Author Archives: Elizabeth Goetz

UDL

I completely agree with Chardin and Novak that teachers and others should strive for universal design, but I am a little frustrated by their chapter “Universal Design as an Instrument of Change.”

Some years ago in my teaching (before I came to City Tech), I didn’t allow students to use devices in the classroom, and I printed my syllabi in Times New Roman, with all its serifs, because I wanted to model MLA style. I was also much more of a stickler about late work–I didn’t accept it–and issued harsh penalties for small cases of plagiarism. I also assigned a lot more reading quizzes. Since then, I think I’ve come a long way in terms of making my teaching more accessible, both at City Tech and in my other classrooms. I allow students to use laptops or tablets, and, if they need them to look up an article they haven’t printed out despite my strong encouragement to do so, phones. I just start class with a general reminder that headphones should be removed from ears and phones stashed out of site and set to “do not disturb” functionality. I print my syllabi in sans-serif Arial, and make sure students know that syllabi and and other documents I distribute in print also exist in digital form on our course website, where size and font can be manipulated. After lots of thinking and experience with plagiarism, I’m now more likely (depending on the specifics of the case) to require revision, report the case to the dean’s office (which keeps a record only to be referred to if the student is found to plagiarize again later in their college career), and subtract a few points from the student’s grade on the revised assignment. I’m more likely to start class with impromptu free-writing in response to discussion questions than to give identification-based reading quizzes. And I recommend to students as a class and individually that they consult with their campus advisors, counseling services, librarians, and writing tutors.

My politics are left; when I’m not teaching, I do a lot of volunteer work to elect local candidates who will work to make our public schools more equitable and better funded. I agree with Chardin and Novak that the schools we attend, often determined by the neighborhood we live in, and funded by it too, are markers on the axis of privilege, as are our zip codes, our appearances, gender position, languages spoken, and on and on. I worry about charter schools like Success Academy that prioritize the classroom management Chardin and Novak point out isn’t all-important (12), and policies like the Common Core that encourage teachers to teach students to navigate a gauntlet of standardized tests that inherently discourage UDL and thereby disempower students. I agree with Chardin and Novak (and the 1121 model syllabus!) that teaching students goal-setting, scheduling, and planning is so important; I am continuously telling students to refer to their calendars, to set reminders on their phone, to adjust their alarm clocks, and giving them time to do so. When students ask to submit work late, I ask them when, given their other commitments, they will be able to turn it in, in order to equip them with a new set of deadlines and accountability.

But as someone also teaching an Intro to Writing about Lit course (at another campus) this semester, when Chardin and Novak write, “We must create learning environments that give all students opportunities to personalize their education, share their voices, and create their own paths to success while embracing their own identities” (11), I strongly agree on the one hand, but on the other hand, I wonder how this can be accomplished in a course focused on reading–how can students individualize their learning when we are all reading the same primary texts together, in order for me to guide discussion? This seems more doable in a composition course when students can do individual research and then give one another feedback on how to write about their findings. And while I appreciate Amy Wedge’s suggestion to point students toward community-service opportunities (19), I am struck by the difficulties of doing this in a CUNY setting as opposed to a neighborhood K-12 setting. At CUNY, after all, our students commute from across the five boroughs and beyond, often work long hours, and are enrolled full-time. Their time is spread thin such that it would be quite a challenge to integrate a community-service component in required English classes. And adjuncts aren’t paid close enough to a living wage to make the additional administrative work involved in such a project feasible! I would like more concrete UDL lesson plans suitable for the college composition classroom rather than lofty ideas about sending students to tend the elderly. Lastly, while it is likely SAGE Publications to blame for this and not Chardin and Novak, but their chapter comes as a PDF in serif font, hard to manipulate beyond zooming in and out. I don’t usually have trouble reading with serifs, but I did find their occasional italics challenging to read. It seems the form and content of this chapter are not fully aligned.

Thinking with Takayoshi and Selfe about Multimodal Teaching

I think multimodal pedagogies are extremely valuable in our technophilic society. But I also think we have to keep in mind that students’ technological prowess or access to technology resources may either exceed or be vastly less than we might guess. Students are fluent in texting platforms and social media platforms, but I (re)learned while teaching remotely earlier in the pandemic that they don’t always know how to enable sharing or editing access in a Google doc, for instance, or that getting students set up on Open Lab can be an ordeal. (I now use Blackboard for my classes simply because students have default accounts on the platform, and I’m reluctant to bring additional platforms into my in-person teaching after semesters teaching remotely using combinations of Zoom, Open Lab, Blackboard, and Google Docs.)

