Teaching an English class

“Creation Care and the Common Good” began last week. It’s an English class for UCBC students who have completed the English curriculum. The purpose of the class is to help students “strengthen reading, writing, discourse, and critical thinking” within their disciplines. The course “looks at creation care and the common good from a Judeo-Christian perspective, and in the context of personal experience.” The class is intended to help students improve their English. It is also intended to provoke students’ thinking about the created world and the common good. If students wrestle with their assumptions, ideas, and beliefs about the created world and about the common good and leave the class with some new perspectives, questions, and ideas, then it will have succeeded.

The course objectives and outcomes are ambitious, for a class that meets 4 hours/week for 8 weeks. But there is considerable more focus in the course today then when I first began developing it back in April. And the course will look different next time, if there is a next time.

It’s good to be back in an English class. It’s been a long time. The teaching and facilitating I’ve been doing over the past several years has been in curriculum development, instruction, and assessment—professional development content for teachers here at UCBC. It was time to get back into the classroom, have my own experience as a teacher here at UCBC, and put my own advice and coaching into action.

There are 18 students in the class—good number. They are from the four faculties/disciplines here at UCBC: communications, economics, applied sciences, theology. There is a range of English ability among the students, and, most likely, a range of interest and academic ability. But that will be part of the fun (translate, challenge!).

Our first day focused on the syllabus—purpose, outcomes, evidence, assessment. Rather than talk through each section as a class, students read in pairs, helping each other understand and clarify. One of the questions was, “What do you mean ‘Judeo-Christian’?” This question was a reminder that my own assumptions, vocabulary, and perspectives will be challenged consistently during this time with students.

One of the assignments that the students have over the class is a set of 4 reflections, each based on a personal experience with the created world. Each reflection has two parts: (1) an experience, and (2) a written reflection. For the experience students are to sit alone and quietly in a natural setting to simply observe and experience that environment for 20 minutes. They are to be quiet—no cell phone, no music, no friends. Just sit and experience and observe. They may take notes or sketch, but not analyze or explain. For part 2, the written reflection, students are to take 30 minutes to write their reflections on that experience. They are to do that writing within 48 hours of the experience itself. Each of the 4 experiences is to have a specific focus: water, flora, fauna, night.

The assignment is intended to encourage students to see things from a different, new, or unfamiliar perspective. I’ve introduced the language of “lenses”—that we wear lenses to the world based on our personal experiences, culture, family. And this course is to challenge students to use different lenses to see the created world and consider what it means to serve the “common good.” Another purpose of the assignment is to provide content from which to address metacognitive practices—thinking about thinking. I suspect that students’ reflections will be of different types. I’m expecting some students to describe what they saw in factual terms, others to describe their thoughts during the experience, and others to write about what they did during the time. My hope is that there will be sufficient range of reflection types and foci to talk about metacognition and its role in facilitating our own learning.

We shall see…

By the way...a huge "thank you" to my sister, Ann Shaw. She's my instructional coach and researcher!