privilege" that earlier generations did not, this does not mean that these students are tyrants who rule us. Unfortunately, however, we've all probably heard of -- or personally dealt with -- students who act like they "pay our salaries" and therefore should not have to follow our rules but in fact can direct us to do their bidding (when most of the time, it's their parents or the government's loans and/or scholarships that are "paying" us). The marketing of college campuses as commodities may very well have something to do with this attitude (as Jerz also obliquely suggests). And this, perhaps, is at the root of the problem: students are still "children" in the eyes of their parents and thus they become so to those who market to those parents. To us, on the front lines in the classroom, students need to be treated as adults. Or in the very least, adults-in-progress.

But I always believe it's a good idea to talk about these things openly; if there is a "power struggle" in the classroom, even when it's between me and a student, I'm all for calling attention to it. People at a particular stage of development -- say, 18-24 year olds -- will almost universally be coming "of age" about the world, and will have the same sorts of quirks, assumptions, hostilities, resistences, curiosities, presumptions, and drives. Good college teachers probably recognize or intuit the ways that people of this age group process the world, and can tap into it in order to generate learning. Often this requires dismantling the assumptions that a person of this age group has unwisely settled upon too soon in life, while also remaining skeptical of one's own assumptions about that age group. This is why I always enjoy teaching "education" as an outright topic when I am running a freshmen level course. It is a good way to get these assumptions about "privilege" out into the air, to be tested and challenged in a collaborative open discussion. Once students see that not everyone has the same economic background and different motivations for attending college, they usually modify and reflect on their own background and motivation and, ideally, how these are influenced by outside forces beyond their own organic will.

In Epstein's "Kindergarchy," he slips into a reflection about teaching literature that reveals his persistent struggle against the idealism of the young in his classroom:

...often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to -- but did not -- write: "D-, Too much love in the home."

Call me a softie, but there's no such thing as too much love, anywhere. This is a primary example of the "power struggle" I was talking about above. Epstein's secret desire to punish students for being loved as children by their parents sounds awfully sadistic to me, but I have to admit that I have felt a similar twinge of frustration before. (Especially when teaching film, which students are trained to think of as "entertainment" not "art").

While it is true that an affective response to literature is not wholly relevant to a conversation in a literature classroom, and that literary professionals truck with reason not emotion, these feelings still exist in any reader response and a skilled teacher can -- and often must -- train students to see how those emotions are constructed by the text, manipulated by the book and its packaging, their own assumptions, etc. Our very job, I think, is to wean students in lower division classes away from "settling" for emotional reactions as a telos for judgment. Yet this emotion is a stepping stone into criticism, and our job is to point to the river and say: look there, a stone that can help you cross over to my side. But of course, sometimes the teacher too must be willing to cross over toward the students side once in awhile too... but there are many rivers to cross.

[Besides, I challenge Epstein's assumptions about the goal of teaching literature generally: When Epstein says that the focus should be "what the author had put into the book" I would ask how one could possibly know that intention and why not just focus on the "book" not the author's effort; when he refers to "its moral weight" I would question how he "weighs" morals and if they are really as pertinent as he suggests; and when he mentions "resultant power" I would ask if he does not here mean the very emotion he was hoping to quash in the first place, albeit an informed one?

[And I wonder if in the memory he recounts, they were responding to a Dickens novel? Muhahah.]

Another way to get into this matter is to discuss the very notions of "childhood" and "adulthood" in the classroom and to unpack how the meanings of these terms are socially-constructed. A child in one country is not a child in another (just think of the drinking age or legal marriage age in some countries, and you know what I mean). Some are afraid that childhood no longer even exists. I teach an advanced lit course -- when I'm lucky -- called "Childhood in Literature" in which we discuss cultural issues like these, while surveying the representation of the child historically and culturally, across a wide range of fiction and poetry (yes, including Oliver Twist!). The course begins with theory by having the class analyze and discuss Neil Postman's excellent book, The Disappearance of Childhood. Postman argues that childhood is a social construct that operates only in relation to what we think it means to be an adult. For Postman, to be a child is not just an organic age bracket -- it means not yet having literacy -- which gives one "access" to adult "secrets." For Postman, the mass media of TV has erased the need for literacy to have this access, producing adultified children and child-like adults. When we teach literacy, we are teaching adulthood.

In another article on aging, Epstein himself seems to recognize the cultural paedomorphism -- that is, the extension of juvenile tendencies into adulthood -- that Postman has lamented when he writes:

I also grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon as possible, while today--the late 1960s is the watershed moment here--the goal has become to stay as young as possible for as long as possible. The consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer only means that they feel they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at least, into one's 30s, perhaps one's early 40s.

Many -- if not the majority -- of the college teachers I know are in their 30s and 40s. Many don't have "kids." You might leap to the assumption that these young teachers are perpetual adolescents who are so much "still in school" that it's become their entire career. (And anyone who wants to be quick to judgment can summon examples easily enough of some teacher they've met who dresses too young, or acts too juvenile, or goes out drinking and dating with students beneath their age bracket, or still loves comix, or plays games, or writes horror stories, or relishes stuffed animals in their offic, or watches Disney cartoons, or plays with coloring books and action figures, or does any number of activities that one might associate with youth culture. Does this make them perpetually juvenile, or simply interesting people who actively know where their pleasures lie?)

