Course Projects | Spring 2018
Reading Responses
Central to work in graduate school is the process of reading and reflection, of engaging with the thoughts of others and trying to distill those thoughts in such a way as to engage with them yourself. But reading and reflection are also about connecting with others, especially your classmates, who serve as live sounding boards for your emerging/evolving thoughts on the complex texts and ideas you’re experiencing in graduate school. To that end, Reading Responses for this class should attempt the following work:
- Responses should be organized around a specific claim/thesis/argument that comes from how you as a reader understood the reading(s), paying particular attention to how the readings address issues of teaching, teaching English, and/or teaching in a two-year college environment — that won’t always be the point of the readings, but your job is to apply what’s there to the TYC context;
- Responses should synthesize ideas from readings and, after we’ve read more than a couple of texts, should attempt to make thematic or theoretical connections between/among the authors/texts we’re reading; likewise, responses should, when possible, make connections between current readings and the ideas that other class members have been/are raising in their reading responses — remember, however, that “synthesize” does NOT mean “summarize”;
- Responses should ultimately ask one or two (1 – 2) big questions, these questions might come from the readings themselves or from how a particular week’s readings throw previous readings/experiences into question. These questions are meant to push other class members to explore their own readings of the texts and come up with some ideas.
Effective Reading Responses avoid the trap of merely summarizing the readings of the week — after all, we’ve all read the texts themselves — rather, well-crafted responses tease out a core issue, problem, or possibility that’s there in the reading and raises additional questions about it, perhaps by putting it in conversation with other ideas (from the class, from other classes, from lived experience).
Reading Response from Discussion Leaders should be emailed to Dr. Banks by Monday by Noon EST for review. Once approved, Discussion Leaders should post their Reading Response prompts to the appropriate forum on the course website by Noon EST on Tuesday. Class members should post on at least 2 of the 3 responses/prompts by Thursday at Noon EST. Discussion Leaders will monitor discussions on their posts throughout the week, making sure each classmate receives at least one comment on their responses.
Curricular Survey of Two-year College English Courses
Two-Year Colleges (TYCs) have grown increasingly similar over the years, in large part mirroring the common “gen ed” push that has been central to four-year college and universities. As long as one of the core missions of the TYC is to provide “gen ed” curriculum to students who will transfer to four-year programs (which isn’t its only mission!), then we’ll no doubt see that TYCs stay fairly close to the course offerings/expectations of four-year schools. The point of this survey, however, is for you to see for yourself what types of courses exist at TYCs for those with English degrees to teach, and to learn how to understand a TYC/department through its articulation of curricular offerings.
To that end, your TYC Surveys will involve exploring a college in North Carolina (not one you currently work at or have attended) and one TYC outside of North Carolina. If you choose, for example, to survey a rural TYC in NC, then you might choose an urban TYC from another state in the hopes of generating multiple vectors for contrast. If you attended or taught/teach at an urban TYC, then you might choose a rural TYC in NC to survey so as to get a broader impression of NC schools.
Your surveys should include the following data, arranged in no more than 2 single-spaced pages per TYC:
- a college profile (name, location, size of student body),
- a summary reflection on the TYC’s mission/goals/values (usually found in a mission statement, strategic outcomes document, etc),
- a list of course numbers and titles (mostly, these will be English, but may also be listed as “writing,” “developmental,” “study skills,” or even “journalism,” “communication,” “theater” etc),
- a critical reflection on what you find most exciting in the course offerings, as well as what gaps/holes that you notice in offerings and why you think these gaps could/should be filled.
The primary outcome of this project is to have you get a working knowledge of what’s possible in TYCs, not necessarily to be exhaustive in the ways a formal research project would be. We will share/compare these in class and discuss what we learned from the search.
TETYC Journal Survey & “Issue” Project
It is easy to “other” the TYC, to construct it as some strange place where courses are crowded, teachers are underpaid and under-supported, students are disinterested and illiterate, and teaching/learning is impossible. Given the broad range of students that TYCs support, and the liminal space TYCs occupy (neither high school, nor university, nor trade school, nor community literacy center), TYCs represent unique educational spaces,
but as many scholars argue, the “difference” does not mean that the TYC is some sort of educational wasteland.
For this project, you will be assigned a year between 2000 and 2017, and read at least half the scholarly articles and opinion essays published in the journal Teaching English in the Two Year College during that year. Our goal is, as a class, to survey the last 15 years of scholarship on teaching English in two-year college spaces in order to discover what teacher-scholars are talking about, what issues or problems they are trying to address constructively, and to discover what “issue” you might want to tackle as an inquiry project this semester. Journal surveys will take the form of an annotated bibliography that’s captured in a Google Sheet (spreadsheet). You will find 5 – 6 articles (“features”) and editorials in each issue, each year has 4 issues, so you’re looking at reading between 10 – 15 short articles for your bibliography (There are a total of between 20 – 24 articles per volume, divided by 2 = 10 – 15) .
