Delays and teaching methods
I'm a day late on a lot of things because of the joys of asthma. I managed to do all but three of the things I meant to do yesterday, however. Two of the three things were rather hefty and needed more breath than I had, and the third will happen in a few minutes and will result in a second post for the day. Your second guest post for the week, by Paul Collins, was delayed. For which I am sorry.
I'm almost back to normal today, though still resting a lot and still taking much medication and monitoring things. I shall catch up on one of my big things today, then, and the other sometime during the week. The second, you see, was my testing of my new teaching notion.
The more I think about my concept, the more will serve the dual purpose of opening better world-building up to people from different learning backgrounds and teaching people how to assess the depth of influence their own assumptions have on the worlds they want to write about. This will give them much more control over their work, as well as helping them address basic world-building in a more credible fashion.
If this works, then, it can be adapted to teach diversity in fiction and could work rather nicely with a series of readings to help individual writers understand how they handle the status quo and how they feed the unquestioned into their own reading and writing. It could also be used as a somewhat different approach to literary analysis, I think, because of the way it looks at crucial assumptions the writer makes in world-building: it would be easy enough to turn it on its head and say "If this is what writers do, how does it affect what you do when you read those writings and assess them?" This turn about was brought to you by Sean Wright, whose regular assessment of how many women writers he reads made him aware that he still thinks he reads more than he actually does. I've been watching his progress with great interest. If literature students logged their private reading while they studied, then I have two of the hard-to-achieve aspects for a one year course on diversity and gender in literature.
The question is really how confrontational this is for the students and how far the method goes in actually bringing these understandings to life. So many grand theories dissolve into "That was nice. Now let's return to normal." I handled a lot of this when I was in the Karpin Secretariat and later when I taught leadership and cross-cultural understanding to various government departments (yep, my evil past emerges again today). I learned on the job that it's not enough to have brilliant theory straight from the experts - there has to be stuff for the student to latch onto and own for each major component of the lesson.
This is the nuts and bolts of what I've been doing with my idea. I think I have those bridges into the theory and I think they'll do the trick on all the levels I need to address.
And now you know what I do with my spare time, I'd better get back to work.
I'm almost back to normal today, though still resting a lot and still taking much medication and monitoring things. I shall catch up on one of my big things today, then, and the other sometime during the week. The second, you see, was my testing of my new teaching notion.
The more I think about my concept, the more will serve the dual purpose of opening better world-building up to people from different learning backgrounds and teaching people how to assess the depth of influence their own assumptions have on the worlds they want to write about. This will give them much more control over their work, as well as helping them address basic world-building in a more credible fashion.
If this works, then, it can be adapted to teach diversity in fiction and could work rather nicely with a series of readings to help individual writers understand how they handle the status quo and how they feed the unquestioned into their own reading and writing. It could also be used as a somewhat different approach to literary analysis, I think, because of the way it looks at crucial assumptions the writer makes in world-building: it would be easy enough to turn it on its head and say "If this is what writers do, how does it affect what you do when you read those writings and assess them?" This turn about was brought to you by Sean Wright, whose regular assessment of how many women writers he reads made him aware that he still thinks he reads more than he actually does. I've been watching his progress with great interest. If literature students logged their private reading while they studied, then I have two of the hard-to-achieve aspects for a one year course on diversity and gender in literature.
The question is really how confrontational this is for the students and how far the method goes in actually bringing these understandings to life. So many grand theories dissolve into "That was nice. Now let's return to normal." I handled a lot of this when I was in the Karpin Secretariat and later when I taught leadership and cross-cultural understanding to various government departments (yep, my evil past emerges again today). I learned on the job that it's not enough to have brilliant theory straight from the experts - there has to be stuff for the student to latch onto and own for each major component of the lesson.
This is the nuts and bolts of what I've been doing with my idea. I think I have those bridges into the theory and I think they'll do the trick on all the levels I need to address.
And now you know what I do with my spare time, I'd better get back to work.
No comments have been added yet.
