Just FYI, if you want to keep up to date with and get notifications about all that’s happening on the LitHub site, you need to hit the Follow Site button. You’ll find the Follow Site button in the bottom right of your browser (do you see it?).
Thanks to everyone who has reached out with ideas and with requests to join the private groups for individual courses.
Cheers!
Gavin
Hello!
As the Fall semester is now upon us, I wanted to send quick welcome back to one and all. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Gavin Hollis and I am subbing in for Jeff Allred this academic year as Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Part of my duties involve maintaining and updating this site, LitHub@Hunter. LitHub@Hunter is a site for faculty in the Hunter English department and a hub (as the name implies) for instructors of a range of multi-section courses. Instructors of those courses–at present, ENGL 252, 280, 285, 304, 306, 307, 320–have private “groups” devoted to their particular courses. Those groups have listserv functionality to allow discussion targeted to those courses, as well as repositories of syllabi and other helpful documents for instructors of those courses.
If you’re not a member of a group whose course you teach, contact me ([email protected]), and I’ll add you.
Part of my duties also involves facilitating meetings across the academic year designed for instructors to come together and discuss (and sometimes disagree on!) matters to do with pedagogy and our curriculum at Hunter. Look for announcements in the coming months. Of course, if you have suggestions for topics and areas of need, please reach out to me.
And finally, part of my role involves being there for my colleagues who are teaching in the undergraduate program should they need someone to talk to informally about issues they may be having in their courses (whether they be curriculum-based or otherwise). I have been teaching at Hunter for sixteen years, observed a great number of teachers, and been heavily involved in the design of our curriculum, and I am happy to put that experience to good use! You are welcome to reach out to me with questions or concerns.
Enjoy looking through the LitHub@Hunter site, and have a wonderful beginning to the academic year.
Cheers!
Gavin
Before you slip into summer mode, an offer and a request:
There was also a discussion of AI in the classroom, featuring Jack Keningsberg, but I failed to record/summarize it: apologies.
Friends, it’s grading time. I have no special wisdom to share, though my friend claims it takes her three Tiny Desks per essay she must grade. Whatever works.
I do have something practical to share, however. I can never remember which grades are appropriate for which situations in the Hunter schema. If, like me, you don’t know a WU from an F from an INC, look no further.
Oh, and if visuals are more your thing, here’s Paul Klee’s “Ad Parnassum”: something about all those tiny dots adding up to something meaningful tends to hit in this season:
Last Wednesday, we had a fascinating discussion with Marlene Hennessey about her penchant for getting students out of the building and into local cultural institutions. You can hear about this from the source below, but a couple of quick impressions stand out:
There’s a lot more to say, but I’ll kick back and let Marlene say it better! Thanks for a stimulating presentation, Marlene, and thanks to all who participated.
Just a quick PSA that course evaluation season is upon us. Be sure to share the following with your students if you haven’t:
Smartphone: www.hunter.cuny.edu/mobilete
Computer: www.hunter.cuny.edu/te
As I’m sure you know, online course evaluations have become a very problematic instrument for self-evaluation and especially Department- or College-level evaluation due to the extremely low response rates.
I give students special encouragement to give qualitative feedback rather than just the “number scale” questions and do indeed learn from those comments.
When I’m on my game, I also share my own instrument, usually a simple Google Form-based questionnaire. This term, since I’ve been running an experiment with “contract grading,” I combined some “how did you perform in the course” questions with some “how did I perform in the course” questions with some “what did you think about this whole ‘contract grading’ thing” questions. Here it is, and of course feel free to copy/adapt.
As I mentioned in this term’s first workshop on “ungrading” and alternative modes of assessment, I’m rolling out a “contract grading” system in my “Intro to Theory” course this term. I’m mostly pleased with the approach so far, and I wanted to share my experience of the midterm, while I’m in the midst of assessing students’ work (read: procrastinating).
I kept the same basic shape of the old midterm: I used to give them a take-home exam, giving them 48-72 hours to provide answers to 5-6 short answer questions that need a short paragraph to respond, plus an essay of several paragraphs on a more synthetic question. I would estimate that it would take a well-prepared student two hours, though many students report taking much longer.
