March 8, 2016

                                              

There are a plethora of valuable experiences and sentiments that the opportunity to teach a First-Year-Composition (FYC) two-quarter-stretch English class offered. I have enlisted several examples as well as considerations that I incorporated (with the help of my mentor and colleagues) in my teaching and scaffolding of student assignments. Teaching college level literacies to a group of FYC students with the aid of my colleagues/T.As provided moments of learning and adaptation. The achievements of my implemented goals in the classroom have prepared me and supplied for me a clear chance to reflect upon my experiences as a T.A. 

 

Application process

I remember first applying to the T.A. Ship Program at CSUSB. I had to rally up two letters of recommendation, one from Dr. Vickers and a second one from Dr. Feizz.  Then in the summer of 2015 a group of 11 of us started to meet to prepare for September’s English 105a first quarter stretch. There was a wide selection of books, but we had trouble agreeing on which one to use. Some of use decided on using the Joseph Harris book while others opted out. I was one of the ones who thought this book was a good selection for the students. It was important for me to expose the group of students that self-selected into my course to this text to make them aware of how intellectual writing is an adaptive and social activity and how they could learn strategic moves to participate in social writing. In addition, the selection of the book, Sign of Life by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon presented itself to be a great way to lecture on pop culture. The students were able to critically think about pop culture through the framework, semiotics. This lesson taught me that the importance of textbooks is not what book you choose, but how I choose to incorporate the readings.  I learned that providing more time usually allows students to get the overall meaning of how digital personas are created on online sites.

 

Pedagogical praxis

During my submission in the T.A. Program, I had certain aims for the class and myself. One of my hopes as an inexperienced teaching associate was to provide students with an opportunity to put their experiences into practice when I created a space for them to do so. I set the goal of developing not only specific knowledge but also more generally important life skills, such as organization and group collaboration. The E-portfollio as a means to enter the public world allowed students to think about how they wanted to show themselves to the Internet world. In a sense this was a critical approach that allowed them (students) a consciousness of freedom and made them aware of the power they had when composing online personas and online spaces. I believe that empowered the students to connect knowledge and make constructive decisions about their multimodal portfolios. I learned that scaffolding the learning expectations and their assignments helped the students have a successful quarter. By working with other T.A.s, I was able to apply others’ concepts and ideas, I was able to see what my peers were doing. I was able to modify some ideas and use them in my own curriculum, for instance, a reading of Montesquieu and the idea of exploration to demystify the five-paragraph essay. 

 

English 105a

As a teacher in training I drew pleasure from pupil success. Using Joseph Harris’ book Rewriting gave us a language to speak about in the modes of writing. I had the opportunity to see students use the work of others and incorporate it into their own work. After delving the first few weeks to develop a unified vocabulary I later had the opportunity to bring in electronic portfolios. In class we took several weeks to work in a computer based classroom where I could cart in mac laptops and have the students explore. These digital portfolios were also put in hard copy binder that students could later reflect upon. In the most elementary stage, I had them collaborated in groups to learn how mac computers work. Thereafter they collaborate in different groups to get each other to learn how to create documents and pages or insert images. During a mock presentation, a five minute review of their work, students presenting or acting as the audience would either ask questions or give expert knowledge on how they created certain elements in their semi-accomplished E-portfolios.

 

English 106A

            Since First year Composition students self selected the courses through a computer assisted program made available by the university, I prepared the 105a class to be a preparatory class for more collaborative group work that would be taking place in the English 106a Class. Here our project would require the use of Google documents and the knowledge of how to use them as a real time mechanism for producing works. Although we started the use of Google documents as a means of producing collaborative essays, they also had other options that they felt useful to their success as student writers. During week 7 and week 8 the students drew ideas on how to collaborate and keep each other accountable for their work though the contracts and a one page write up about the understanding from each group member. Here is when they discussed what other medium of communication they would use. One group created a Group me, a mobile messaging app that allows users to communicate through mobile access using SMS messaging. Group two decided to communicate using Instagram, an online mobile photo sharing, video sharing and social networking service. As I reflect on these choices that the student made, I am eager to know how they care to make choices in the classroom that benefit them fully. Our collaborative essay and our annotated bibliography were moments where I saw students explicitly exercising agency. There were times when student each sat facing each other negotiating who would accomplish what, and how they would manage to come back during class hours to mesh their ideas into one. As I saw each individual engage in the social environment that I helped to create, I knew that I had successfully accomplished more beyond knowledge gaining. I learned that providing the tools, the space, and time for the students to do their work they wanted would freed me up to conference with them individually regarding the writing processes.

 

Derive Experiences (frustrations)

As I have reflected each semester on the experience of being a teaching associate, and have temporarily concluded that a student centered education makes for the best learning to help student learners to become autonomous and independent in their decisions when it comes to writing and learning.  However, by putting the leaning in the student’s hands there were many moments when it would only take a few rebellious off-topic students to throw the group dynamics to head in a different direction that was not fruitful to the class. In these few moments, I had to redirect the group’s efforts. I would make them aware of their critical role in collaborative groups and make them wary of the time and space that they were occupying and how it only facilitated their group work since trying to orchestrate a time and space for everyone in the group to meet would never occur.  These moments made me aware of my “active” role when students veered off in unwanted directions. Nevertheless, I have seen how some group have a better grasp in acknowledging their peers’ voice and implicitly helping peers’ problem solving and implement practices that made the shy or less talkative student’s feel valued. Another valuable take away from teaching were moments where I had to get students back on task. In these moments I learned that role changing was a consistent model to take on different roles in class.

What I found most difficult about this experience was the creation of assignments. I would create prompts, which seemed to mean different things to different students. I would hear this side when students would ask themselves in class about a certain understanding of an assignment. For instance, at one point I recall handing out a prompt on instruction for group-annotated bibliographies informing them how the structure of their collaborated bibliographies would look. There were a lot of question as to how the bibliography would look and how it was to be formatted. Although I had put MLA guides they seemed unsure. The next prompt, which was a second phase of the first was first started in class and then done at home which minimized a lot of the confusion and lack of understanding of how annotated bibliographies would appear when turned in. Another method that I initiated was using class time. This seemed to resolve certain issues with prompts, so starting out by providing classroom instruction and asking for comments and clarification and getting groups to re-explain what I was putting forth made it a bit easier for the students. Thereafter, I incorporated time in class and then had them take the assignment home to finish up. Finally, I had them at times composing and coming up with how an assignment would look. This was by far the most challenging past. I had each group imagine the beginning, the midway stage and the end stage of their collaborative essay. This has been by far the most successful leap that I have been able to accomplish as a novice-teaching associate. I hope that my style, assignments, and assessments evolve with each classroom experience that I had the opportunity to be a part of.

In the process of hoping to create a student-centered environment, I have also created a space for storing my personal thoughts on teaching and learning. I hope to continue to use the space to reflect on, some of the work the students have engaged with during these two quarters.  This storage strategy is my own teaching portfolio, which has a compilation of active work, collaboration and a comment section for peers and others to comment on. It will function as a showcase of my trajectory in the education field as a student and teaching associate.  I am hoping that all that I have listed above meet my primary aims of facilitating agency, critical thinking, and multimodal literacies in the classroom. That is what I signed up for when I first applied to the T.A. program at California State University of San Bernardino (CSUSB).