Introduction
While earning my graduate degrees at Penn State, I had the opportunity to teach a variety of different courses spanning several areas of content and three distinct “environments.” Along with traditional courses in classrooms, I’ve also taught online courses and “adventure literature” courses that pair classroom activities with experiential trips and activities. From this diverse body of experience, I’ve developed a skill set with two important applications: 1) I am capable of teaching a variety of courses and 2) I design my courses to appeal to students with different learning styles and needs. Though I find that my fundamental goal remains constant across all courses—what I call “ignition pedagogy”—I’ve also included additional sections below that expand on the unique challenges and rewards of utilizing engaged scholarship and of teaching online courses.
I. Ignition Pedagogy
The best students I’ve encountered want more from their courses than they can find in a classroom. Though I think of myself as grounded in traditional pedagogy, my work with engaged scholarship and my experience teaching online courses have outfitted me with skills I use to meet the demands of the twenty-first-century’s most motivated students as well as to ignite in their less-driven peers a passion for learning.
While earning my graduate degrees at Penn State, I had the opportunity to teach a variety of different courses spanning several areas of content and three distinct “environments.” Along with traditional courses in classrooms, I’ve also taught online courses and “adventure literature” courses that pair classroom activities with experiential trips and activities. From this diverse body of experience, I’ve developed a skill set with two important applications: 1) I am capable of teaching a variety of courses and 2) I design my courses to appeal to students with different learning styles and needs. Though I find that my fundamental goal remains constant across all courses—what I call “ignition pedagogy”—I’ve also included additional sections below that expand on the unique challenges and rewards of utilizing engaged scholarship and of teaching online courses.
I. Ignition Pedagogy
The best students I’ve encountered want more from their courses than they can find in a classroom. Though I think of myself as grounded in traditional pedagogy, my work with engaged scholarship and my experience teaching online courses have outfitted me with skills I use to meet the demands of the twenty-first-century’s most motivated students as well as to ignite in their less-driven peers a passion for learning.
Through my work as an instructor and teaching assistant with the Adventure Literature Program, I have seen the effects of grounding abstract ideas in the tangible. Designed to pair the familiar aspects of an English course—reading and discussing texts, composing essays, completing exams, etc—with the additive experiences of immersion in a particular place and physical activities that complement the more cerebral side of the course, these classes allow students to learn in a variety of ways. During their trips to local farms, students in “Eating Your Ecology” work and eat alongside farmers and then compare their actual experience to the ideas they encountered in course readings like Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. Similarly, in “The Wilderness Literature Field Institute,” the hiking, camping, and canoeing that students undertake allow them to imagine the mental and physical toll that the elements had on Lewis and Clark, Thoreau, and John Muir. Courses built around a particular place—“Exploring the Chesapeake Bay” and “The Beach,” for example—encourage students to contemplate the differences between studying a place and being in it. Having participated in six of these courses, I’ve seen the ways the trips reinforce and expand upon—but also undermine and complicate—students’ beliefs about a wide range of topics: resource extraction, wilderness preservation, watershed management, outdoor recreation, labor, and “Nature” to name but a few. The additional level of engagement these courses offer—as well as the way they force students to learn with their minds and bodies—makes me eager to incorporate experiential elements into future courses in both large and small ways.
|
the trips reinforce and expand upon—but also undermine and complicate—students’ beliefs about a wide range of topics: resource extraction, wilderness preservation, watershed management, outdoor recreation, labor, and “Nature” |
Finally, though, outdoor experiences—rock-climbing, sailing on a skipjack, and setting out kale plants—comprise only a fraction of my pedagogy. Like most teachers, I spend most of my time in a traditional classroom. But whether addressing students from a lectern or a campfire circle, I encourage them to interrogate the fundamental assumptions they have about "the way the world works." I provide historical contextualization in order to demonstrate that things have not always been this way and need not remain as they are, but also deploy the insights of post-structuralist theory in order to establish that things are not as they now appear either. As a humanist I feel that imparting a healthy level of skepticism is one of the best services I can provide to students bound for “practical” and “objective” curriculums.
No matter the course designation, I also work to improve my students' composition skills. I emphasize the importance of creativity, underscore the need for clarity, demand mechanically correct prose, and stress the value of drafting. Though not the most glamorous part of my job, I enjoy the tangible sense of accomplishment that comes with this part of my work: the world needs competent communicators, and I am glad to roll up my sleeves and do my part.
