Reader Response: A portal page

An awful lot of alliteration there!

As I look for material on reader response to use in the Native American course, I keep running across a website called The Expanding Canon: Teaching Multicultural Literature in High School produced in 2003 by Thirteen/WNET New York in collaboration with the National Council of Teachers of English. It's pretty extensive, and I need to make a project of downloading it and reading it. But in the meantime, here are a few quotes I've come across -- copied here just so I'll know where they are.

Here's the disucssion that got me started. It's from an introduction to reader-response theory in the first lesson module:

Language arts teachers at all levels now widely accept central tenets of the theory, particularly the notion that learning is a constructive and dynamic process in which students extract meaning from texts through experiencing, hypothesizing, exploring, and synthesizing. Most importantly, teaching reader response encourages students to be aware of what they bring to texts as readers; it helps them to recognize the specificity of their own cultural backgrounds and to work to understand the cultural background of others.

It was that cultural angle that first attracted my attention. But I got the feeling a lot of the students haven't done much in the way of reacting to the arts in general.

Another passage I stumbled across in a Google search, from the fifth program on cultural studies in the classroom, suggests how cultural studies and reader response might work together:

Cultural studies ... is particularly valuable for teachers of multicultural literature because it focuses on the social divisions of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Cultural studies looks at the ways in which meanings, stereotypes, and identities (both collective and individual) are generated within these social groups. The practice of cultural studies almost always involves the combination of otherwise discrete disciplines, including literature, sociology, education, history, philosophy, communications studies, and anthropology. An interdisciplinary approach is key to an understanding of these issues, because it allows students to study and compare multiple, varied texts that deal with the culture and history of a particular group.

And a bit that I particularly like expands the definition of "text" to something more like what I want to do in the humanities courses:

The central teaching strategy of cultural studies is intertextual reading: comparing each literary text to culturally related texts. By reading literature in the context of other cultural works, students learn how the literature they study both creates and reflects cultural beliefs.

Texts for this practice may be drawn from almost any source: advertising, television, historical documents, visual artwork, legal documents, theological writing, etc. It's best to contextualize literature with primary sources or compilations of primary sources. Teachers should also look for texts that raise issues with which their students can identify. For example, in this session, Ishmael Reed's poetry and Graciela Limón's novel both look at transformative journeys, which students may relate to their own experiences.

When using this intertextual approach, teachers will want to brief students before giving them materials to read. It's usually helpful to explain that students will be asked to look for ways in which the different texts address similar issues; it's also useful to explain that students will be asked how these texts reinforce or challenge our ideas about those issues. Teachers may also want to offer general information about the texts: when they were written, by whom, for what purpose, etc. Finally, teachers may want to provide background about the characters and images they'll find. For example, when teaching Reed's "Railroad Bill, A Conjure Man," teachers can describe the trickster figure and his role in African stories, African American folklore, and legends before encouraging students to look for trickster references in the poem.

I like that. "Intertextual response." Is that the word I'm looking for? More googling is in order I guess, to find out what, if anything, "intertextual" means in literary theory.

HUM 221: Alaska Native values

Link to faculty page -- also add to syllabus along with the links on Haudenosaunee and Lakota values ...

The Alaska Native Knowledge Network at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks has a webpage on Native values with links to separate webpages on:

Alutiiq | Athabaskan/Athabascan | Iñupiaq | Cup'ik | Yup'ik | Tlingit
Here's the overview:

ALASKA NATIVE CULTURES all hold certain values to be paramount to their cultures. This website showcases some of the similarities and individualities of various Alaska Native groups and thier values. Below is a list of some important values all Alaska Native Cultures share, and at the bottom of the page are links to individual culture pages.

• Show Respect to Others - Each Person Has a Special Gift
  
• Share what you have - Giving Makes You Richer
  
• Know Who You Are - You Are a Reflection on Your Family
  
• Accept What Life Brings - You Cannot Control Many Things
  
• Have Patience - Some Things Cannot Be Rushed
  
• Live Carefully - What You Do Will Come Back to You
  
• Take Care of Others - You Cannot Live without Them
  
• Honor Your Elders - They Show You the Way in Life
  
• Pray for Guidance - Many Things Are Not Known
  
• See Connections - All Things Are Related

A valuable resource, and a good way to start off the semester next year.

Faculty report 2005-06

Note: I just finished my end-of-year faculty report for the Dean of Academic Affairs, and I'm posting it here for convenient reference.

