WELCOME

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!


--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100

Monday, February 7, 2011

The Combined Voice of Student and Teacher

It seems to me that in the topic of Educational Reform one voice is yet to be heard. Both student and Teacher alike have tried to confront a variety of issues that they face together while joined in the task of educating the generation of tomorrow. This participation and collaboration is both needed and very exciting to see. But I cannot help but notice the silence of the parent-voice, and especially the unarticulated voice of fathers in particular while listening to the different viewpoints and shared concerns.

A video on You-Tube gave voice to a group of 200 students at Kansas State University who collaborated with their instructor, Michael Wesch in an effort to be heard. The short video, entitled “A Vision of Students Today,” documented how students felt left out of the decisions regarding their education. Comments by students include, “I don’t complete 48% of my reading assignments,” and are followed by observations, “Only 24% are relevant to my life.” Another voice is heard in an article published in Educational Leadership (online) by Peter Cookson Jr, entitled "What would Socrates Say?" who ponders the future of technology in the classroom and the general methods of learning in the 21st century by adding meaning to lesson plans that include student participation and active learning.

Questions about surface (rote learning) vs. deep learning are addressed by a variety of authors and experts in the field of meta-cognition are heard to advocate student interaction with the material and encourage analysis, evaluation and understanding over the old-school methods of memorization and learning of dry data which is seen as irrelevant and outdated. As we explore how we teach understanding through various interactive technologies it is almost as if the unstated observation, "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day," is heard. "Teach a man how to fish, or how to learn, and feed him for a lifetime," becomes the new goal that students and teachers face.

I would personally champion the progress and strides that I see in these areas except that I find myself at a loss to articulate my concerns as a parent, grandparent and father. As a student of 50+ years I'm excited for change and would love to see the next decade unfold. As a grandpa, concerned for well-fare of his children's children I don't know what to think. As students and educators alike prepare the next generation for the challenge of the problems they inherit will the voice of the passing generation be heard? Or is it too late, is it as I fear, the channel has not only been changed but the TV is turned off and the generation that dropped out, turned on and tuned in has faded silently into a thing of the past?

I for one would like to encourage others to watch another video, submitted in reply to the "Vision of Students Today".
It can be found here: "A Vision of K-12 Students Today". The vid continues along the same lines as the Wesch student collaborative effort and it prepares the way for concerns of parents who wish to advocate for their kids who may yet be unprepared for their future. This is such a large subject and the questions that arise are well stated and relevant to one and all.

"Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the kindling of a flame." - Socrates


More later,
~Michael (Dad, Grandad and Student)
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