Generative AI slaughtered my exam, with an assist from the long, poop-encrusted tail of superficial videos on theoretical topics on TikTok, YouTube, and the like. So I dropped some blue books on students, cut out the essay (which kind of hurts me), and gave them a more robust selection of short answers, since I think those do the best job of demonstrating who has attended and participated faithfully in class: out of 18 questions to choose from, B contracts were responsible for 7 answers in 75 minutes, and A contracts for 9.
The wrinkle I wanted to share was a last-minute change inspired by one of my ninth-grade son’s teachers. For his midterm, the teacher permitted students to bring a single page of notes of any kind, and that’s it. I have a dim view of the way this kind of testing prioritizes speed on the one hand and the capacity to fill a cache of memory quickly and then (presumably) dump it after the assessment is over on the other. But I thought the one-page restriction might give students a helpful aid to memory, pushing them to consolidate their learning in advance and avoiding the potential anxiety that might attach to the paper shuffle of the open book-open note exam or the panic of rolling into a demanding exam with nothing.
The early returns are good. I’m responding more or less the way I would with a graded exam, with qualitative comments sprinkled in. Instead of numbers and calculations, however, I’m giving a simple “satisfactory,” or a + or – for exams that, on the whole, show extra pizazz or significant problems clearing the bar. One exam thus far seems to constitute a “breach of contract,” and I’ll have to work that out with the student in conference.
The mini-revelation has been the value of the one page of notes. I required them to turn the notes in, partly to police whether they’d plugged the answers into a chat interface to copy and partly out of curiosity. It’s a fascinating window into parts of their process that I wouldn’t ordinarily see or think about, including:
Given that recopying and editing notes demonstrably aids in committing them to memory and/or understanding the material they cover on a deeper level, I wonder whether the imperative to create the single page and share it with me doesn’t sneakily nudge them towards better preparation. I think I’ll try it again. Hat tip to the formidable Steven Mazie at Bard Early College High School!
We had a lively discussion at the workshop on “Research Across the Curriculum” yesterday. I simply forgot to record it, so apologies, but I will do my best to capture some of what we discussed and, especially, the assignments and resources that were shared and discussed. Thanks to all who participated and especially to Jennifer. Enter the TL;DR zone if you dare…
The topic, broadly speaking, was how we teach research and writing skills, and how that pedagogy shifts as we move across the spectrum from rudimentary college-level writing in 120 to the capstone or honors projects at the 400 level. How might we be more mindful in our teaching about what base of knowledge or level of experience students bring to a given course, what constitutes an appropriate level of challenge that puts them in what Vgotsky calls the “zone of proximal development,” and how our work with them will prepare them for the next developmental step in our curriculum?
Jennifer Newman, subject librarian for English and the Humanities, has extensive experience with these issues, including:
She emphasized that teaching research skills is not an abstract, dry exercise in the selection of databases, the manipulation of their interfaces, and the discovery of new bibliographic tools. Increasingly, she pointed out, students already know this stuff, and they find it easy to master.
Instead, she recommended that we all, humanists and librarians alike, think about information literacy more broadly, helping students to understand that research embeds them in networks of critical discourse and requires them to gradually develop a sense of what to read, how to read it, and, most important, how to enter the “critical conversations” afoot in areas of their interest.
One compelling insight she shared relates to the ease and ubiquity of information that today’s students can access. This endless extensivity of reading material has its benefits, obviously, but Jennifer pointed out the problem of what scholars call “container collapse” in information ecosystems in which everything is online. Whereas in print culture, a tabloid, a slick magazine, an academic journal, a trade paperback, and a monograph look different and send a wide range of cues through their form factor before we even read them, much of the information our students seek comes in very similar “containers” in ways that make it hard for them to differentiate between, say, “scholarly” and “non-scholarly” sources, or even between minimally fact-checked journalism and the fever dreams of Infowars.
The rest of her presentation shared a rich trove of examples of her own strategies, often devised with or for other faculty members, including myself and Donna Paparella. These often involve projects on a much more modest scale than the traditional research paper, such as:
What binds these exercises is a focus on the sophisticated skills students tend to lack in the “messy middle” of our curriculum: what characteristics define literary critical writing, how to locate and decode arguments, how to sort out citations into different schools of thought, how to locate a coherent “conversation” among scholars that one might enter, et al.
For a deeper dive, including loads of links, slides are here.