We as teachers need to be conscious of our outward expression of "age affiliation" as well as our students, but it should not control us or fill us with shame. The psychology of identity behind age affiliation is intriguing but very complicated, and the distinctions between childhood and adulthood are often false binaries. What Epstein might fail to recognize is that the "serious work" of academia is neither to "become adult as soon as possible" nor to "stay as young as possible for as long as possible" but rather to have a more consciously realized life, period. That's how I prefer to think of it. Shine light on behavior, perhaps even share one's own feelings, but ultimately let students judge it for themselves. To lash out at students with poor grades for "too much love in the home" is probably fighting childishness with childish behavior. It is not always what we do, but how we do it, that separates children from adults. Thus, we need to treat college-aged students like adults, perhaps most of all when they are acting like children.

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I'm humbled to be featured in the June issue of Pittsburgh Professional Magazine, and they've kindly given me permission to post a .pdf of the article on my horror website. To check it out, visit:

"Ghoulish Goals: Seton Hill writing professor keeps collecting awards for his horror fiction"
by Kathleen Ganster (photos by Jim Judkis).

If (and only if!) you enjoy weird twisted horror stories, then you might want to drop by the new incarnation of my horrror writing blog, The Goreletter.

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I was browsing through a list of open source academic journals on the web this morning and found Critical Studies in Improvisation -- a journal of music and performance theory, mostly -- whose latest issue [Vol 3, No 2 (2007)] is a Special Issue on Improvisation and Pedagogy.

Having studied Keith Johnstone's book, Impro, as a source for ideas in the teaching of writing, I found it a worthwhile follow-up. Teaching is always improvised, to some degree, but what these writers focus on is how improvisation in the classroom generates learning.

Of particular interest to me was R. Keith Sawyer's essay on "Improvisation and Teaching" which draws on cognitive learning scholarship to define the skills of "expertise":

1) Deep conceptual understanding. Experts haven’t simply memorized a large repertory of facts. Of course they know a lot of facts, but in the expert’s mind, those facts are embedded in complex conceptual frameworks. Experts understand the mechanisms underlying phenomena and are able to explain surface features in terms of underlying mechanisms and conceptual structures.

(2) Integrated knowledge. Each piece of knowledge is highly interconnected with all of the other pieces of knowledge. Expertise does not result from possessing distinct compartmentalized knowledge; everything known is related in an integrated framework.

(3) Adaptive expertise. Experts have mastered a large range of standard procedures and solutions. When first encountering a new problem, they typically will quickly recall a variety of similar problems they’ve encountered in the past, and they will begin by considering one of the solutions that has worked in the past. But experts do not simply apply these memorized procedures in rote fashion; they are able to flexibly modify the routines they’ve mastered or to combine elements of distinct routines as is appropriate to the new problem.

(4) Collaborative skills. Experts work together with other experts in teams and in complex organizational structures. Unlike the hierarchical corporation of old, where everyone’s job description was quite specific, the boundaries between each team member are fluid, and many tasks require the simultaneous and joint contributions of multiple experts to be successfully accomplished.

Sawyer draws specific connections between these skill sets and the needs of the improvisational musician, but argues that too often, the Industrial age classroom model (chairs lined up in rows, teacher-centered lectures, "banking model" frameworks etc.) inhibits -- and even prohibits -- these skills from fomenting. Such outdated models, moreover, are inappropriate for contemporary culture, which "requires a new learning environment" that is project-based, inquiry-based, or problem-based. "These new learning environments are unified by their improvisational nature—they place students in loosely structured environments, where they work together in a relatively unstructured, improvisational fashion."

One of the reasons this article spoke to me was because I recenty saw a news report on MSNBC that revealed new studies in the brain function of jazz performers, in which scientists have musicians play keyboards while inside an MRI machine. They hope to unravel the "secrets of creativity," and so far their findings suggest that the brain of a creative artist in action, performing live, functions in the same way as a dreaming brain does. This does not come as a surprise to me at all, but I think it is important to recognize the way that irrationality and the unconscious always play roles in the overly rational space of the college classroom, and that what we sometimes see as nonsense is often the most productive classroom experience.

As I prepare to teach some graduate learning modules in the Writing Popular Fiction program later this month, this article reminds me to keep the environment improvisational and not to over-plan the courses into dull singalongs. I think I often have approached teaching in an improvisational way, creating an open and collaborative learning environment, but I tend to think of the literary texts or student writing that we employ as "composition" -- that is, like sheet music. But, no, perhaps the texts are the instruments themselves in the student hands, not a set of directions. Learning occurs when that texts are processed, following student comments and discussions that riff off one another. The teacher can conduct, or perhaps better yet, play along. In the cacophony of student group work and open class discussion, an outsider might hear chaos -- but I need to remember that that's what learning sounds like, as I try to assist students toward a sense of knowledge mastery and expertise.

