The First Year Experience

Dublin Ireland

June 23-26, 2008

Presentation:

FYS as a Locus for Faculty Development: Creating Mini Learning Communities

Handouts:

Dublin:minicommunities

In order to help faculty achieve their First-Year Seminar goals, Middlebury offers each instructor a support team composed of two professional staff members and two student peers. Instructors may choose the whole team, parts of the team, or no team if they wish.

Two components of the team, a research librarian and peer writing tutor, are well-known support components of many first-year programs. In addition, Middlebury has added two other members to our team, an Educational Technologist and an ACE or Academic Consultant for Excellence. All team members are attached directly to a specific FYS, and I’ll briefly give you an overview of the contributions of these four team members.

The first member of the team is a Reference Librarian.
Middlebury no longer gives students a stand-alone orientation to its libraries, so the FYSE is the place where students really learn to use the libraries and their resources. Having a librarian attached to a specific seminar means that the librarian can plan instruction and resources tailored to the demands of the particular class. What the librarian does with each class depends on the goals we have outlined for all FYSEs as well as the goals of the individual FYSE instructor. The librarian can prepare a site that gathers research tools for a particular class and can vary instruction from basic assignments, to assignments a bit more complicated to assignments that are quite complex.

The next professional member of the team, the Educational Technologist, also, offers an array of service–from no instruction-to-instruction in quite complex technologies. Again, Middlebury does not give its students a stand-alone tech orientation, so we recommend to faculty that they, at least, have the Educational Technologist do an orientation to our servers. All FYSEs have an e-mail list that even the most low-tech faculty use for class updates and for sending attachments. Some faculty chooses to have their own course web sites, and in addition, Middlebury has its own course management tool, SEGUE. Many faculty uses SEGUE–even if it is just a place to house a syllabus on line. Others take advantage of Segue’s Web 2 characteristics. So SEGUE can prove useful to instructors with very little technical knowledge as well as those with cutting-edge expertise.
Every page in SEGUE can be discussable. And many instructors use SEGUE for robust on-line class discussions. Finally. The Educational Technologist supports high end use, and can instruct the class in digital media projects. The Summer Workshop series provide faculty with great ideas for using technology. In order to help faculty realize their individual seminar goals, the workshops feature faculty exploring specific technologies and discussing their pedagogical reasons for choosing them.

The Educational Technologist and the Librarian are the professional members of our team, but we are very proud of the two students members in the team. The newest member of the team is our Academic Consultant for Excellence, or ACE. ACEs have GPAs of 3.7 and above, and they work with students on TM, stress reduction, and are excellent student role models.

Peer Writing Tutors are trained to help students with every phase of the writing process and can also assist faculty with in-class workshops. Both ACEs and PWTs complete over ten hours of training.

The support team has been an innovation that has helped faculty teach challenging and fascinating courses that guide, support and instruct students in their first semester at college.

To protect their privacy, I do not have links to digital stories done by Writing to Heal class, but here are links to digital stories done by some of my other classes.

I blogged about my Writing to Heal class last year when a high school class visited Middlebury. You might be surprised at what happened.

I’ve included some sources that helped me prepare my course:

Anderson, Charles M. and Marian M. MacCurdy (ed). Writing and Healing. Illinois: NCTE,     2000.
Ballenger, Bruce. Beyond Note Cards. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
Center for Digital Storytelling
DeSalvo, Louise. Writing as a Way of Healing. Beacon Press,     2000.
Pennebaker, James. Opening Up. New York: Guilford Press, 1990.
Rico, Gabriele. Pain and Possibility. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Sometimes I have comments closed here because of spam, but you can reach me at:
mbertoli(at)middlebury(dot)edu.

Session: B.25 on Mar 22, 2007 from 12:15 PM to 1:30 PM Cluster: 109) Creative Writing
Type: Concurrent Session (3 or more presenters) Interest Emphasis: race/ethnicity
Level Emphasis: 4-year

“Writing to Heal,” “Voices Along the Way,” “ The Art of the Personal,” and “Writing Across Differences”—these writing courses at x College challenge students to explore issues of identity by confronting loss, nationality, sexuality, class, gender, spirituality and ethnicity. In this presentation, three faculty members from Middlebury College discuss hybrid writing assignments from courses that combine creative and critical writing with the use of digital media. Discussing and writing about complex issues of identity and loss have transformed the lives of students taking these courses. Teaching these issues has involved personal and professional changes in the lives of the faculty members as well.

