COETAIL--Flash Fiction and Student-created "Textbooks"
A post toward obtaining my Certificate in Educational Technology and Information Literacy (COETAIL)
In the recent COETAIL class, one question asked of participants was, "Can we have our students find/analyze/create up-to-the minute textbooks for our classes? How would this change the dynamic of the classroom?"
Courses in the arts, including creative writing, have long tended to be fairly student-centered. I recall a version of this approach pre-Internet at NYU's Creative Writing Program in a Craft of Fiction course in which the professor asked students to create the syllabus list of contemporary novels to be read that semester and to take turns leading the discussions in teams each week. There was no set list of texts. There was no textbook. Students determined the content and direction and challenge level of the course with guidance from the professor.
I'd love teach a course in which students create "textbooks" for a literature class or creative writing class--this could work for various age and ability levels, for different genres, online or face to face. I can envision projects, units or entire terms. Mulling this over, I came up with this example of a Flash Fiction lit/creative writing class:
For this course in flash fiction students would start by searching for information on the genre, defining the genre, its history, characteristics, and trends, and searching for flash fiction stories online, as well as links to print anthologies of flash fiction or literary journals that regularly feature flash stories. The information and resources would be shared among classmembers and with the public via social media tools. Next, the course would have students selecting a set number of flash stories to read from the resources, then sharing and commenting on the stories they selected, as well as commenting on stories selected by classmates. After that, students would create flash stories of their own, gathering feedback on drafts, revising and editing. Finally, the class collection of stories would be disseminated to the public as a group publication, performance of readings, blog posts, podcasts, audio anthology (such as a school version of Grub Street's The Drum ), video readings, or other format.
So where's the textbook in all this? A resulting student-created textbook chapter? A final ebook with the resources, comments and class-created flash stories? Or is a "textbook" really needed at all?
In March an EdCampColumbus a conference session was titled Textbooks are Dead, People: The Relevance of Student Created Ebooks in the Common Core (here is the Storify of tweets on the session with some interesting links). And I like Shawn McCusker's textbook project, described in The Textbook is Dead, Long Live the Textbook! What 1:1 is doing to Traditional Classroom Resources.
One reason for having a textbook is convenience, to save teachers and students from busywork and from having to reinvent the wheel each year, so perhaps my flash fiction project or course would be begun by one student group and further built on in a following semester or year by other student groups. Perhaps students would be creating a textbook chapter. Or perhaps, we are simply moving toward crowd-sourced "textbooks." Or perhaps we should just shift our focus to resources and information.
In the recent COETAIL class, one question asked of participants was, "Can we have our students find/analyze/create up-to-the minute textbooks for our classes? How would this change the dynamic of the classroom?"
Courses in the arts, including creative writing, have long tended to be fairly student-centered. I recall a version of this approach pre-Internet at NYU's Creative Writing Program in a Craft of Fiction course in which the professor asked students to create the syllabus list of contemporary novels to be read that semester and to take turns leading the discussions in teams each week. There was no set list of texts. There was no textbook. Students determined the content and direction and challenge level of the course with guidance from the professor.
I'd love teach a course in which students create "textbooks" for a literature class or creative writing class--this could work for various age and ability levels, for different genres, online or face to face. I can envision projects, units or entire terms. Mulling this over, I came up with this example of a Flash Fiction lit/creative writing class:
For this course in flash fiction students would start by searching for information on the genre, defining the genre, its history, characteristics, and trends, and searching for flash fiction stories online, as well as links to print anthologies of flash fiction or literary journals that regularly feature flash stories. The information and resources would be shared among classmembers and with the public via social media tools. Next, the course would have students selecting a set number of flash stories to read from the resources, then sharing and commenting on the stories they selected, as well as commenting on stories selected by classmates. After that, students would create flash stories of their own, gathering feedback on drafts, revising and editing. Finally, the class collection of stories would be disseminated to the public as a group publication, performance of readings, blog posts, podcasts, audio anthology (such as a school version of Grub Street's The Drum ), video readings, or other format.
So where's the textbook in all this? A resulting student-created textbook chapter? A final ebook with the resources, comments and class-created flash stories? Or is a "textbook" really needed at all?
In March an EdCampColumbus a conference session was titled Textbooks are Dead, People: The Relevance of Student Created Ebooks in the Common Core (here is the Storify of tweets on the session with some interesting links). And I like Shawn McCusker's textbook project, described in The Textbook is Dead, Long Live the Textbook! What 1:1 is doing to Traditional Classroom Resources.
One reason for having a textbook is convenience, to save teachers and students from busywork and from having to reinvent the wheel each year, so perhaps my flash fiction project or course would be begun by one student group and further built on in a following semester or year by other student groups. Perhaps students would be creating a textbook chapter. Or perhaps, we are simply moving toward crowd-sourced "textbooks." Or perhaps we should just shift our focus to resources and information.
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