Final Post

For your final blog post, please articulate what you learned, how you plan to apply that learning, and what you plan to do to continue to study the subject you've gleaned on in this course.

Before I discuss the most important thing I learned in this course, I just want to provide a bit of background about how I came to this field. (For us social constructionists it's all about context!) When I started teaching composition and professional writing four years ago, my prior teaching experience consisted of one year as a middle-school substitute (I learned a lot, believe me!) and one semester as a TA teaching "remedial" freshman composition. Those experiences were in 1985 and 1986, respectively, so to say that my teaching skills were "rusty" in 2003 is an understatement. (In between 1986 and 2003, I spent most of my time working as a technical writer and manager, and some of my time studying anthropology, but more about that later...) When I was hired as an adjunct instructor, I figured they would give me a syllabus, a lesson plan, and a textbook and expect me to follow them. Instead, what I got was a boilerplate syllabus (everything EXCEPT the course content!) and a two-hour workshop discussing the learning outcomes of the course. It was up to me to figure out how to do this! Talk about being thrown in the deep end! To make a long story not quite so long, I spent the next four years learning how to teach composition by trial-and-error, by drawing on my experiences as a student, writer, and manager, by reading composition journals in what little spare time I have, by observing and talking to colleagues, and by learning from my students. Based on the positive reviews I have received from students and colleagues, I must have done something right! However, I still have not been able to get past the feeling that I am "faking it." That somehow I am not really qualified to teach composition, despite having done so for four years and having almost 20 years experience as a professional writer to draw on.

Which brings us back to this course and what I got out of it. As I mentioned, I studied anthropology as a graduate student in the early 90s, focusing on the anthropology of education. So I am quite familiar with post-modernism, social construction, and many of the topics we talked about this semester. I also received an MS in Tech Comm, so writing pedagogy, at least from the student's perspective, is not completely foreign to me. And my experience as a writer and manager has given me a pretty good idea of what "good writing" is. If I were missing any of those experiences, I don't think I would have been able to teach composition at all. However, this course has provided the missing element, the one thing that I hope will enable me to enter the classroom next semester and not think that I am faking it (at least not as much!). What this course has done, aside from filling in gaps (some rather large) in my knowledge, is provide a scaffolding on which to hang all the knowledge I had previously gained in other contexts and have been struggling to organize. Now I know how post-modernism, cognitivism, and social construction have influenced composition, and I know the historical development of the field. Some of my classroom practices have been affirmed, while others are marks of what Fulkerson what call a mismatch between epistemology and practice. I now realize that I have been operating from a social constructionist standpoint, but have been relying too often on incompatible pedagogical techniques just because "they were in the textbook" or "that's how Dr. Soandso teaches." Now that I have a scaffolding on which to hang my old knowledge, supplemented by the new knowledge gained in this course, I will be able to more confidently engage in pedagogy that reflects the values I described in my teaching philosophy.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. Learning never stops. But now, as I continue to assimilate new knowledge from scholarship, research, colleagues, life experiences, and students, I will do so more confidently, knowing how the newly discovered fits in with the already known.

Regarding my interest in social construction that I have explored in this course, I have no doubt that it will continue to inform my pedagogy. While I have no immediate plans to continue researching composition theory at this time, what I have learned about social construction will serve as a strong foundation as I begin my dissertation research focusing on how the rhetoric of science, specifically with regard to global warming, is socially constructed.

One final note about this class: While the course content has been invaluable, I have learned just as much from the community of scholars (that's you guys!) joining me on this journey. The opportunity to be exposed to such diverse viewpoints from composition "insiders" and those from diverse but related fields has been terrific. I have enjoyed reading all of your blog posts and have enjoyed our MOO discussions even more. Thanks and enjoy what's left of your summers!