Hybrid genres that combine critical with creative writing provide students with theoretical knowledge and background from which to better explore their lives and identities in a thoughtful, informed manner. Digital media projects from weblogs to digital stories that combine words, music, photography and video encourage students to explore issues of their own identity through media often more in tune with 21st century students than conventional linear forms of writing. The music and visual images students choose in these projects often evoke deeper, tighter writing than students have produced before. A combination of formal and informal writing in public and private writing spaces allows students the opportunity to write for self, for others, or for a private few.

The different kinds of disclosure and identity writing in these courses explode the typical boundaries of assignments and genres when memoirs transform into short stories and research papers and projects use theoretical, creative and personal sources as evidence. In the process that unfolds in these classes, students and faculty learn to control and define their own narratives and explore who they have been, who they are becoming, and who they might yet be. Writing and media assignments that encourage students to understand their own identities better can lead students to understand and imagine better the identity of others. These assignments and courses have transformed personal pain into healing and forgiveness and have transformed self-disclosure into both self-acceptance and political mobilization.

Presenter 1 will discuss “Writing and Healing: the Self and Others” based on her teaching “Writing to Heal”—a course that developed from a school-wide tragedy and personal loss. This writing-intensive course examines writing as a catalyst for healing after loss or grief. This writing workshop class focuses on student writing, but also analyzes fiction, drama, poetry and creative nonfiction. Reading James Pennebaker’s Opening Up and Rico’s Pain and Possibility creates a theoretical underpinning for class discussions. Coursework includes formal analytical essays, creative work, hybrid assignments, electronic journals, oral presentations, and the opportunity to do digital media projects.

Presenter 2 will discuss “Developing Writers for Social Change” based upon “ Writing Across Differences”–a course that explores the many choices we face as speakers and writers when communicating across human differences such as race, gender, sexuality, religion and class. Organized by literary genres, and drawing on writers such as Julia Alvarez, bell hooks, Dorothy Allison, Martin Luther King, Beverly Tatum, W.E.B. DuBois, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Marmon Silko and others, the class analyzes and produces a range of works that employ diverse methods of argument and inquiry, including personal narrative, online discussion, literary analysis, and research presented in papers, weblogs or digital stories. The course creates personal and public domains for written and digital work. Students respond to one another’s work, creating a writing community that is both supportive and challenging.

Presenter 3 will discuss “Hybrid Language, Hybrid Genres” based on work in two courses. The first, “Voices Along the Way,” an interactive first-year seminar designed for ESL students, introduces contemporary American culture via literature and film and explores the American landscape and mindscape through a sense of place, family relationships, and the American educational scene. Students conclude the course by “creating an identity,” within which they explore their own potential contributions to a global community. In doing so, they write essays, create web pages, and design and deliver multi-media presentations. The second course, “The Art of the Personal: James Baldwin’s Non-Fiction,” looks closely at how one writer, James Baldwin, articulated so eloquently the national, racial, sexual, and religious antagonisms of his lifetime, the class explores the personal essay as a vehicle for, as Baldwin put it, “recreating out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” The class reads Baldwin’s major essays (from Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time), writes about them, and writes personal essays.

The course work of Presenters 2 and 3 motivated them to establish a cluster of seven Social Justice Course classes at Middlebury College, which collectively brought in speakers to address topics, such as, white privilege political expression through the arts, as well as, collectively organized deliberative dialogue sessions on gender. The Cluster motivated Presenter 2 to change her course name to “Writing for Social Change.”

By discovering, disclosing, representing, and transforming identities though unconventional creative writing assignments and digital media projects, Presenters 1, 2, and 3, have affected positive transformations in their students, their colleagues, themselves, and their Academy.

Mary Ellen Bertolini
(Speaker 1) Middlebury College Writing and Healing: the Self and Others
Catharine Wright
(Speaker 2) Middlebury College Developing Writers for Social Change
Kathy Skubikowski
(Speaker 3) Middlebury College Hybrid Language, Hybrid Genres

NITLE-sponsored Social Software Users’ Group at the College of Wooster (Ohio) January 2006.

