Second Life and the Classroom

In the online world of Second Life, virtual residents known as avatars can move through life-like situations including creating and maintaining businesses, friendships and social situations. Companies like Coca-Cola sponsor concerts and Reuters has actual correspondents who report on Second Life news. Recognizing that this virtual world lends itself perfectly to education, more and more college professors are using Second Life in online and classroom teaching. According to CNN, over sixty universities and colleges have set up classrooms in this online world where professors deliver lectures, oversee classroom discussions and hold office hours.

So how does this work? Any one can go on to the site at www.secondlife.com and download the software. Once downloaded, you create your own avatar and then decide which area of the site you would like to enter. Linden Labs, creator of the program, has worked with educators to set up classroom portals where students can enter (as their avatars) and interact with other students and the instructor. Currently, these portals cost $1000. for initial set-up and approximately $150. a month to maintain. However, one does not necessarily need their own portal or world in order to use all that Second Life has to offer. The tools available through the program allow one to move their avatar through the virtual world and to chat with others through a text based program. In addition, educators can develop unique content for the site which can be read by the entire community.

For many online instructors, Second Life adds an element of "real-time interaction." While online learning is the wave of the future, many students and professors miss the face to face interaction that comes with classroom learning. Avatars in Second Life act as "virtual" stand-ins and can replicate the characteristics of the person allowing for a more personal experience.

If you are interested in learning more about this virtual world, check out www.classroom20.com/group/secondlife.

Ellen Feig

PTSD Teaching: Trauma in the Classroom

Shakespeare 3, This is Shakespeare 6 —over

Shakespeare 6, This is Shakespeare 3 —over

Shakespeare 3, Give me a sitrep when you have the enemy in sight—OVER

THE ENEMY IS IN SIGHT—over

Wilco—OUT

This is a passage from the pedagogical memoir, Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet, about a Yale PhD teaching literature to West Point cadets. It brings up some important issues regarding everyday trauma and the classroom. First of all, there’s the challenge of teaching people exposed to trauma, accident, and death. The term PTSD was first diagnosed after soldier’s returned from Vietnam to describe a malady of the heart (hence the book title) : Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition. Their hearts remain small drawn. Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle Wilfred Owen “Insensibility” . Here’s a link to the book: http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_S/soldiers_heart1.asp

Now while BCC is not West Point, the community college is still a place of much accident and trauma. There is not a semester gone by that I do not hear horrible stories about someone’s father shooting their brother, soldiers back from Iraq, death, and foreclosure. Moreover, as the President said in our last Spring conference there are more vets at the school than ever. How much of this trauma is just made up by students is debatable. This doesn’t diminish the fact that trauma presents a real pedagogical challenge to the community college professor in just as profound a sense, as that experienced by a professor at West Point. And these phenomena have increased after 9/11. That is what the memoir “Soldier’s Heart” is about. But they increase or decrease during any time of war or recession. As we can see from the cars on the lawn at BCC, a lot of people are enrolled, many due to traumatic life circumstances.

PTSD is an imaginative and mental “insensibility.” This raises the question how might literature and the humanities be involved in the expansion or recovery of a sense and imagination that gets shut down due to traumatic circumstances? Battles that rage in Afghanistan and Iraq end up being battles that rage within us. Thus, I’ve been considering a renewed pedagogical perspective on PTSD in the classroom (not just war and the recession but the traumatic things that students bring into the classroom). This doesn’t have anything to do with “psychology” or “counseling” but it does mean using literature to address the deepest forms of mental and psychological blocks that our society meets out. This means listening or expanding their imagination with, for example, hard-boiled heroic models of men and women who manage to act honorably even when society seems senseless and dishonorable. While we may begin with discussions of “imprisonment” as a material condition, the traumatic fact is that there are greater threats in terms of imaginative incarceration through routine and duty.

This thinking about the classroom as a site for regaining our “sensibilities”, ultimately leads to another conversation about the tense relation between liberty and obedience that society demands. The “market” into which we are sending our students begs us to prepare them for societal conformity— the demands of business, employment, and the government— but also requires that we teach them how to innovate. How do we use the classroom to alternately serve or undermine the fact of societal conformity, obedience, and its often incongruity with innovative thinking? The humanities classroom may provide the imagination and fortitude required to face such everyday traumas depending on its own tendencies toward conformity. Now our only challenge is how to replace wounds with words.

