[May’s Teaching Carnival is from Jill Morris, and she provides her own introduction below. ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find previous carnivals on Teaching Carnival’s home page. --@billiehara]
When I volunteered to write this Teaching Carnival (what feels like) many months ago, I was a wife, a WPA, a computers and writing junky, a graduate student without a complete dissertation, a job market hound, a closet ballerina, and a Writing Center Director. As I piece together my notes, now, I am single, on my way to a tenure track job with no administration duties, a Writing Center Director preparing to hand over the keys to a new shiny coordinator, a graduate student with a dissertation in hand, and I am about to present a conference paper that involves me actually doing ballet. This Carnival reflects, I believe, at least some of my inner chaos which is a chaos many teachers share—balancing life with research and teaching.
So here there be dragons, technology, rhetoric, writing and race. Here there be sexy titles, smartphones, work-life balances, student loans, and the meaning of writing. It’s a new spring with many possibilities for summer and fall teaching just out of reach. I hope some of these posts will help inspire those who read them.
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- “Sex and Word Clouds.” Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Texas Wesleyan University. Having recently returned from the CCCC Conference, I was struck by how true this post is—session titles matter. This post will help you craft better and more effective conference panel titles and discusses how randomness doesn’t really work. However, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning does recommend using a Word Cloud program like Wordle in order to pull out key terms and phrases that should appear in your title.
- “Cell Phones, Driving, and Social Learning.” Lisa M. Lane. Everyone knows that some students seem to learn best in a face to face atmosphere. In this post, Lane connects this concept with research about concentration, driving, and talking with why some students seem to fare better in classrooms where they have other students to use to gauge response to material with.
- “Birther Thirsty: A Question about Racism in the Academy.” Ted from Telluride, College Misery. Over at College Misery, one poster writes about his concern about colleagues unwilling to believe that Obama was born in the United States. His post wraps up with a question about racism in the academy and the comments, thus far, are both friendly and enlightening.
- “The Activity of Composition,” Alex Reid. Reid shares with us an intense essay about writing—what is written, why we write it, and how our values have changed over time. He writes that “we are caught up, or limited by, our attachment to a particular view of the humanities” and this view does, indeed, limit our view of what rhetoric can do. In the midst of this discussion, Reid notes that many teacher comments on student writing might well fail the Turing test because we are so caught up in commenting that we fail to respond to writing as human beings first and teachers second.
- “CCCC Atlanta Rewind Part 2,” Derek Mueller. As part of his conference wrap-up, Derek shares his poster session contribution which tracks rhetorical style from prose to new media. It’s quite useful for anyone who teaches style in a variety of modes in the classroom.
- “The 4Cs Adventures of Gertrude,” Jenn Stewart. As I was one of the creators of the C’s the Day Game recently played at the Conference of College Composition and Communication in Atlanta, I knew that this year’s conference would be special for me. However, I had no idea the impact our silly prizes (sparkleponies) and wild networking ideas would have on others. I knew, in my own Writing Center practice, that the littlest things can change peoples’ lives, but I often forget it when faced with giant classrooms or conferences.
- “Role Model?” Profgrrrrl. This post reminds us that others cannot always see our failings and may actually think that we are doing pretty well.
- “Please Don’t Flame the Students.” Tenured Radical. Tenured Radical shares some thoughts about working with young, politically conservative students. This one isn’t to be missed, but if you do, here’s a taste: “It is a common strategy for conservative student groups to make every possible effort to get in the faces of faculty in order to provoke a response that will “expose” our inherent desire to oppress them and limit the expression of their ideas. Hence, when faced with such opportunities, however compelling, it is often best not to respond at all. “
- “Bait.” Community College Dean. Only shortly thereafter, Community College Dean responded to the post, noting that faculty also sometimes bait Administrators into taking “recognizably human action” as well.
