[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]
On a discussion
that balanced skills and content as well as any I’ve ever been part of.
This was my
first time teaching FSU’s new First Year Experience seminar, and I
wrote back in my Semester Previews series about my goal of featuring a consistent
thread of content (around the topic of cultural representations of
#BlackLivesMatter) despite the course’s overarching and important emphasis on
student skills (as framed by a Reading Apprenticeship approach).
Finding that balance
between content and skills within my overall student-centered pedagogy has
been both a challenge and a priority for all of my classes for many years now.
But the particular nature of the challenge here, in a class so fully dedicated
to preparing students for all of their experiences in college, was one of many
things that was new and different about FYE from any other course I’ve taught.
I can’t say that
I really figured out how to achieve that balance consistently in this first
version of FYE, and I’m excited to have the chance to teach the course at least
one or two more times over the next couple Fall semesters. But this week’s
Semester Recaps are focused on moments that did work, and there was one
particular class discussion that really exemplified the balance I’ll work to
achieve more regularly in my future FYE sections. After many weeks working with
written texts in a variety of genres (nonfiction including memoir, journalism,
and scholarly analysis; creative literature including fiction and poetry) I
wanted them to spend a couple weeks practicing analyzing multimedia texts, and
so we watched the same pair
of recent cultural works that I’ve used in my First Year Writing II
sections for a few years: the film Fruitvale
Station and the Black-ish Season
2 episode “Hope.”
I love both of
those texts, and it was fun to share them with this new group of students, who
seemed to enjoy them a great deal as well. But I have to admit I wasn’t sure
how much we’d have to say about Fruitvale
when we returned to class discussions (after portions of two class periods spent
watching the film) to engage with it. Which made the discussion that ensued one
of the most surprising as well as one of the best I’ve ever been around. Students
highlighted a wide range of analytical lenses for working with multimedia texts,
from camera angles and sound editing to choices in the screenplay and the
acting performances, among others. And they used those analytical lenses to
raise a number of important elements of the film’s themes, its portrayals of
identity and community, race and racism, the real
historical figures and events that inspired it, and more. I’ve never had a
discussion balance analytical skills and content more successfully, a moment
that modeled not just why we teach a class like FYE, but what we’re aiming to
do in every classroom.
Next recap tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Responses to
this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?
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