By now, everybody knows why I chose to make Open Knowledge my theme for ENGL102: my extreme distaste for the textbook market. My outrage could have been addressed sufficiently just by embracing Open Educational Resources, but of course that wasn’t enough; I wanted to make the entire field of Open Knowledge our topic, and embrace the peeragogical approach I started reading about early in my investigation of the movement. I knew that all of these choices would mean more work than I typically need to do for an ENGL102 class, and that they were risky choices as a result, but I saw enough potential in the approach to take the risk.
I also knew, have long known, that my teaching style doesn’t work for everyone, and that it was possible this new approach would create an even greater distance between those students who enjoy my classes and those who don’t. This proved to be my most astute pre-quarter prediction. Reactions to this version of ENGL102 have ranged from proclamations of the importance and relevance of this class to frank disengagement. The quarter-long project played to the strengths of some students while exacerbating weaknesses of others. Group work forged solid connections between some, and was torturous for a few. If I choose to pursue this model for an ENGL102 class again, that disparity of experience is, I feel, the most importance thing for me to address. While I believe in the sentiment educator Mike Rose expressed as “Students will float to the mark you set,” and actually prefer the wording favored by Jaime Escalante of “Students will rise to the mark you set,” it is incumbent on me as the teacher, as the leader and facilitator of the educational experience, to help as many students as possible reach that mark.
My own experience with the class, able to experience it from both within the process and without, was positive. Despite the challenges presented by the class structure – not able to rely on a single, cohesive text supplied by a traditional textbook publisher, tapping the students for regular early input on direction and systems, allowing two back-to-back sections of the same class to forge their own divergent paths – and the additional obstacles an overbooked life is almost always certain to throw in your path, in many ways this was my favorite ENGL102 class in my time at North. I had done some reading into Open Knowledge through my affinity for the writer Douglas Rushkoff, but learned more, both broadly anddeeply, about the movement every week. Pressed to find their own way and presented with diverse readings, students engaged in better analysis and synthesis of sources earlier in the quarter than I had ever seen before. As a result of reviewing countless Open Educational Resources, I developed full confidence that college-level composition can be taught without expensive textbooks. And, after completion of a quarter-long project, likely the longest writing project the majority of my students had ever engaged, I saw more confidence in some than I saw in any of my previous classes, and now that I have begun reading those projects, can see that confidence was well-earned.
Of course, not everything went smoothly. For exactly the reason I mentioned earlier, the discrepancy between the most and least engaged students, I would build more structure into future versions of this class. I should know well enough by now that all of the warnings in the world about procrastination will fall short, as they have for me as a writer myself so many times, and would schedule more intermediary steps along the way. The focus on process I usually bring to composition classes fell by the wayside as I asked students to engage a long inquiry, and there was clearly a need for greater conceptual scaffolding, helping students to see and internalize the skills they were developing, so clear to me but perhaps harder for the students to recognize.
I guess it all comes down to the question of whether, knowing what I know now, I would make the same choices at the beginning of the quarter, and I’ve decided I would (even if I will make some different choices next time). It would be impossible for me to learn as much as I have this quarter, or to really develop as a teacher at all, without attempting change and taking risks. Every difficulty I faced this quarter brought some reward that outweighed the challenges, and I only understand how it could have been better for having experienced it imperfectly first. And I hope that for at least some of my students, it is the same, because honestly, they, collectively, quarter to quarter and year to year, are the reason that teaching is the only job I have ever truly loved.