As GN shared her personal expepriences as a teacher I found myself remembering my many years of teaching before coming to Aditi. My story was the same in a way because before coming to Aditi I taught grad and post-grad at the Univ level and had no idea what year plans, unit plans and lesson plans were!!! Believe it or not/nutz!!! I also didn't know a lot of other things. Naturally:). Pedagogy , for instance, while not exactly a closed book to me , was something I knew about more by hearsay - listening to lectures etc. My way of picking things up has always been the trial and error method. Autodidact, some hiss at such. All it means is self-taught. Not officially trained. That's not always a plus point but sometimes it is.
Anyway, to come to my story, after starting to teach in Aditi I found that many of my students were unable to follow my classes because they found time given to them for discussions completely unstructured. This confused them.Another complaint was litt. is boring and this is not easy like we thought but English was. I found all this welcome feedback because it occurred to me that my method of "cognitive dissonance," a method I had been using without knowing its pedagogical name even before i came to Aditi was something I had to tone down for them.
It was a problem of context.
The text needed explication. They wanted to surround it with little notes they had made in the margins. Nuggets of wisdom I had said. They wanted a discussion where there were clear guidelines and a road map of questions with a well defined destination.
They wanted handouts they could post like slips in their notebooks.
Being thrown on their feet suddenly and told to walk was dampening. Despite the constant remarks I wrote in the margins of their written homework like "good" and" this is fine" and "quite ok"they spoke simultaneously of things being too difficult and not challenging enough.
I understand one thing . The context has to be clarified more so that/before the content can be ingested.
The World Literature Blog
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Saturday, July 30, 2005
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5 comments:
Dear Koshy,
That made for a very insightful and thought-provoking read!!!!!!......You come with a clauldron of experience!!!!....Believe in yourself and you will get there!!!(look who's talking;-))...See you on friday at PPSE.
So Koshy, what would you do to make the context of the content clearer?
But more importantly, what about the context of your teaching made it difficult for cognitive dissonance to work to stimulate the kids in your class to think? Was that the intention of your use of this pedagogy?
I do not quite understand what Mahesh means by the potential of acontextual learning. Maybe his blog will contain the explanation. Thither do I depart!
tara, thanks for your post. what i meant by lack of context is this, the students think in a vacuum regarding the subject whereas i think in context. to familiarize them with that context takes time, precious time, which takes away from the actual "syllabus" and in the effort to balance the two plus make context clear so content can be analysed and probably a kind of obfuscation takes place.
Yes Koshy,To be able to go to the student's level and make an impact in literature studies is quite a challenge.
Hi Koshy,
I have enjoyed reading these responses and the almost discussion-like quality to these exchanges, almost as much as I enjoyed reading your reflection!
Your response to Tara about the fact that you "think in context" while the kids don't is the "context" for your teaching , right? (The different connotations of the word context do make it a bit confusing!)
So by analysing the problem, and understanding how your students are likely to learn better, you have a better understanding of the circumstances (or "context") in which your teaching/learning must take place.
How have you modified your pedagogy now?
Cheers,
Shuchi
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