While I myself have some abilities in word processing and data management platforms, I don’t feel well suited to teaching the use of platforms beyond the library’s research databases and word-processing software–much though I try to encourage students to create work in other platforms if they have outside knowledge. I have to admit, though, that I feel stymied by instances like a student last semester who made a video about skateboarding but I think his friend who helped film did most of the editing (the friend owned the camera). But maybe this is fine? This article’s suggestion that teachers hesitant about multimodal writing could let students choose modalities for their written work rather than teaching students how to use those modalities was encouraging to me, though–that I can definitely do.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about developing an assignment (maybe a version of 1121’s Unit 2 or 1101’s Units 2 and 3) where students research the neighborhood where they live or their family history (or maybe the neighborhood where they were born? but that could make site visits harder). I think it would be really cool to incorporate multimodality in such a project–urging students to photograph and film neighborhood fixtures, local denizens, record audio or video of interviews, film what they see as they walk down the block. In their tech surveys this semester, all my students (or at least those who completed the survey…) said they have smartphones, so they could film on their phones to keep the need for material resources down.

On Not Really Teaching Grammar

I don’t really teach grammar. Sometimes when students write “something was done,” I comment, “done by whom? Avoid the passive voice” and link to Purdue OWL on the passive voice, but certainly not for entry-level undergraduate writers. If a sentence isn’t clear, I ask for clarification. I do sometimes comment that students should avoid fragments or run-ons, but I admit that I think a better practice would be to ask what the nounal clause in the fragment is doing, or to ask a student to break up a complex idea (code for a run-on, in this case). I tell students that grammar matters insofar as it helps aide clarity, and otherwise, it doesn’t matter very much. Reading their drafts aloud can help with this, I explain, as it can also help with sniffing out where their ideas lose or gain coherence or excitement. I do tell students to reread also, to ask family members, friends, roommates, and classmates to read, to take home extra peer review worksheets for these purposes, and to run spell-check, which, I explain, doesn’t catch everything and needs to be tended with a critical eye because it, too, is imperfect, but it’s a start. And everything needs to be read with a critical eye anyway. When I teach Hunter’s version of 1121, which they call 220, Introduction to Writing about Literature (and which doubles as a required course for English majors in addition to fulfilling Pathways gen ed requirements), I try to explain to students terms like “antecedent” and “pronoun” because these terms are useful to refer to the motifs we trace through a text, and sometimes I’ll explain “parallel construction” or “gerunds.” But I’m pretty likely too to just say “-ing verbs acting as nouns,” and I tell students that so long as they describe what they see in words that are clear to their readers, it doesn’t matter to me that they use so-called official terms for the literary techniques (so-called “devices”), methods, or grammatical practices they observe. They just need to make it clear to me what it is they are writing about. And grammar, and the words for it, are but one way to do that.

Difficulties of Teaching Research on a Campus with Minimal Wifi and Other Thoughts on Research Papers

In my own writing as an academic, “research papers” have often relied on secondary sources. I love the idea of having students do research on their own lives and have recently encouraged them to mine their text message exchanges or record conversations to find words or phrases to explore in writing for 1121’s Unit 1 “Portrait of a Word” assignment–but I could do well to follow my own advice. My 1121 students who focused on autobiographical material were much less likely to plagiarize (although I think the few who did mostly did so without realizing they were committing academic dishonesty). I would love more prompts like that in 1121 Unit 1 that help students reframe their own experiences as generative material to think and write about. While my dissertation research focused primarily on poetry and memoirs and critical sources about my literary sources, I have occasionally done research for more creative autobiographical writing by asking family members to fill in details for stories I don’t fully remember or wasn’t originally there for. Maybe this could be an assignment in an 1121-style and/or -level class: Profile an older relative; gather information by interviewing family members, freewriting your own memories, and reading through any written records you can find.

In my classrooms, I rely a lot on librarians’ workshops and annotated bibliographies to explain research. I’m interested in primary sources from students’ lives and sources from library databases much more than I am in what students find in the first page of Google results. But I don’t necessarily do a great job at this–my 1101 students last semester had a pretty hard time using library databases to find sources for their annotated bibliographies, despite the intense scaffolding of my course. This semester, I was pleased to schedule library workshops for my 1121 students in person, but when one section’s librarian was quite late and my students voted that another library workday to find sources with assistance would be helpful, the librarians told me that there were no available days my sections could use what seems to be the library’s one computer lab during our normal class meetings before my students’ research assignment is due. I’m a bit frustrated with that–it feels hard to teach online research, through the library’s databases or otherwise, given the extremely unreliable internet on campus. (I emailed NYCCT’s VPs about this last week, and was told that the wifi signal wouldn’t be amplified until next fall–so frustrating!)

Liz Goetz’s Teaching Statement

Below is the teaching statement I’ve been sending out when I apply for non-adjunct teaching jobs:

As a teacher, I try to demystify the process of making meaning from difficult texts for students. I begin the semester with texts they find familiar in some way because I want students to feel comfortable even while they are being challenged. I make close reading fun and use scaffolding to make assignments manageable. These methods make texts seem relatable and give students a clear grasp of the interpretive and argumentative processes.

