My First Activity

I like the idea Bean presents in the beginning of the chapter teacher as facilitator/coach--it speaks to my own orientation, as one of my major influences is Paulo Freire (_Pedagogy of the Oppressed_), who Dr. Strickland discussed in class a couple of weeks ago. Borrowing from another blog post for another class, I'll say here that Freire possessed a strong aversion to the student-teacher dichotomy of traditional pedagogy. He sought to democratize the classroom, to *enact* democracy as a pedagogical tool in part by minimizing the authority role of the teacher. One simple means to this end, in my opinion, is the acknowledgment that a teacher--in the traditional sense--can also be a student in their own classroom, learning from their students as much as their students learn from them. Students can take on teacher roles within the classroom, just as Bean discusses in terms of providing means for active thinking and learning. For example, Strategy 2 from Chapter 7--having students take on "a teacher's role" in order to help them “escape the student-to-examiner role” that can be “debilitating” (123)--is one example of operationalizing this approach.

With that in mind, one activity that I might use to teach my first formal writing assignment could involve having them write to a hypothetical “new learner” about the discussion on linguistics and standard language that I plan to include early in the semester or do a summary of the discussion—something that helps them synthesize what’s covered. The material is intended to help them understand what standard language is and how it emerges. One question, then, is who determines it (English, for example, has no academy—despite several attempts to create one—as Spanish and French do). It’s arbitrary(following Saussure’s discussion) and usually historically-determined, based on issues of power, (Standard British English—and by extension Standard American English—is based on one of the five dialects that have historically existed in England, the Southeast dialect, because it was the one spoken in London and the surrounding region and so it was what was spoken by the merchant class and government officials—those in positions of economic and governmental power). A standard language can also only be an approximation (no one speaks a standard language, for example). I want to decenter prescriptivist grammar in order to then show that even though it’s an arbitrary, cultural construct, the value in being able to “perform” it is quite real (doing so leads to advancement in education, one’s career, etc.). The idea is to open up the discussion and find an intersection for those who have strong verbal and writing skills already--and/or those who might have strong prescriptivist views on language use--and those who don’t have strong skills in these areas and/or those who necessarily see the value of learning how to write in a way that approximates the standard. If I can convey this view, I believe it’ll set the tone for productive facilitations of writing skills throughout the semester and so can only help to improve the outcomes of the formal writing assignments.