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"Student Outcomes" is a new, ongoing series of interviews with my former students who are now living life after college. Considering how much of our work is based on the assumption that "learning outcomes" will be met, I thought it would be a good way to catch up with them and to see what sort of impact college has had on their lives in the long term. Past students interested in participating should e-mail me. Comments, as always, are appreciated. -- Michael Arnzen

First up...

Neha Bawa, Seton Hill U class of 2006

Start with a brief bio that tells us first where you are now, then what your status was in college (e.g. "Creative Writing major, Volleyball player, Tetris fan, whatever.) Let your personality show.

I am an eternal English major who keeps moving from one aspect of dissecting the language to another. I’ve completed my undergrad as an English Literature major, and currently, I am teaching English writing to college freshmen and I’m about to begin graduate classes in Communications.

Tell us where you thought you'd be now, back when you were a college freshman.

As a college freshman, my worldview was very convoluted, and I had no idea of how to picture myself in the future. When I first took Introduction to Literature in sophomore year, I knew I wanted to teach college students, so I’m exactly where I thought I would be.

Describe your college experience in one word. Then elaborate in no more than five sentences.

Eclectic. My college experiences have shaped my life and my thinking tremendously and have made a hard core liberal out of me. From the good to the bad and the ugly, the only year I would relive would be my Senior year, for both, academic and personal reasons.

Describe one very specific lesson from the college classroom that you'll never forget. Give us concrete details. Tell us not only what it taught you, but also how and why it worked.

It was a class with you, in fact, that taught me a very valuable lesson in classroom management. I remember, I had started explaining something to a classmate about poetry, and you stopped teaching and asked me if I had started teaching the class at some point. It’s always stayed with me because I use it in my own classroom every time my students start talking in the middle of my sentences. Sometimes, respect has to be commanded.

What do you know now that you wish someone would have taught you in school? How might that lesson best be taught?

I have always wished that, beginning with freshman year, universities made it mandatory for students to learn about post-college savings and retirement options. Terms like “Tax Deferred Annuities” and “Individual Retirement Accounts” hold no meaning for college students and new college grads, which means that the time they spend with philandering away their earnings could have been spent building a nest egg. Also, I’ve always wanted universities to spend more time and resources on career advice and counseling, especially at Seton Hill, where the resources exist, but are not advertised well enough for the students to be completely aware of them.

What teaching method(s) were you subjected to that never made a dent on your learning?

Reading responses based on emotions, instead of literary techniques used in a text. Being inundated with homework doesn’t necessarily mean that the class work is being understood. That just means that there’s more on the plate as “busy” work.

What college experience did you find most displeasing at the time, but now recognize as an important contribution to your learning?

Writing research papers. I have never had the patience to sit in a library for hours and research a subject into the wee hours of the morning, but now that I’m teaching, I realize the importance of understanding research methods, especially when time management is involved.

What habits -- good and bad -- did you pick up in school, that you still continue to apply?

Constant reading. Constant. Whether I read fiction or non-fiction, a newspaper article, or even the back of a tube of toothpaste, I make it a point to read something new every day.

What do you miss about the college classroom, if anything?

The personal and social touches to teaching and learning.

If there was one suggestion you would make to college teachers everywhere, what would it be?

Please don’t ever let yourselves forget, that at the end of the day, after the tenure has been earned, after the papers have been published, after the book deals have been signed, that our profession is about making a difference in our students’ lives and not always our own.

THANK YOU, Neha!

***
Read more "Student Outcomes"!

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The "Munch Piñata" pictured above was created by my wife, Renate Müller, as one of the "prizes" students could win in a live "writing contest" held in the final session of my fun "Horror & Suspense Writing" course this semester. She did a knockout job emulating Edvard Munch's "The Scream" -- a subject which we had discussed often in this particular class. Other prizes included a few of my horror books and fun little things I bought at a thrift store -- like vintage Halloween decorations and (my personal favorite find) an antique sausage grinder. It was very kind of my wife to hand paint the "Munch Piñata," which she built by modifying a strange decoration of what was supposed to be a referee shouting a touchdown call. She modeled the colors and lines off the expressionist's painting, but really crafted an amazing piece of sculpture on her own. I'm so very lucky to have such a supportive spouse and a great artist in my life. Everyone who saw this sculpture (which I had to share with my colleagues up and down the hall prior to class) was impressed, and I have to congratulate student Kevin Hinton on winning it -- and I hope he won't destroy the thing with a bat just for the cheap candy that I shoved inside its guts. (It's more fun to scoop that out with your fingers, Kevin!)

The writing contest today involved a 2 column list of "scary" adjectives (dark, bloody, etc.) down one side of a handout, and "scary" nouns (blood, obsession, etc.) down the other. Students had to make their favorite match and then use that as a fictional book title (like "Bloody Obsession"). Then they had to write the back cover copy -- the book description in all its hyperbole. This they read to the class, while a handful of studnt judges (who also won prizes for being the top of the class, as voted by their classmates) decided the criteria and then picked the winner. The process for making this 'game show' sequence of events work is rather complex, but it was a fun time for all. After the winners were chosen (who all got to pick their favorite prizes from the prize table), I spit out trivia questions to give away the remaining gifts to the first person to get the answer right. These were all based on class readings over the semester. The class had a fun end of term, I think. And though everyone didn't win a prize, everyone got candy.

