Or at least it seems that way now – I’m sure I’ll be slammed when I actually do what I intend to do.
What am I talking about, you ask? Well, updating a course that I’m teaching in the fall, you sillies! This will be the first of four posts that I’ll do in this vein, and if all of them go like this one did, well, it’s smooth sailing! (Famous last words).
The course: This is a course that I’ve taught only one time before, a theory course for master’s level students that focuses on one particular “strand” of theoretical inquiry. If you want to know more precisely what theoretical strand, I’m happy to talk about that, but for the purposes of talking about the updating, it’s not necessary for me to go into detail about that.
Successes the first time around: The first time, I invested a lot of energy on the front end in designing the course, from figuring out the pacing of the readings (and what to assign) as well as to constructing a lot of “stepping-stone” assignments that would lead up to (in theory – ha! see what I did there?) the students being able to write a successful theoretically oriented seminar paper at the end of the whole shebang. Looking back on that part of things, the structure that is, I’m still really happy with the design of this course. However, even with that being the case, I didn’t feel approaching this second run-through confident in just keeping everything as it was.
Challenges the first time around (I almost wrote failures, but I don’t think that’s actually the right word – not that I wouldn’t admit it if there were “failures” but that just wasn’t quite how it went): I think the challenges were twofold, both of which relate to the student population for the course, but one is a more “macro” issue and one is a more “micro” issue. On the macro level, our M.A. program is new-ish (and at the time that I first taught the course it was NEW). Most of our students are returning after some gap after undergrad, and they have chosen to pursue a master’s degree for one of two reasons: personal enrichment, or promotion at work. Further, our program is an M.A. in English and not an M.A. in Literature, which means students aren’t necessarily heavily invested in literary theory or in criticism. Most, in fact, come to us with an interest in their own creative writing or with an interest in professional writing. So while literary study or theory is part of the program, it is not it’s primary purpose. In other words, our grad students aren’t heavily invested, at least upon entry into the program, in the work that this course does, and they don’t necessarily enter with a foundational background from undergrad in how to approach theoretical reading or how to approach their own writing from a theoretical vantage point. This then leads to the micro problem(s) in the course: 1) I did not adequately communicate to students in the first week exactly how much the course would kick their asses (which resulted in high attrition, ultimately); 2) in spite of all of my scaffolding, I did not clearly and explicitly build checkpoints into the syllabus for things like me giving a sample presentation, meeting with me, workshopping drafts of the seminar paper, which I did do, but I did it on the fly and so students didn’t know up front that it would exist and some of them missed out on crucial “checkpoint” moments.
Now, let me pause to address what I suspect some people might say about the above. I suspect that some people might say that these students shouldn’t be in an M.A. program. I suspect that some people might say that my “hand-holding” does them a disservice. Here’s the thing that I’d say to both of those potential criticisms: I’m trying to respond to the reality of my teaching situation in the most ethical and effective way that I can imagine. Now, I could ignore that reality, and say that I should run my seminar just how I experienced seminars in my graduate programs, and that would make a certain point, but I wouldn’t likely get work of the quality that my grad instructors got. I also wouldn’t likely be doing my students any favors in teaching them (most of whom are first gen college students, let alone grad students) the level of expectation for graduate study (and by the time they finish our program a fair few do decide they want to go on for terminal degrees). I hope that what I’m doing is giving them some tools to be more independent as they move forward in the program. And I hope that what I’m doing is to ensure that I get work to evaluate that really is of the quality that I think graduate work should be. I don’t know that my choices are the only ones or the “right” ones, but they are what I’ve come up with.
What’s staying the same: Actually, nearly everything. I still like the majority of the readings I’ve chosen and the way that I’ve paced them, and I’m still happy with the set of assignments that I developed. I didn’t know that until I’d hunkered down and actually forced myself to look at the damned course for this updating project. So that’s the good news, and this is the reason that the updating was so much easier than I’d imagined it might be.
