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 