Faculty Report, 2005-06
Peter Ellertsen

Courses taught:

Fall Semester: Communications 150 (intro to mass comm.), 15 students; COM 221 (intro to public relations) 20 students; English 111 (rhet./comp.), two sections totaling 30 students. New Horizons: COM 221-70 (intro to PR), 7 students.

Spring: COM 209 (basic newswriting), 12 students; COM 222 (intro to advertising), 18 students; ENG 111, one section with 10 students; Humanities 221 (Native American cultural expression), 28 students; COM 296 (capstone), 2 students; and COM 199 (independent study), 2 students. New Horizons: COM 150-70 (intro to mass com), 5 students. I taught HUM 221 and COM 199 for the first time this semester..

Committee assignments: Chair, assessment committee.

TEACHING STRATEGIES:

What changes did you make in your teaching this year? Please comment on any successes or failures you had in making changes to the syllabus, using a new textbook or material, or trying a new teaching strategy.

The biggest change, perhaps, was introducing Common Student Learning Objectives and Course Based Student Learning Objectives on my syllabi and beginning to use them more rigorously as I developed individual lesson plans. I’m finding it gives me more focus, as does the use of classroom assessment techniques over time.

I also taught a new course, in Native American cultural expressions, in a new field – the humanities. So I had to get up to speed on the field as well as course content; this involved a lot of experimentation with assignment formats, which is an ongoing process I expect to continue next school year. At the end of the spring semester, I opened a teaching weblog at http://teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ in which I am exploring some of these issues more fully. This grows in part out of my experimentation with the use of blogs as a teaching tool during the spring semester, posting links to supplementary readings and prompts for writing assignments to the personal blogs linked to my faculty webpage at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/welcome.html. The experience was encouraging, and I plan to do it in a more methodical way in the coming academic year.

Teaching mass communications majors in the new baccalaureate program will also require som adaptation of my teaching methods, since students’ motivational level and competencies should be higher than I have found to be the case with Gen Ed students.

In what area of teaching do you think you made the most improvement this year?

Lecturing (which is something I thought I would never do but turns out to be worth pursuing after all). I usually tuned out on classroom lectures in my student days, but this year I was assigned a classroom (Dawson 220) that required more lecturing on my part than in the past because of an instructor-centered (as opposed to student-centered) classroom design. It isn’t a style of presentation that comes easily to me, but I’ve reflected on lecturers who held my attention in grad school (there were a few) and read up on the Socratic method and lecture techniques on the Internet as I try to develop a style that fits my personality and teaching goals. I’m still awkward at it, since it involves a major change in the way I conduct classes. But I think I’m coming along. Only one student evaluation said I was too long-winded in class (fewer than in the past, come to think of it), so I think I’ve made a good start.

What would you like to improve on next year?

Lecturing! At my suggestion, I’ll meet lecture sections of my humanities classes in Becker L15 twice a week and a lab section in a computer lab once a week. This has been Okd by the scheduling committee. Since the humanities courses involve music and other art forms in addition to printed literature, I plan to make more use of electronic media – videos, sound tapes, etc. – next year. This is another area I need to work on next year, since basically I am a technological klutz.

Were there any other factors that helped or hindered your performance this year?

As always, I was able to work in an environment that values classroom instruction even when I had to spend a lot of time on accreditation and other issues that took time away from teaching. That’s important, and I think I tend to overlook it when I do these end-of-year reports.

One factor that took some getting used to was teaching in a computer lab that was designed more for lecturing and PowerPoint presentations than for writing and classroom discussion. In D220, all the student desks face the front of the room and there isn’t enough space between rows for me to work individually with students at their computers as they are writing or researching issues on the Internet in class. In all other regards, I like the classroom and plan to keep adapting my introductory public relations and advertising courses to a lecture format in order to continue meeting there. I have asked members of the scheduling committee to assign my writing and editing courses in future to computer labs like D22 or L16 that have sufficient space for me to intervene in student writing processes; their enrollment has tended to be between 10 and 15 students, so I anticipate no problem in being able to teach them in the smaller labs. My solution to the problems posed by the classroom design in my humanities courses is detailed above.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In addition to your teaching, what other professional activities did you participate in during this academic year?

Membership in professional organizations:

• National Council of Teachers of English
  
• Society of Professional Journalists

Conferences/Workshops:
Presented paper “Sacred Harp Singing in a Living History Environment” to the Fall Conference of the Midwest Open Air Museums Coordinating Council, Eagle Creek Conference Center, Findlay, Illinois, November 10, 2005. Participated in Appalachian Dulcimer Week, Western Carolina University, for “learning and promoting the dulcimer’s history and traditional playing styles,” June 2005.

