What is andragogy, and how might the approach help in teaching FYC?

As we’ve discussed in class, andragogy is the theory and practice of educating adult learners. Originated by Alexander Kapp in 1833 and expanded on by Malcolm Knowles, andragogy (in Greek, “man-leading") should have sharp distinctions from pedagogy (“child-leading").  In contrast to young learners, adult learners are primarily self-directed and work from vastly different motivations.

In class, we went over the primary motivations for adult learners:

1.     Need to know—Students have to know why they are learning what they are learning.

2.     Foundation—Individual experiences must be valued, as they fuel class activities.

3.     Self-concept—Students feel a need to be involved in the planning and execution of their own education.

4.     Readiness—Adults need to know how subjects are relevant to their own lives.

5.     Orientation—Classrooms that are problem-centered and not content-centered are more effective for adult learners.

6.     Motivation—Adults respond better to internal vs. external motivators.

For adult learners, there must be a good reason for investing time and energy in a subject. They are much more likely to bring their own experiences to light in the classroom, as they are naturally apt to search for real-world applications in the subjects they are learning. In a “traditional” classroom, the teacher serves as a lecturer, as a resident expert that delivers packaged information to students. In contrast, with andragogy, the teacher serves as conductor to students, stepping in to assist students in self-direction when needed. We know that, for adult learners, learning is best acquired in a social setting where they can actively participate in conversation. Also, repetition can be helpful to engrain essential ideas. The whole concept seems rather Platonic (“Truth cannot be taught, only learned”), as its focus is guide autonomous learners with a gentle hand. A teacher cannot force a student to learn if the student does not want to.

As I look back, I find that the basic principles of andragogy certainly pervaded my undergraduate career.  My professors did give some lectures, but most of my classes were opened to discussion for more than half of the class period. My professors were always available should I need to discuss anything, from paper ideas to misunderstood concepts to my future career plans. I think that, for students, college is the transition process between teacher-led learning and self-led learning.

With that in mind, FYC students are just beginning this transition. So many of them come in with external motivators as their only concern (ex: Most students whose papers I graded, when asked what their goal was for the class, answered, “To get a good grade.”). To help them to transition to being internally motivated, FYC (as some of us have discussed before in our blogs) should not have a large emphasis on grading. Rather, students should be assigned projects that they can be passionate about and that spur class discussion. I think the key difference in young learners and adult learners is passion for the subject. If we as instructors can help students to discover a passion for any part of the class, we have taken the first step towards helping them to become autonomous learners.

A General Idea of My Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy stems mainly from the Social-Epistemic values outlined by Fulkerson—the idea that truth is relative and contextual, and that readings should be put into the context of society. I believe that knowledge is not a state of achievement, a trophy to be attained and sat upon one’s mantle; it is an evolution that will continue to change the more we interact with texts and other humans, and the more we attempt to join the discussion ourselves through writing. I also highly value reading a text and discussing it within its context, noting how politics, religion, gender, etc. can drastically change its meaning. In addition, I have found that I highly value Expressionism in teaching—the Platonic idea that truth can be learned but not taught, and that truth is acquired mostly through internal investigation. Truth being an internal investigation would mean that it could be relative to each investigator, which ties in with Social-Epistemic values. I think a focus on Expressionism in the classroom encourages the development of ideas before the development of style. While style and rhetoric impact the message of a piece, it is far more important (at the beginning of a student’s career) that we, as teachers, allow for students to tell their own stories and reflect on others’ through assignments like response essays and journaling. What content will be left to hone if ideas are stifled by fear of incorrect style?

Primarily, I have found that I believe in the power of story—awakening students to the realization that story shapes and propels our lives. Many other teaching philosophies that I have read have talked about a focus on connecting to students through something that they already know or value; every human already has an investment in story. I believe in conducting a classroom that emphasizes the power of connecting to other humans through reading, writing, and discussion, which ultimately creates a discourse of community. Learning happens most effectively within a community, because it instills passion for other perspectives of the world in students and awakens their sense of justice for members of humankind. I believe in smaller classrooms and getting to know my students personally. As a teacher, availability and approachability are vital to fostering dialogue in an effort to transcend barriers through narrative.