Teaching of Writing Circles

The first Teaching of Writing Circle was held today, and it was a great success! Thank you to everyone who attended. Kelly began by providing an overview of the HSPA (High School Proficiency Assessment) as well as some sample writing prompts. We then began a discussion about expectations of student writing at the secondary level and how such writing is largely driven by the test. There was so much to discuss--an hour simply doesn't feel like enough time.

Here is the information on the rest of this semester's Teaching of Writing Circles:

Teaching of Writing Circles: Fall 2009
12:30-1:30 in C-325

9.22 How does assessment impact our students’ writing abilities on the high school and college levels?
Prof. Kelly Keane will initiate the discussion through a brief presentation on the HSPA and preparation for college.

10.13 How do we establish objectivity in the writing classroom?
Prof. Stacey Balkan, Prof. Adam Goodell, and Dr. Alan Kaufman will initiate a discussion on failed methodologies that ultimately posit topic and not process as their locus of discussion; and they will likewise make a plea for alienation as a means of engendering critical reflection.

11.3 How do we make writing assignments relevant to students’ lives?
Dr. Jon Yasin will initiate a discussion on using hip hop generally and emcees more specifically to teach the writing process, academic dishonesty, and the importance of research.

11.24 How do we teach students to use detail in their writing to capture their audience?
Dr. Maria Makowiecka will initiate the discussion on using vivid detail in “Painting Pictures With Words.”

12.15 How political do we get in the writing classroom?
Prof. Laurie Lieberman will initiate the discussion of how she uses current politics and the voting process to address such issues as organizational skills, critical thinking skills, and various types of essay writing.

Using WebQuest in the Composition and Literature Classroom

WebQuests, while traditionally used in middle and high school settings, can be a wonderful tool in a composition and literature classroom. Recently, I created a WebQuest based upon Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey. Students were assigned the task of becoming a specific literary figure, writing a daily journal in the voice of that figure and analyzing whether or not the character moved through the steps of the hero's journey. As a final assignment, the students were required to draft and revise a two part essay that looked at the character's journey through the steps and looked at their own personal journey. Sources were cited in MLA format.

The quest (created using Zunal.com) required the students to research, analyze websites for their worth, keep written notes, draft and revise an essay - learning objectives for the particular lesson were achieved.

For more information on WebQuests, visit webquest.org.

Alienation and Critical Pedagogy: An Unorthodox Approach to Composition Theory

In what has been an important and earnest effort to recognize the wholesale negation of our students’ collective agency vis-à-vis their academic and socioeconomic disenfranchisement, we seem to have likewise ascribed an epidemic of internalized inferiority to them when in reality they are intensely narcissistic. They not only feel confident in their dismissal of primary texts—i.e., “Ginsberg was merely a raving drunk”—they also feel rather confident dismissing any and all secondary scholarship—i.e., “Harold Bloom is an idiot.” A tragic consequence of our efforts to engender intellectual confidence in our students via a barrage of initiatives that displace their accountability is the false notion (on the part of our students) that their personal experiences are somehow relevant to all texts (regardless of national, cultural, and perhaps even disciplinary context). Thus, they are often incapable of engaging with texts critically, because they immediately flee after the first line—of, e.g., a poem or story—immediately citing a seemingly relevant anecdote. For example, when scrutinizing the plight of a child soldier in the Sierra Leone, several of my students gleefully offered what they deemed similarly horrific moments at the local mall, etc. On the contrary, when they feel completely alienated from a text and are thus forced to meaningfully parse sentences, stanzas, whole pages, they seem more apt to really scrutinize said texts while simultaneously employing those same analytical tools that are otherwise so quickly cast aside. While alienation as a basis for pedagogical practice may sound strange, we should remember our first day in a theory class when poststructuralist jargon danced on a chalkboard before our numbed expressions and we quickly sought any and all available references and attempted to keep from drowning. This is precisely what my students do when they arrive at Borges in the fourth unit of my current incarnation of WRT201—they squirm at first, and then suddenly (and rather magically) begin to read, really read…underlining, commenting in the margins, etc. Thus, while it always seemed more logical to assume that familiar topics would be somehow “easier,” this is in fact true only as a means of initiating the writing process, but not as a means of producing critical writing or even cogent exposition.