Other:

• Volunteer interpreter at Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site. I interpret the log schoolhouse during the summer and sing with the New Salem Shape Note Singers.
  
• I coordinate meetings of the Prairieland Dulcimer Strings, a community group of amateur musicians that meets at my church (Atonement Lutheran).

INTERACTION WITH STUDENTS

Did you serve as an academic adviser this year? No.

Did you serve as an adviser to any student organizations? Yes. If yes, please list. The Sleepy Weasel, campus literary magazine. My duties are primarily editorial.

In what ways have you supported other college activities this year?

Editor of Nuts & Bolts, the assessment newsletter. In addition, I consciously assigned my freshman English and journalism students to observe and write about Free Food Days and other on-campus activities, partly for the writing experience and partly to expose them to the student activities. I make a practice of donating copies of The Chicago Tribune and several music magazines to the Resource Center when I’ve finished reading them. I very much like what Joanna Beth Tweedy has done so far to create a welcoming, productive atmosphere in the Resource Center. It reminds me of the commons rooms in a more traditional school, and I try to do as much as I can to help her in these efforts.

ASSESSMENT

Have you used any means of assessing how students are learning (other than grading course work)?

I use several Classroom Assessment Techniques, primarily reflective essays. Often I embed them in the final exam, and perform a rudimentary content analysis on student answers to rather broad questions in order to see how often they mention topics that are covered in the CSLOs and CBSLOs on the syllabus. For more information on the technique, see the student prompt at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/reflect.html linked to my faculty page.

I often use a variation of the “one-minute essay” CAT – asking students the clearest point, the most confusing point and the point(s) they want to know more about -- in a variety of ways. These range from a quick survey, either at the end of class or not infrequently during the class when I suspect we’ve gotten off track, to framing reflective essay questions that embed a clearest-point, most-confusing-point rubric into final exams or other assignments at the end of the semester. It has gotten to be pretty integral to the way we move through the material in a course.

What would most enable you to use consistently some assessment tools or techniques that would tell you about the College and student learning?

Since I edit the assessment newsletter, as in the past I’m more interested in the answers other instructors give to this question. I use reflective essays a lot in my own classes, as stated above, and am getting more focused in the questions I embed in the essay prompts as I gain experience with the technique.

HUM 221: Alaska Native, Orthodox church links

Posted today to my Hogfiddle blog.

Eklutna village is an Tanaina (or Dena'ina) Indian settlement about 25 miles northeast of Anchorage just off the Glenn Highway near the head of Knik Arm. It's noted especially for the Athabascan "Spirit Houses" in its Russian Orthodox church cemetery, which reflect a blending of Orthodox and Native spiritual practices. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia gives a few details:

The Eklutna area was the site of many Athabascan Indian villages as long as 800 years ago. Today's residents are descendants of the Dena'ina (Tanaina) tribe. A railroad station was built in 1918, and Russian Orthodox missionaries arrived in the 1840s. Brightly-colored "Spirit Houses" in the Russian Slavic style now lend character to Eklutna.

But by far the best online resource on Eklutna is a personal webpage put up by an Alaskan identified only as "sunhusky" who has a wealth of pictures and well-informed explanations about Anchorage, the nearby Mat-Su valley and other southcentral Alaska attractions.

To read the rest, go to my Hogfiddle blog on music and the arts. It gets better as it goes along.

Keywords: HUM 221 / Native American religion / Alaska Native

HUM 221: '06 reflective essays

Notes on the reflective essays embedded in the final exam ... jotted down while I was grading the papers and written up in the airplane over southeast Alaska on the flight into Anchorage on May 5. More-or-less unedited.

Historical context. My notes say, "They're getting the survival of Native culture, not as much 20th-century social dislocation (diabetes, chemical dependency, poverty, etc.) though ..." I think the first part of the course could be more of a broad cultural and historical overview, maybe lumping Northeast, Southeast (and Athabascan?) cultures together as Woodland, and touching on distinctions of the Plains, Southwestern and Pacific Coast cultures ... but with more emphasis on SW and Pacific NW artistic conventions ... then moving from the overview to intertribal forms, activism and cultural survival, "Native Pride," powwows, music, cedar flute, literature and postcolonial themes, etc. Do this in context of contact-conflict-separation-assimilation-trival renewal paradigm, in other words give it more of a historical context.