- “A Dirty Little Secret about Professors,” Dr. Crazy. Dr. Crazy points out that the real life of a liberal professor is a far cry from life changing as we can rarely even get students to care about changing their grammar (let alone their political beliefs).
- “Communication in the Classroom,” Prentice. Prentice writes about using Mass Effect to teach a class wherein the teacher was not even fully aware of the skills that were being used in the class until it happened.
- “Hosting a Writing Group.” Notorious Ph.D. is considering hosting a writing group on her blog and is looking for willing participants.
- “Cool Teaching Tools.” Blogenspiel. On the eve of beginning to redesign, rethink, and perhaps reteach a historiography course, Blogenspiel shares some great teaching tools in Zotero and Wall Wisher including some wonderful group assignments.
- “Weird email issue.” Bardiac. Bardiac writes about a student with an inappropriate e-mail address. Having once failed a student because my spam filter disliked his sexual-slangy e-mail address, I can empathize. Of course, Bardiac’s student has an unfortunate racial term in it, and mine was simply unfortunate (but not specifically disparaging). While we want to encourage students to use their professional, school-given e-mails, this is complicated by the recent Freedom of Information Act filings against State School professors. Bardiac asks—what to say?
- “A Colorful Approach to Revision,” Blogging Pedagogy. This post discusses using crayons and color to supplement peer review exercises.
- “Using Twitter to Teach.” Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Texas Wesleyan University. This is the third part of a series about using Twitter in the classroom, and the fight to get to do so. The instructor writing the article was faced with “You cannot use Twitter or Facebook in your class to communicate with students…it is against university policy,” which happens to be my own school’s policy. In fact, students are not allowed to use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media at all on campus according to a policy they must sign in order to become a student here. If you have had an experience fighting for the right for social media you may also share your story in the comments.
- “Grading on the iPad.” Undine. As an iPad owner, I already control classroom media via Bluetooth, play Angry Birds, and now listen to music in my car all via my tablet. However, like many users I’m interested in knowing more about using the iPad to grade. This post not only covers some of the basics, but it also links to a few other places where you can read reviews and commentary on using the iPad for a common task.
- “Bad Education.” Malcolm Harris. While not strictly about teaching, Harris compares the current housing crisis to what he sees as the future education-funding crisis. Tuition costs are rising, and not because teachers make more money, but instead because administrators are making more, fewer of them are teachers who have gone into administration, sports programs and stadiums are sucking up more money, and advertising for college is at an all time high. Harris discusses student debt, adjuncts, and administrators with a straightforward aplomb that is worth reading.
- “Let Go.” Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, Texas Wesleyan University. This post reiterates a simple statement I’ve told myself over and over again for the past few months: Let go. I feel trapped by my curriculum sometimes, I know I need to “cover” certain aspects of the course material or the next teacher down the line will be unhappy. I’m the WPA—I know this. But I’m at my best as a teacher when I “let go.” I’ve spent the past few months in freefall—personally, academically, and philosophically—I cannot claim that this was not a terrifying position to take. And yet, I’m a better teacher, I’ve found my friends utterly trustworthy, and I’ve found a new life. In the face of increasing standardization, student learning outcome-i-ness, and the only advice I have left to give is to do the same—let go.
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How about you? Do you have any last minute links you’d like to add to this month’s carnival? Did we miss your work? If we don’t know about you, we can’t link to you. So, let us know what you are up to in the classroom. You can easily have one of your blog posts about teaching in higher education included in an issue of the teaching carnival by doing any or all of the following:
- Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
- Tag your post in Delicious (or Diigo or other bookmarking service) with
teaching-carnival.
Billie Hara will compile teaching-related posts for Teaching Carnival 4.10. You can reach her via email (billiehara@gmail.com) or on Twitter (@billiehara). Keep in mind, that if you don’t send us your posts, we might miss them. So send them on! Lastly, if you are interested in hosting a future Teaching Carnival, please contact Billie Hara for information.
[Image by P. J. Lewis and used under the Creative Commons license.]
