Week 8, Post 3: Practically Speaking

PRACTICE: What might your theory look like in practice? What kind of teaching activities would we see in such a classroom? Would any of the Discovery of Competence activities fit with your theory?  Would any of the Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts activities fit with your theory? (Make sure that your read and comment on your group-mates' blog postings.)

Generally, in the Expressivist model, we would see lots of free reading and lots of free writing.  The Expressivist goal is to provoke an emotional response (Reader Response) or expression to a text.  In the ideal world, we would simply expose students to mountains of books, let them pick their choice, and let them write what they like based on their responses, since, after all, reading and writing are as natural as breathing.

TDOC activities tend to be far too prescripted and limited to the Expressionist way of thinking.  TDOC activities tend to revolve around research and other group activities, as opposed to the almost unlimited freedom model of Expressivism.  The students' texts are the texts of the class, but beyond this, all bets are off as to how much free reading and writing is meant to take place.  Still, Expressivists favor lots of expression, including group discussion, and TDOC includes plenty of this.  Generally speaking, though, TDOC would not fit well with Expressivism.

FAC activities have an even tighter rein on the student in a sense, in that the whole class does nearly everything as a group.  On the other hand, they're required to do loads of free reading and lots of journals.  In this way, FAC lines up nicely with the Expressionist model.  Given the bounty of FAC group discussion, FAC syncs up with Expressivism, too.

On my own last week, after the reading and other blog postings, I was so exhausted, I couldn't get my head around this post, applying McCormick to other cases, let alone "tweeking" another curriculum with it.  But I liked this exercise in class Thursday very much!  In a way, it was my favorite class of all.  It's like we were "riffing" -- to borrow a jazz term -- but with pedagogical methods, instead of musical phrases.  Frankly, Mark made a tough exercise really great, pushing us and pushing us to imagine new applications.  Until last Thur., I always despised curriculum planning, but I think this woke up something new in me.