Here's a photo of the class that I asked them to take before we got started on the contest. No, this isn't how they always received me when I walked into the room, and no, they're not all screaming from the stress of the end of term. They're all emulating the character, who you can see on the table in the center. They were a great group of students -- very induldgent of my whims all term -- and very open with their creativity and willingness to take creative and imaginative risks. This is how fun teaching can and should be. I'm proud to have shared the experience with them. And I like to see them scream....

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I've been reflecting on an approach I consciously employed last week in two different class scenarios -- an online chat with graduate students and in a discussion of a literary reading with advanced writing students -- just to see how it might stimulate the conversation.

I launched both by being contrary to student expectations. Students often inherently assume that because they have been assigned a topic or asked to read an essay, that the teacher inherently advocates for those topics or the points in those essays. This comes from reading information-centered textbooks, which often is delivered by the teacher as immutable truth. But ideas are issue-driven, and I think a good teacher models the good scholar in the field by showing how critical thinking circulates in that field. They risk raising issues about the assumptions that frame or underpin a statement of fact. They play devil's advocate and are receptive to student questions and challenges. So in my classes this week, I took this to the extreme and I started the discussions from a negative, even somewhat hostile, position. I denounced the very idea of having a conversation about the text or the topic in the first place.

"Hostile" is probably connotes anger; that's not what I mean. I have in mind antagonism and conflict rather than aggression. Let me explain what I did.

In the first instance, I was a "host" of a gathering of graduate Writing Popular Fiction students in an online discussion that was entitled "Work Habits for Writers." The chatroom had no controls -- it was a "free for all" conversation, with perpetually scrolling lines of input as students made their points or asked questions. But I worried that the topic threatened to bore them with dull dogmatic claims about the writing process and discipline, so I began the chat by tossing out a question, rather than making a claim. And I didn't ask them "What are bad work habits that writers have?" but rather said "So do writers really need work habits all? Aren't habits bad?"

To my happy surprise, it immediately summoned answers in defense of the topic, asserting why habitual work discipline is necessary and good. The students started listing all of their own habits, and explaining why they depended on them, and why these routines were productive for them. But more importanty, they immediately took OWNERSHIP of the topic, rather than just waiting for the teacher's wisdom to be handed down. It was as if they felt the duty to remind me that it was my chosen topic and that it was my duty to run the show, and -- dagnabit -- if I didn't take ownership of it, they would. It also worked as a preemptive strike that allowed those who wanted to be curmugeonly to get their say and get over with it. I was a little worried before the chat that if I took the negative position that everyone would say "I agree" and then we'd have nothing left to talk about. But instead, the novelty of the approach raised critical thought. The remainder of the chat -- an hour long -- really put me on the "question-raising" side of the conversation, probing and challenging student comments, pressing them to answer the question "why" as much as "how."

In my Publication Workshop course -- an undergraduate face-to-face class in the English major which usually involves full class critique of a writer's manuscript or a book chapter -- I put the students in a circle to discuss a chapter of Annie Dillard's great book, The Writing Life, which they'd read for homework. I'd taught this excerpt before, and anticipated that it would be a very divisive reading: the pragmatists in the class (the majority of them) would be overly critical of Dillard's whimsical musings and metaphor overload; the poets and philosophers would fawn over it, completely in love. Though I lean toward the latter of the two, neither reaction, I think, is justified because most undergraduates I've taught don't quite understand her phenomenological approach to writing, where form follows content.

This time I wanted to cut off those reactions from the very start. So I took a contrarian approach -- pretending at the start that Dilliard is not all she's cracked up to be. I began the conversation not by asking a question but by reading from a review of The Writing Life by Bruce Bawer called "Author-Suffering" that appeared in American Scholar. In my opinion, it is a very negative review, but one that offers critical reasons for its response. As I read the most negative sections from the review aloud to the class, students laughed and covered their mouths at the audacity. It liberated the conversation, because "anything goes" after something like that. But the students who liked Dillard's writing were immediately put on the defensive and came to the fore. Some saw the validity in Dillard's writing and argued those points, and some thought Bawer had gone too far. But -- truth be told -- most students tacitly agreed with Bawer's response. The review gave them permission to share their feelings, feelings which students in upper division courses are often hesitant to share because they don't want to feel contrary to the teacher. Here they very carefully worded their reactions, which weren't quite as hostile as Bawer's but still based in a negative evaluation. This allowed me to offer probing questions that tested the criteria behind their evaluative reactions (Why do you think she uses "too many metaphors"? How many are too many? Where exactly do you draw the line?).

Because Publication Workshop is a course in writing for a public audience, the specter of what happens when you get a bad review was also released in the room, allowing us to address author fears and anxieties (which followed up on our class conversation about the first half of Betsy Lerner's book The Forest for the Trees). Reading bits and pieces from Bawer's review aloud to the class -- and hearing the vocalized reactions from the class -- helped the more "literary" writers in the room to see the dangers, too, of being too literary. I raised the notion of epistemology -- and even read a definition of "phenomenology" to the class from a book of literary terms -- so they could better understand Dillard's approach, but they still weren't buying it.