What’s changing: Small things, but I think significant ones. 1) I’m going to be much more explicit about the quantity of work the course entails and the quality of the work that I’m expecting on the first day. I did a bit of that the first time around, but I was afraid of scaring them off. Now? I don’t think I did them any favors by taking a softer approach; I think that actually accounted for the mass exodus that happened in the first 4 weeks. 2) Remember those “checkpoints” I discussed above? I have included a mandatory individual conference with me that must take place prior to week 6 in the course; I have explicitly noted various “checkpoints” on the syllabus, and in so doing I have made transparent the “support” toward completion of assignments that I will give students and when that will happen – no more flying by the seat of my pants with that stuff. 3) I have added a film to round out the “non-theory” weeks in the course. The last time I had two films, but there was something missing. Now, I have Black Swan to view on the first day. I think this is going to be crucial toward easing our way into the first four weeks of the course. It also alerted me to the fact that somehow Laura Mulvey had been left off the course in its first carnation. Whaaa? 4) I switched out the bulk of the reading for the final reading week in the course, and changed it with something that is both more accessible and which directly connects to my own research. Also, and this is even more important, it gives a sort of “where are we now” critique of most of what we’d read in the course to that point, which will be a nice “conclusion” to the course, which I didn’t have before – before the course just sort of petered out at the end. It’s a bit long, but since we won’t meet during the Thanksgiving week, they will have two full weeks to get through it. And also? This is graduate school. Suck it up.
The Take-Away: I’m really glad that I was encouraged by Virago, among others, to write about this, because it made me actually stop procrastinating and work on it. And in the working on it, my excitement about actually teaching the course returned, and I accomplished something that I needed to accomplish, which is a Good Thing. Going along with that, it’s very easy in the summer to get so into one’s head that one forgets about how the work that one is doing relates to other people, and teaching is the thing that consistently (and wonderfully) brings me back down to earth in that way. Less generally, and about this class specifically, the take-away for me is that I’m really happy with what this course aims to do, and I think that the design of the course is solid. I still think that it can improve (obviously), but I don’t feel like the whole course needs to be scrapped and envisioned anew, and that’s important, too, that confidence that I do actually know what I want to teach my students and the faith that I have in them that they can succeed even though I’m presenting them with challenging stuff. Also, I saw that in my own pedagogy I am really trying (if not always succeeding) to create something that is akin to what I myself experienced in AST, and that was nice, too, to realize that I do strive to be the sort of teacher I admire – that I’m not just phoning it in.
I’ll warn you, though, I’m not sure that the take-away from the next three classes that I need to update is going to be all so warm and fuzzy. Those courses present different challenges, and I’m much less psyched to return to at least two of them. And one of those three is going to be online for the first time, for lots of good reasons for the institution, for students, and for me, but I can’t claim that I’m super-stoked to be returning to the online teaching or that I’m very hopeful about how that all will turn out, for a whole host of reasons. I mean, I think it will be fine, but I tend to aim for more than “fine” in my teaching. So. And one of those classes is freshmen comp, after a long break from the comp classroom, so revisiting that syllabus, that course, and just the teaching of writing in general I expect to be a brutal re-entry. (But let’s note: I volunteered to put that back into my rotation. As much as I loathe comp, I really love working with first-year students. I certainly hope that my little newbies are going to be a fun group, because if they’re not…. wow will that suck.)
So that is my pedagogy post for the day. And I probably should stop working, but I’m thinking that maybe I’ve hit a stride and I should press onward? Ah, hell, we’ll see how I feel after I have some dinner.
Oh, and on a unrelated note, I had a fabulous lunch today with CC, CF, and TT (another colleague) and it was a very good lunch indeed! Both in terms of the food and in terms of the conversation and I hope in terms of a new bond forged. There are some things that are excessively irritating to me in my department dynamics right now, but I have hope that those will fizzle as we embark on the new academic year.
Can I just pipe up to say that I really enjoyed reading this? (Especially since I totally agreed with Virago’s comment on your previous post).
It would have done me a world of good to be able to talk more with others about pedagogy when I was teaching history — my history PhD program had a required pedagogy course, which was a Very Good Thing, and I missed that kind of conversation when I graduated. I’m a history liaison librarian now, and am working to balance the library-instruction teaching I’m expected to do (which can feel disconnected from actual research processes) with history pedagogy.
And now I want to seek out some of my faculty and see if they’ll talk with me about their own course-revision processes! Would be a welcome relief from the emphasis on number-crunching instruction assessment I’m dealing with at the moment.
Also, I’m pondering starting a blog, not another librarian blog (there are quite enough of those) but one where I could think through intersections between academic professoring and academic librarianship. And this post, frankly, gives me some good ideas about how I might approach that.
So, thanks! And best wishes for working through the other courses.
Don’t you know that it’s very uncool to give a fucken shitte about teaching your students effectively? The people at College Misery told me so.
