[I tried to wait to write this Fall semester series until I felt certain about what the Fall would hold—but I don’t know if I ever will, not even as it unfolds. So I decided to share one thing I’m cautiously but definitely excited for with each of my Fall courses, because what can we do but hope—and work—for the best?]
On the many
things I’m looking forward to with a new course, and the one I’m most excited
about.
I start my 17th
year at Fitchburg State this Fall—that’s 17 years of teaching a 4-4 load (often
in reality a 5-5 load with an overload grad and/or online course each semester)—which
means (among many other things about the last nearly two decades of my work and
life) that there aren’t a lot of types of classes I haven’t had the chance to
teach. Indeed, the last time I taught an entirely new type of class—not just a
new course, but one within a category I hadn’t taught before—was seven years
ago, with my Fall
2014 section of Intro to Speech. So it’s been quite something to spend a
good bit of the summer thinking—both on my own and in a series of required
professional development trainings—about such an entirely new type of class:
our FSU First
Year Experience seminar. We’ve piloted this course and program for at least
two academic years now, but an English Studies colleague taught our department’s
first couple sections of the seminar, so this Fall will be my first opportunity
to do so.
The reason for
all that summer PD is that our FYE program uses a specific pedagogical and
learning model: the reading
apprenticeship framework. It hasn’t been easy to wrap my head around an
entirely new way to approach my teaching—you know what they say about old dogs,
and this one is quite fond of his particular version of a student-centered
approach—but the more we’ve talked about this framework, the more I’ve come
to look forward to using it to help my class of first-year students strengthen
many different skills and habits that will be crucial to their success throughout
their time at Fitchburg State. I’m a particularly big fan of the varied,
multi-layered approaches to reading that the framework provides, not just
because I teach predominantly literature courses (although yes) but also
because I’ve long wanted to teach reading more overtly but hadn’t quite had the
language or tools to do so. Strategies like think aloud
and talk-to-the-text
will be great resources, not just for this class but for many others of mine as
well.
I’m most excited
for the specific theme on which my FYE section will focus, however. That’s a complicated
thing to say, because this is a course where the content is significantly less
important than the skills and methods—and moreover, that’s always been the case
in my student-centered pedagogy (which doesn’t mean the content isn’t
important, just that there’s always a hierarchy). I’m certainly on board with
that emphasis, but I’m nonetheless very excited to talk with these first-year
students about our section’s theme: cultural
representations of Black
Lives Matter and identity. After all, an intro to college can’t just be
about skills and habits for individual success—it also has to be about
introducing the kinds of challenging communal conversations and concepts that
students will be learning, engaging, analyzing, and sharing across their time
in college. I can’t think of any such conversations that are more challenging
nor more crucial in September 2021 than ones around race and identity in
America, and I’m really excited to talk and work with these incoming FSU
students on those questions and ideas, and to see how their voices,
perspectives, and ideas keep developing.
Next Fall
preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
Fall courses or work you’re (cautiously) excited for?
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