Okay everyone!  This has been kind of a whirlwind!

We have our last meeting on Monday at 10 am.  I’ll resend the link to the meeting on Sunday

For Monday, please

1. Please read your colleagues’ blog posts on research.  They are delightful.  If you have not posted, please do so now!
2. Clone the Open Lab Site. I want everyone to try it, even if you decide not to use it.  Just to see what the site is like and what’s on there.  Here is the link to the materials: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fyw-pedagogy/how-do-i-download-my-courses/. This site is “the hub,” meaning the hub for the FYW Model Courses. This is where you will find the model course link and info about cloning, etc…

If you need help: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fyw-pedagogy/how-to-clone-a-course/

(There is also other help here under “technical help!” if you need help with writing a blog or editing a page)

3. Play around on there.  Look at what is on your new site. Much of the material is already uploaded for you.

4.. Decide if you want to use Open Lab or Blackboard as your MAIN site.

5. On your MAIN Site– the one students will go to to find homework, syllabus, course schedule, etc…, upload:

• your personalized syllabus,
• the announcement for the first week, and
• the major essay assignments

please note: these are all already entered into the Model Course– and will be entered into your cloned course.  You will just need to personalize them if you want to make changes.  (For help editing a page, please see: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fyw-pedagogy/how-to-edit-a-page/)

6. Send me a link to your Open Lab site at Chall@citytech.cuny.edu.  For Blackboard, you will need to invite me to be a TA (I am getting instructions about how to do this.).  EVEN IF YOU ARE USING BLACKBOARD, please email me the link to your cloned OpenLab site (See Step 2!)

Edit: For Blackboard, I can’t actually figure out how to add TA’s and BB support is not getting back to me (I recall this was pretty glitchy in the spring) so for now, if you are planning on using BB, please just email me the bullet pointed documents above.

See you Monday!

Okay, here is what I left in the replies section on another person’s post. I think I am now starting a new thread! I’m still finding this hard to navigate and have not finished the readings because I only just accessed them, but my first impression is to find “Getting on the Right Side of It” fairly problematic in its efforts to examine privilege. This description stood out to me: “Meanwhile, Alice, a light-green-eyed native of Trinidad, also prided herself on her ability to speak “proper” English with a “perfect British accent” (in fact, neither of the two students actually possessed the phonological systems they claimed).” I hope we’ll discuss.

As for my own research, these last few months I have been doing a lot of fear based research about PLAGUES and AUTOCRACY. I also, like much of the country, went deeper into my research about racism and police brutality in this country. All of this research was reactive to real things happening in the world.

As far as PLAGUES, I read a lot of news articles about coronavirus in this country and worldwide. I have curated my social media sites so that I mostly see posts from news sources I have some trust in (The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian…). I also have ongoing dialogs with friends and family in other states and countries. We regularly share our experiences, perceptions, and research with one another and help one another make informed choices. I also read a YA book called FEVER 1793 with my daughter, and we reflected on the similarities and differences between what the girl experienced then and what we are experiencing. NPR also did a great series recently that I listened to on a long drives.
As for autocracy, I’m reading Masha Gessen and researching the best way to vote safely in November and following candidates up and down the ballot.
As for racism, I joined a study group run by my friend Naomi Extra, who is black and getting her PhD in American Studies at Rutgers. We read the Combahee River Collective statement and had a group zoom discussion where the poet Cheryl Clarke joined in. It was amazing and gave me hope.

I can’t find the readings, but I have been replacing the traditional research paper with an EMPIRICAL one for years. In fact, for some classes, I stopped making it a paper at all. Students start with a question or a hypothesis about something that interests them. At least one of their sources needs to be EMPIRICAL, as in they interview somebody who they can argue is an expert, or they conduct a survey. When they are done, they create a presentation for the class, which I would like to continue if it could be melded with the curriculum here online somehow….

