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One teacher's approaches: a brief overviewUses home | Snapshots | Module contents | Approaches | Student initiated uses An individual perspective by Pam Knights
Page Navigation: Introduction | Children's Fiction | American Fiction | Edith Wharton | Conclusion IntroductionThese three 'project' modules - Children's Fiction, American Fiction and Edith Wharton - provide many of the examples elsewhere in this report. On this page, I'd like briefly to talk about them together, to give an impression of how, as a beginning-VLE user, I began to think about and to develop them. At the start of the project I had imagined creating far more dynamic resources (Harry Potter's 'virtual' Dark Arts book), but came to my senses, realising that I could spend three years devising an interactive feature which students would click through in eighteen seconds. To make duo merely a 'homework' planner did not appeal; and, while I recognised that, as far as students were concerned, the major 'gifts' were the resources -- the online articles etc. -- I also wanted to see whether I could make duo a different kind of space - part of the literary classroom, rather than just a corridor to a virtual library. Although licensed by 'the project' to give some time to duo, I wanted to try out and report on 'low-cost' activities-- quick, easy and, above all, useable as part of every day teaching once the project and its funding were over. Children's Fiction'Special Topic' on contemporary fiction for Level 2/3 students - usually 60 students, whom I teach in 3 seminar groups of 20 (sole teacher).
Main purpose - I have always tried to set up very interactive seminars, and students usually quickly become involved, participating energetically and valuing each other's contributions. I wanted to reflect our seminars in the look and feel of the VLE, and to give us the sense of a lively community 'base'. Initial (and continuing) problem - redundancy? duplication? When I was introduced to duo, I had already created a small web-site for the module, and was reluctant to lose the public interface this provided. I resolved this through simply linking to my site through duo, targeting pages relevant for upcoming seminars.
This has preserved my web-site for news, links from other children's literature sites, access for interested non-module members etc., while duo now gives a private space for module-specific materials: details of seminars, journal links for preparation, student work, prompts for independent research, discussion board, email. This split is not entirely satisfactory: I have little time to maintain both sites, and the www site is currently languishing. I can also find myself making double postings: e.g. for topical items, do I use the web 'news', via direct links to the Guardian or BBC sites? Or the duo announcements page? Or direct students via the Newspaper 'INFOTRAC' feature under duo 'Tools'? Or all of them, for different audiences? I would also like more fluid and fluent links for discussion between module members and other readers. Like other contemporary areas of the subject, Children's Literature blurs academic/popular boundaries, and (with 'crossover' literature), the child/adult divide. A restricted VLE site is perhaps not the best place to open up issues and questions about and within this interesting domain. Main approach - as in my seminars, trying to build a community of readers and giving students a sense that their interests matter. As with other contemporary modules, students bring a lot to seminars, and can rightly regard themselves as contributing to the body of knowledge. I have tried to highlight their own input by attempting to turn duo into a place for their work and voices - whether messages from former students, records of seminar debates and discussions, photos of activities with school children or with visiting novelists or academics, or students' interviews with writers. A spin-off from this is that most students say that they very quickly feel part of a keen and active reading-group, in seminars and in the wider community.
Some other advantages I encountered duo when I was just beginning to want to extend my first, rudimentary web-site, and was not sure how to go about it. The VLE has made it easy to try out features which I would have found technically daunting - among them:
Signpost: You might want to think about the VLE, not as a substitute or replacement for seminars, but as in dialogue with them. Lively work in each space will feed into and enrich experiences in the other. American Fiction
Survey module for Level 2/3 students -
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Political
and cultural documentaries, B.A.A.S. mailings about public talks,
notices about research studentships, US writers' tours, or relevant
news-items and letters (e.g. about Bristol's slavery museum) again
seem worth including. Glimpsing new announcements on the duo home
page or the module welcome page would, I hoped, give students a
sense that there is a wider world of American studies. In the first year
of using the module, students I did not know in person began to
email me with items they had noticed, or simply to tell me when
they had enjoyed following one of the links -- a sign that this
tactic was working.  |
Resources - material for individual topics + misc samples. |
This use for duo - as allowing a 'voice-over' -- appeals to me most, and, I think, makes the difference for students. As module convenor, I have seen its numbers increase over the years from around 70-90 students (in the 1980s) to its present 300 or so. With more free choice, it also attracts a range of 'outside' students from around the university, who might have no other contact with the English Department. The staff team is now very extended, sometimes including post-doc teaching assistants as well as full-time colleagues. The VLE seems a wonderful way of providing a unifying 'voice' in the module, rendering the whole experience less impersonal.
Example of other, small-scale, use
In this module, in the project year, I used the 'group' facilities with a small level 3 tutorial group. The group enjoyed having their own private discussion board and email circle, and got into the way of using it to prepare for our tutorials. As well as simple notices, I wanted to use the board to encourage closer reading between tutorials, and halt the over-rapid thematisation and spatialisation of the text in students' first commentaries.