Likewise, I begin the writing course with a unit on the “self”—or more specifically, rather existentialist notions of the self courtesy of Wislawa Szymborska’s “Negative,” Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” and Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Previously—i.e., this past summer when I had this epiphany about alienation after years of starting with “easier” units—I only used Ginsberg and Camus; honestly, Szymborska was a completely random idea that was the serendipitous consequence of a bookstore fiasco! So, while it may seem that a discussion of post-industrial malaise and existential crises may be a bit much for our first unit, it has been far more productive than former assignments that featured Hughes and Ginsberg, and that basically functioned as a springboard for all sorts of absurd tangents. However ironically, this unit on the “self” has simultaneously catalyzed a discussion in which students are able to celebrate their narcissism and at the same time to meaningfully parse what are somewhat knotty texts, because they are desperately looking for connections! In short, I am (somewhat apologetically) exploiting this narcissism for the higher purpose of teaching literature! For example, in attempting to deconstruct Camus’s notion that the “myth is not tragic [unless] the hero is conscious,” they sought desperately to find like scenarios in their own lives—“selling out” for a position at “the Gap,” etc; but all the while (and perhaps because the language and context are less accessible) they didn’t stray from the text. They were actually doing close readings—a task that I had long since abandoned after successive bouts of depression…I did, however, offer more palpable narratives, which I do believe is a necessary component of teaching our student population, many of whom have been subjected to a paltry secondary curricula that covered virtually nothing in the Humanities! Toward that end, we discussed more popular illustrations of this theme in films like “Office Space” and also in David Foster Wallace’s recent (and completely tragic, albeit hilarious) story “Wiggle Room,” which was featured in The New Yorker last year.

So, my students began with Szymborska’s “Negative,” a poem that interrogates the binary nature of our lives and the ameliorative narratives of life and death—i.e., those embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition—and they were able to use a poem (rife with examples of myriad literary tropes including elaborate uses of imagery) to make sense of the “negative” or inverse realities that delimit our experiences, etc. Anyway, this led to a rich discussion of their perceptions of and perspectives on life and death, which led rather logically into a discussion of Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” a poem that directly antagonizes the deification of industry and beseeches a dying sunflower for an explanation of how “she” let “all that civilization” destroy her “soul.” This, of course, led us back to “Office Space” and again rather logically into a discussion of Sisyphus and his futile rock. The unit was appended with Robert Frost’s “Design,” a poem that conveys Frost’s more pragmatic approach to nature—the antithesis of the rather romantic pastorals that pedestalize and thus render nature a mythical and mysterious place to which we—humanity—have no practical connection. Inclusion of the Frost poem in their first process essay was optional, but many students this semester have opted to try…we’ll see how that goes when they submit final drafts on Friday!

Interactive Fiction and Composition

How do we engage our tech savvy students who see reading and writing as a chore? Think outside of the box and make technology work for us in the classroom! Interactive fiction (or narrative) combines literary narrative with interactive video gaming creating a true multimedia experience for the student. While most video games use graphics and fixed sequences that challenge the player, interactive fiction is text based gaming that requires the user to actually craft the story or narrative. There are two inputs - the game input and the player input. The game input appears in second person point of view, present tense whereas the player must input text using imperative command. Students are in control of character actions and plot development and learn quickly that they must be concise and complete when inputting text. In addition, students learn the importance of voice, grammar, mechanics and tone.

Interactive fiction is easy to use in the classroom as there are many downloadable games online. In addition, those who are tech savvy can use Inform 7 (a free downloadable program) to create their own interactive fiction adventures in class. I have used games by Will Crowther (the father of interactive fiction) and Emily Short in my classroom with great success. Throughout the class, I remind my students that each time they play a video game, participate in an interactive XBox 360 game or chat they write. I then commend them for creating a new language with its own terms and rules.

Should you have any questions about IF, feel free to contact me.

Ellen Feig

Broader Research Assignments in the Writing Classroom

In her video spotlight interview, Bonnie stresses the importance of an embedded research element throughout a writing course (in any level - from ALP to Comp), instead of saving it exclusively for the obligatory research paper. I find this an interesting idea because I often wonder how effective it is to teach research only in one isolated assignment. As most of us know, our students' view of research, avenues of searching, and the authority of sources has changed dramatically with the world of internet dominance where in many cases source hierarchy has been destroyed. Certainly a few weeks of limited instruction on Academic research - much of it spent teaching (ever-changing) MLA formalities - can't be enough. What are some ways we can engender research elements in our writing assignments throughout the semester - outside of the traditional research paper?