No matter the course designation, I also work to improve my students' composition skills. I emphasize the importance of creativity, underscore the need for clarity, demand mechanically correct prose, and stress the value of drafting. Though not the most glamorous part of my job, I enjoy the tangible sense of accomplishment that comes with this part of my work: the world needs competent communicators, and I am glad to roll up my sleeves and do my part.
Because my scholarship focuses on the georgic mode, I encourage my students to think about the importance of labor to a balanced life. |
Laboring through the unspectacular parts of life is more than a metaphor for me: as the focus of my research, it inevitably influences my teaching. Because my scholarship focuses on the georgic mode, I encourage my students to think about the importance of labor to a balanced life. Exposing students to contemporary works like Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2010) and Christine Byl’s Dirt Work (2013), older texts (like Virgil’s Georgics—the fountainhead of the mode), and several works in between encourages them to consider whether enjoying one’s work is as important as the prestige of the white-collar career for which their college-education is preparing them. Though posing such questions risks generating existential crises in senior Business majors, my aim is to present the possibility that happiness can come from embodied work or, even more likely, from a life that balances the cerebral with the physical. And as the university system continues to be charged with degenerating into a curriculum of advanced job training, asking such questions is surely worthwhile.
|
My work as an educator also involves supplementing face-to-face instruction with a variety of virtual tools that improve my students' digital literacy. My students utilize the standard technologies (word processing programs, course management systems, email, etc) but I also encourage students to break out of their comfort zones. For example, beginning in the fall 2010 semester, I required my technical writing students to compose an E-portfolio that included web-based versions of their resumes, reflections on their short- and long-term career goals, and samples of relevant past coursework. In the spring of 2013, my “Eating Your Ecology” class on food writing was able to Skype with Kristin Kimball, the author of The Dirty Life, one of the course texts. Bringing Kimball into the classroom in this way is, to date, my favorite use of technology in the classroom.
In the summers of 2012 and 2013, I taught online versions of both a literature course and a composition course. The experience of those courses convinced me that online teaching is the paradigmatic double-edged sword. First, online courses are harder to teach well because without face-to-face contact, a level of accountability evaporates. Students know they won’t be put on the spot with a difficult question and their failure to turn in an assignment or to give their best effort in leading discussion is all but invisible in a world where names exist apart from faces and bodies. In the same way, the minimum effort for teachers is lower: there is no online equivalent for my compulsive need to over-prepare for a traditional lecture. However, online classes have advantages as well. Though the word documents I use in online courses to replace lectures do not ask me to over-prepare, I can do a better job answering a question they generate. Having the time to research an answer to a student’s query—as well as the ability to deliver my response in a carefully crafted email—means that my answers are more complete and thorough. The online environment itself, properly utilized, also offers distinct advantages: online discussion forums have the potential to produce more purely constructive learning; using links, videos, and podcasts effectively can make a course more multi-vocal; self-pedagogues find the flexibility of an online course freeing; and, finally, some students are simply more comfortable in online courses.
Although each offers unique challenges, working across these learning environments—interacting with students inside and outside the classroom, as well as online—has helped me recognize my overarching goal as a teacher. Whether I’m delivering a lecture on Willa Cather, using email to suggest revisions to an essay draft, or carefully arranging a pile of sticks and leaves, I am aiming for ignition. I want students to be excited about learning, and I’m looking forward to continuing to blend experiential, traditional, and online pedagogies in future courses.
In the summers of 2012 and 2013, I taught online versions of both a literature course and a composition course. The experience of those courses convinced me that online teaching is the paradigmatic double-edged sword. First, online courses are harder to teach well because without face-to-face contact, a level of accountability evaporates. Students know they won’t be put on the spot with a difficult question and their failure to turn in an assignment or to give their best effort in leading discussion is all but invisible in a world where names exist apart from faces and bodies. In the same way, the minimum effort for teachers is lower: there is no online equivalent for my compulsive need to over-prepare for a traditional lecture. However, online classes have advantages as well. Though the word documents I use in online courses to replace lectures do not ask me to over-prepare, I can do a better job answering a question they generate. Having the time to research an answer to a student’s query—as well as the ability to deliver my response in a carefully crafted email—means that my answers are more complete and thorough. The online environment itself, properly utilized, also offers distinct advantages: online discussion forums have the potential to produce more purely constructive learning; using links, videos, and podcasts effectively can make a course more multi-vocal; self-pedagogues find the flexibility of an online course freeing; and, finally, some students are simply more comfortable in online courses.