As, in another context, I had just been revisiting Wolfgang Iser's and other 1970s' and 80s' 'reader-response' approaches to Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury suggested its own exercise; and these examples here come from our own small-scale 'reader-response' activity--a 'freeze-frame' of individuals' reading, and an attempt to encourage discussion of techniques and effects, rather than simply themes and characters. Beyond this, I hoped that -- as a short-cut, in the space of a brief tutorial - it would help students to articulate their own approaches to reading and to texts; and I was delighted at the impact it made.
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Freeze-frame exercise: The Sound and the Fury. Details . |
... This simple activity took no time to set up, but turned out to stimulate one of the most engaged and interesting tutorials of the year.
Edith Wharton
Module
for our taught MA in English Literary Studies- normally 4-6 students. (Sole teacher.)
Main uses for VLE - collection of links to Edith Wharton Association
web-site, searchable texts, e-journals, 19th-c. magazines, exhibitions
of visual arts; discussion board; interactive reading, using
online texts.
Main purpose - a 'home' space for the module - important for MA students who had come from different institutions (and countries), and included full-and part-timers and some living at a distance.
Initial thoughts - my first thoughts had been whether to bother at all for such a small group. These were, surely, experienced, independent learners, who could track down and access everything for themselves. Edith Wharton is well provided for, through the wonderful Edith Wharton Society site maintained by Donna Campbell, and duo seemed, perhaps, redundant.
First postings - Fortunately, I decided to use it as my first trial space on completing 'duo training'. (It would be easier, I thought, to explain myself to this friendly small group than to practise in front of a vast lecture cohort.) I spent two hours uploading links, extracts and other resources that I already had to hand, and would normally have issued on paper. I enriched these offerings with some direct links to online articles, Wharton's early reviews, more recent media items and reviews of adaptations, and to online exhibitions at the Smithsonian (Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent)-- and directed students to specific items and paintings, as part of the preparation for our next seminar (on The Custom of the Country). Students appreciated having these in the same place as the group email facilities; and, without having to use a poor reproduction (let alone, having to come into Durham, to navigate the 'oversize' shelves in the stacks to find one), spent time thinking about the paintings, and in exploring others. Some printed out paintings to use as a focus in the seminar.
Developments
Discussion board: most of the students took to the discussion board with only a little prompting; and suggested that, since they were geographically scattered, this would be a good place for airing first thoughts and questions before the seminar.
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MA seminar postings - alternatives to the formal 'presentation'. |
Interactive reading: there are numerous online texts for Edith Wharton. Some of these, obviously, were useful for otherwise hard-to-find materials (e.g. her war-poetry), but I experimented with ways of encouraging students to try different kinds of close-reading through 'interacting' with texts - turning virtual text into a quasi-physical medium.
I linked our site to what was then 'www.concordance.com' for some refined searches. But also suggested downloading texts into Word. Word - always available - offers all kinds of facilities for deleting, scrambling, cutting, pasting, commenting, underlining and highlighting text, not to mention 'style and grammar' checks, searching, editing and 'replacing'. These are old techniques, which I have used in the past with print, paper, paste, pen and scissors. But whether in cheap 'old', or expensive 'new' media, all these ways of defamiliarising the text can jolt response and stimulate fresh attention, to bring out new aspects of even the most well-worn works. Students could swap versions by email, or post them into duo (as in sample extracts here), and became interested in their colleagues' developing lines of interest.
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Students said they had gained confidence through this licence to 'play'
with texts, and enjoyed seeing each others' thinking in process.
Conclusion
General
Trying to rouse student enthusiasm, in our first 'phase' with duo, I realised that I was tending to reinforce 'efferent' approaches, highlighting all the resource-features-notes, quizzes, pictures, on-line articles, essay advice, FAQs, library links, and so on, which promise instant pay-off.
Since then, I have also been trying to keep in view the more interactive models that I generally hope for in my 'live' classes. Here, I have outlined a few of my initial efforts to sustain and develop teaching principles and methods initiated in my lower-tech classes - whether building up a positive group culture, or offering students ways of working closely with texts, on-line as they do in seminars.
Although I would like to have produced more elaborate (and showy) online resources, I have found even the simplest features can be useful - most of all, as an extension of live teaching, when students work on duo, but turn their individual readings back into the dialogue of our groups.
A personal note
Although I would, in any case, have tried to develop the VLE in my own modules, framing 'duologue' as a departmental project has made a tremendous difference to my own work, extending my usual 'English' research, writing and teaching-practices into very different areas. The impact on my time has not been neglible - the hours spent on writing this report, for example, could have gone into creating more duo resources (not to mention RAE-rateable research); but this has been more than outweighed by everything the experience has brought: working with students and colleagues, old and new, in different ways, discussing teaching and learning across disciplines, and finding ways of dissolving the (sometimes isolating) walls of the individual classroom. All this has been energising, enriching and fun. It has also led me on to fresh projects (virtual and actual), and, these, I hope, will help to keep the links and the windows open.
Pam Knights
Department of English Studies,
University of Durham, U.K.
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