I also shared a single example of putting this principle into practice, taken from my 252 course. There, the final project is an “exploded” research paper (in the engineer’s sense of an “exploded diagram”). Each stage of the process, from devising a question, to visiting the library and consulting with Jennifer, to sharing simple lists of citations and then annotated bibliographies on the blog with peers, to meeting in pairs with me to course-correct, come with bite-sized, manageable assignments and timely, substantive feedback. The final “deliverable” is somewhat scandalous: a deliberately unfinished 12-page essay, of which students only write the first four paragraphs, paragraphs that must include a thesis, a brief lit review, and a “signpost” alerting the reader to what’s ahead. Students submit this truncated essay along with a questionnaire that requires them to engage in “metacognitive” reflection on their research process. As I said in the workshop, this approach is somewhat artificial and may not reflect a given student’s most efficient process—many of us start in the middle of our arguments and circle back to the beginnings later in the writing process, for example—but it does help students focus on the distinctive pieces a mature essay should have, and it helps them start to figure out how to scale up the complexity of their arguments, engaging in a critical conversation rather than “shoehorning” in random moments in X number of required citations to shore up a predetermined conclusion based on the student’s rudimentary close reading (sound familiar? I thought so).
I won’t try to sum up the many stimulating comments shared by colleagues, other than to share the fantastic prompt Donna Paparella mentioned. It’s exemplary, to me, for its steering students into the “zone of proximal development” for 220ers, introducing historicist methodology in its simplest form, and “roughing in” the search process by sharing a manageable range of databases and other resources to choose from rather than having students fling out keywords into OneSearch or Google, like Whitman’s “noiseless, patient spider.”
Q: What is the purpose of this course?
A: English 285 is an introduction to creative writing. Accordingly, it combines further development of the close reading skills across genres cultivated in ENGL 220 with development of creative writing skills through weekly reading and writing assignments in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Students will also learn how to engage in verbal workshop critiques of classmates’ work that draw on critical reading skills developed through discussion of literary selections. In addition to critiquing the work of peers, students will explore approaches to revision by a process of revisiting their own drafts. Finally, students will complete a final project consisting of one piece in each genre and a written reflection on the writing process.
Q: What are the differences between English 285 and other creative writing courses in the major?
A: English 285 serves a crucial role as a gateway. All creative writing concentrators must earn a "B" or better in the course in order to continue in the concentration. They must also gain enough experience with the three genres featured in the concentration to succeed in future workshops with more intensive focus and heavier workload in a single genre.
Q: What does a good syllabus look like in this course?
A: You'll learn a lot, if messily and inductively, from looking at the syllabi on the 285 instructors’ group page on the CUNY Academic Commons. Here are some useful first principles:
Q: How do you balance the close reading of "model" texts by published authors and the workshops with student work?
A: Most instructors cluster the "reading" sessions at the beginning and the "workshop" sessions at the end, with a rough 50/50 split. Most also move through the genres serially in each half of the course (e.g., poetry, then fiction, then creative nonfiction, both for the readings and for the workshops). It is essential to cover all three genres and to give each equal weight. Whatever your preferences or comfort level, it ill serves students to stint their exposure to one or more of the major genres they may encounter in higher-level courses.
Q: What's the best way to assess learning in this course?
A: Approaches vary greatly, so peruse the many sample syllabi in the Commons Group under FILES. But a few overarching principles are common to successful syllabi:
Q: What resources do I have access to as an instructor?
A: Please visit the 285 instructors’ group page on the CUNY Academic Commons, where you will find sample syllabi, course units, and so on. I encourage you to post your own helpful documents to this page, and contact me if you have problems joining or using the group. ACERT, Hunter’s center for teaching and learning, is a lively hub linking instructors, librarians, ed tech specialists, etc.: their site has a wealth of teaching resources, and they host scores of events on pedagogy each year.
Q: What are my options in terms of “learning management systems” (LMS)? Do I have to use BlackBoard or Brightspace?!
A: You are free to use whatever you’re comfortable with. By default, all courses get Bb shells (or Brightspace from AY 2024-5), which you are free to customize/use. But there are many alternatives, including free/open options based on the WordPress blogging platform. Instructors can now host course materials on CUNY Academic Commons sites like this one: there are hundreds of sites to browse there for inspiration. Get started here if you're interested.
