Charles Dickens bored the crap out of me in high school. I missed a section of reading one night, and even though I knew our English teacher wouldn’t allow me to retake her reading quiz, I went to class the next day in fine spirits. Looking down at five open response questions I couldn’t answer, I began to write.
I made predictions for the upcoming chapters. I connected scenarios in the book to global events. At the top of the page next to my name, I scribbled a short, “Sorry I missed the reading! Here are some thoughts.”
When I got back my quiz the next morning, I– and everyone who sat close to me– saw it: a big, red ‘F,’ underlined once, circled twice.
I expected to fail the quiz. I didn’t answer the questions correctly, and I admitted to shirking the reading. But it wasn’t the intense emphasis on my bad grade that really hurt me, rather, it was the note my teacher left below it.
“Disrespectful. Failure to participate again = detention.”
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Disrespectful?! I will never forget that. To sit there for thirty minutes and restrain myself from thinking about the text that the rest of my class was answering quiz questions on, simply because I missed my window to read the chapters assigned for the day? That, to me, in that sweaty tenth-grade classroom, epitomized the death of my class participation that year. I never felt enthusiastic walking into that classroom again.
Okay, this is totally an aggressive example. But it’s not unlike the situation Elizabeth Brewer describes at the start of her chapter, “Involving and Evolving: Student Feedback and Classroom Participation.” In this chapter, Brewer furthers Genevieve Critel’s suggestion that instructors should include their students in conversations about participation. However, she points out problems with Critel’s idea of “universal design,” and instead suggests new ways for us to understand students as the experts of their own learning styles. To do this, Brewer interrogates what prompts her students to participate, how they are able to demonstrate their participation, and why we must remember there are places external to our classroom in which our students participate, as well.
UNIVERSAL DESIGN
Brewer agrees with Critel that students need to be at the center of the conversations that we as instructors have about participation. However, according to Brewer, giving students the opportunity to participate in the classroom guidelines for participation does not necessarily make the design “universal.”
Of course, Critel’s intentions are noble in proposing a universal design policy. But Brewer takes issue with the definition that Critel seems to be working with, which she outlines in her ‘Defining Universal Design’ section. Brewer writes,
“So what is universal design if it isn’t universal? And is it possible to mobilize this concept and its foundations to create learner-centered participation expectations, as Critel suggests? The Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University characterizes universal design as the “design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.””
Brewer takes issue particularly with the idea that this definition allows no wiggle room for “adaptation or specialized design.” As Critel emphasizes, a universal classroom framework should ideally allow students with different needs, abilities, and experiences to design, redesign, and “evolve” the classroom’s participation structure. So, a constantly changing, dynamic framework best materializes Critel’s ideal participation space, according to Brewer.
According to Brewer’s chapter in The Rhetoric of Participation, the following three tips are key to inviting students to join you in the design and redesign of their participatory space:
(1) WHAT?
First, Brewer asks her own students questions about the content of her course in order to get a sense of “what” works for them, and what the course’s problem areas are. She uses a practice common in educational development of putting her students in small groups and asking them to “diagnose” the course, prompting them with questions such as:
- What about this course and instructor is making it easier for you to learn?
- What is making it more difficult for you to learn?
- What are specific suggestions you have for improvement?
From these questions, Brewer learned about her class’s preferences. For example, she learned that they prefer to read scholarly articles and reflect on them individually, and then come together in a large group, in a circle, to discuss. But, when it came to reading and dissecting chunks of their class textbook, they preferred to take collective “class notes” that were projected on the board as they read.
I found this so interesting because it’s not a necessarily profound idea, but it encourages so much exploration. Especially teaching ENL 265, writing instructors have many options of writing guides and useful examples to incorporate into their curriculum. As a student, I prefer to highlight and annotate the margins of long scholarly articles, and add to these later during class discussion. But when it comes to reading through short articles on the Nielsen Norman Group website for our usability class. I’d much rather design a page of notes I’m copying into a Google document. It’s been a long time since ya’ girl has been an undergraduate student, but I definitely had different preferences for taking notes on different things, with different documents, in every class!
(2) HOW?
Next, Brewer shifts the questions she is asking her students, from “what” questions to “how” questions. By asking her students “what,” Brewer was able to identify areas within the course content that she might change to suit her students’ learning needs. Introducing “how” allowed Brewer’s students to evaluate how they best learn in the class.
Again though, Brewer emphasizes the importance of flexibility when attempting to invite students to design the course participation requirement. Initially, her students identified discussion boards as a method that they all liked to help them to better understand class concepts. So, in responding to this feedback, Brewer promptly made these available…
… only for nobody to use them!
How often does this happen to us? Here are a few different instruction methods I’ve used at different points through the semester, that have sputtered out and become obsolete; useless in terms of helping my students:
- Discussion board attendance check-ins
- Ticket-to-leave questions
- Interactive PowerPoint lectures
- Turn & talk
But, like Brewer, I obviously returned to the drawing board, and I continued to loop my students into the discussion around making participation work for them. Brewer mentions that “if [she] had not asked students, [she] may have opted for Twitter as an alternative participation mode, thinking this option would increase opportunities for student interaction,” but continuously allowing her students to evaluate how they are most likely to learn has helped the most. Personally, I keep coming to class with these brilliant plans to engage my own students, and that’s great… but as I reflect, I wonder, what might my students be able to teach me about how they best engage with our class concepts?
(3) WHY?
Finally, Brewer investigates spaces where we are evaluating our students; participation outside of the classroom. Her last topic of consideration for enacting a universal design for a participation requirement begs the question, why in the world do we neglect office hours in our treatment of classroom participation?!
We (I) may (definitely) go into our own office hours feeling significantly more relaxed than we do our ordinary days of teaching. It feels a little less formal, right? You’re working with one student, or a small group, and you can afford to be a little more candid and conversational when you’re one-on-one with a student. Maybe it’s just me who feels this way, but Brewer reminds us that “encounters outside the classroom can be seemingly higher stakes performances of knowledge for some students,” and that our students likely nervously anticipate meeting with us!
When we’re evaluating how our students feel about their own participation, Brewer’s last move in her argument about how to think about a universal participation requirement design is to remind us that office hours count, too. We should be questioning what students want to use their time in office hours for, of course, and again, how they best engage with the material.