As we quickly approach the due date for the initial work on our plan for next year, I find myself searching for common threads throughout all of the approaches we’ve been assigned so far. One in particular has jumped out at me – the need to consider context.
As we tackled the first 4 readings, I found myself feeling (in certain cases) as though some of the material, though intriguing, may not be applicable in my classroom. But as Paula Mathieu explicitly points out in her piece, understanding our “place” is critical in determining our approach to a first-year comp course. As is evident in the numerous academic readings about FYC (Shipka lists 12+ in her suggested reading list, none of which include any of the professors asked to contribute to the text we are studying), approaches to this course inevitably change with time, audience, place, instructor, among other factors like required grading policy guidelines, number of students enrolled in the course, etc.
Crafting our courses will require us to consider all of the factors I mention and the contributing authors allude to, as well as, of course, others, as we adjust to schedule changes (snow days!, last minute assemblies, testing windows, prom, field trips, . . .) and other demands we encounter through implementation. I do not suggest we not plan – in fact, the plan is CRITICAL – but rather that we heed the advice provided to us to consider our context.
In reflecting for this post, I flipped back through my annotations to look for obvious connections or ideas throughout the texts. I discovered that many of the ideas I marked were ideas that I thought sounded fun and engaging to teach (like Mathieu’s researched interview – I found this assignment terribly interesting) – I was thinking of myself in the context of the course – what might I enjoy teaching. I also noticed many question marks with notes like “how might this work at Conrad?” or “would this work in the HS setting?” (like Reid’s publicly posted forums and grading policy). With these notes, I was considering the students sitting in my classroom – my audience. I even discovered a note in which I mentioned a particular student and how the strategy might be particularly successful for him (I taught him as a 10th grader and know he is registered for this course next year). Designing a course with particular students in mind has obvious implications (not all positive, of course), but the context in which I will be teaching this course next year (which includes teaching 15 out of the 20 students whom I taught as 10th graders) facilitates some ability for me to consider the context of the particular learners in my classroom to customize the activities to meet some of their specific needs. This context will be available to me as long as I continue to teach 10th graders and E110 students at Conrad.
To be clear, my plan is not to design this course year after year with my particular students in mind, but I mention my unique context as a consideration, one that is impossible for me to remove from my thinking as I begin to piece together the approach and syllabus for E110 at Conrad. We must be sure that the context of our individual styles, students, school requirements, and beyond work their way into our course plans, in the same way that each contributor designed courses that met the context of their unique situations.
E688: Seminar in Teaching Composition 
Context is vital. Teaching at my alma mater has given me a bit of a head start for understanding the context of my institution, but I foolishly focused on what I knew already early in my career; lately, I focus on what I do not know. I’ve grown to ask more questions and listen more rather than talk (just as Redd suggests). The context of any institution is so vast, one can’t expect to ever fully define it, so, as Katrina admits, planning for every individual student’s context isn’t the aim, but a general, community context. Even then we have to keep up with current events and trends; infiltrating the context influenced by society and defined by the community is no easier than tracing habits to their origins (we all want to claim our good habits and blame our bad habits- same with context). With a task that one can only hope to clarify and add to, with no hope of ever fully comprehending, ongoing inquiry is vital. I find current events, informal/formal interviews, and teacher accounts on social networks to be the most efficient means of forming and maintaining your awareness of the context of your institution. Such inquiry inevitably leads to understanding individual student contexts and becoming more involved than our job description requires, but the juice is worth the squeeze. Showing students you care to such an extent that they can’t help but realize your passion for their future success is one of the best ways to get them to buy into your course. But I digress…
It will be interesting to see how we develop our courses based on our respective contexts. We are very similar in the sense that you teach at a STEM school and I teach Senior English for the STEM college within my building (We have STEM, Business, and Humanities colleges). We are very different in the sense that Conrad has selective enrollment and William Penn does not (in theory, that shouldn’t affect Penn’s enrollment in challenging courses, but it does). I’m eager to see how everything pans out for us and to maintain a message board when we put theory into action.
I wholeheartedly agree that we have to consider the context of our high school situations as we construct our courses. I envy your ability to already know the majority of your students as you make these important decisions. Since I won’t be teaching this course until the following year, I don’t know who my students are likely to be. I have the additional handicap of trying to anticipate whether or not my students will have Internet access in the classroom during the course. We began a one-on-one iPad initiative with our freshman class last year and all incoming students will be added to that program. Unfortunately, when I teach this course to the seniors, I will either have to convince the administrators to give the students permission to bring in an electronic device to access the Internet or I will have to get permission to reserve one of the computer labs on a regular basis. The more I think about that issue the more convinced I am that I need to know before I construct the actual course how that problem will be resolved.
At first I was confused by the wide range of course options described by the various authors. However, as you have pointed out, each of the authors crafted a course to meet the needs of his or her unique situation and we have been given the freedom to do the same for our own students’ needs.
Katrina,
You’re in a very interesting situation as a teacher and I urge you to take full advantage of it. We usually can’t count on knowing who are students are in advance, but if you do, that’s knowledge you can and should draw upon.
The broader question is, of course, what it means to teach a college level course to high school seniors. I see all three of you grappling with this question in various ways. Next week the rubber meets the road. I look forward to seeing how you adapt these ideas and readings to your particular context!
Joe