My methods

The Bean book is swell: it's intelligently and cleanly laid out, succinct, organized for maximum tool-grabbing. And it makes me feel good about my own teaching, because I'm already using many of the methods he advocates. The old head's not swelling, though – there's still plenty of stuff I'm not doing yet, or not doing well. So I'm going to organize this blog in two categories: methods I'm already using, and methods I'd like to try.

METHODS I'M ALREADY USING

• Writing at the beginning of class to probe a subject. One of my favorites.
  
• Guided journals. Also a standard of mine – I use guided freewrites at the beginning of class a lot. I used to collect journals, but found it too daunting to read all of them. These days, I don't collect them at all, and award my students participation credit for writing when I tell them to write. I like the idea of sampling, though – may have to try that.
  
• Double-entry notebooks. I use these for my own research, and I have my 101 students make 'em for their own research.
  
• Exploration tasks to guide "invention" for a formal writing assignment. Also use this one in 101. Great for idea-generation. However, one thing I need to do better with is teaching students how and why
  to do exploratory writing, since I've encountered resistance from the closure- and grade-oriented students like what Bean describes on pp. 99-100. I might just lift his tidy explanation of exploratory writing from pp. 101-02.
  
• Explanation of course concepts to new learners. I'm trying a variation of this one in my 402 class soon: small groups of students will each read a single chapter of the textbook, and then prepare a wiki and a short presentation to the class that summarize the useful concepts from that chapter. We'll see how it goes.
  
• Summaries or abstracts of articles. Always a good one for tough readings, especially in 101. I'm especially a fan of the one-sentence summary, and I'd like to try the 25-word précis.
  
• Using small groups for problem-posing, believing/doubting, norming, and workshops. Some of my most-used methods.
  
• Group papers. A staple of 402; an intriguing possibility for my Dream Course.
  
• Wikis. Not in Bean, obviously, but a method I'm trying to use more and more. I just used wikis in 402, having my students list advice on resumes and cover letters. I liked the idea that because there's so much advice on job application stuff out there – much of it contradictory – my students would have to research and think critically about which advice they wanted to follow. I don't think they were as happy as I was with this approach, though – I got the sense that they wanted me to just tell them how to write resumes and cover letters. Maybe I should have explained my purpose more thoroughly first. For my Dream Course, I'm toying with using a wiki as a course website, having my students discuss games and game analysis methods on it.
  

 

METHODS I WANT TO TRY

• Writing during class to refocus a lagging discussion or cool off a heated one. I like the idea of this, and I need to store it in my repertoire of "things to do when stuck" – a mental basket that's usually sparse or empty, because I'm better at planning than thinking on my toes.
  
• Writing at the end of class to sum up a lecture or discussion. I've done this a couple of times, and I like it: it keeps students working and thinking right up until the end of the period. Usually.
  
• Open-ended or semistructured journals. I'm going to have the students in my Dream Course keep a blog, and it'll essentially be a journal. I know it'll have some structure, but I haven't decided how much yet. My current thinking is that there'll be a consistent structure, something like, "Each week, you need to be playing games outside of class and blogging on your experiences. In your blog, you're welcome to write about whatever experiences, thoughts, and questions come to you, but I also want you to try applying the critical theories and methods we're reading and talking about in class to the games you're playing. Play with these tools – see how they work."
  
• Metaphor games, extended analogies. I don't quite know how I'd use this method, but it sounds like a lot of fun.
  
• Thesis statement writing. Bean's proud of this one, and I'm intrigued by his enthusiasm. It seems useful as a summary exercise, but I worry about students then thinking that all theses have to be just one sentence.
  
• Tasks linking course concepts to students' personal experience or previously existing knowledge. Scaffolding! I really need to do this more.
  
• Thesis support assignments. As Bean suggests, this method can be combined with small group debates. I can see it being really useful in my Dream Course – I can have students take part in some of the big game studies debates (e.g. whether games are games or stories).
  
• Problem-posing assignments. It should be obvious that this one's worth trying, since it's what we've been talking about in class. The tricky thing for me is coming up with the right problems – ones whose answer I'm not already committed to. Or maybe it's inevitable that I'll have answers to problems in my field, and thus I just have to keep from forcing my answers on my students and stifling their thinking.
  
• Assignments requiring role-playing of unfamiliar perspectives or imagining "what if" situations. This is another creative one that I'd like to try but am not quite sure how/when to try it.
  
• Cases and simulations. My 402 textbook – George Kennedy's – is chock-full of these, and I've been leery of using them because they're so long. I'm going to try one, though, in the next week. We'll see.
  
