1. My topic, tentatively, is racist discourse in ethnically homogenous classrooms. I would like to better understand how students in all-white classrooms talk about race. I would also like to look at how I could make students understand the power of language, especially hateful language. I grew up in a town of 200 people. The entire population of the high school was white and there were instances of racism all through my school career. I myself was guilty at times. Some people from my high school never got over the racism. I don't know where they learned it, but they were not taught any different in school. In my future teaching career, I would like to tackle this issue and hopefully help students think about race differently. For now, simply understanding how they talk about it is my main goal.
2. It looks like I will probably do a paper for this one. I want to research and better understand a topic and then synthesize the information into one final product. A paper seems like the best choice for that goal.
3. I don't really have many questions at this point. This topic relates closely to my topic for ENGL 461, so I am well on my way to understanding this better. I guess one question I have is whether or not I should include some sort of teaching material in my final product. Lesson plans or teaching strategies or something? I don't know if that's really what I'm going for yet.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
About the transcripts...
The transcripts were an interesting text for this class. It is difficult to read through a transcript and understand what is going on, so I really thought it was useful for us to perform them. It also made for an entertaining few days of class. Every performance seemed to include good discussion and was useful for us to experience, as there were so many different examples of what discussion can look like in the classroom.
I especially liked the one that Kelsey did in Belgrade. I liked the way the teacher was interacting with the students. He was playing a sort of game with them where he would never really answer their questions, but would instead keep asking them questions so they would come to the answer themselves. This rhetorical strategy would be difficult to implement successfully, but I think he was able to do so because he had an excellent rapport with his students.
Another transcript I enjoyed was the one that Alyssa and I acted out, the one with Greg. I enjoyed playing that part because it was so funny. We discussed whether or not Greg's story was relevant to the discussion, and it really wasn't in an explicit sense. He did, however, loosen the class up for later discussion, as Doug and Emma informed us. I think it is useful to have a student like Greg in every classroom. He may have gone on a tangent irrelevant to the discussion, but he improved the dynamic in the classroom, creating a space more conducive to discussion.
The main goal of my future classroom discussion will be to have fun with it. That does not exclude arguing, because, at least for me, getting excited enough about a topic to have a lively argument is a lot of fun. I would like to develop a rapport with my students similar to the teacher in the first example I cited, and I would like to let students like Greg tell their stories (within reason) to get the class in the right mood for lively discussion. One thing I will always make sure to do is answer every comment with a summary of that comment and feedback. I think teachers sometimes didn't do that in the transcripts. For example, in the one I recorded, I noticed that the teacher sometimes would listen to a students comment but never expound on it and would move on to something else. She is a student teacher so I guess she has some leeway in the discussion department but I really think she did a good job considering her lack of experience.
I especially liked the one that Kelsey did in Belgrade. I liked the way the teacher was interacting with the students. He was playing a sort of game with them where he would never really answer their questions, but would instead keep asking them questions so they would come to the answer themselves. This rhetorical strategy would be difficult to implement successfully, but I think he was able to do so because he had an excellent rapport with his students.
Another transcript I enjoyed was the one that Alyssa and I acted out, the one with Greg. I enjoyed playing that part because it was so funny. We discussed whether or not Greg's story was relevant to the discussion, and it really wasn't in an explicit sense. He did, however, loosen the class up for later discussion, as Doug and Emma informed us. I think it is useful to have a student like Greg in every classroom. He may have gone on a tangent irrelevant to the discussion, but he improved the dynamic in the classroom, creating a space more conducive to discussion.
The main goal of my future classroom discussion will be to have fun with it. That does not exclude arguing, because, at least for me, getting excited enough about a topic to have a lively argument is a lot of fun. I would like to develop a rapport with my students similar to the teacher in the first example I cited, and I would like to let students like Greg tell their stories (within reason) to get the class in the right mood for lively discussion. One thing I will always make sure to do is answer every comment with a summary of that comment and feedback. I think teachers sometimes didn't do that in the transcripts. For example, in the one I recorded, I noticed that the teacher sometimes would listen to a students comment but never expound on it and would move on to something else. She is a student teacher so I guess she has some leeway in the discussion department but I really think she did a good job considering her lack of experience.
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