by Ryan Dippre (Original)
Category: The CEA Forum
Abstract
During the summer and fall semester 2012, I took on a project to take every standardized exam our English majors take. Thus, I signed up for and took the GRE General Test, the Praxis Content Area Exam (English Language, Literature, and Composition: Content Knowledge), the Senior Major Field Tests in English and Writing, and the GRE Subject Exam in Literature. My goals in taking the exams varied by the exam, but one overriding goal was consistent: I wanted to see what these exams are actually like, so I can help students prepare for them. When students talk to me about graduate school or a career in teaching, they often ask about one of these exams. However, I had not taken either the GRE General or Subject Exam since the mid-1990s, and I had no idea how or how much the exams had changed since then. When students asked about the Praxis, I was forced to draw on what I had heard from colleagues and students who had taken it. In each case, I was at least partially ill-informed, and taking the exams seemed like the best way to truly understand what our students needed to do to prepare for these tests. What I found is that changes to the GRE General Exam make it much more reflective of the type of thinking required in graduate school, while both the Subject Exam and Praxis have not kept pace with changes in English graduate studies or high and middle school teaching, respectively.
Abstract
Scholars and teachers often focus only on alphabetic texts in the classroom (Palmeri; Alexander and Rhodes; Jewitt; Selfe; Shipka); however, we do our students a disservice if we do not prepare them to compose with and understand the rhetorical consequences of using a variety of modes. In this article, I argue that we need to teach our students to be critically aware of the affordances of each mode as well as the ways in which those affordances affect communication. With this in mind, I offer an example introductory assignment using William Blake’s “The Tyger” to help students gain a critical awareness of modal affordances. Utilizing Blakes poem, three versions of his etching, a choral version of the poem, and YouTube video of a dramatic reading of the poem, I analyze the ways in which meaning making is affected by changes in and juxtaposition of different modes. I suggest that this same kind of analysis could be conducted with students, helping them discover how different multimodal texts lead to different meanings and consider how the meanings could have been made clearer or made different.
by Melissa Carol Johnson (Original)
Abstract
This essay is grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning and will focus specifically on the ways in which the Harry Potter books highlight the diversity of learning and teaching styles; privilege active experiential learning and problem solving over passive rote learning; and emphasize the benefits of collaboration over competition. Through analysis of the teaching styles and pedagogy of Professors Binns, Umbridge, Snape, Lupin, and Sprout, I illustrate that a pedagogical approach such as active learning is only successful when coupled with a supportive, non-threatening, cooperative learning environment in which critical thinking and risk-taking are encouraged and rewarded.
Abstract
“Violating Pedagogy: Literary Theory in the Twenty-first Century College Classroom” discusses the challenge of teaching literary theory to undergraduate and graduate students in a cultural atmosphere that may at times feel simultaneously anti-intellectual and overpopulated with competing scholarly concerns. Approaching theory as a guiding force for individualized inquiry, we can embrace the fragmentation of the field by organizing courses according to major topics of interest that are addressed by multiple schools and movements, allowing for idiosyncratic theoretical fusions to occur. Further, the teacher of literary theory can assist students by acknowledging that the study of theory can be enlightening but also intellectually disruptive, creating more questions than it answers and forcing investigators (including the instructor) to reassess their own systems of belief in ways that may be disquieting or even painful.
Abstract
While a thematic approach to teaching is not a novel idea, the specific needs of the developmental writer and a diverse student body can find the continuity of a theme especially beneficial, and the theme of fear has proven particularly successful. The typical developmental composition course at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University includes a broad range of student ages and experiences, though they often share discipline interests and career goals in the fields of engineering and aviation. To engage and unite such a group, the theme of fear allows individuals to share unique knowledge bases as they consider the appeal of fear as well as its use as a manipulative tactic in politics and the media. This article examines how fear can be applied thematically in the developmental writing course through a three-unit structure that develops communication skills, writing mechanics, and critical thinking.
Abstract
This article presents an effective model for a manageable interdisciplinary project that shows students the connections among art, English, and other disciplines; gives composition students an external audience for their writing; and emphasizes the importance of research in the process of creating arguments and art. This interdisciplinary project model provides the opportunity for interested faculty to engage in interdisciplinary teaching without directly challenging institutional structures.
Abstract
This article discusses ways literature is taught at the university. It describes a gap in the way English is often taught in literature programs and the way future teachers are taught to teach English to secondary students. It argues for teaching literature in ways that might be good for majors in both fields, ways that support the work valued by each sub-discipline
by Ian Barnard (Original)
Abstract
In literature, composition, and other areas of English Studies, relateability can be an important tool to inscribe marginalized subjects as academic citizens. However, its larger arc reproduces ethnocentric and individualistic ideologies at the national and personal levels that foreclose the true understanding of and engagement with Otherness that defines learning. What are the particular intellectual and other challenges, pleasures, and rewards of refusing the pedagogical imperative to engage and understand through identification? I conclude the article by deploying theorists of difference to ask what it means to understand difference as difference, how this understanding might be facilitated, and what the value of such an understanding might be.
Abstract
This essay develops a theory of “digital liminality” as a way to analyze the role of technology in the classroom, and in students’ lives. It is also a report on the ESL classroom as a site of intercultural exchange between instructors and Muslim students. The role of digital media in higher ed was a question I had to confront at a Middle Eastern University, where students exhibited a strong cell phone addiction. I theorized Saudi students’ immersion in their cells as a liminal phase during a university rite of passage. Digital technology exposed them to things that would be inadmissible when they were later reintegrated into a deeply conservative society. My students wrote about living between “Western freedoms,” and a world of submission, where most of them would work and raise families. In my Freshman English courses, a temporary cell-free zone was established, enabling students to defamiliarize their use of digital technologies. Students investigated their own role as “threshold people” on the verge of a new way of life, critically examining their own digitally mediated liminality. Students then did presentations about the challenges of re-incorporation in a Saudi context. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and ESL theory and practice, I integrate excerpts from student journals, providing a personal perspective on my analysis of digital liminality, and ESL classrooms as intercultural crossroads.
