My Inquiry

My undergraduate career focused on teaching, breeding me to work with students who do not work in a stark, tradition school setting where a teacher stands at the front of the classroom and the students submit to all of her commands.  Instead, I spent most of my time working with students who are commonly identified as at-risk or non-traditional.  Note, I say non-traditional recognizing that the teaching tradition has been established for well over 100 years--we have not really changed our teaching style much since we established our modern public school systems.  I spent my student teaching in a title-one school where I faced the reality that some of my students would not be able to take the "English" material with them when they went home.  Instead, they had to focus on more important things like earning money to help out their parents, like getting home after school to watch their siblings, like basic needs so they could survive the week.  For these reasons, I was taught that it was more important that I think of activities and lessons that students would think about when they were away from school doing these things, and these lessons oftentimes did not include homework.  Maybe that's why I shy away from assigning my students homework--I think I need to work on that.

Although I was bred to be engaging and find things students could relate to, the materials I had to cover in a public school were predetermined.  I lost my sense of engagement (to an extent).  Working at the University level brings the idea of student engagement to a whole new level.  Not only do I want to continue working on finding things the students enjoy and can identify as important issues/concerns for their lives, and I also have a new culture to navigate.  The University is a different set-up--it's not a Title I school and I can expect students to do their homework.  Students here may have different interests than students in other locations (such as Texas which is where my teaching background stems from).  I have to engage with the university culture myself to engage with my students.

That being said, I really want to explore different ways to bring engaging activities into the classroom for my students in a rhetoric and exposition (composition) course.  I want my students to learn new things--I want them to work with different worldviews and to be taught the purpose behind critical thinking.  I want students to begin evaluating the information that comes in front of them, and I want them to understand the importance of writing as a communication tool.  All of these goals, I think, can be more easily achieved if I have activities students can enjoy and be relevant with.  So, my question:  What can I do to engage students in the classroom--specifically for composition and literary courses?