by Phebe Baker
I was interested to hear my colleagues recently on the subject of student-centeredness and other issues concerning developmental education. Not only is CAP supposed to be students-centered; apparently that is the mandate of the entire college, according to the Strategic Plan adopted last year.
But what does it mean to be student-centered? If the CAP program makes counselors and learning labs available, is that student-centered enough? In the seminar I attended, this was on of the questions raised. Perhaps counselors and lab instructors should be mandatory (or more mandatory than they are now). Perhaps a counselor should be present in the classroom most of the time, and not merely appear for visit once a semester. Perhaps the lab instructors should collaborate with the classroom teacher in devising a syllabus, an exit exam, and other evaluative instruments throughout the term. It might even be possible for lab instructors to actually work in the classroom. By this I infer that student-centeredness is a method to loosen the absolute authority of the classroom teacher by adding other authority figures to the mix.
I must confess right now that I have always been student-centered, although not necessarily by choice. In younger days, in other institutions, I have attempted to follow the learning theories espoused by my supervisors - behavioral objectives, affective education, basic skills, great books, wiring as process, rhetorical analysis - but I always had a problem, in that my students always discovered the worm in the educational apple. After a while I realized it was me, not them. Other teachers seemed to pass away the years in peace and quiet; it was only my students who ignored me in class and engaged each other in discussion that was occasionally private an discreet but more often flagrantly contentious and sometimes even unruly. Something in my demeanor, something in my practice, something in the way I engaged my young charges, tipped them off that they could “get away with murder,” so to speak. let me make it perfectly clear that on one actually died, to my knowledge, although that time Bradley Abramson painted his face green and climbed out the window the day before Thanksgiving and danced and warwhooped all over the high school parking lot maybe caused the principal’s heart attack a couple of months later. But I digress.
At times my students seemed to have an excess of physical energy, and so I took them on walks and filed trips. I organized classroom activities that involved role playing or drawing large interpretive murals on 3-foot wide rolls of brown paper or making up poems and chanting them to the accompaniment of handmade musical and rhythmic devices. What I wanted was for the students to have fun, to have a good time so that they would come back to school by choice and associate shoos with the opportunity to socialize with their peers.
I know my practice was different from that of many colleagues. Students told me that had never been in such an open class. It has never one, in I think it could be 35 years now, occurred to me to ban a student from my class, for example. I don’t think I’ve ever kicked a students out for talking. After all, talking is English (usually) and that’s what I’m supposed to be teaching. And frankly I just can’t relate to colleagues who remove students for such offenses as coming in late or wearing a hat or not having a book. If something is worthwhile in a class or in a book, the student will get to class as soon as they can with whatever supplies they can scrounge up. And with regard to hats, perhaps the students is covering the hole in her head from an old gunshot wound.
I think student-centered means believing in students - believing in their worth as individuals, and trusting in the process of classroom interaction to “teach: them or “grow” them or “mature” them or “cultivate” them or whatever is supposed to happen in the fourteen weeks that make up a class. I think there are many among our faculty who make a practice of disbelieving students, and I think this is a shame.
I see our students as coming form so many different places, with so many diverse cultures and life experiences, that studying them would be in itself a full and rich curriculum I can’t relate to colleagues who blather on about what great literature they are sharing, what wonderful concepts they are giving. Often, teachers who think they giving something, aren’t. Teachers talk too much. I have proof - tapes form classes where teachers ask questions they’ve answered themselves in the preceding sentence. This is educational? I have tapes of my own classes, where the best parts are the students questioning each others’ writing about a shared text. The worst parts are the words of the teacher. Why doesn’t she shut up?
Of course the whole hegemonical (I want to write hegemaniacal) structure (even in the computer lab there’s something called hierarchy that the experts use to fix things) is built on an opposite view from mine. For example, I am called a “visiting lecturer,” although lecturing is the worst thing I could ever do in class. (It’s funny; there are still those in authority “above” me who follow an Aristotelian model for student writing in which it doesn’t matter what the student says as long as the thesis is the third sentence of the third paragraph and the next three paragraphs begin with the words “first,” “second,” and “third,” respectively. The last paragraph, of course, is supposed to begin, “In conclusion.”)
I submit that the worst thing a teacher can do is lecture, not only in CAP, but in any class. Yes, I do remember taking all those books full of notes at Brown University. In fact, I still have the books, “In deo speramus” embossed on their covers in gold. Because it was done to me, does that mean I should continue the practice? this morning I was listening to a man on NPR whose father and grandfather were proud members of the Ku Klux Klan. To what lengths must we honor the practice of our parents?
