During the Fall 1, 2012 term, I had the opportunity to teach an English 150 class (“The Process of Composition”) in The Learning Studio as an Innovative Teaching Fellow.  The high-tech room—with its wall of screens, moveable furniture, and available tablets and iPads—is reason enough to want to teach in the space.  An added bonus includes collaborating with an instructional designer from the Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning; I was fortunate to work with Michaella (Kella) Thornton, the Assistant Director of Instructional Design.

English 150 is often one of the first courses a student takes at SPS.  Some students have been out of school for a while and may not have written a formal essay in many years.  With these considerations in mind along with the potential of The Learning Studio, it was decided that I would pilot a special section of the writing course as theme based, wherein everything we read and wrote about would be related to food.   I had taught a similar course several years earlier while working at another university and had experienced the benefits of such a curriculum.  Not just something we  all must eat every day to survive, food offers a lens through which to examine politics, gender, class, race, identity, heritage, health, sustainability, agriculture, literature, film, and culture, to name only a few related concepts and disciplines.

As we prepared for the course, Kella and I determined that we would ask the students to participate in a course blog and Twitter.  I had never blogged before and had my doubts about Twitter, but since I was going to ask the students to be involved in these activities, I concluded that I needed to know how they worked.  Several months prior to the course’s start, I therefore started posting to a blog about food-related topics in and around St. Louis (I wrote about food years ago for CitySearch and often focus on how food and literature intersect in my academic writing, so this was not a new topic to me).  I also opened a Twitter account and started tweeting.  Shortly after I began tweeting my blog posts, George Mahe, St. Louis Magazine’s Dining Editor, contacted me about writing for the magazine.  I quickly changed my mind about Twitter ‘s usefulness.

The connections I made through writing for the magazine proved invaluable for the course.  I invited three members of the local food community into the class as guest speakers.  All three guests—Reine Bayoc, chef-owner of Sweet Art ; Maude Bauschard, owner of Maude’s Market; and George Mahe—spoke not only about food but also about writing, particularly how important effective communication is regardless of one’s job or major.  Bayoc, for example, is currently writing a memoir, so her appearance during our food memoir unit made perfect sense.  At the time, students were working on their own remembered person/event paper in which the memory had to be connected to food in some way.  Thanks to The Learning Studio’s design, we recorded all of the guest speakers’ presentations.

Academic writing can sometimes seem arbitrary, particularly in entry-level courses.  Students often wonder what the larger purpose of an assignment is and approach the course as something “to get out of the way” before moving on to their major courses.  The practice of writing in and of itself provides a great means of improving one’s skills, and that’s the implicit understanding often made explicit to the students.   When writing is tied to a larger purpose, however, and the instructor and members from the outside community participate in writing on a regular basis and reinforce the need for deliberate practice, the students come to understand how important writing is well beyond the classroom; ideally, they also come to value how a basic composition course can help to launch their studies.

For an overview of the course, click on this link to see a presentation outline that Kella and I used when we presented at the Focus on Teaching & Technology Conference at UMSL last November.

Monsters aren’t just for Halloween anymore . . . and haven’t been for a while.  Recent trends in literature—including Young Adult (YA)  literature—film, TV, and the fine arts reveal a renewed interest in vampires, zombies, ghosts, and serial killers.  All of these monsters and more fall under the larger category of “The Gothic.”  While many associate “Gothic” with “Goth,” a term that conjures up images of pale skin, black lipstick, and a melancholic mien, the word describes a literary style or genre dating back to late-eighteenth-century England.  Many believe Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, to be the first Gothic novel written in English.  With its haunted castle, family secrets, and murder, the novel set the stage for authors usually only read by English majors—Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, James Hogg—and those more universally recognized thanks to film adaptations and popular culture—Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Bram Stoker (Dracula), and Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).

Like so many other literary genres, The Gothic quickly made its way across the Atlantic to the United States, with the publication of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland in 1798.  Many critics believe that Edgar Allan Poe’s works turned the outer trappings of The Gothic (haunted houses, ghosts, and vampires) inside, within the tortured psyches of the mentally insane.  As The Gothic has evolved over the years, one thing remains the same: the monsters—whether external or internal—reflect our society’s fears and anxieties.  Consequently, the ends of centuries and unstable periods in history often see a resurgence in Gothic works.  Take, for example, the end of the 20^th Century and millennium; Gothic films like The Blair Witch Project provided a safe outlet for viewers to purge their anxieties about Y2K.  More recently, vampires and zombies have overtaken literature and film.  One scholar, Diane Winston, the University of Southern California’s  Knight Chair in Media and Religion, argues that our current fascination with monsters reveals larger epistemological concerns.  That is, the monster, whether it’s a zombie, vampire, or serial killer, evokes basic questions of humanity.  Moreover, Winston and other scholars believe all things Gothic are emblematic of moral dilemmas and allow us a creative and entertaining means of solving these dilemmas.  Scary movie as therapy?  Perhaps, for some—as long as you can get to sleep.

Photo Credit: Coastal Carolina Univesity http://ww2.coastal.edu/mbachman/Gothic.htm

As I encounter students who are new to writing, at least as a core part of a course, inevitably I see two types of writing emerge.

One type of writing that comes out is found in the discussion of a text. In discussing, as authors grow more comfortable with the course setting, the writing is soundly couched in that author’s personal reaction and understanding of the text. They “get” certain parts of the text and are able to go on at length about the meaning or intent of the author. The parts of the text that they don’t “get,” they can point to as well; often as they articulate why the text puzzled them, they come upon a solution of their own. Their words have the confidence that is born of understanding their own relation to the text. This writing comes from our need to be heard and understood. It is writing that takes risks and finds rewards.

The second kind of writing is what gets submitted as an essay on a text. Initially the writing is stilted. It overreaches itself in its attempt to sound informed. It often parrots what the student has read elsewhere, or what I have offered up in discussion. It is a form of writing that attempts to give the instructor what a student thinks the instructor wants. It is often shallow and lacks any voice whatsoever. This writing comes from a place of seeking approval. This is safe writing that never admits there is anything difficult about a text and never covers new ground.

In the best cases, by examining their discussion posts and their essay writing side by side, I can demonstrate to students that their best writing comes from a place of both understanding and trying to understand. Instead of filling their essays with safe certainties, they should be building, brick by brick, their own answer to a question that puzzles them. Even if they fall short of their ultimate premise, the journey will be instructive.

If there are no risks, there are no rewards. Students should be encouraged to take ownership of their own writing, to chart their own course and surprise us all.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brightmeadow/281659324/