To cap it off: for homework, I had asked all the students to write an extended metaphor for their own writing process to bring to class on the day we read Dillard. Going around the circle rapidly at the end of the hour, I asked everyone to report what they compared their writing process to ("writing is like fishing on a row boat..." etc.). After making the full round, I asked. "So was that too many metaphors?" Eyebrows lifted and heads nodded and I could see that -- from the perspective of the respondant -- the planned structure of the class itself helped make my point. Thus, beginning with negativity, and being contrary, I still had a position on the issue all along...but self-evidently, it was not the ONLY position possible, or even one that was articulated as the final one. They left class, still mulling it all over. That's a great way to end.

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I have stopped running a newsletter I used to keep for my journalism/writing students (and also freelance writers), called The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. This newsletter once offered me a place to write articles about some the issues I was teaching, as well as to connect with others in the writing profession, but mostly it was a huge dumping ground for weblinks I felt any graduating writing student or freelance writer -- including myself -- could ever need to begin the hunt. It was a collection of weblinks clustered by categories like "jobs for writers" and "writer's guidelines" and "calls for papers" and "internships" and so forth. Most of the articles I wrote for that newsletter went on to be reprinted in trade magazines or taught in some of my classes. It was a good newsletter.

I started that newsletter because I wanted an easy way to advise my students who might be thinking about careers in freelancing, or looking for markets to publish their work. I had them simply subscribe to it -- and that way I'd feel confident they'd continue to get that information even after they graduated. But there came a point about a year ago when I realized that the newsletter didn't have enough "new" material to justify sending out a new issue, and that my articles were more valuable if I didn't just give them away online like I was doing. The whole point of the newsletter was to find paying markets for writing -- yet I was giving my own specialized writing assignments away free in the process -- and slaving under my own deadlines, too, no less!

The links were really what mattered. So I began copying and pasting those links into our Course Management System at SHU -- called jweb (a jenzabar system akin to Blackboard...which we will soon affectionately call "Griffingate" at SHU). I copied them slowly and awkwardly, hoping my writing students would find the links useful. However, the links have to be copied from class to class in another slow and awkward fashion, involving a hidden copy-and-paste system they call a "bank" (but which I call a "pain"). I mean, why not offer faculty a central hub for repositing weblinks to share across the board with all the classes they teach? Why hide their links from other classes? Why use their laborious interface at all? I thought about going back to my newsletter...

But there's no need. There are plenty of other ways to centralize a page of links -- from building your own teaching website to using one of an array of bookmark-sharing ("social bookmarking" or "social networking") services. I chose the latter (and I already feel years behind the curve). I have moved those links to del.icio.us -- an ugly but useful site that is a little confusing at first in its architecture, but one that I have found more and more useful for sharing (and learning about new, related) weblinks. Here's my page:

Arnzen on del.icio.us

It has the added benefit of allowing TAGS to organize the links in intricate cross-referential ways (see Best Tagging Practices by Tagamac's Ian Beck for more information). I've informed the students in my current Publication Workshop class about my new page, but now that I've launched it, I need to start thinking about ways that I could -- possibly -- use the site in different and creative ways while integrating it more deeply into my teaching. (My reluctance is founded in the sloppy aesthetic weirdness of some of Web2.0).

So I've started looking around to see how other sites are using this weirdly-punctuated site in a productive manner for their classes, and I thought I'd share what I've found so far in case you're seeking info on this, too. In his blog post, "Del.icio.us and teaching", English professor Bradley Dilger gives a clear and articulate narrative about how he employs his del.icio.us page in his writing courses. He tags the links he wants to share with his students with the course number, which students are asked to browse. The other tags that are connected to links (by theme) give the student reader a pivot point that can spin them into further research on Dilger's course page or across the whole del.icio.us site. Neat.

One of the elements of del.icio.us that appeals to me is the ability for people to subscribe to specific tags in your profile, meaning that they will be alerted whenever you post a new link and mark it with that tag/keyword. Thus, del.icio.us could be used to assign weekly readings and alert students to updates (one educator's site I read calls this "Homeworkcasting" and invokes rss feeds to send new posts to a secondary del.icio.us page dedicated to a class). Kaye Sweester also recommends finding teachers in your same field and adding their profiles to your del.icio.us "network" in order to be alerted of what your colleagues are doing. One could easily, I think, also work in reverse and have the del.icio.us site be a repository for class research generated by the students themselves, building a network of profiles that interconnect between individual student profiles.

Quentin D’Souza -- who runs the great educational resource website Teaching Hacks -- has a good del.icio.us page for me to turn back to later, as I try to learn more about creative ways of using social bookmarking in my classes.

