He Said/She Said is a new recurring feature on the EDC blog. Throughout the year Joe Lipsett and Samah Sabra will tackle a number of topics from their positions as Teaching Development Associate/Educational Developer, as well as Contract Instructors (in Film Studies and Canadian Studies respectively).
He Said (Joe Lipsett)
For me, the first month of a new term is filled with exciting opportunities. It may be idealistic, but to me it feels like a fresh start: a chance to try a new teaching method that I’ve “borrowed” from a faculty member who’s stopped by the centre, or revise something that didn’t achieve exactly what I’d hoped for in a previous course. It’s also a chance to get to know a new batch of students: explore what they want to get out of the class, what they bring to the table and discover how I can help facilitate their learning experiences so that they leave the course with everything they need to succeed in the future.
I’ll admit that there’s usually also a certain amount of anxiety or even apprehension. Sometimes the anxiety is associated with what my students will and won’t know, a circumstance that’s often resolved when I realize that my students are far more capable and wise than I expected. At other times, my anxiety is well-founded, and I’m confronted with the realization that my carefully constructed rubric (which I assumed was so straightforward!) is confusing and more jargon-filled than I believed. It’s not an “end of the world” situation, but it can make the first few classes a little more complicated as the students and I negotiate our respective understanding of the course assessments.
I had an amazing experience with the course I’m currently teaching. Of the four principle assignments, one (the largest) is a group project and another (the first) required my students to attend a festival on their own time. I expected student resistance to both because they are unconventional for my discipline, and because they demand that students do more than write a paper independently. In the first class, I braced myself for their resistance, and yet all I found was a deluge of questions. Lesson learned: I’ll stop assuming I know what students do and don’t like about particular classroom activities/assignments and instead incorporate additional time for discussion.
By the time October hits, these kinds of issues have traditionally settled into a groove and everything feels far removed from those initial few classes. When I reflect back on the start of term, it feels simultaneously exciting, confusing and jumbled; a bit chaotic as the students and I get to know each other. Although some things never go as well as I hope (why is it so difficult for me to learn 20-40 new names?!), I love the vibrancy that fills the campus as students explore new classes, new instructors and new topics.
Samah, how do you feel about the new term?
She Said (Samah Sabra)
I think this is an area where Joe and I are mostly in agreement. I am always excited to start a new term, although I consistently begin to be filled with anxiety a few days before the first class. One consistent anxiety I have during the lead-up to each new term is about the potential disconnect between my experiences and those of the students coming in to their first year of university (particularly as that age gap gets bigger with each passing year). So many of the theories I teach in the social sciences emerged at particular historical junctures that are now a central part of how I need to contextualize the things I teach, adding a new layer of preparation that I have to undertake before each new unit. At the same time, it becomes increasingly difficult to anticipate what students have been able to take for granted throughout their lives that I had to work to learn.
This is not to suggest that first year students are a homogenous group with identical life experiences, but it is to say that there are some general things many of those first year students who are coming to university directly from high school are likely to share in common. For example, while the beginning of my undergraduate degree was, for me, the first time I got an e-mail address, it is extremely unlikely to be the case for the first year students I teach. Every year, however, I realize that although there will be things they know better or differently from me, this is an excellent opportunity to enrich the classroom experience for everyone involved. Every year, I am able to continue my journey through post-secondary teaching and learning with the help of students who are just beginning their post-secondary educational experiences.
Last year, the big moment came for me when I was teaching a class where we were discussing feminist theories about social reproduction and about domestic labour being a form of work. Met with blank faces, I stepped back from what I was doing and asked students to think through these concepts and write down a question they had about them. I then opened up the floor to questions. The first question I got from a young man in the class was this: “What I don’t understand is who they were trying to convince. Who doesn’t already understand that this is work? Or that social reproduction plays a vital role?” What I learned from this question, echoed by others in the class, was of the necessity of contextualizing some of the concepts I teach which have, even if not entirely so, become part of the social imagination of this younger generation. It wasn’t that they thought this was an outlandish feminist claim. Instead, these particular students considered it an obvious starting point for further discussion.
This year, the moment was slightly different in nature. I was in a class on the twelfth floor of Dunton Tower last week, in a room with lots of windows overlooking the city of Ottawa. Students had just begun completing an in-class group work assignment when the power went out. From my perspective, given that the assignment required them to use the web to find and search certain documents, answer some questions I had provided and post their final products on cuLearn, a lack of electricity made it impossible to get the assignment completed during class time. After all, the wireless routers in the building were no longer working. I therefore suggested to students that they could have until midnight (instead of 11:30 a.m.) to complete the assignment and post it to cuLearn. What happened next was pretty amazing: a student asked if he and his group could stay in the room to finish the assignment and when I asked how they would get the information they need or sign on to cuLearn to post the assignment, he pulled out his smartphone and told me he could convert it to a router by turning on the “hotspot” function. Others in the class followed suit and most of the students got the assignment done, in a room with no power and no wireless internet capability.
In both of these instances I was reminded of how different my experience of the world is from those of the students I teach. Despite entering each year anxious about those moments where the differences between my life experiences and those of the students in class come to forefront, when they finally do happen – and they always do – I am grateful for the reminder that these differences enrich the classroom. As instructors, we are trained to think of ourselves as having a lot to teach students, we too easily forget that when given the chance, they also have a lot to teach us!