Although each offers unique challenges, working across these learning environments—interacting with students inside and outside the classroom, as well as online—has helped me recognize my overarching goal as a teacher. Whether I’m delivering a lecture on Willa Cather, using email to suggest revisions to an essay draft, or carefully arranging a pile of sticks and leaves, I am aiming for ignition. I want students to be excited about learning, and I’m looking forward to continuing to blend experiential, traditional, and online pedagogies in future courses.
II. Further Thoughts on Experiential Education
Designing curriculums with an element of “engaged scholarship” appeals to me because the idea, though formulated in new language, is old, storied, and, I would argue, accepted. Thus, debates about engaged scholarship must begin by accepting its merit. The conversation should not be about whether or not such pedagogy is worthwhile, but should focus on how to balance experiential, embodied learning with traditional classroom instruction. |
debates about engaged scholarship must begin by accepting its merit.
|
Though the concept surely antedates him, Thoreau has much to say about the importance of learning by doing in the “Economy” section of Walden. He insists that students must do more than “play” or “study” life, but must “earnestly live it from beginning to end.” To illustrate his point he suggests that students could learn chemistry by baking bread, engineering by laying foundations, and metallurgy by making their own jackknives.
Those who would scoff at Thoreau and write him off as an impractical philosopher-crank should recall that the sciences have long embraced active, embodied learning. Though the spirit that informs undergraduate chemistry “labs” is different from what Thoreau might have hoped—chemistry undergraduates are not baking bread for four hours once a week—they still proceed from the logic that students will better learn some things by doing them. And the same goes for other classes where a weekly session of “hands-on” learning is required.
Earning an undergraduate Forestry minor showed me the value of engaged scholarship, but also led me to internalize the assumed difference between science courses and humanities courses. On the one hand, my Forestry classes required labs (not “labs” at all, actually: we spent most of our time in patches of woods and forests on or near campus). In these labs we would wear hardhats and learn those things not easily conveyed by books or in classrooms: how to identify an elm tree, how to use a clinometer, how to “read” a soil core. English classes, on the other hand, were run on the logic that they functioned perfectly well while entirely confined to a classroom. Bringing my hardhat to English classes made clear the wide space that separated the two fields I was studying: such materiel was anomalous in English courses—out of place and unnecessary.
Given my background, I was surprised when I came to Penn State and began working with Dr. Burkholder in his Adventure Literature courses. Though I was familiar with the concept behind the courses, I was intrigued by the arena in which it was being deployed. I soon realized (and remain convinced) that experiential learning adds something to literature courses, too. By engaging the mind and the body together, Adventure Literature courses provide additional means for students to engage with the material. By interacting with a subject across different contexts, students’ engagement and retention improves. But we already knew this. Why else do we encourage students to read poetry aloud or travel to readings ourselves? “Engaged scholarship,” then, merely names the instinct many of us are already acting on: namely, that no subject is entirely cerebral.
Those who would scoff at Thoreau and write him off as an impractical philosopher-crank should recall that the sciences have long embraced active, embodied learning. Though the spirit that informs undergraduate chemistry “labs” is different from what Thoreau might have hoped—chemistry undergraduates are not baking bread for four hours once a week—they still proceed from the logic that students will better learn some things by doing them. And the same goes for other classes where a weekly session of “hands-on” learning is required.
Earning an undergraduate Forestry minor showed me the value of engaged scholarship, but also led me to internalize the assumed difference between science courses and humanities courses. On the one hand, my Forestry classes required labs (not “labs” at all, actually: we spent most of our time in patches of woods and forests on or near campus). In these labs we would wear hardhats and learn those things not easily conveyed by books or in classrooms: how to identify an elm tree, how to use a clinometer, how to “read” a soil core. English classes, on the other hand, were run on the logic that they functioned perfectly well while entirely confined to a classroom. Bringing my hardhat to English classes made clear the wide space that separated the two fields I was studying: such materiel was anomalous in English courses—out of place and unnecessary.