The second worst thing is to control the conversation.
Some teachers say they have “conversations” with their class. I find this difficult to imagine. these teachers are probably having a conversation with one, two, or three students and probably one dialogue is going on at a time, with the teacher in control of the flow, sort of the way Oprah controls the mike. Maybe the teacher is at the blackboard listing words and concepts, trying to take a stab at literacy, although classroom conversations are almost smack in the middle of the current oral tradition, in my experience of the genre.
So what should be going on in class? LEARNING. That is, the students should be learning as well as the teacher. there should be enough space for everyone to be able to learn. but this will only happen if the students have responsibility for what goes on, at least as much as the instructor.
I’ve found that the best way to shut myself up I s to devise plans that can work without me. The one I’m using now in my 8 a.m. CAP class has achieved its own momentum. The students write on an assigned topic for the first half hour of class, then for the next 40-50 minutes I assign them to groups of three to read and interrogate each other’s writing. I am controlling their behavior here, but not the flow of ideas. I am not asking questions for which I know the answer. After a short break, we regroup in a large circle and render a text, each person making a short statement with no interference allowed until everyone has had a chance to speak.
I’ve found that I can write and speak along with my students and take part in the activities of the class without trying to push an agenda, like grammar or civil rights, and yet these agendas come up faithfully from the process of human interaction. It’s like Quaker meeting: when I was young I was impelled to speak in Meeting, but now I know that if I keep quiet, someone else will say whatever it was I was thinking. The Quakers call this “the Spirit of the Meeting,” and I think they are on to something.
We were asked before the CAP seminar to reflect on what or preconceived notions of our students were. How did we categorize them; i.e., why were they in CAP? There is really only one answer to this question. The reason our students are in CAP is that they did not express themselves in the placement essay, which just about everyone I speak with seems to agree is an accurate instrument to indicate the ability to generate college level writing. My experience with these inexpressive students is, no one has asked for their opinion before. No one has listened to them, much less read their writing. Therefore our main task is to give them as much practice juggling actual ideas as possible, and have as much attention paid to them as possible, in the short time we have them in class. In the words of the poet, “Hurry Up Please It’s Time.” I’ve wasted time on tours to the library, booklists for independent reading, etc. Now I cut to the chase. I pick the books, but I let them choose the order in which they are read and what is actually discussed in class.
A group of three students (a collaborative triad) works really well in my morning class because the class has twenty-one students in it, so if everyone shows up I have seven groups of three. If someone is absent, then I fill in. That’s when I get to share my writing. I’ve found that taking responsibility for assigning the groups every morning and keeping an informal list so that I vary the placements has added some excitement to the class. Maybe it’s sex appeal, or maybe it’s curiosity, or maybe it’s (could it be?) intellectual ferment, but the class is working like yeast and grape juice, bubbling away, interacting, and bringing things out into the light.
One very helpful activity in the Practitioners’ Inquiry Project (which has been meeting on alternate Thursday afternoons for almost four semesters) has been to interrogate the assumptions of teacher-made classroom material, such as tests, syllabi, writing prompts, grammar exercises, and evaluations of student work. I’ve noticed that many teachers assume their students need a great deal of specific direction before they are entrusted to commit themselves to an essay - whatever that may be. Many times the directions for writing are longer than the writing itself. Does this sound like fun to you? But at least it proves that the teacher can write.
Another helpful activity, “Deep Talk,” is described in Shared Territory by Margaret Himley. The basic premise is that our students are not different from us. They are US, not OTHER. We are adults working with adults, and all of us share the human impulse to define ourselves in relation to the universe. We are all makers and creators, but the forms we choose for expression will vary.
As English teachers we should allow our students the space to create a work. A book, a sewn-binding notebook that is a cumulative compilation of writings in and out of class, is such a work. Another type of work is the 500-word computer printout. I am requiring both types this semester, as well as a daily classroom evaluation/reaction sheet from each student at the end of each class.
My grandson enjoys me the best when I crawl on the floor with him. He knows full well I am an adult, not a baby, but he becomes much more expressive when I am on his level. And according to the Christians, even God Almighty decided that the best way to teach was to become like the ones to be taught. Therefore I agree with Patricia Carini, Bahktin, Friere, and every other theorist/practitioner who envisions our pedagogy as a current, a limitless flow, an ever-more-opening space for dialogue. CAP is not a box, like a coffin, but a living river of life.
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