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"...however effectively one 'prepares' for a class, the realities of learning alter the original orientation in a number of creative and unpredictable ways. If the structure is too tight, or the scenario is too predictable, then we move towards a tightly organized outcomes-based approach to learning. We end up confusing the relationship between clear goals (set by the teacher), and an anticipation that the student will meet the expectations of the course, because they have replicated the core meaning of the content. This is, to some degree, summarized by the assumption that teachers need to envision what students should know at the end of a course. Yet, knowledge cannot be packaged in such a simplistic way. We gain an understanding of an idea, for example, through dialogue. The dialogue can lead in an untold number of different directions. The fundamental unpredictability of dialogue is that both interacting parties may have no sense of where they are headed and may, indeed, learn in ways that they had not anticipated. This should be a source of excitement, but it is often a source of anxiety. I believe the anxiety is partially situated in how we define teachers and students." Ron Burnett, in "The Radical Impossibility of Teaching"

I have not really processed this article as fully as I should yet, but Ron Burnett's "The Radical Impossibility of Teaching" was a fascinating read for me, because -- among many interesting ideas that question the assumptions we have about institutionalized learning -- the argument cited above encapsulates my occasional resistance to "outcomes based" assessment. I believe that having assessable goals and objectives gives a class a focus, a common ground, and a sense of direction. But by the same token, there's a degree to which these outcomes need to emerge organically from the class itself more collaboratively than they typically do. Burnett argues against the notion that objectives be prescribed by the teacher's hasty, generalized prediction about what students "need" that is handed down from above before the fact -- especially if "above" means not only the teacher, but some larger institutional group which the teacher is simply delivering like some enforcer or mediator between the institution and the student. Burnett invites us to think about some radical reconfigurations which cultivate creativity in the classroom. Like, what if the students were allowed to collaborate with the teacher, modifying and revising the learning objectives in the class? (The answer asks for more responsibility from the student than you might think).

In a system controlled universally through "outcome-based" assessment, where curricular administration risks becoming reduced to an act of enforcing policies rather than enhancing the development of teaching, such revision is virtually impossible. And yet at the same time, students do in their very particularity and individuality revise and adapt the learning objectives in their own ways. Assignments like "reflective essays" and "self-assessments" encourage students to gauge their own investment in course outcomes and to pursue them as they feel they need. And as long as teachers are working closely with students in interpersonal ways -- such as in individual office conferences -- the learning that happens can be guided and modulated to some degree in concert with the teacher.

While a teacher can use the course itself to "play" off the objectives, the syllabus remains the invariable law and point of accountability. The outcomes themselves are never really open to student revision in any way that can be filed, made permanent, or recognized publicly in the name of "accountability" or "assessment." Thus, I would suggest that the "radical impossibility" at work here is not one of teaching or of learning, per se, but of the very idea of a universal "outcome." Although grading and assessment have numerous modalities, a self-conscious teacher must recognize the virtual impossibility of measuring outcomes in any concrete way, beyond some abstract/numerical method (evaluations by ranking rather than providing qualitative comments) that reduces the significance of the experience and threatens to rob the quality of the course objective -- if not the course itself -- of meaningful substance.

Ah well...I'm still mulling these ideas over. Burnett's essay was originally delivered to the Federation Internationale des Sciences Sociales, in Milan Italy in 1999, and subsequently published in Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications + Hypermedia, his excellent weblog.

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Note: What you are about to read is more about the Donald Trump television show than any college-affiliated apprenticeship (well, unless you count Trump University, of course).

I recently employed a version of Trump's "The Apprentice" game show in my "Publication Workshop" classroom on the spur of the moment, and I thought I'd post about it here.

I frequently distribute a page of text -- ostensibly a page from a writer's "manuscript" or a mock "student paper" -- and ask students to edit it by hand for homework, or in class...and then I project the page onto a screen (using an overhead or document projector) and go through the passage with my pen, asking students what changes I should make along the way. It's workshopping -- or collaborative editing -- and it often helps students learn how they might more consciously proofread and edit their own work, in the process. I try to employ this method in every writing class I teach now, because it offers a great model for peer criticism and establishes an environment of critical reading.

For homework in my advanced creative writing class last Friday (called "Publication Workshop" -- a course in, essentially, how to be a freelance writer), students had been given a chart of typical proofreader marks that copyeditors will use, taken from the Chicago Manual of Style and were asked to apply them to a passage of mistakenly typset text I created with more gaffes, errors and blunders than you will ever see in the real world. Every line had a typo or an awkward construction or a misaligned character. Things were centered that shouldn't be; carriage returns were everywhere early. Every sentence needed to be corrected, often in multiple ways.

Instead of the usual "Arnzen standing at the projector" and vocally calling out for students to offer potential edits for me to make, I decided to mix it up off the cuff. I asked a student in the front row to start at the beginning of the passage and "walk us through" his edit step-by-step. I like having students take charge of the class like this, and I found a seat while he put his paper on the projector and adjusted it so everyone could see. Then he went through the first sentence, smartly spotting some blunders that demanded to be fixed.

I interrupted him before he could move to the next sentence. "Hold on..." I turned in my chair. "Are there any other changes anyone would make?"

People shook their head no. He had it right.

I twisted back to the front row, where the student smiled, eager to move on to the next line.

"Um...how do you spell ____________?"

He furrowed his eyebrows and bent over the projector. "Um...I think...um..."

Time ticked by and he looked up at his classmates for possible help.

I made a stupid "Dragnet" sound (dummmm-da-dumpdum) and then pointed at him like Donald Trump in the boardroom: "You're fired."

