Week 11, Post 5: My Favorite Martian

It looks as if Unit Three will be the autobiography, which explains the form and content.  It would follow B & P as closely as possible, but with exponential work on one man's shoulders.

Week 11, Post 4: Syllabus?

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You!

Week 11, Post 3: Tentative Overview

Unit 1: Discovering personal voice; personal narrative; descriptive essay.

Unit 2: Taking a stand; the argumentative essay.

Unit 3: Autobiography.

Unit 4. Sociological text; essay relating autobiography in sociological context.

Unit 5. Sociological research paper.

Week 11, Post 2: IRW Tensions?

The primary gaps between IRW and the model I have in mind (largely B & P) are community building and metacognitive understanding.  In B & P's model, students are so busy reading and writing and re-writing, there is probably much less emphasis on chatting about process.  Also, because my course would be half as long as IRW, there would be far fewer chances for community building.

Week 11, Post 1: What I Wanna Say Is

Flesh out your teaching philosophy a bit more for part 1 of the portfolio. (Feel free to draw on the quick-writing that we did in class.)  Bring 4 hard copies to class.

If philosophy means my general orientation or viewpoint about reading and writing, and the way I hope to help students, I'd say I'm an expressivist-cognitivist.  I found my passion for reading and writing by doing plenty of "outside" reading and journaling in high school.  In this much, at heart I'm an expressivist.  I learned to assume a more formal style for essays and research papers, paying attention to form as well as content.  In this sense, I'm an objectivist.  I find placing a text in historical context adds many layers of additional meaning to it, so delving into context is useful, though not nearly as important as other aspects like the author's intention and  the reader's schema.  Given the time and resources, such social studies can be fascinating, but it's hard to justify that time spent with so many other pressing priorities; thus, only incidentally would I call my philosophy socio-cultural.

* It essential to honor the student's own schema, rather than foisting one correct meaning of a text.

* It's vital to engage the student in meaningful experiences with language -- as personal and usable as possible.

* It's important to give the student a great variety of opportunities to read (magazine articles, hypertext, fiction, nonfiction) and to write (personal narrative, descriptive essay, argumentative essay).  It's equally important to give students the chance to read books of their own choosing (for pleasure) and to write "low stakes" pieces, such as free writing and non-graded journals.

*While I generally favor an expressivist approach, like B &P, I would employ pre-reading discussions and post-reading comprehension questions to ensure the basic points are clear.

*While I admire McCormick's socio-culture angle, I prefer B & P's reading/writing saturation approach, which doesn't allow much time for the historical study of the structure of power and the plight of the victims.  However, as a matter of respect to all students and all cultures that they represent, there should be some lesson(s) on the erroneous misinterpretations of SE as the superior dialect, and an acknowledgement of all dialects as honorable and valid.

*It seems crucial to integrate reading and writing (I still need to understand this better).