Teaching: Orchestrating external factors
Orchestrating external factors involves deliberately manipulating the classroom furniture and other environmental aspects, attending to how I present content and other material, incorporating field experience activities into the course, and making room for both social interaction and personal reflection.
- Classroom environment. The way a classroom is arranged affects the way students interact with each other, the types of conversations that take place, and the kinds of learning that occur. To encourage a broader range of interaction among students, I sometimes rearrange the tables and chairs or assign random groups. When we study fantasy, for instance, students experience the sense of being taken out of reality (their usual, self-selected seats) through the means of a literary device (random assignment). We discuss both the genre and character development while experiencing disorientation and defamiliarization. I occasionally reconfigure the tables and chairs into two U-shaped rows (for performances) or into a large circle (for whole-class discussions). We discuss how the different configurations and different spaces affect our own personal perceptions, our interactions with others, and our abilities to absorb information. Online courses present other challenges, but programs such as Elluminate allow for group assignments. Video posts and chat sessions allow students to see and communicate directly.
- Presenting content information. How I introduce and present content determines, to a large degree, whether students will perceive the content as relevant and whether they will be motivated to read assigned texts, to participate in class, and to complete assignments. To accommodate as many learning styles as possible and to help non-native English speakers, I use different types of visual and aural aids—including videos, recordings, still images, objects and demonstrations, and PowerPoint presentations—to cover foundational information and to review main points. I try to make PowerPoint presentations available to students before class (with some slides left blank to allow sequential introduction of information) so students can take notes within the file for future reference. Because I have a performance background, my delivery style is animated and inclusive. Content presentations almost always include discussion and are followed by group or individual hands-on activities.
- Field experiences. Learning begins before students come to the classroom and must connect beyond the classroom. To this end, regardless of the particular course I am teaching, students complete at least one field experience in the term. Field experiences for my children’s literature and writing courses have included attending a public library story time; interviewing someone from a different occupation to learn how that person uses writing and makes decisions in his/her work; visiting an art collection and observing both the environment and the collection; and visiting a botanical garden to create a child-friendly scavenger hunt with map and clues. Such activities help students relate what we are doing in the classroom with how the information can be used in the “real world.”
- Social interaction, personal reflection. Neither literature nor composition occurs in a vacuum; however, learning requires both stimulation and reflection. Accordingly, I plan teaching sessions that include whole-class participation, small-group activity, and individual response. For instance, I may involve the whole class as I model analyzing a composition—often an advertisement, which includes multiple styles of writing, illustrations, and graphic elements—for its underlying ideological messages. Then, small groups analyze a different ad. Finally, students create their own ad. For a literature course, I may involve the whole class in voicing the same phrase (“My favorite food is ___.”) in different intonations reflecting anger, joy, snobbery, fear, etc. This helps students understand possible character motivation. Then students work in small groups to enact a scene from a book or movie that illustrates conflict or an ethical dilemma. Finally, students individually present a passage and share their understanding of what the conflict is, possible ways the conflict could be resolved, and what option the author chose.