Given my background, I was surprised when I came to Penn State and began working with Dr. Burkholder in his Adventure Literature courses. Though I was familiar with the concept behind the courses, I was intrigued by the arena in which it was being deployed. I soon realized (and remain convinced) that experiential learning adds something to literature courses, too. By engaging the mind and the body together, Adventure Literature courses provide additional means for students to engage with the material. By interacting with a subject across different contexts, students’ engagement and retention improves. But we already knew this. Why else do we encourage students to read poetry aloud or travel to readings ourselves? “Engaged scholarship,” then, merely names the instinct many of us are already acting on: namely, that no subject is entirely cerebral.
By encouraging students to take their studies beyond the classroom, we remind them that those barriers are highly permeable.
|
Along with the way it names a familiar learning principle, engaged scholarship also reiterates that nothing is entirely academic. By encouraging students to take their studies beyond the classroom, we remind them that those barriers are highly permeable. Learning cannot be confined by walls, and neither can the ideas and technologies generated inside classrooms, labs, and universities. They, too, will travel out into the world: fission enabled lethal bombs, Free Trade undermined indigenous economies, and fracking has real world consequences. Engaged scholarship reminds us all, teachers and students, that nothing is just an idea.
|
III. More Reflections on the Relationship between Technology and Teaching
A good friend and fellow instructor of Adventure Literature courses and I have suggested that we should issue each other Teaching Without Technology certificates. Such a document, we joke, would recognize the way that technology can both distract students and provide a crutch for teachers. While I’ve been annoyed by my share of students with cell phones and have also at times leaned a little heavily upon multimedia teaching aides, by my reckoning, technology is simply a tool. Like any other tool, it can be misused. A hammer can smash thumbs even though it’s designed for driving or pulling nails. My job as a teacher, then, is to mediate the use of technology—to use it to enhance learning, but also to limit and even prohibit it when necessary.
My use of digital technologies varies depending upon the degree of constructive learning I’d like to take place. To be crudely reductive, I use fewer digital technologies or less advanced ones when I’m acting as more of an instructor and more when I step back and become a fellow learner. For example, I’ve found that online discussion forums facilitate a very different kind of class discussion. Because the forum unfolds much more slowly (over hours or days rather than minutes), I hear from students who tend to be more contemplative and reserved. Online forums also remove me from the front of the classroom; I’m a disembodied line of text just like everyone else. And finally, online forums preserve the discussion. They act as an archive to which we can return.
|
Because online forums unfold much more slowly (over hours or days rather than minutes), I hear from students who tend to be more contemplative and reserved. . . .
|
But of course, there are also times when I need to have attention focused upon me. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to teach. When I have lecture material to deliver, I try to use digital technologies that focus student attention rather than disperse it. These tend to be older technologies, sometimes even analog: chalkboards, overhead projectors, and powerpoint presentations. However, these are the moments when I like to use videos, blogs, and songs for the ways students tend to naturally fixate upon a flashing screen or a compelling harmony or rhythm.
In short, some technologies help center the class and others usefully uncenter it. Thinking about technologies in this way has, I think, helped make me a more effective teacher.
My friend and I will never give each other Teaching Without Technology certificates. For though we are gesturing towards electronic and digital tools when we speak negatively about technology, we understand our dependence upon technology. Pencils, chalkboards, and books are technology. So too are the tents, paddles, and vans required to run Adventure Literature classes. In our better moments we recognize that our anxiety is about new and unfamiliar technologies. We recognize their potential value, but also see that they threaten other ways of learning—older ways of learning . . . the ways we learned. Simply put, I’m still learning how to teach with technology. I’m trying to balance the new with the best of the old. I’m working it out and will continue to do so for as long as I’m a teacher.
In short, some technologies help center the class and others usefully uncenter it. Thinking about technologies in this way has, I think, helped make me a more effective teacher.
My friend and I will never give each other Teaching Without Technology certificates. For though we are gesturing towards electronic and digital tools when we speak negatively about technology, we understand our dependence upon technology. Pencils, chalkboards, and books are technology. So too are the tents, paddles, and vans required to run Adventure Literature classes. In our better moments we recognize that our anxiety is about new and unfamiliar technologies. We recognize their potential value, but also see that they threaten other ways of learning—older ways of learning . . . the ways we learned. Simply put, I’m still learning how to teach with technology. I’m trying to balance the new with the best of the old. I’m working it out and will continue to do so for as long as I’m a teacher.