Sophylou – Thank you so much for commenting! And I for one would LOVE a blog that talked about the intersections between academic professoring and academic librarianship. I have to say, I have had NOTHING but positive experiences working with the librarians on my campus with library instruction, and we collaborate a lot about how that instruction will happen so that it will fit the needs of my courses and do the most effective work for students. I wish librarians and professors were in conversation MORE, actually, because I know I’m one of the few people in my department who does library instruction at all levels, and usually English is very library-instruction friendly. I think that for many faculty, they think that the end of the line in library instruction is first-year comp, which is SO. NOT. TRUE. And one of the reasons that I love doing library instruction with my students across various levels so much is that it keeps *ME* up to date with what’s happening with the databases and whatnot. My point here is, you have at least one reader if you were to start such a blog
(Also, I hear you on the assessment number-crunching. It affects us all.)
CPP – you, my friend, are a rabble-rouser and a trouble-maker. But you make me laugh, so of course you are welcome to comment as early and often as you like
Sounds like a great, carefully-planned syllabus (and I here you on the need to be explicit about workload and checkpoints — doubly important, as I’m sure you realize, in online classes). And it sounds like you had a productive day, with no dust of snow, crow, or hemlock tree required (though if your weather is anything like ours, the dust of snow would be welcome).
Oops — “hear” you. It’s late as well as hot here.
I’m going to comment more substantive later, but just wanted to fire off a couple of quick things: 1) yay! smart pedagogy post! and 2) sophylou, I would totally read your blog, too!
er, *with something more substantive
WordPress, instead of letting blog-owners edit comments, let us edit our own! *shakes fist*
I suspect that a substantial fraction of the posts at College Misery are parodies of bitter broken-down professors written by people who aren’t professors themselves.
Since I’m updating/re-creating a course written by someone else that I haven’t taught before, I’m glad you’re writing about this. Hopefully your productivitiy will motivate me!
I wish librarians and professors were in conversation MORE, actually, because I know I’m one of the few people in my department who does library instruction at all levels, and usually English is very library-instruction friendly. I think that for many faculty, they think that the end of the line in library instruction is first-year comp, which is SO. NOT. TRUE. And one of the reasons that I love doing library instruction with my students across various levels so much is that it keeps *ME* up to date with what’s happening with the databases and whatnot.
Thank you so much for saying this. I’m another academic librarian who tries to convince people of this all the time. It’s already very difficult to teach students everything they need to know in one session, but to try to cover everything they’ll need for the rest of their academic lives is never going to work.
My M.A. teaching is also theory-intensive. I revised the course extensively last fall to include a thematic core for the second half of the course (where we study textual production, transmission and reception) and that worked very well for the most part. My students, who come from all sorts of specializations, were interested in how the broader history of texts illuminated their own research questions. Since that’s what I’d hoped to achieve, I’m reasonably pleased but I see that there are still some aspects to refine (improving the reading list and thinking about how to get students to lead discussion more in the first weeks of this unit).
Your post here has fired me up to think about the changes I want to make this year based on the successes and challenges of the last go-round, so thanks very much!
OlderThanDirt — Hear! Hear! Just so you know, I’m another prof working with the librarians all the way through our graduate courses.
OK, I promised a more substantive post and here it is. I think those checkpoints — and making them transparent — are an excellent idea, and much needed. As you know, my student body is similar to yours. Our grad students might be a little more oriented to literary study than yours, but that doesn’t mean they come into our program understanding the expectations of graduate level work. Heck *I* didn’t understand those expectations and I’d been educated among much more ambitious/academically-socialized students. But unlike my students and yours, I had the *much* more advanced PhD students to serve as my models as well as my professors. Although I might have appreciated more transparency about “this is what it takes” and “this is what we expect,” it was easier for me to get up to speed with the multiple examples of those many models. (In fact, the classes where I felt like I was flailing the most were the ones that had only first-year students enrolled in them.) MA students don’t have that; the second years are still getting the hang of things. What’s more, your students, like mine, have likely not come from undergrad programs where they were being pushed to be more like graduate students in their final year or two. (Or, as you point out, for some of them, it’s just been too long since they were undergrads.) So the learning curve is steeper for them.
It took me a long time to learn how to give MA students those kind of checkpoints (without them feeling like I was treating them like babies), and not to just expect them to live up to some inchoate, hazy expectations of “graduate level work,” but I know now that they are really important.
So, um, to conclude, yay you!
[...] I had already started doing this when Dr. Crazy wrote about revamping one of her courses and Sisyphus wrote about needing to change one of hers, so I [...]