Before I get too far away from the teaching semester, let me record what went well in English 101 at Spartanburg Methodist College, here in one concise post.
I began the semester with a lot of ideas, but the one I was most committed to was the idea of adopting a tree. I had in mind we'd choose our tree in early September and that we'd return to it throughout the semester and describe how it was changing. In the last week of August, we went outside to choose our tree, and I wrote a blog post about it here.
I decided to have us do a few more experiments--once they chose a tree, they wrote directions to it, and then we tested them. That experience gave us a great way to talk about precise language.
I wanted them to read the work of others who had adopted a tree. I had saved one article from The Washington Post, and it led me to another article. We wrote about which author did the better job of convincing a person to adopt a tree. We talked about the proper way to refer to these two outside sources, and over several class sessions, we talked about how these skills are transferable to writing a research paper.
I didn't realize that I was going to combine all these efforts into one paper. I thought about having them choose one approach (description/describing a tree, process/writing directions to the tree, using outside sources in arguing that everyone should have a favorite tree, and maybe a creative approach) and write it up. But I decided that it worked as a larger paper with parts, so I created a handout that told them how to take the informal writing that we'd been doing and turn it into Essay Two. They also had to write a reflective piece about all the pieces they'd been writing.
What was really cool is that it seemed to deflect plagiarism. It's hard to have AI write the description of the tree, such a specific tree. It was the first time I had done this, so there weren't lots of essays floating around, the way there are if I ask students to write about a social issue.
I had a vision of other modules we'd do, perhaps a birding module, perhaps a photohaiku module, along with a research paper where they would find some outside sources to go with ones that I would hand out. But there was a hurricane, and we got off schedule in all sorts of ways.
We still needed to do a research essay. I decided to do an abbreviated experience. Instead of sending them out to do research, I collected materials. We watched this TED talk by Suzanne Simard about how trees talk to each other. Earlier in the year, I found an academic journal article that she co-wrote that covers the same subject, but in a much more scholarly way, and I brought that in, along with an article about her that appeared in The Guardian. We talked about the differences and similarities between these sources, and we did an annotated Works Cited page--part of it we did together, and the analysis of the works, each student wrote on their own (nothing complicated, just a sentence or two).
Then I brought in some additional sources that covered the same topic, including Simard's larger book and a children's book that covered the same topic. I had them write a small research paper that analyzed which source covered the topic best and/or which was their favorite. They had to refer to at least three outside sources, and because we had run out of time, I didn't require them to find other sources, although we did talk about how they would do that in future classes, if they had a more rigorous research assignment.
I do realize what has been lost, in our semester long focus on trees. I love the idea of students choosing a topic and diving deep and learning a lot. But through the years, I'm less and less convinced that happens, except for one or two students, who have probably been doing that on their own anyway.
In this time of planetary destruction, teaching students how to notice the world around them seems more important than ever. Exposing students to the ways of being a naturalist in the world, even if they're not going to be scientists--that seems very important to me. Along the way we did creative approaches too, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I think those experiences helped some of them realize that they do have creative skills, that these, too, can be learned.
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