Among many great conversations that took place at SSUG, one stands out for me. It concerned the different ways faculty and librarians look at copyright issues–especially for multi media projects. Faculty tend to look at what’s best for my class, my students; whereas, librarians tend to look at what’s better for the institution. Emotions rose–even in this very genial group–around this issue, but we all left more respectful of the issues our colleagues face, so thanks again, Barbara, for dragging me along!

Picture postcards of fall in Vermont may show turning leaves of all one color, but most trees change gradually, with green, yellow, red, orange and fallen leaves–all from the same tree.

My students write at least three drafts of every formal paper, and I emphasize a different concept for each draft: organization, argument, and macro issues in the earliest drafts, style, grammar and micro issues in the later drafts. I place my point of intervention in draft two, after students have conferred with each other and the tutor. Theoretically, they have moved beyond organization when I meet with them, but that is not always the case. In my meeting on their papers, we could be discussing anything about their work from the finer points of style to addressing the topic.

As I circled the class on Friday, as the class workshopped Paper #3, I saw that they had become familiar with the language of talking about writing. Student who had struggled with organization on their draft twos a few weeks ago now made insightful suggestions to their peers about their organization. The combination of workshops, conferences and revisions manages to hit a number of different learning styles as students do and read and speak and listen and write on their own and their peers

While the presentations happen in front, the back channel discussion projects on the left at the Social Software in the Academy Workshop at the Annenberg Center

Since I’ve returned from the SSAW, I’ve been turning over in my mind the experience of backchanneling. A few things stand out. First, when I was presenting myself, I was very much aware that most people were looking down at their laptops rather than up at me, and I called attention to that fact by commenting that I would stand up rather than sit down during my presentation. Second, when I knew there was a backchannel with a sidebar discussion going on, I had to be on it–or at least on the main one. There were others, too, but I tried not to be greedy. Being on the backchannel was fun and informative. Links, questions, comments–all flew by in fast forward speed. Was this so different from the paper and pencil backchannel I often have when a colleague sits next to me at a lecture, and we write commnets to each other in a notebook? Maybe, this is more honest, I wondered, because the speaker can see these notes later.

Mote asked a similar question right after the Conference:

Looking back, though, I remember more about the presentations I heard the first morning before I was on the backchannel. Maybe I was born too late to be part of the ADD generation, but I definitely suffered from “continuous partial attention” during several of the later presentations. The important question is–is that at bad thing? At home, I frequently watch a movie or the news with a magazine or a laptop open. How do we know what is worth giving our full attention to if our full attention is never there? Eventually, will we lose the ability to pay full and complete attention to anything?

Years ago, when I taught junior high school, I had a trick to get my hormone-driven 7th and 8th graders focused. Everything in their bodies and lives pulled them away from writing and books, and I had to fight for their attention with every trick I had. At the beginning of class, I’d form an “A” with the index finger of my left hand and the index and third finger of my right hand, and I’d hold that “A” high above my head. “Give me your Undivided Attention!” I bellowed at first. Later, I shortened it to “Undivided A,” and, finally, I only had to form the “A” with my fingers to settle my class and begin to teach. Here’s my dilemma now: I don’t always want to give my undivided attention, but I sure still want to get it.

Our student-faculty panel at the SSAW05 Conference at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication in L.A. Session II: Exploring the Use of Weblogs in the Classroom I Panel: Pandora�s Blog? What Happens When College Students Take to Social Software in the Classroom

Mai 2005 B 076

Originally uploaded by sebpaquet.

Sebpaquet’s picture (Mai 2005 B 076) of our panel–>
Barbara Ganley, Middlebury College
Eugene Lee, Middlebury College
Mary Ellen Bertolini, Middlebury College
Piya Kashyap, Middlebury College
Before we arriving at our hotel, Barbara drove us out to the Getty Museum, and we lingered around in the beautiful gardens before heading inside to see the Irises. We made a brief stop at the Pier in Santa Monica where I put my feet in the Pacific for the first time.

I