At Hunter College, a senior college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, I have frequently taught “Introduction to Writing about Literature,” a general-education course that teaches freshmen how to interpret and write analytical essays about prose fiction, Shakespearean drama, and poetry. We begin the semester with outwardly familiar texts so that students feel comfortable as interpretive challenges increase. For instance, students find A Raisin in the Sun accessible because its setting in an urban apartment is recognizably real to them. Many students have read Lorraine Hansberry’s play in high school, so their prior knowledge of the play reassures them they’re on solid footing in the class. Students learn the value of thorough and close (re)reading as we examine debates and tensions within the text (Afrocentrism versus black assimilation, for example) on which the text can be convincingly read as taking opposite stances. We talk about how the play can be staged different ways to make various characters appear more or less sympathetic, and how tracing where the text’s sympathies lie is key to discerning its meaning. With this interpretive practice, students understand that, while not a hard science, literary analysis permits any reading that students can support with logical analysis of textual evidence—that is, that all claims about a text must begin with evidence. Seminar-style class discussion in a mix of small groups and the full class helps to focus students and show them that they have the skills to make meaning from dense texts both in conversation and in writing. After students write argumentative interpretive essays about more familiar texts like A Raisin in the Sun or Othello, they have gained the practice to give them the confidence, patience, and interpretive scrutiny to make sense of texts whose styles may feel more foreign to them, such as poetry.

Much as prior exposure to a text makes students feel more comfortable deeply analyzing it in ways they hadn’t thought of before, their resulting new understanding of close-reading methods makes them feel more secure and ready for challenges when we enter our poetry unit. We practice collaborative close reading by analyzing a given poem line by line in a class-wide conversation. I ask students to think about word sequence, why lines are broken in particular places, how the poem sounds when read aloud, how ambiguity might allow for multiple meanings, whether such multiple meanings can be in play simultaneously or contradict one another. Discussing these issues as a whole class enables students to bounce ideas off one another, to find textual evidence to support their views and refute opposing ones, and to learn from the reading methods of their classmates, as well as to benefit from my guiding questions and high level of enthusiasm. This convivial environment makes interpreting seemingly difficult texts a friendlier and more productive experience for students.

I further build up students’ confidence by helping them realize the close-reading practice they already have. For example, their interest and ability increase when we discuss the similarities between close-reading a poem and close-reading a text message exchange, as both involve scrutiny of line breaks, word choice, tone, and approach to punctuation. I also often have students interpret song lyrics of their choosing as a homework assignment. This assignment shows students that poetry occurs in other media and genres that they are more experienced in close-reading.

While I give students oral feedback and ask constructive questions to guide their thinking in generative directions in class, I also open lines of clear communication for students to test ideas during scaffolded research assignments. Careful preliminary scaffolding makes students feel prepared for what could otherwise seem the arduous task of composing research papers. After reading their primary source, students write prĂ©cis on a secondary source and post them to an online discussion board so that they can develop a shared resource bank of articles they have read. Students can use one another’s prĂ©cis as readers’ guides to critical articles, and I tell them they can use one article they originally found via the discussion board. This helps make research feel more manageable, because students are already armed with two secondary sources when they use the library’s databases to find their next sources, often their first time seeking scholarly sources online.

Next, students write an annotated bibliography with a research topic to show the common point of entry for each of their sources; they then compose a proposal along with guiding questions to formulate their thinking. Students email me their annotated bibliographies and proposals. This allows me to give them the go-ahead promptly or to ask them to better flesh out their ideas, to find more suitable sources, to home in on their topic, to favor interpretation and argument over synthesis, to include more generative guiding questions, and so on. Students feel acknowledged and can then either move on to the next stage of their research or start revising promptly. Further, when I ask students to revise by a certain deadline, they practice their organizational skills. It is now their responsibility to organize their schedules, to distribute their workloads, and to be in touch with me to request a slight extension if the new deadline is simply unreasonable for them given other commitments.

Using email for this purpose enables prompt, efficient communication with students about their ideas as they develop and helps maintain a record of the trajectory of their thinking about this project over the course of the semester. I always cater the feedback I give a student to that student’s particular work, but processing student work relatively quickly and early in their research process allows me also to shape discussion and activities in class to help students grasp any concepts that prove troublesome for multiple students. Students feel that they’re not alone in their confusion when I tell them that many of their classmates are grappling with similar issues. We can also use such in-class discussions as a workshop space wherein students can suggest possible solutions to their classmates’ concerns about obstacles they may face in researching and writing, repeating these class-wide brainstorming sessions as necessary for the duration of the assignment.

During peer review, students learn that there are other ways of approaching any assignment, be they better, worse, or just different. Exchanging drafts with their peers not only gives students extra feedback in a low-stakes setting, but also improves conviviality in the classroom due to their small-group workshopping conversations. During group work, I walk around the room to check in with students. I often start these short chats by asking them for something going well in their partner’s paper, and something their partner could improve upon, guiding them to keep their focus on their classmate’s paper rather than their own. For peer review helps students think reflectively about writing while giving them a short break from their own writing. This defamiliarization with their own writing lets students return to it with a somewhat fresher view and better identify areas in which they can improve. As always, as I walk around the room, I carefully observe students’ strengths and weaknesses in order to tailor our course so I can build on students’ preexisting reading and writing backgrounds to give them the skills they most need.