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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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Integrating Online Discussions Into a Literature Course
By Nick Coles, English THE DISCUSSION BOARD WILL NEVER DIE!!! This comment posted in a student’s evaluation of my Working-Class Literature course last semester was the most exuberant of many remarks about how useful, even pleasurable, students had found their participation in online discussion to be. I’ve been teaching Working-Class Literature at Pitt for 25 years. The course engages students in shared inquiry about the nature of work, the experience of class, and the uses of literature in a culture like ours (now and in the past). In part because I also teach English composition, frequent writing and guided discussion have been the primary means of learning in the class. This worked well when the course was an upper-division writing-intensive class primarily taken by English majors and capped at 20 students. Change in Dynamics These changes affected class discussion. Whereas I used to arrange my classroom in a circle, seminar-style, the students were now all facing me. Discussion was now mostly mediated through me and often dominated by those students who were most comfortable speaking to a large group (not always also the most thoughtful contributors). Because this was the only literature course many of my students would take at Pitt—and I wanted to engage them in habits of close and attentive literary reading—I continued to use a form of reading log I had developed over the years. In this “double-entry journal” students recorded observations, quotations, and reactions to their reading on one side of a divided page, and made connections, developed interpretations and raised questions in writing on the other side. I’ve valued this form of learning log in part because students often write quite freely about their responses, and I am able to see their thinking process and comment upon it. Nevertheless, I was growing dissatisfied with the sense that, although there was value for students in articulating their thinking to themselves and to me in writing, their insights and questions were not finding their way back out into the class as a whole to enrich our conversations. Similarly my own comments were being made only to individual students, one at a time. Redesigning the Course
Three kinds of support helped me with the changes I went on to make: a morning of CIDDE training on working with CourseWeb; conversations with colleagues from several Arts and Sciences departments around the table in the CXC seminar; and one-on-one planning sessions with an instructional designer who has taught and studied writing in online environments for some time. Introducing Online Discussions The impact on class discussions has been impressive. Often, conversations begun but cut short by time constraints in class would be continued online. Posts began to blossom with attached artwork, links to relevant articles, chunks of independent research. Some posts ran well over a page, while the shortest was the single word “Word!” offered in response to a particularly righteous statement by a classmate. A rough taxonomy of posting would include:
Most importantly, students’ evaluations suggest that for many of them, the goals I had in mind were met. For example, the following comments were offered:
I appreciated the process so much myself that I am using online discussion again in this semester’s Seminar in Composition. I especially value the spirit of engagement I witnessed in that forum, the quality of attention and insight on textual questions, and what it taught me about students’ thinking and, therefore, what we might need to address in up-coming class meetings. And I found myself looking forward to logging on and seeing what was being said, joining in as I was moved to — whereas I cannot honestly say the same about the fat sheaf of hand-written journals I used to carry around with me.
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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