Papers: Models and Exercises

The question of research integration into the classroom is a popular/important one in many job searches today. The CHE had a thread on integrating research into the classroom recently that had several good points.

Polly_Mer asked some good questions.

Is the only thing you do integration of research into your classroom is through selection of syllabi topics or do you share your published papers? Do you share work in progress? Do you share the major theories in the field in a way that is different from the standard texts? Do you use seminars to have students help bounce ideas around? Do you bring in conflicting, cutting-edge papers for students to critique or otherwise work on the cutting-edge for a handful of topics? Do you bring in non-scholarly articles from the popular media that cover your area either correctly or incorrectly for discussion? Is any of your research on pedagogy of your field? Or are you completely mum in all ways about your research because teaching is teaching and research is research?

What could you do with an undergraduate research assistant or as an advisor on a senior/honor thesis? Would taking those students on a trip to an archive and then co-authoring a paper be reasonable? How about maintaining a wiki on your area or otherwise contributing to electronic media? What about doing outreach to the public and the K-12 local schools? Judging at low level research seminars like the Junior Science and Humanities Symposia? Photocopying your papers (don’t mention this one even if it is the only one you can see working)?

In response to the original poster’s (OP’s) query about the question “How do you integrate your research into the classroom?” Marlborough said:

This is also a question about how your expertise plays to a non-specialist audience and how well you can explain it. Good answers include

“Doing this research involved a lot of work with material objects. Now, when I teach research methods, I include examples students might not have thought about, like clothing or grafitti.”

A good general theme–”My dissertation is about the implementation of a government policy on the periphery of its authority. I’ve learned that what is said at the top is not always how it plays out on the ground–and I tend to bring that question to a lot of the situations we encounter.”

“I am always working on something, and I find that sharing the process with students as I go along helps them to understand that we encounter the same frustrations and successes when we work on this field. I tell them about going to the archive, or checking notes, or translation work, or a bad day when I didn’t find anything useful in some books I thought were going to have what I wanted.”

The OP said:

I have had students work on translations of poems, with annotations. Maybe it would be good to try to publish something like that collectively with the students, as a thematic anthology of poems, or example, in which we could collaborate in the translations and introduction.

and Merce replied:

You could take a text already in the public domain and do a crowd-sourced translation with all your kids and publish through a website with images, translations, helpful bio or dictionary historical info links.

This might be something interesting that could be put together for English. Not the translations, obviously, but having students do multiple readings of one poem and do annotations, so that multiple voices about the poem are coming through. That might be really interesting.

I am teaching Developmental Writing, which I love. Despite my desire to teach the course, and my preparation for it, I still struggle with parts of the course. How do I make the course relevant to my students and make it sufficiently challenging?

One idea I found at the CHE fora seems to offer some significant possiblities:

I’ve been structuring my comp courses around a “welcome to college” theme for years, and it doesn’t get old nearly as fast as you’d think. Most of the students seem to have no problem with an entire course about university education. (I try to keep the assignments varied and cover a lot of territory — everything from analyzing representations of college life in the movies to researching a contemporary issue of the student’s choice, as long as it affects the college community in some way.)

A few readings that I use:

Jack Meiland, The Difference Between High School and College

William Cronon, Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Education

Caroline Bird, College is a Waste of Time and Money (for a contrarian view — I might try something a little more contemporary next time around, since an updated version of her argument seems to be in fashion now)

And there are a ton of short pieces from the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed that work well with this sort of theme.

I like this idea. It reminds me of work I did many years ago with my students to try and get them to understand the culture of the college they were attending. I can certainly see where it would be useful for my students, who come from a low socio-economic stratum, to learn about the culture of college itself.

Siobhan Curious is asking what learning looks like at her blog. She teaches college English and I enjoy her blog and recommend it to my readers.

This particular article also has an interesting set of assignments for reading personal narratives. That’s not something I can teach at my college right now, but perhaps you can.

What does learning look like?

My developmental students are remembering what their headings should look like, that papers should be double spaced, that font size should be twelve. They are remembering they need a title, remembering not to use right justification, remembering to not just repeat the question but to answer it. To me that looks like it is learning.

But what if it’s not? My sophomore students had an out-of-class essay to write. In that essay all the problems mentioned above (and some others my developmental students have never practiced) showed up. My sophomores, who have had two freshman comp classes and have taken other college courses, didn’t learn how to write a paper for English.

So, I’m going to ask the question from a very different angle. What does learning look like? When is what it looks like really learning?

Ten Wonderful Things, Pt. 4: Harry Potter from Classroom as Microcosm made me laugh out loud. Unless you are an English teacher, it might not strike you as funny. (Of course, if you aren’t an English teacher, what are you doing on the blog?) Even if you are an English teacher, if you’re a big Twilight fan (and there are plenty) you still might not like it. BUT for the rest of you, the article was delightful.

I assign it in my Child Studies course, where we first read Franny and Zooey. They almost all hate F & Z, and they all, almost without exception it seems, love HP. The reasons for this are a focus of discussion for much of the course; “What makes a book good?” is a running question from the beginning of the semester until the end, when they write a story themselves and evaluate it according to the criteria they come up with.

