Teaching Rhetoric and Composition

Recently, I was reminded of the Reggio Emilia Approach to education that combines student-centered teaching with constructivist pedagogy. The approach was founded by a man named Loris Malaguizzi, an Italian early educator, in the years following the end of World War II. While this theory was put to use for early childhood education, such as preschool and primary schools, it can be applicable to the college classroom. I bring this up is because of the possible parallels that can be made from when the early education theory was put into practice to now, with classrooms forced to go online. The approach was used in a time of social and political change in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Malaguzzi along with other Italian educators needed to rebuild their communities. Malaguzzi noticed people building up a school, brick by brick in a town called Villa Cella, near Reggio Emilia. Malaguzzi saw this as an opportunity to build a school that offered more than just a building for students to learn in b

https://www.wired.com/story/question-productivity-coronavirus/?utm_source=pocket-newtab I know that the last thing y'all want right now it something else to read, but Firefox, in all it's nosy, article-suggesting glory, recommended this article to me which was a surprisingly good read. I thought I'd share, because one of the biggest battles I'm having right now is trying to not quantify my self-worth with how much or little I'm getting done at home. Even if I didn't get much done outside of work on my least productive days, at least I used to be able to say "I went to my job." But now, it seems like I'm turned all the way on or all the way off - sometimes I've been working 12 hours days, and sometimes I hit the minimum requirements for the day and feel really guilty about giving up. Personally, I don't think it helps I don't have a desk in my apartment - there's no real way for me to completely separate my work time from my relax

How much power should be given to students is one of the questions we may still be asking ourselves as instructors and students at the same time. How much is too much? I know that we have had this discussion before, but I would like to ask about it from what I read in chapter 4 of In Our Own Voice. I think we had this touched on this a little bit at the beginning of the semester, but I would like to see how our perception may have changed since we are about to finish our first semester as instructors at Ball State. In this chapter, Deletiner cites Boomer when he claims that any teacher who is far from the idea of being a "judge" in the classroom is "devaluated as soft or even slightly crazy" (p. 95) This makes me think of what side I am taking in my teaching practices this semester. At least in my mind, I don't give place to the idea of being a "judge" or as someone who needs to be heard and "obeyed" in the classroom because I am the one

Hi everyone! This week I did a (rather lengthy) 'reading response' (from my own readings) about the concept of "ungrading". This concept essentially refers to the idea of getting rid of all grades in the classroom and, when required to give a grade at the end of the semester, requiring the student to give themselves a grade based on the reflections and work they've done throughout the semester or co-creating a grade in a one-on-one meeting with your student (ideally having frequent reflections and checkins throughout the semester). There's a lot of evidence to support the effectiveness of this, but I thought I'd give you a really cut-down version of my paper to explain why I'm really eager to try incorporating this into my classroom. You can read the full paper here . Ungrading One of the most difficult pedagogical conversations is assessment. Everybody either thinks they know how to do it, or fully admits they have no idea how to do it. We read

Faymonville's article challenging monolingualism in the classroom piqued my interest as my class currently works on their multimodal project. While I agree that introducing students to a wider range of languages is important (as is supporting those who come from languages and cultures outside of our own), there's a pretty large practical concern. It's easy for the author, a native German speaker, to disrupt a monolingual English situation in their teaching. Having students from other cultures and languages in our classroom also helps disrupt those structures (not that we should force responsibility onto these students, but I think their very presence can make our predominantly Hoosier classrooms wonderfully uncomfortable). I have a much harder time doing that disruption as a white dude from Ohio. My question is, then, do our multimodal assignments do enough work to ask the kinds of questions Faymonville wants us to ask? If they aren't currently, can they? One of t

“We write so that a reader can understand. In order to understand each other, it is assumed, we have to speak the same language. But is that really so? … Why do we automatically categorize a non-native writer’s manifestation of difference as an error rather than an experiment in making meaning? Why do we not give the non-native writer the benefit of the doubt that he or she might be trying to convey meanings that cannot be expressed through native, standard usage? …These Sturm-und-Drang questions are meant to provoke readers to question whether a non-native error can actually be an indication of a writer’s confidence in a reader’s ability to follow and understand him or her beyond correctness or to be motivated to understand experience of misunderstanding” (Faymonville 135). I found this passage particularly insightful as I currently have one non-native speaker in my English 104 course. When working through their primary research (duo-ethnography) on mental health as it relates to