• Using small groups for question-generating. This seems like a great one for getting into a difficult text, and even for responding to a presentation. I'm going to try it in 402, where I have a lot of student presentations coming up.
  
• Using small groups for evidence-finding. This might be an interesting way to encourage research – I might try it in my Dream Course. Bean's note about giving students several days for this type of activity seems worth remembering.
  
• The metacognitive strategy. I really want to remember this one, because it seems like a brilliant way of responding to odd answers in class – something I'm not very good at (again, the thinking-on-toes deficiency).
  
• Various strategies for making groups work well together. Like the pre-teaching Bean does for exploratory writing, the stuff he tells his classes about group work – especially the "empathic listening," learning-style differences, "egothink" and "clonethink" – is the kind of stuff I need to spend more time with at the beginning of each semester. He's also right about how gender, race, nationality, etc. affect interactions, of course; but despite Bob Eddy's efforts in 501, I'm still not real confident about how to talk about this stuff with my students without encouraging essentialist thinking.
  
• Early in the course, hold a discussion about discussions. Same thoughts as above.
  
• Classroom debates. I've done this before, but I'm going to use Bean's handy debate structure on pp. 176-77 in the future.
  
• Fishbowls/paper presentations. I'd like to try these in my Dream Course as a combination… I'm thinking something like a conference panel discussion, in which a small group of students would present short, previously-prepared papers/presentations to each other, and discuss them.

Cowboys, Language, Power

Maybe it’s the effects of sitting in an airport on two hours of plane sleep, but the “language and power” section seems inappropriately named. Maybe it’s because language and power are pretty much the specialty of all English majors – whatever our subdisciplines – but this section, of all we’ve looked at so far in WLMA, has a title that’s too far-reaching. It needs narrowing. I realized after I finished all of the pieces in it that they’re really all about gender and language and power – a still-massive topic, but at least there’s one more circle thrown into this particular Venn diagram.

One question I could see tying these pieces together under would be: How do men use language to attempt assert power over women? “My Last Duchess” is full of that, of course, as is “Sweat” and of course Hamlet. However, the obvious corollary question – How do women resist men’s linguistic (and physical, and psychological, etc.) control over men? – is equally present in “Sweat” and “Gertrude Talks Back.” I especially liked how Hurston’s Delia essentially defeated Sykes through silence: she stands back, says nothing, and lets him bumble his way into the snake. (Couldn’t help but think of the trailer sequence in Kill Bill II, though I’m not sure if it relates significantly.) I really see Delia’s well timed silence resonating with Lorde’s arguments about speaking up. “Gertrude Talks Back” was hilarious. It’d be fun to bounce that off of Mel Gibson’s way Oedipal version of the Hamlet/Gertrude relationship.

Jane Tompkins’ essay was spectacular. There are so many good things to play with here, from the ways history is written (a new historicist could have a ball with this piece), to the ways museums either do or don’t culturally resonate, to the simultaneous love-and-dominance-of-nature, to genocide. Her passage on page 880 about hunters who are also conservationists described an interesting ideological paradox, and thanks to CNN’s incessant braying in the Houston airport,* I found out that this ideology still obtains today: as I was reading this passage, Mike Huckabee was giving a speech of Republican hunter types, claiming his subscription to this very belief. That speech would be a perfect little text to bounce off Tompkins’, though I’m not sure if the fact that Huckabee is soon to be a historical relic himself would make it more or less poignant. Back to Tompkins, the passage on the p. 881 about how, in museums, we “look at the objects in the glass cases and at the paintings on the wall, as if by standing there we could absorb in to ourselves some of the energy that flowed once through the bodies of the live things represented” rang very true to me, and reminded me of the Holocaust Museum. Which would resonate with Tompkins’ essay perfectly for a class, if one had the means to take them to it. Alas… what happened to field trips?

I liked “Jimmy Yellow Hawk” as a touching coming-of-age story, though of course it presents an entirely different cultural attitude about animals than the one described by Tompkins. Another text that might be interesting if one were inclined to explore peoples’ relationships with animals is “The Carnivore’s Credo,” an essay in2007’s Best American Essays that argues that the most respectful thing us meat eaters can do to animals is not to stop eating them altogether, but to 1) make sure they’re humanely treated until slaughter, and then 2) eat them with care and reverence in social settings. That’s not a very good summary, but I don’t have the essay with me. Suffice it to say it’s an unusual argument, one I’d not heard.

Last thing, as the plane’s landing: I applaud “Stewed Beans” heartily, and recommend teaching a unit around this question: What is the social function of farts?

Then you could watch Blazing Saddles.

*where, unlike Sea-Tac, I was reminded every ten minutes that the Threat Level was Orange, and that jokes or inappropriate comments about security could get me arrested.