Harry Potter is special because they think it’s good, but it’s also special because I think it’s good.

This is not the part I found most delightful, but is, instead, just a tease. Enjoy the post!

Many years ago, in response to a request by the faculty, I created an assignment series that worked on helping the students express their beliefs without relying on jargon. A recent article in The Chronicle by Stephen T. Asma on “Soul Talk” made me remember that experience.

But the sentences “James Brown has soul” and “My soul is anchored in the Lord” rely on a very different system of meaning—they don’t correspond to anything particularly. Instead they take their meaning from a coherence they have with other terms, concepts, values, connotations, and associations. “This song has soul” means: This music restores us, this music has integrity, there’s something authentic and natural in its style, this music contains strong emotion, the repetition is hypnotic or ecstatic, there are elements of the African-American experience in this music and these lyrics, this song draws on gospel and R&B genres, this song is so funky you can smell it, and so on. That is the matrix of connotations that make up the context of soul talk—and the soul talk is coherent to the extent that it coheres in some way with all these other experiences and meanings. In that sense, the soul is meaningful to many of us without any scientific verification of its existence.

I personally believe that it is a legitimate rhetorical exercise, though I can see why a philosopher might wish to avoid the whole question.

What did I do?

I asked the students to write down ten things they believed.

I then asked them to choose one. They did a freewriting exercise on that belief. What did it mean? Why did they believe it? When did they come to believe it? On what is the belief based?

Then I asked them to discuss that belief without jargon. I included the idea that they could explain the history of their coming to that belief.

I received some amazing papers.

I also received some not so amazing ones.

But then I moved on and the exercise has never been repeated. I wonder if something like this would work in Dr. Asma’s classes.

This is a story I tell in my classes, but I didn’t have the exact sources beforehand.

I also pass out a sheet that shows what the news media considers plagiarizing. Here’s the original and the plagiarized version – and the columnist who was found to have done this (before he ever got his washingtonpost.com job) resigned, and the editor said he would have fired him:

Murray had written:

“Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They’re known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.’ ”

Domenech wrote:

“Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They’re known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human.”

Washington Post

This shows them that plagiarism doesn’t have to be 10 pages of direct copying to ruin your career.

This is from avaya on the Chronicle’s fora.

I had oral reports in class this semester. I graded them hard. Most people made As anyway, because they did exactly what I wanted. Four people earned Ds and one earned an F. (This of the people who did the reports, 46 out of 50.)

I was very hard on the grades. If you went over a full minute, you lost a letter grade. If your poster wasn’t legible from six feet away, you lost a letter grade. If you did not introduce your topic, you lost a letter grade.

One student went from a C- to a D+ (though we don’t use +/-) and really wanted to know why he didn’t make a C. The main reason was his work was late. However, he would have made a C if I had not graded so hard on the oral presentation because he did good work.

So I am rethinking my grading, again. I don’t think I will change the rubric for this semester. He is the only person whose grade would change because of it and I don’t want to encourage grade grubbing. I think if he had asked, rather than complained, I might have been willing to do it, though. And that bothers me.

So I need to be more forethoughtful about the presentation grades.

MsMicrobe, on a Chronicle forumgave these as her criteria:

1. Main topic controversy identified
2. Adequate background
3. Organization of talk is clear to audience
4. Data presented to support ideas
5. Conclusion clear.
6. Appropriate scientific language used
7. Effectively uses visual aids
8. Effective delivery
9. Answers questions
10. On time. (with reasonable limits above and below the target time)

All of the students are expected to ask questions. I will call on someone to ask a question if none arise.

I break speaking down into confident body language and confident voice usage. I have each student fill out a feedback sheet for the speaker. They have to tell the speaker the best thing they did with body language (posture, eye contact, etc.) and what one thing they should focus on improving. They also have to praise the best thing the speaker did with their voice (speed, volume, inflection) and indicate what one area the speaker should work to improve.

I do NOT want to have to look at 50×50 feedback sheets, but I like the idea of doing it.

I am going to think about this long and hard this semester.

Fun idea
Oh, this is a good idea. And it might be fun.

Give a “bad” presentation illustrating some common problems, and let the class critique you.

from Systeme D at the same forum.

For this assignment, you must introduce your students to the means for evaluating websites properly.

Here are three good resources:
Berkeley
Cornell
NMSU

Once you have explained how to evaluate websites, give them a couple to look at. Ask them which ones are bad and why.

Then, for homework, have them find a website on a topic they are an expert in that is terrible. Is the information wrong? Is it misleading? Are there gaps in the information?

Have them present their website for two minutes the next class period.

It’s a fun introduction to how to choose good websites, from finding bad ones.

Tollefson of Berkeley has put together some good ideas for assignments in his “Encouraging Student Writing.”

I particularly like:

Book Review for a Professional Journal
After perusing an appropriate journal to identify the format and approach of typical book reviews, students can practice their skills in summarizing and placing material in the context of related reading and research by writing a book review for a professional audience.

and

Letter to a Public Official or Company Officer
Writing a persuasive letter, arguing for or against a particular policy, requires students to organize their case from the policymaker’s perspective, decide the best way to present supporting evidence, and anticipate and respond to counter arguments.