I’m finding a tough time articulating goals here partly because I find myself waking up from three years of marginal work in high schools (as a “paraeducator” or tutor/group instructor chiefly for students on special education plans, and as a substitute teacher) where, while I was not without some freedom in how I provided instruction, didn’t make decisions about curriculum or provide a whole lot in the way of classroom instruction as such. This essentially disempowered position had its advantages: because I wasn’t assigning grades, I could be seen as an advocate for the students I worked with, as essentially their advocate; while on the teachers’ side, I’d be praised if things went well with my students, but not held responsible if things went badly. The disadvantage was, of course, that without that responsibility I had limited power to develop my own sense of what kind of teacher I wanted to be, of what vision I would have for what students “should know” or be able to think about.
But then, I’ve had a certain reluctance about this all along, particularly after my miserable experience one semester teaching comp with a syllabus of my own making that didn’t really have strongly focused pedagogical goals. After that, I “reigned myself in” and taught an adapted version of the syllabus the rhet/comp people in the department had developed, and this ran relatively comfortably — partly because I felt only “partly responsible” for the content. After all, I was teaching comp, and who really knows how to teach that? (Or so I reassured myself.)
In this way, my main goal is to simply craft a syllabus for the fall that makes some kind of intellectual sense and whose rationale I can articulate for my students in a way that enables them to experience some kind of intellectual curiosity and ask focused questions about an object of study, to engage texts of whatever sort. I’ve hardly even begun to think about the political piece of things, to be honest; it is mainly my conviction that sustained intellectual engagement in itself is an act of some resistance in the present conjuncture (though perhaps it always has been). That said, I don’t want the “intellectual” content to be perceived as a block to lived experience, to its real sensory and emotional dimensions. There is a sense of wanting, for myself and for the students, to get at “the outsidedness flavor of it” (to borrow a phrase from my favorite curmudgeonly rock vocalist, Mark E. Smith), although this is to some extent a projection of my own introspectionist tendencies and the felt necessity of their transcendence.
I really respond to the title, Jesse. THinking about my early teaching, the 'goals' had sort of the shape of '---uh---to SURVIVE?'
ReplyDeleteBut that experience in the HS classroom is really valuable; 'them,' in their natural environment.
'Sustained intellectual engagement' Yes, please. But I suspect we need to show them what it IS, literally. I think about everyday life in a big suburban high school. Nothing there that gives a shape / reality to intellectual work.