This summer after two months quarantining, I decided to drive across country and back. I live in the East Village, don’t own a car, and haven’t taken many road trips. So I had to do research. I called it SOCIAL LONG-DISTANCING. My goal was to drive to California to stay with friends (and to celebrate one of them being a Pulitzer Finalist!) then drive back, seeing national parks on the way. This would be in a rented van with a mattress in the back. I would sleep in the van at campsites (or in Walmart parking lots, they allow it) when I couldn’t sleep at my friends’ places. I had a cooler for food so I didn’t go to any restaurants. I saw Badlands, Zion, Bryce, Arches, Crazy Horse, Yellowstone, Devil’s Tower, Garden of the Gods, stayed at a farm, a ranch, and a gay CAMPground, etc. And visited 18 states. I was researching so many things, before and during trip. Which kind of vehicle, how much it’d cost, where to rent it. What kind of mattress, futon, air … What parks to see. What route to take. How long to leave for visits, for driving. I used the internet. I asked my friends. I called the campsites and Walmart and the national parks. Some weren’t opened now, most were. I asked many questions. I found if I didn’t ask follow ups, things like parks having limited hours would not be mentioned. I asked my friend in Wisconsin about driving to the Badlands as he was a geologic engineer who researched the Badlands. He prepared me well. I found personal interviews the best. It took 8 weeks. I drove 8,000 miles. Best thing I could have done this summer. I saw my friends. I wrote some. I taught on the road. I used the research and stayed very flexible as weather and lockdowns would happen (that meant research too, what weather would be like when I would arrive somewhere). I made it back, last day driving in the storm. And in time for this training!

I like the idea of letting students pursue their own passions. Making research a hobby instead of a chore. I like the idea of having the project be about finding topic, sources and analyzing them, not about writing the paper too. That takes off pressure and lets them learn about researching.

A few years ago, after hearing family stories, I got really interested in doing some research on my great-great-great-grandfather, who was one of the founding members of the Tailor’s Union here in NYC.  It began with my interest in leaving a detailed record with pictures of my family on Ancestry.com.  I began my research with the notes left behind from my great aunt, which included a photocopy of a booklet published on his professional life, but it was in pretty bad shape.  I went online and much to my surprise, The reminiscences of Robert Crowe, the octogenarian[!] tailor by Miss Helen R. Burns, Principal of the Cooper Settlement in NYC, was available for purchase from the University of Michigan’s Library! I wrote an article about his professional life, and intertwined some personal details, which the booklet was devoid of.  He had a very prolific life here in NYC not only spearheading the Tailor’s Union with his excellent oratory skills, but in England as well (Queen Victoria had him imprisoned for his union activities there).  I shopped it around various newspapers and it was eventually published in the Irish Echo for their St. Patrick’s Day issue, with a picture of him taken around the time the booklet was published in 1902 (he was born in 1823 in Dublin).  It was an extremely exciting research adventure that in many ways helped me to connect more intimately with him and my family.

Curiosity and delight in Kynard and Graff

These are fun, pieces to read, relying on personal classroom experience to explore alternate ways to research as well as write the research paper.  Carmen Kynard’s experiences at the beginning of her article bemoans the lack of variety of imaginative source material in the production of the standard research paper based on textbook examples, library websites, or unfortunately, some of my own handouts.  Why not explore (or even require) the use of some of her suggestions, such as “autobiographical accounts”  (as I frequently use for my own research, but usually discourage students from using for theirs, oddly enough; I have to think about this), “poems, interviews, and survey data.”  Certainly, incorporating these formats would reduce reliance on secondary sources that sometimes lead to unintentional plagiarism created by plugging into a format.  Kynard’s “jam” assignment, asking students to respond to a controversial subject by gathering three types of appropriate materials: imaginative writing, a visual/verbal text and a verbal text, analyzing each text for style, comparing and contrasting the texts, and possibly using the texts in a final research paper sounds fascinating and would certainly avoid the miasma of standard research and the paper that results from it.

Thinking about Kynard and Graff, I’ve come up with a few more ways to possibly add “curiosity and delight” to research and research paper writing, and I’m anxious to try some of them out:

• What about changing the audience? In other words, not having the students write for me as the teacher but, for example, imagine themselves as journalists reporting on a major event for a newspaper, or a lawyer arguing an unsolved murder from history.
• Changing the character of their narrative: become a Jewish immigrant who comments on her/his memories of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima on its 85^th
• How about deliberately and dangerously, writing a research paper designed to propagandize for a particular cause?

These assignments can be argued to change the purpose of the formal research paper that is commonly taught, but expand the concepts of audience and purpose, encouraging students to learn that research papers don’t all look alike, and that the writing skills learned in an English classroom can be utilized in other classes.