"What?"

Students laughed. He smiled, looking confused. "I don't..."

I chuckled. "Come on...You're fired. Sit down." He shrugged and picked up his paper.

I called on the person who was sitting next to him. "Why don't you show us how you fixed the next sentence?"

She apparently was a fan of The Apprentice, and was eager to play along. But eventually she was fired. As were the next batch of students. And a few who hadn't done the work, who I "fired in place" before they even were invited to go to the front of the class. One student had drawn doodles in the margin of his copyedited manuscript that made the whole class laugh when he displayed them on screen. I can't recall if I fired him for that, or just for his oversights on the manuscript, but he too was fired.

The students were playing along with me and didn't take my massive layoff of the whole classroom as a hostile act. One crucial element that made it fun for them was that I handed them the power to fire. I made it a group activity. I didn't just judge their editing skills, I would turn around and ask the class if they spotted any problems, and if they did, I would say: "You're right -- tell him he's fired." And they loved it.

In fact, we went through the entire single paged document, and the fun escalated as we went, because it was a little surprising how quickly the turnaround was as students got up and then sat back down. And because everyone's critical lenses were in focus, every single student was fired, missing some pesky little thing or another, save for the last person, who did the last sentence.

Now, I have to say in my defense that there are many problems with this method. I don't necessarily subscribe to the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" worldview of the Trump boardroom -- and in many ways I feel a college classroom should be a sanctuary from such cutthroat nonsense. I'm a big fan of collaborative, not competitive, learning. But there was something fun about the students competing to stand up in front of the room and "survive" the editing drill for the longest period of time without getting fired. And it was something of a thrill for the class to try to "catch" a student oversight just so that they could say "You're fired." Perhaps it was somehow empowering.

I could go on and explain how the event may have underlined the entrepreneurial skills that this particular class hopes to engender in the student writers, since an editor who rejects a manuscript is perhaps doing the equivalent "firing" of a Donald Trump to a game show contestant. And Trump himself might even have something to say about the relationship between art and business. But the truth be told, I just had my class do this exercise for kicks -- to get them out of their seats and a little more engaged in the daily grind of manuscript proofing -- and the whole "firing" business just made for an efficient way to speed up the process and get multiple students to take the stage.

I was surprised when I did a quick web search to see if others have used The Apprentice in the classroom. It's very popular, apparently. (I should confess here that I never watched the show until the most recent Celebrity Apprentice series, just to see what KISS bassist Gene Simmons would do on the show (and he got fired quickly!)).

Obviously, the Trump show is attracting the attention of media culture critics and business theory scholars. The Wall St Journal and CNN have run in-depth articles on how some MBA programs are actually integrating the structure of The Apprentice into their curriculum, which are borrowing the show's model as a way to grade student performance ("You're flunked!"). The show, these programs argue, not only teaches entrepeneurial skills, but also the arts of negotiation, the work ethic, and interpersonal business communications. (Scholarly work has been done on the latter, see David Urban's "Deconstructing the Trumpster" or "What the Apprentice Teaches About Communication Skills" by Katherine N. Kinnick and Sabrina R. Parton).

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This afternoon I attended a great Teaching & Learning Forum on our campus on the topic of teaching with technology. Mary Spataro -- our campus technology-enhanced learning guru and Instructional Design pro -- ran a healthy discussion on implementing technology in a way that supports the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education outlined by Chickering and Gamson for the American Assn for Higher Ed. This work was done in 1987, and though I have heard these principles in various guises throughout the years, the citation was new to me, so I thought I'd briefly blog about it.

In a nutshell, Chickering and Gamson argue that it is good practice for a teacher to employ these seven principles in their courses...

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,


2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,


3. encourages active learning,


4. gives prompt feedback,


5. emphasizes time on task,


6. communicates high expectations, and


7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

In our development session, Spataro broke the faculty into small groups, assigning one principle to each group to unearth ways that they are using technology in their courses to support such practices. My group discussed "gives prompt feedback" -- such as using e-mail to respond to student theses or topic proposals before they actually write their papers, or having some stock "comments" to copy and paste into a response to student writing. Spataro also added that recording oral notes is another way that is gaining popularity (though, as I have argued with my SHU colleague in New Media, Dennis Jerz, there are instances where too much play with this may not be fair to the student writer because it does not, for example, teach direct editing skills by example... on the other hand, such text-to-speech technology can be liberating as Norman Coombs has explained).

In their 1996 article, "Technology as a Lever," Chickering and Ehrmann similarly illustrated how these principles can be achieved with technology (and the website that this article appears on -- hosted by the Teaching Learning and Technology Group -- gives a host of good sources on the topic). They mention Coombs (again) and his use of e-mail as an example of how online discussions can get quiet students to raise issues in a more equalizing and honest setting (in this case, Coombs reports that he had taught for many years, but it wasn't until he began to use e-mail to teach his course that a student finally had the gumption to ask, “What’s a white guy doing teaching black history?” -- see Ehrmann's "Grand Challenges" for more on using e-mail as an educational tool). The article is a great I like how they conclude with the argument that "technology is not enough" and that students need to take action to learn on their own (or to make the instructor aware when they are not "respecting" the diverse ways that students learn).

