Teaching Connectively

I think the most important aspect of teaching is connecting with students as human beings. Students have lives outside of school. Their lives affect everything in the classroom: from attendance to how they approach their own individual writing process. I believe identifying these connections, and affording them recognition in lectures and assignments, provides the strongest foundation for the students educational experience. This foundation strengthens their resolve to finish college and gives them the confidence to survive the outside world. After all, knowing someone with the prestigious title of lecturer, instructor, etc. supports their efforts may be the only thing they have to rise above any and all aversions they face in their daily lives. This essay argues the value in teaching composition with the students needs in mind. The first thing teachers should learn about their students is everything about their previous writing experience. We can learn their composition history by asking about their current writing process, the genres theyve explored, and the different rhetorical situations theyve experienced. Most freshman writers lack a writing process consisting of multiple drafts with many revisions. Most students learn writing through very linear models focusing more on speech. This is an incorrect view of composition. We can discover the origins of these issues for individual students and address them through class discussions to return their confidence potentially squashed by English teachers wielding red-ink pens. Students with little understanding of the writing process, let alone clear understanding of their personal processes, probably have limited understanding of rhetorical situations and genres. Fortunately, many of them have experience writing in different genres and addressing different situations without realizing it. We can demonstrate social media status updates as a form of rhetorical situations. These updates serve a specific audience (their friends, family, and peers), often intend to persuade or inform (sharing links to articles and videos), and students adopt a specific language to write them. Writing online is widely recognized as a rhetorical genre. First-year composition students should be encouraged to write in as many mediums or situations as possible. The classroom is a perfect medium to relay interests and real-life concerns into discussion and assignment building. An example of an assignment built on their interests is writing an informative piece for campus safety. Class discussion regarding student concerns could involve campus security. As an exercise the students could write a letter to the Department of Public Safety, the Provost, and/or the Student Government Association expressing their anxieties and offering recommendations for improvement. The tone should be more serious and the language more formal in this rhetorical situation. These assignment suggestions involve student concerns and interests while recognizing their right and abilities to express them. This was something not always afforded to them in traditional high school conditions. This brings us to the classroom community of discourse. Discussions should observe scaffolding methods to allows students to develop their own learning foundations. It is important to reverse any harmful notions related to the writing experience resulting in a lack of confidence evident in their writing. We should generate the discussion around student initiation by asking open-ended questions, allowing students to complete their own thoughts, and building on their contributions (even interruptions) to produce a more conversational discourse atmosphere. These classroom discussion design respectable communication scaffolding, building on everyones experiences as equals.

My first composition one classes often remarked on how comfortable they felt in the classroom. They felt like they created a sense of community that their other courses lacked. We participated in sharing exercises such as an introduction to rhetoric presentation and creative nonfiction narrative writing. In the first exercise, my students were asked to bring examples of what they considered good rhetoric. Many of them brought materials which were very personal to them. One of my students even cried during his presentation standing at the podium in front of class. When they shared their narratives, they established a level of common ground in shared life experiences such as losing a family member or surviving their first fender-bender. One of my students claimed, The peer reviews felt like less of a chore and more like asking someone you respect to give you feedback on your work. I never experienced this before and usually hate asking other people to look at my stuff. I felt so proud my students made connections with their classmates and learned to respect one another. Although it is important teachers generate student discourse within the classroom, the interaction between teacher and individual student is understandably more significant. The primary venue for this interaction is feedback. Handing over your intellectual work for critique is very intimidating. It is extremely crucial to keep this in mind when reviewing your students work. This is something your student composed. It is an example of his or her skills as a writer, an adult, and an intelligent being. Therefore, teacher responses warrant a certain amount of delicacy. Feedback focusing solely on the errors, miniscule to overt, can be very damaging. This response method can actually reverse any of the healthy scaffolding developed throughout the semester. However, the responses must address the issues directly, pointing out the exact faults in the higher-order-concerns of argument development, organization, language, and other rhetorical situation concerns. Students do not learn from vague recommendations such as be more descriptive, or make this interesting for the reader. Teachers should not expect students to generate positive revisions based on indirect feedback which leads to confusion and uncertainty eventually progressing into self-doubt. Students look to their teachers for guidance. Not only are instructors shaping their minds for rhetorical composition, they are also introducing them to the academic discourse community where they are expected to contribute as adults experienced in analytical approaches to the everyday world. This is not an easily grasped concept. If they are first- generation college students, they already overcame so many odds by even registering for the class. Now, we, as first-year composition instructors, are asking them to understand the basics for thousands of years of evolved rhetorical theory. We cannot see ourselves as just lecturers. We must recognize our roles as communicative mentors and do our best to fulfill them.