I believe the first time I ever really got interested in research was accidentally. Up until my grad school thesis, yes I do realize I was a late research revelation bloomer, I would just do projects because I guessed that is what you just did in academia- do what you are told to without thinking too heavily upon why you are doing it. It was not because I didn’t care, was uninterested, or anything near to not understanding the purpose of schooling. I just trusted my instructors without a doubt. However, as I have learned as a professor, trust is not easily earned from some students and you have to show them why they should care about the things they are learning. While in grad school, I taught a bridge program where we instructed students in the NY Regents ELA exam and prepared them for their first semester of writing as freshmen in college during their junior year of high school. Teaching to the Regents seemed to clash heavily with preparing them for their first semester of college.

I had not realized this clash when I was a student myself because I was in the process and not outside it. The two ways of teaching were not going on at the same time, so I was not able to clearly see the stark differences because of this as well. So, for the first time in my academic career, I did something out of curiosity that was not clearly defined by an instructor. I wanted to do it for my current students at the time to discover why they reacted so adversely when I taught the Regents exam, but took to first year writing so well. Test taking, test preparation, and thus test pedagogy are somewhat enamored with teaching to a rigid end goal of a test and the outcome of it. Rigidity limits options, curiosity, and want of learning. Unlike myself, who thrived on being told what to do, most students thrive when they are allowed to wander and experience things to develop who they are as students, and this also applies to them as writers. My thesis focused on this clash of ideals.

From the research, I

1)Shifted the way I was teaching my hybrid class- I taught the Regents portions as I would a first year writing class.

2) Learned about my own difficulty transitioning to college writing.

3) I came to understand that options and freedom are more attuned to human nature. If all students are human, then they would yearn for this more than rigid expectation. I was an academic robot most of my learning career, but they would not be.

All of this set me upon the path of seeing writing instructions more than about words on a page, but more aligned with self-discovery.

From my thesis writing experience, I also learned how to expand options for research. The person mentoring me through the process used the words: no, you can’t, that isn’t an option, I don’t know, but this doesn’t seem right to me, etc. This further showed me that freedom is quite essential for research. When I would spend a month alone toiling away in an echo chamber of blissfulness centered around my own ideas, I was immensely motivated and happy.  When I would meet with this mentor, who I was required to have through the process, I was miserable and felt unsure of myself. It took me about a week to recenter myself after those meeting to get back to focusing upon what I felt was the research that had and must be done. After that week, I was motivated, curious, and able to flow with work.

For my students, I never tell them (YOU CAN”T), I ask them (WELL HOW CAN WE DO THAT). I leave their research project very open to what they want/need to do. They can do it upon a topic that aligns with their major if they have one, one that they are interested in personally, or something we just riff about one-on-one. If a student doesn’t know what they want to do, I usually ask a ton of open ended questions to get them to where they feel comfortable and curious about a topic. Sometimes, students just ask to be told  a topic. I honestly tell them that the project is large, research is tiresome, and you’re going to be bored if you don’t see yourself in the research. Mainly, research is about finding yourself in one way or another. Sometimes, it is finding your future self within a topic you will one day dedicate your life to. Other times, it is something you dabbled in your whole life, but never focused on academically. Research is more about finding yourself rather than information I feel. If you show students they are doing this for themselves and not for some unknown purpose or reason, they become so involved that they ask, “I know you said X amount of pages, but is it okay if I can do Y.” Usually, the only time students struggle to make page counts or to find research pieces for their topic is when they are uninterested or disconnected from the topic and they just choose a topic from Google after they typed in- good research paper topics.

Sorry I posted this in the Reflection section originally

Hello All, my name is Anthony Eid. I have been teaching, hmmm let’s see here, since 2014 in higher ed. I had to open my resume up to actually see the year. I was a tutor, both online and in person, prior to that since 2010, so I get a bit muddled with the year that I started in the actual classroom sometimes. Tutoring online always felt a bit more reactive. I would wait for students to hand in papers or a request for tutoring would come in, and then I would activate and become a tutor. There was no before or after sometimes, the tutoring would be in the moment mostly and per paper. Sometimes, I would have regular students, but mostly I tutored a new student each time. Being reactive is great when there is no history with students. However, with teaching online the past semester, being reactive made me a bit nervous and anxious.

The situation was very day-to-day and piecemeal the first couple of weeks. However, with some planning, a bit of presence with my students, and tons of emails, things began to settle and I was less reactive which put me at ease. The in-classroom plan got thrown out for the most part. When plans are set out and there is a goal in mind, I feel more comfortable. I assume my students would be as well, so we both benefited from that reorientation and refocusing. It was hectic at fist, but things smoothed out as time went along. I am hoping that with all of us starting online in the fall that there won’t be any whiplash from the sudden shift and classes will start up as they ended my last semester-in peace and reassurance.

