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Summary of the Project This course design, captured in this portfolio, culminates a five-year journey experimenting with pedagogy and engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning. After several productive redesigns, in which I introduced new pedagogies and technologies to help students engaged in more sophisticated research and writing, I realized that the problem was "how they were reading."
I was driven back to something even more basic. I needed to inquire more carefully about how this was really breaking down.I could tell that there was a fundamental gap between my assumptions about how students read and how they were reading. And the differences weren't just in background knowledge; they were not just not being smart or disciplined or persistent. It was that they didn't know how to read a certain way.
I also realized that the moves they were or were not making were at the level of "intermediate" cognitive moves. I realized that I needed to understand these intermediate cognitive moves better AND that they themselves needed to understand them better.
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Some sources for ideas that have influenced me. These are links to some useful resources including the "glossary of key pedagogical terms" at the Visible Knowledge Project.
VKP Glossary
I have found the writings on "constructivism" and "cognitive apprenticeship" particularly useful.
Taking Learning Seriously
An excellent and important article about learning by Lee Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation.
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Example of a primary source we would use in the course.
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The "Four Step" Approach In the course I had the students go through a key sequence about one third of the way through. * They gathered in groups of three to engage in a "think aloud"--a close reading/brainstorming session around passages from a story we were reading and some texts they had never seen before. We videotaped these sessions. * After the session, the groups viewed the tape and produced a "transcription outline" of their think aloud. * Then, individually, had to write an analysis of the productive and less productive "reading methods" they were employing during the think aloud, and post these online. This turned out to be a very effective exercise, both for my understanding of their reading practices and THEIR undersanding (or growing awareness) of their reading and its relationship to approaching complexity in interdisciplinary literary studies.
"A Hypertext Course Portfolio in American Literature"
An earlier study of American Literature and the use of new media, that I wrote.
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Some Key Findings
Students are always drawing upon reading protocols, even if they are often very narrow. Asking them to be conscious of their reading method as a method by itself begins to open them up to more expansive approaches.
My students oscillate between two responses to literary texts and their historical contexts: (1) the leap to certainty ("What Melville must be saying here is..."). Or (2) the opposite, a kind of reluctance to imagine questions beyond their knowledge. That is, they cannot imagine or articulate a systematic approach to thinking about something where they do not have all the knowledge necessary or they are not experts in. They lack a method for proceeding with uncertainty.
Finally, related to that, I realized for the first time ever in my career that what students lack is not necessarily a method for better interpretations, they lack a method for NOT closing down on interpretation. What students need, I now believe, is a method or protocol for "deferral." Learning to read so that they can open up a text and defer meaning in the most productive and generative ways--that is the goal of a course design for "flexible performance capability."
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Examples of Student Work Below I'm pretending I have links to examples of student work. I am pretending that I have chosen three: (a) an example of a student whose reflections on the think aloud really came to a lot of awareness; (b) one that sees some new things as a result of the exercise, and (c) someone who still evidences the obstacles discussed above.
Student Learning Example "A" (fake link)
Student Learning Example "B" (fake link)
Student Learning Example "C" (fake link)
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