Hugh Nicoll's Weblog » teaching

Writing Across the Curriculum

Hugh Nicoll — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:00:59 +0000

The end of the term provokes reflection. What have I done well with my classes? Where did I go wrong? In what ways do I need to change my approach to the teaching of writing, design of assignments, construction of more useful learning environments for my students? Toward those ends, I began to take a look at resources available online, and am very pleased to see what’s happened at The WAC Clearinghouse.

The site now hosts several online journals, most usefully, Across the Disciplines, and a collection of digitized books discussing the teaching of writing, writing across the curriculum pedagogies, and reference guides to rhetoric and composition studies.

In addressing the needs of my students here in Miyazaki, I need to find a similar resource in Japanese addressing academic skills and the development of expertise as a writer in the L1.

Seminar Presentations

Hugh Nicoll — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 07:46:17 +0000

My American Studies seminar students finished their graduation thesis presentations yesterday. I am very proud of what they achieved. Their topics included Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison – Sula and Beloved, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Langston Hughes – The Ways of White Folks and Not Without Laughter, Truman Capote’s life and works, Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Ann Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Amateur Marriage, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

musings on language

Hugh Nicoll — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 07:51:48 +0000

Reading Jerome McGann on Clark Coolidge : wandering Copenhagen, journeying to Manchester via Frankfurt…

The twinned experiences of reading and thinking about poetry and poetics within the multilingual flow of heard languages in travel has got me thinking about language, language use, and language learning and teaching in new ways. It also has me wondering about the difficulty of learning and teaching other (“foreign”) languages — and wondering why we seem so insistent as students and teachers about this notion of difficulty. All around me, inside me too, the ubiquity of code-switching in the multilingual flow is primary. Inner life, in own words, English and Japanese. Copenhagen’ dominant background is Danish, bilingual (Danish/English) signage, and code-switching on demand, with English loan words sprinkled through everyone’s speech no matter their origins, mother tongue(s), and multi-lingual competencies. This seems — at least in over-heard casual conversation and public interactions — the same for everyone: Americans to British to Danes to Germans and Swedes, Africans, Thai, Turkish, …. all. In global business and travel this seems merely necessary and normal. We need to communicate with each other for instrumental purposes and so without worrying about the finer points of how to develop our language learning strategies, reading skills, improve our vocabulary learning techniques, etc. we just get on with language life, step by everyday step.

If a finer (more discriminatory) understanding of difficulty in language/language use is to be encountered and embraced, won’t this happen in the domains of the arts and sciences? For example, say, in poetics, philosophy, or computer programming? If there is a point to my meditation it is not to attack the anxieties and concerns of language learners and teachers, but to seek a better understanding of our real responsibilities through a more rigorous analysis of how we handicap ourselves in our educational institutions.

Note: McGann, Jerome. The Point Is To Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present, University of Alabama Press, 2007.

critical moments in academic writing

Hugh Nicoll — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 01:43:59 +0000

Pennycooks’ “Critical moments in a TESOL praxicum” is fascinating on several levels:
1. It takes one episode in the life of a teacher trainer, and seeks within the whole of that experience, including the train journey from Sydney to an outlying Asian majority suburb, as its primary subject.
2. The essay is framed by the train journey, an obvious though nonetheless effective analog for teacher development at all levels. It is also an example of the “narrativized, quasi-ethnography” (343), which can be a refreshing change from the standard applied linguistics fare. Of interest here too is the fact that “experimental” or “creative” academic texts are not very new at all; the topic has been explored by post-modern theorists and applied linguists for decades. And yet this sort of text still seems new against the sere background of realist, empiricist, positivist texts. (No wonder so many smart people stay as far away from the academy as they can!)
3. It seeks, particularly in the final “reflections” section, to come to terms not only with the search for “critical moments” in which awareness of a pedagogical issue may be raised, but also with the simultaneous awareness that the process is inevitably messy, unfinished, and that all we can do as teachers is to sieze upon epiphanic moments, meditate on them perhaps in the same way that we can, by re-reading, come to love a poem that we may never fully understand, and keep searching.
4. It furthermore expresses a certain wistfulness for the hands on, at-the-chalkface, in the trenches metaphors through which teachers construct their identities and establish pathways of communication with their students. This suggests a subtle resignation or fatique, perhaps, with the distance from the ordinary classroom that having achieved academic sucess has created.
Citation: A. Pennycook, “Critical moments in a TESOL praxicum in B. Norton and K. Toohey (eds.)Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (2005), Cambridge UP.