Classroom Activities: Affect, Pleasure, Activation

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Classroom ActivitiesAffect, Pleasure, Activation

• Susan Edmunds, Karen Hall, and Cristina Stasia

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Purpose of Our Panel

• Offer suggestions for stimulating different ways
  of learning in order to engage diverse learning
  styles

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The First Day

• Focus on the big picturemajor course themes,
  essential definitions, key methods
• Be interactiveits difficult to move a class
  from silence to discussion, from stasis to
  movement, so set an active, participatory tone on
  the first day

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First Day Opening Exercises

• Find a course theme in a piece of contemporary
  media
• Connecting course work to contemporary media
  culture and students everyday lives is an
  effective method for encouraging student
  involvement and investment in class discussions

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First Day Opening Exercises (contd)Strike the
Pose (demo)

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Opening Exercise For the First Day
Who listens to Interpol?

• Make connections between what students know and
  do in their daily lives and what their readings
  are encouraging them to explore
• As an opener to Stuart Halls Encoding/Decoding
  essay, ask students to write their favorite band,
  favorite store in the mall, last movie they saw
  in a theater and last book/magazine they read on
  an index card mix the cards and hand each
  student a card that is not their own ask
  students to find the student presented to them on
  the card--without speaking.
• Have them introduce their partner and identify
  what they decoded to reach that conclusion

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Opening Exercise cont.

• Have their partner explain any disparity--how
  they encoded their look with a different
  intention
• Briefly define encoding/decoding
• Assign Encoding/Decoding

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Opening Exercises Beyond the First Day
Vs.
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Opening Exercises Cont.

• Identify and apply key concepts in an article as
  a group before turning to a reading assignment
• To introduce an essay on film violence, have
  students list violent films on the board
• Ask them to identify what makes these films
  violent (hitting, explosions, victims, etc.)
• Ask students if the impact of violence is the
  same in all the films and list how it differs
  (ex Die Hard vs. Irreversible)

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Intro Exercise Cont.

• Have students identify why the violence
  differs.
• This will spark debate. Use the definitions
  of strong and weak violence from the article
  to ground the debate.

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Activities

• Turn board games into classroom games

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Successful Group Work in Class
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Working with Groups in Class

• Without direction, classroom groups typically
  digress into socializing
• Provide groups with clear objectives
• Include some form of group reportsstudents can
  make reports orally to the class, email their
  results to the class, add them to blackboard, or
  hand in written work to you depending on time
  restraints
• Feel free to return to results on subsequent days
  or move onevery loose end cant be tied up

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In Class Group Activities

• I dont understand
• Divide the class into groups
• Have each group identify a passage from the
  reading members had difficulty understanding
• Have groups exchange passages with each other
• Once groups discuss the passage they have been
  given, they report to the class
• General discussion can then follow until the
  passage is adequately interpreted

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In Class Group Activities, contd

• Create a worksheet with questions
• Distribute a worksheet to all students
• Divide the class into groups
• Have students work cooperatively to complete the
  worksheet

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Group Work Outside the Classroom

• Any worksheet that can be done in class can be
  assigned for outside class work
• Any assignment can be made collaborative (see
  http//web.syr.edu/kjhall/ETS141/home.htm for a
  list of buddy assignments)
• First year students are typically intimidated and
  frightened buddy or group work can help break
  through barriers
• Keep in mind that it can be difficult for
  students to organize a meeting time, so its
  helpful to make blackboard available as an
  alternative
• A practical choice for outside group work is a
  library scavenger hunt where students locate
  resources, personnel, and information pertinent
  to other coursework

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Response Papers

• Keep in mind that you must directly and
  explicitly define the goals and objectives for
  student response papers otherwise, you will get
  a wide variety of student writing that will be
  difficult to assess.
• Even though you may think of them as short warm
  up exercises, be sure to keep in mind all of the
  learnings from the paper writing panel.
• One excellent use of the response paper format is
  to allow students to voice their gut reactions
  on blackboard once initial responses have been
  aired, students are more able to move to a
  critical, intellectual response in class
  discussion.

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From Emotion to Analysis
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From Gut to Brain

• Have students freewrite for ten minutes about
  their reaction to a text
• When they are done, assign a response paper for
  next class
• Instruct students to use their gut reaction to
  write a critical response
• Guide them by providing them with a list of
  words/phrases

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Transitions Cont.

• Phrases
• Use I feel to buttress an analytical statement
  I felt sick when the woman was killed because
  the director used a close-up of her face to
  illustrate her suffering. This is different than
  a mainstream violence scene because...
• Use Im confused to support inquiry and
  possibly --I'm confused because--the authors
  choice to marry off the protagonist contradicts
  the feminist politics of...
• Use I hated to argue with the text I hated
  this movie because the soundtrack was so
  overbearing and annoying. I know it was supposed
  to be artsy, but if you are trying to raise
  awareness about an issue, you should target a
  mainstream audience and use a popular soundtrack,
  like in the documentary we saw last week...

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Note Taking Instruction

• Assign 1-3 class note takers and have them post
  notes on blackboard after each class
• Share your notes with the class as a model
• Use the teaching station technology to model
  effective note takingeither handwritten notes
  using the document camera or type-written notes
  by projecting word onto the front screen

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Innovative Assignments

• A growing majority of students have produced
  multimedia work. Consider assigning a multimedia
  project
• Consider publishing student work on the web or
  having them post their multimedia work on any of
  the number of sites available such as youtube.com

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Developing your personal teaching style

• your personality can be an important resource
  in the
• classroom

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KNOW YOURSELF
no intellectual or personal trait is a foolproof
asset (example humor) even intellectual
and personal drawbacks can be --with
care--rendered useful(example bad head for
facts)
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It's really just like choking             
 ...aikido style

learn to redirect energy that closes learning
down.turn it around to open opportunities for
learning back up
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"Being Yourself" in the classroomrequires a
constant renegotiation of the balance of forces
within you and between you and your students

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Reading and enacting sociological positions in
the classroom

• Students often read their teachers according to
  preconceived (and not necessarily identical)
  grids of sociological classification.

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• Teachers coming from abroad and/or from working
  and lower middle-class backgrounds, and teachers
  who are women, people of color, queer and/or
  living with disabilities face added challenges
  in the Syracuse classroom.

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It is best to be prepared for this in advance

• Talk with peers and experienced teachers about
  their experiences.
• Think about how to relate your embodiment as a
  teacher to the larger lessons of the course.
• Develop strategies for rerouting assumptions that
  may be directed at you personally back out to a
  more general--and collective- critical
  investigation of the world at large.