Usually, on the first day of class, I introduce myself a bit differently than what I did above here. I focus more upon my struggles as a student. Most students understand that when a person stands at the front of the classroom that comes with some experience and credibility. I don’t tell them how many years I have been teaching. I simply explain how many years it took me to feel like the writer I am today. I tell them about the struggles I had with my first paper in college. From that experience, I was so afraid every time I put pen to paper because the grade I received on it did not reflect how accomplished and confident I felt in high school. Honesty is a tremendous part of my teaching practices. I believe it helps students to be honest with me and helps them voice their needs and wants right away. In addition, I know my students are about to write a literary narrative, and that also helps them right away see what they can do for that piece. The literary narrative comes at them fast, so I hope this is another example of one outside of their readings. However, I believe this approach will somewhat terrify them in a posting. In front of a classroom, my energetic and smiley presence usually smooths out the story and let’s them see it was not all doom and gloom, and that there was a happy ending. I believe doing this as a recording will be better than not, or I can figure out a new way of doing this altogether.

The intended goal of such an introduction may be a bit off center as an online posting in writing. I am trying to reassure my students that they can accomplish their goals in this class if I can work my way up to being a college writing professor from being devastated by my first grade on a college paper. However, as I said before, being online is a situation that may not match this introduction so well in writing. This is similar to a writing style I have dabbled in but have researched a bit more, stand-up comedy. The basic anatomy of a joke is set-up(the information the audience needs and these are usually the unfunny parts of the joke), punchline(the funny parts of the joke that usually brings about laughter from an audience), and tag lines(they are sort of like sequels to the punchlines that can keep a joke going, and thus the laughter). When on stage, these are the usual components audiences watching American stand-up have come to know and expect. Jokes are usually cultivated over a tour. Comics will hit different audiences with the same joke, and then will alter it as time goes on to suit most audiences. If it worked in D.C., Boston, and Minneapolis, it may make 90% of your audience laugh, and possibly get others who have not encountered your act or know you as a comedian to do so as well. My students have not met me yet and as I said above, they expect a certain routine on the first day from their professors. Some comedians get away with a lot on stage because they have the charisma to hammer it out till they get to the next bit. That is similar to my first day gloomy speech. I get away with a lot because of my energy, but that introduction only works because of that. If just put online without context or that energy, students will not connect with it. I am aware of who they are as an audience and what they are expecting. My opening day bit is not good for all situations, so I should change it to be applicable online.

Hi everyone– thanks for the Zoom today.  It was nice to see you all.  For tomorrow, I’d like you to do the following:

1. Respond to at least two people’s introduction posts. You can do this simply  by posting a comment.
2. Familiarize yourself with the curriculum and the model site hub. This is the link to the site: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fyw-pedagogy/ .  I think it is quite clear now where the materials for 1101 are (and I have relabeled them) but if it is not, they are here: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fyw-pedagogy/how-do-i-download-my-courses/. You may find it easiest to look at the “entire semester weekly plan”. Also, and I’m sorry to say this, because I do really like the core curriculum syllabus, but as I think of it, I think it will be easiest for this semester if we all use the mainstream units, since all of the support materials are written for this curriculum and I think it is best if we’re on the same page.  If you really want to argue with me on this, I’m open to the debate!
3. Personalize your syllabus. There is a syllabus for you in the documents, which is mostly finished, but there are some things you need to fill out yourself (your course times, for example.)  By “syllabus,” by the way, I am not referring to the course schedule.*  We have also planned this out for you, but these are separate documents. The syllabus is just the rules and regulations!  That said, you will need to personalize your details, including the class meeting times and you’ll have to see how you feel about the grading policy.  We will discuss it tomorrow. 
4. Reflections on Research: If you have not done so yet, read the Summer Institute Day 2 readings. Watch my BRILLIANT 🙂 slideshow on “Research as a Process of Discovery” on the Hub and write a blog post by noon tomorrow answering the following questions (categories: Summer Institute, 1101 Unit 2)
   • When was a time when you got really interested in something and researched that thing. How did you get interested? How did you go about the research? What did you DO with that research?
   • Using what we’ve read in Kynard and Graff, how might we expand the definitions of a research project to more fully contain the curiosity and delight of research?

I will send you an email with the new Zoom link for tomorrow.  We meet at 1:30.

* We can talk tomorrow about the weekly schedule that goes out to students.  I didn’t make one for you because everybody does this differently, but I am willing to make one to go with the curriculum materials.