I also believe that reading and discussion are immediate catalysts for writing. Meaningful discussion with a classroom community fuels research, as it allows students to create a verbal and mental outline for potential writing. As teachers, we can show students that their most valuable asset for writing and developing ideas is their surrounding community (professors, peers, literature, secondary sources from scholars in their field, etc.). In this community, students are provided ample opportunity for feedback and revisions, both in and out of the classroom. Keeping Expressionism in mind, I would like to note that, by implementing regular and consistent writing exercises in class, students learn that through writing comes agency and voice. Creative writing exercises stimulate originality, and writing exercises that dwell on the importance of secondary sources show that through writing, they can insert themselves into the discussion. Specifically for the teaching of rhetoric, I believe in using examples of speech (perhaps guests from the theatre program to act out, say, Shakespearean monologues) to analyze rhetorical skills. To teach effectively, we must bring the subject down to its contextual level. As rhetoric was once intertwined with speech, it only makes sense that, to fully understand rhetoric, one must witness it in its first form.

As much as I am attempting to analyze my own ideas of teaching, I must admit that I think a teaching philosophy is only as good as the teacher. I fully expect to change my philosophies over time, and I acknowledge that even the best teaching philosophy does not guarantee an effective teacher. However, I think that the process of learning to teach any subject effectively is just as complex as the process of learning how to write—we will all use vastly different modes of getting there.

"Based on your teaching philosophy (which may change over time), what are types of assignments that you would include in a FYC syllabus?"

Though many of us are not confident in our teaching philosophies yet, it is telling how we each can speak to which assignments we were given that challenged us the most and caused the greatest growth in our writing abilities.  As I have said in a previous blog, I have always valued reading and discussion most highly in the classes I have attended.  My most resonant learning experiences took place in smaller classes with an active, engaged teacher who mediated discussion between students. These discussions inevitably contributed to the content of my research in the majority of my classes, and I learned to think critically and make my own rhetorical choices by debating with my professors and fellow students.

Seeing as one of the largest aims of this course is to get students to see themselves as writers, I think it is vital to provide many low-risk opportunities for students to express their ideas thoroughly without the fear of being graded too harshly.  I appreciated my professors who, for daily quizzes, would write a response question over the assigned reading on the board and ask for roughly a page of writing in class.  Oftentimes, s/he would give us ten minutes for response, and the paper was used for an attendance grade.  While this was not exactly “free-writing,” it contributed to class discussions as it allowed students to take ten minutes at the beginning of the class to formulate what they thought of the assigned reading. 

Style takes form the more a student is able to write.  I think that, when first learning to write, it is crucial for a student to take notice of authors’ styles and analyze them; however, I am not sure that a beginning writer should be graded heavily on their writing style.  I think that corrections should be made to emphasize clarity in a new writer’s style, but smaller suggestions (regarding, for example, word choice) should not count as direly.  In regards to practicing the analysis of style, one of the most enlightening assignments that I have ever been given was to write an emulation of an author.  For example, we were given a passage of Hemingway, and we were to compose our own passage in Hemingway’s style.  This exercise made me dissect an author’s writing more thoroughly than almost any other assignment I had had before.  We looked closely at each word’s purpose in a passage and the author’s written mannerisms, which led to a deeper analysis of the author’s rhetorical choices.