Reader response. A good experiment, especially for one that just sort of happened without planning in the middle of the semester when nothing else was working, and one worth developing more consciously next year. (I've got a strong hunch reader response is a good way of getting into cross-cultural issues. There's a multicultural website on "the expanding canon" for high school lit teachers, featuring selected works by Ishmael Reed and Graciela Limón, that looks promising.) Needs more planning tho' ... along with just about everything else in HUM 221 ... replace research paper with a set of reader response essays? Needs more backgrounding, tho' ... the Reed-Limón website says:

In the classroom, a cultural studies approach usually combines literary readings with social and historical analysis. By reading texts in this way, students achieve a deeper understanding of how historical circumstances, social traditions, and the media work together to create a cultural milieu in which certain sets of beliefs are either reinforced or questioned. When the right texts are brought together, students can begin to see literature as a social product with a specific history and a particular agenda.

Should work for Native American studies, too. The website is well worth studying.

Scheduling and technology. The class needs to be Tuesday-Thursday, so we have enough time to screen videos. A lot of my problems this semester were technological, and the fix can be technological, too. The blog showed promise, both in terms of linking readings -- an important matter in a course there's no handy-dandy textbook for -- and giving out assignments, elaborating on them. Moving to the Presidents Room is going to require me to do more with media.

Masks!!! Our brief treatment of Haudenosaunee practice and attitudes on the use of masks in healing, false face society and ban on use of masks for non-religious purposes was mentioned by more students than anything else, including kids who didn't make a whole lot of effort the entire semester. Can do more with it, use it next time to show resistance to commodification, introduce that issue along with expropriation. Contrast it to Cherokee attitude on masks, Northwest Coast masks and attitudes on intellectual property.

On the whole, I'd give myself about a C+ the first time out.

Intro: Of logs, blogs and teaching

This "teaching b/log" grew out of my experience spring semester with two other blogs. It got to be convenient to post assignments to them as I was preparing for class, then go to the blogs in class the next day and follow the links. But the subject matter didn't always quite fit. And I wasn't entirely comfortable with posting assignments to blogs where students would have to scan -- or skip -- over personal rants on music, old newspapering buddies and other subjects that "won't be on the test." So at semester's end, I decided to open a new blog dedicated entirely to classroom teaching.

During the school year, if experience is any guide, I'll be posting mostly assignments and readings I run across from day to day, mostly in the mass media. I've been keying them by course number on my other blogs ... here's an example on Native American studies (note how it's keyed to HUM 221, the course number) ... and here's a feature story on grizzly bears I used in COM 209, my basic newswriting class (with the course number tagged on at the end). Best way to find old assignments and stories is to key the course prefix and number in the "Search This Blog" field at the top of the page.

I've always wanted to keep a teaching log, too, and I've started them a half dozen times on hard copy. (I usually keep up with them for three to five days, get busy, lose the notebook and abandon them.) But they can be an aid to teaching. There's a good description on the Missouri State University website that I plan to be quided by:

A teaching log is a weekly record of important experiences, insights, or milestones in your teaching/student learning. As time passes, the log will become very valuable in disclosing your craft: what worked well, what did not. When was I most comfortable and connected to the class; when was I least comfortable and least connected to the class? What are your current assumptions about teaching and learning; do they change over time; are they founded in fact? If you could change something about the teaching for this week, what would you change? If you change something, did you document why?

In addition, I'll be using the blog to keep abreast of developments in learning outcomes assessment. Since I chair my college's Assessment Committee, I try to keep up with them. My posts on the subject have strayed over into the politics of higher education, but they'll be more germane here than in my music and journalism blogs.

All of that said, I plan to use this "teaching b/log" primarily in the classroom.

There's a saying attributed to President James A. Garfield, who admired a professor named Mark Hopkins whom he'd had at Williams College. It's usually quoted like this: "The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." There's a longer version, too, with "a log hut, with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other," and no doubt it's more accurate. I found it in an article by James O'Donnell, vice-provost for information systems and computing at the University of Pennsylvania, that has some compelling thoughts on how technology has become a seamless part of liberal arts education:

These days, I often find myself in our dining hall [at Penn] with one or another student, deep in animated conversation of just the kind Garfield imagined. But the appointment to meet was certainly made by e-mail, and the conversation continues a discussion begun earlier -- sometimes much earlier -- that oscillates effortlessly between electronic and face to face.

Very true. But I like the version with Mark Hopkins and the student on the log better. And since I'm keeping a teaching log, I like the pun best of all.

So, if you'll forgive another pun, I'll log off now.