I embarked on this course with a little trepidation. It is my first education class on this campus (I took a qualitative research course in the Education Department at the Univ of TN, but it was much more about research methods than pedagogy) and it is focused on using technology, which I have improved in greatly over the last few years but still don't consider an area of strength for me. I have been pleasantly surprised, however.
For one, I've found that much of what we have discussed is immediately useful to me in my composition courses. I completely changed my major project for this semester in order to let my students play with some of the cool tools we reviewed, while enabling to think about who needs to know the information they discovered in their research and how they could most effectively present that information to their chosen audience. They (mostly) had fun while engaging in the higher order thinking I was hoping they would do.
In addition, it's been very eye-opening for me to see just how many really great resources are readily available online if I build up a personal learning network that will help direct me to them. Life as an adjunct professor can be a very isolating experience. I have a person assigned as my officemate whom I have never seen and am beginning to doubt exists. I was depressed all spring by the continued sight of several candy canes that the office staff had placed as gifts into all instructor mailboxes at the end of last semester that were never picked up by those who presumably never had time to come into the department. I work really hard to build relationships with my colleagues during my more extensive time on campus in my office doing conferences, on social media, and by participating in a faculty learning community this year. These efforts have led to sharing some good assignments and classroom management strategies, but those benefits pale in comparison to the volume of practical materials that I have come across this semester. I plan on using the NGLC composition course lessons to help me manage teaching five sections on two campuses in the Fall.
For some reason, I've had a very lone wolf, solitary genius mentality about my lesson plans, feeling like I had to invent everything anew for myself, but I've seen such high-quality lesson plans and resources through this class, and even in the structure of the class itself, that I feel empowered to treat teaching as a community affair that I don't have to manage alone.
At the same time, I have felt encouraged to embrace the sharing economy in education. I am undertaking the creation of some discussion guides, class activities, and assignment ideas built around satirical or entertaining videos that also aim to inform the public, such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, with my colleague across the hall from me. I have used John Oliver clips fairly extensively in my classes because he creates such beautiful yet entertaining arguments and have assigned a group project where students were to create their own mini-episode of Last Week Tonight. I've shared those lessons on a very small scale, but now I'm going to attempt to go big. Because if I don't have to plan every little detail of my class myself, I can afford to spend more time making the lessons I'm passionate about really great and worth sharing.
I didn't expect to learn so much about community in a class where I expected to (and to a certain extent did) feel like an outsider. But technology enables us to create community with those beyond our immediate physical access.
Bubbl artifact
I used Bubbl.us to create an artifact illustrating what I learned this semester. It's an intuitive and free application, two features I generally love.
No comments:
Post a Comment