Upon completing the initial survey, you will write a 300-400 word reflection on the year you studied, noting 2-3 major themes or issues that you observe/found interesting, as well as why, and then propose a topic for more sustained research in your “Issue Project” in your final paragraph.
Based on the TETYC survey (both your own and others, as well as your readings from course materials), you will identify a key issue or problem or possibility that you discovered and want to learn more about. This might be the topic you identify in your survey reflection, or after feedback from the professor and looking at other themes in the survey, you might identify a different option for inquiry.
Project Proposal: After completing the survey (check the schedule for due dates), you will write a proposal for your inquiry-based “Issue” project. Your proposal is a short, one-page (200-300 word) explanation of the issue you’re interested in, why you’re interested, what you already know and what you hope to learn through research, and what form your project might take at the end, as well as a starter bibliography of 10 – 15 articles or book chapters that you plan to read/investigate as part of the project. This is all very tentative work, so you shouldn’t be anxious if you don’t know exactly what form your product will take or what sources you’ll make use of.
Product Format: Projects may take the form of a traditional researched essay or literature review, or may be something more teacher- and student-focused like a set of teaching resources you create based on your research. Projects may be print-based, primarily visual/audio/video, or some combination of all of them. You will negotiate your topic and the format for your project with the professor.
Digital Teaching Portfolio
Your digital teaching portfolio will be one artifact that you can carry with you through other graduate classes and ultimately to job applications for two- and four-year college teaching. This semester, we will fill your portfolio with artifacts that are common both to teaching portfolios and to job applications. Invariably, when applying for jobs, you will be asked for your curriculum vitae and a statement of teaching philosophy, in addition to your letter of application. However, teaching-oriented jobs also tend to ask for more materials, like sample syllabi and assignments. Some jobs I’ve applied for even asked for samples of student writing that I had “marked” (responded to, graded) and for “evidence of teaching effectiveness” (by which they meant student evaluations of my teaching) — these sorts of materials are much less common, however. This semester, we will work on building the following projects for our portfolios:
- Sample Syllabi: After the curriculum survey, you will build two “from scratch” syllabi for two very different courses. Because elsewhere in the certificate and/or graduate program you will have space to construct a developmental/basic writing and a first-year writing course, for this class you will construct syllabi for two courses other than Dev/basic writing or FYC. Syllabi should contain the following pieces of information:
1) Introduction to the course, 2) Goals/objectives, 3) Textbooks, 4) Projects/Assignments, 5) Grading Scale; 6) Schedule. - Teaching Statement: The teaching statement is typically one single-spaced page (400-500 words) which reflects your core beliefs about teaching and learning. These are very difficult statements to write: if you’re too general, you come off sounding like your classroom is just all wonder and glory and unicorns and rainbows; if you get too specific, you end up having to write different ones for each type of job you want; and if you get too theoretical, you might be seen as unapproachable or not “student oriented,” which can be a negative when applying for jobs at TYCs. We will work on striking that balance this semester, but this document will take many many drafts to perfect — you will work on this document throughout your career.
- Teaching Activities: Typically, in a portfolio, you would have sample assignments that you have given in different types of classes so that readers can get a sense of what, in practice, you do with students as readers, writers, etc. Since you may not have taught yet, these activities will likely be aspirational in nature — what you would likely do. Essentially, you will look at the two syllabi you create this semester and envision activities that would help students to achieve your course goals and objectives, or to complete assignments. Then you will create at least one sample activity for each of your syllabi in your teaching portfolio
- Curriculum Vitae: The CV is another one of those tough documents to create. It’s not a resume, so it’s not “skills-based.” CVs (from the Latin “course of life”) are intended to show the highlights of your “academic life,” the education you’ve received, the awards/honors you’ve earned or been given, the courses you’ve taught, conference papers you’ve presented, grants you’ve won/worked on, publications, etc.
These documents will help you to begin to frame a public teacher identity. But as you continue in graduate school or in your professional life, you will want to consistently add to these materials, revising what’s there as you reflect on and revise your teaching practices. For fun, I’ll share with you both an older and a more recent version of my own teaching philosophy statement, CVs, etc.
WordPress Tutorial 1: Introduction
Sample Teaching Portfolios from Former Sections of English 7960