If it isn't self-evident from this weblog, I am in favor of technology-enhanced learning and I do try to follow the above principles, though I am always skeptical of pedagogical AND technological dogma. I use technology in many of my courses and in advising, but I would add that there are times when technology can actually get in the way of achieving these principles. Sometimes there are simply "technical difficulties" but at other times there are "faculty difficulties" with the technology, or it is utilized in unconsciously (or even fetishistically) poor ways. If a teacher is not modulating their employment of technology in the classroom with other methods, and aren't engaging with the course technology to the same degree their students are, then, for example, these tools can only get in the way, lead to passive learning, or discourage other forms of student-faculty contact. Being receptive to student feedback on the medium for communication is crucial.

Simply put, sometimes we use the wrong tools for the job without knowing it; this does not necessarily mean one has to throw out the tool if it isn't working, but instead try another guage (swap an inch-based wrench for a metric-sized one). As Spataro urged us today, it's best to start small...you'll find the right amount of technology to use along the way.

Chickering and Gamson actually mention something similar to this final point in their original article, when they discuss the classroom as an environment that a teacher develops. Here's how they see the ideal environment for teaching the principles:

• A strong sense of shared purposes.


• Concrete support from administrators and faculty leaders for those purposes.


• Adequate funding appropriate for the purposes.


• Policies and procedures consistent with the purposes.


• Continuing examination of how well the purposes are being achieved.

All of this, I would say, obviously pertains to teaching with technology, as well. Technology is not just a tool; it is an element of a learning environment that needs just as much planning, planting, grooming, and trimming as a tree in a backyard.

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...one question we might ask is: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" I do not think we do. The single most important thing I learned as an undergraduate may have been that I was capable of graduate study. I learned this from a professor who had no idea he taught it to me. Brief remarks that seem innocuous to us may have a lasting impact on our students. Hopefully, the influence is positive. I do not mean to give us more importance or power as teachers than we actually possess. However, a different but equally significant error may be to ignore the potential impact we can have at moments when we are least aware of what we are saying. -- Peter J. Giordano, Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It

I had a similar experience, when an American Literature teacher named Beth Ann Bassein answered one of my annoying questions by saying, "Oh, you'll learn all about that when you get your Masters." It floored me. She just continued on in her lectures, not missing a beat. I barely even knew what graduate school was, let alone felt I'd be able to get into one, and here this professor was, assuming I would get my master's degree...heck, she didn't even bother trying to talk me into it! Beth Ann Bassein taught me many things when I took her classes, especially her poetry writing courses (because she's a knockout poet herself), but she was one of the toughest teachers on campus and that one passing comment -- with all its unexpected acceptance and faith in my ability -- alone gave me courage to try. (I had another moment like this when, during my Masters, a Medieval lit professor wrote in the margins of a critical essay: "Oh, shut up and go get your PhD already!") These little para-educational things mean nothing -- and yet they mean everything.

So what a wonderful essay Giordano's "Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It" is. He reminds us that we are not always in control, that learning often happens between the cracks of the syllabus, and that what we say and do informally with (or around) our students can often teach them far more than we realize.

In his essay, he raises a very pithy question: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" And the answer is, of course not. All we really have is faith and speculation and a whole lot of intuition. Sure, good teaching is mentored, learned, and practiced, grounded in deep, lifelong study and professional development. It's based in what people call "best practices"...but I think we often draw on our unconscious well when we are teaching -- modeling our strategies and challenges off of how we ourselves learned best, and refining our techniques and personal style in a series of never-ending encores of successful teaching strategies we've employed in the past. New teachers really do make it up as they go along -- and might be surprised to learn that older teachers (usually the ones who are still engaged and excited about teaching) are making it up even still.

One of the joys of teaching, for me, is coming up with a really good discussion question off the cuff, or dreaming up an impromptu writing prompt, and watching what happens when students get inspired by it. It's magic. I'll sometimes run back to my office and make sure I write down what I did, so I'll remember to do it again in the future. But sometimes we'll run a really great exercise or discussion prompt one year and it'll come as a surprise to us just how good it can be, but when we repeat it the following year, it doesn't click and we wonder what we did wrong. The idea is only half of it; it's the fuel -- but the classroom dynamic provide the fire.

Giordano mulls over metaphors for teaching, and how none of them are quite right, though "midwife" comes closest. I like his idea that teachers need to be "good company" to students. We have to let go of control fantasies for that to happen. Giordano's essay reminded me of the basic principle of learning: it can happen any time. The best thing a teacher can do is try to create an environment where there's lots of flint that might spark fire. But it's up to the student -- and an infinite number of variables beyond anyone's control -- to strike it.

I think it's crucially important to remember these lessons during times of (what Carolyn Segal has termed) Assessmentdelirium.

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I found this article on a site I often mention here on Pedablogue: the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list run by Rick Reis out of the Standford CTL program. Their mailing list is worth subscribing to. I'm currently researching "Transormation Theory" for a pedagogy paper I'm delivering next weekend at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and I found Giordano's essay very useful.

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