Though students do not begin research papers until 1302, I believe the students should at least touch on the writing process in 1301.  For new writers, formula can be a tool that revolutionizes the way they envision writing a paper.  It is almost imperative to break up the process to make writing less intimidating to a student.  Laying out a foundation of a clear writing process—research, note cards, outlines, rough drafts—and going through this process slowly at first can be extremely effective for certain students (as long as the professor attaches the purpose of learning these stages to the process).  As I think of it, the idea is to teach students a thorough process first, and then let them know that it is okay if they deviate from it effectively.  I believe that assigning readings that exhibit many different writing styles can help students to realize that, to be a good writer, one does not have to operate through formula, as formula functions more so as a starting point.  The extra readings that we would work from would most likely be short essays or stories, such as Gawande’s “The Learning Curve” or Pollan’s “An Animal’s Place.”  I would want them to form smaller discussion groups in class to analyze the choices they see the writers making, perhaps speaking to how the grammar, diction, or tone affects the author’s message, and what that means for the impact of the piece.  We might even discuss research papers written with different formats and analyze the purpose or the use of each format.  After, I would ask each group to address the class with their findings.  I would hope that, as such was my case, students would glean insight from both the readings and class discussions, and that would begin to affect their individual writing skills. 

"What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?"

Keeping in mind that I have never taught before, I look at this question and I barely have a clue about what the most difficult thing to teach will be; my only experience stems from the one year I spent working in my undergrad university’s writing center. Based off my time working with students in the writing center, the things I have found most difficult to explain are editing and using secondary sources to enhance a paper.

Yesterday, my first quota of grades was due for ENGL 1301.  After grading twenty-nine papers, I can say that I wrote twenty-nine comments that each advised some serious revisions.  I saw students struggling to fill word counts with repetitive sentences.  I saw students attempting to write for an audience they couldn’t begin to analyze—the unnamed, faceless grader.  I saw students testing this grader to see how little effort they could expend on an assignment.  On the other side, I also saw concerned freshmen who were used to writing what a teacher wanted to read, as well as a small few who genuinely appeared to want to build on their prior experience with writing.  As I began grading, I found myself searching for ways to comment constructively, rather than giving in to the vague, easy critiques that I had so loathed receiving on my papers.  I am afraid that over time it will become increasingly tempting to give vague commentary.  I think that, in teaching students to edit their work, it is important to first teach students to distance themselves from their writing. For new writers, it is much easier to critique others’ writing than to hear critiques about their own.  To give an example of this distance, some professors ask students to revise a paper they wrote previously.  This assignment, I have seen, tends to help students solidify their voice and update it. For many of these students, we also tell them to read their writing out loud so they can hear the flow of their paper and revise it accordingly.

In this generation, almost none of these students are coming to college ready to revise their work at all.  I will be the first to admit that I came to college with this “one-and-done” mindset.  In my whole high school experience, I wrote one research paper.  One.  This paper took a whole semester to write, as my teacher stuck to this process-based mentality of teaching.  She said to pick a poem; I picked a poem.  She said to make an outline; I did.  She said to get research from books rather than online, to make an outline, make note cards, make a rough draft, and a final draft.  Throughout this entire process, never did I truly understand the motivation behind it.  I did not understand how I was supposed to integrate my scrawny ideas about a Langston Hughes poem into a paper with published authors and critics.  In my mind, a paper alluding so much to others’ research seemed akin to plagiarism, a watered-down version of these authors’ works.

Working in the writing center, I saw students constantly fail to integrate good sources that both enlightened and supported their work into their papers.  Most students would come through with an assigned number of sources, and they would have already filled them with random websites (from which they took a statistic or one solitary quote) or, oddly enough, Bible verses.  I found it incredibly difficult to explain to these students that, to be worth using, a source must enhance one’s writing.  Teaching students to determine useful, credible source material is, I believe, vital to academic writing and intellectual thinking.  Credible sources are one of the most useful tools of rhetoric when used well.  They create a conversation within a piece of writing between persons that are knowledgeable of the topic, and they allow a writer to insert him/herself into the discourse.  I came to understand finally my relationship with source material by reading across multiple disciplines.  This is why I believe that, in a freshman composition course, reading and discussion are as important as writing, if not more so.  Many of these students openly say they “don’t like” reading, and some will never attempt to read anything more intellectually stimulating than their Twitter feed.  However, relevant reading and in-class discussion, I have witnessed, can sometimes pull students out of this mindset and inspire them to take part in a bigger discourse.