Acadmic Paper Building Assignment

Working Title: Deviant Pedagogy: Disrupting the Barriers between Students and Professors

Intro: 1-3 pages

-          The problem: barriers and punishment between teachers and students

· Classroom as prison

· School seen as something to ‘suffer through’ and ‘get past’ rather than enjoy

· Authority and Engagement

· Established dynamic since kindergarten

-          The end goal: improved teaching by increasing identification between teachers and students and establishing a better rapport

· Personal story: When dad asked me to come talk to his class, and they weren’t uncomfortable.

· What that meant

· Comfort of students in the environment

· Willingness to ask questions

-          Reasons why: improved rapport/better atmosphere means better teaching, more learning, etc.

· More engaged in the learning process

· More likely to take part in discussions

· Greater energy for the teacher

· More emotional support for the students

· More learning

· Internalizing information

· Interest in the topic increased

· More willingness to connect with teacher

· Ensure teaching is a dialogical process

· Socrates in Meno

· Judith Butler

· Longo

-          How to get there:

· Many potential ways

· Connecting with students on a personal level

· Eliminating grades

· Disrupting expectations

· Etc.

· Disrupting expectations

· Opens possibilities for learning

· Breaks the dynamic established for so long

· Invites students into the process, rather than gate keeping

Teaching is Argument: 2-5 pages

-          Any attempt at teaching is a token of argument; the teacher is trying to persuade the student to retain the information.

· Quickly: Type/Token distinction

· What an argument is

· Rhetoric (sophistry) always considered a skill that can be taught, or that can be used to teach other things.

-          Therefore, methods of argumentation can be applied to/as methods of teaching.

· Methods of persuasion as methods of teaching

· Levels of persuasion

· Bribery (grades)

· Threats (again, grades)

· Investment (skills to be used later, ‘real world’ knowledge)

-          Therefore, any scholarship about argumentation is also scholarship about pedagogy, when examined from that perspective.

Literature review: 5-10 pages

-          How persuasion and writing are teaching

· Gorgias, Isocrates, etc.

-          Comments and thoughts through history of writing instruction supporting the disruption of this barrier

· Ancient: Aristotle, Quintillian

· Modern: Berlin, Berthoff, de Certeau, Elbow, Kastman-Breuch,

· Technical Communication: Grabil, Kuh, Slack

-          Radical disruption, such as expletives, is not (well) supported

· Why that is

· Diogenes, Longinus, Nietzsche

· Why it doesn’t matter

· Foucault, Graff and Winn, Maata, Murray, Nietzsche, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Quinn

-          Establishing importance of atmosphere in pedagogy

· Discourse communities

· Dilger, Foucault, Maata, Murray

· Burkean Identification

· Burke

Anecdotal results and problems: 4-6 pages

-          Students more receptive

· Breaks the ice

· Makes them more likely to talk during class

· Freedom to fail, or at least be wrong

· Explicit explanation for the purpose and reasons behind it

· Quick and dirty method of breaking down the barrier

-          Use of humor

· Breaks tension

· Helps identify, both in the Burkean sense and in other ways

-          Quoted student evals (?)

· IRB? Check.

-          Some complaints

· Students that don’t like being uncomfortable

· Maata

· Pushing them to think critically means making them uncomfortable

· If they liked it, they wouldn’t be uncomfortable.

· Might be other (better) ways to disrupt the barrier

· Faculty who mishear/overhear

· How they might misinterpret what’s going on

· ‘Professionalism’

· Effective pedagogy is the goal

· Professional appearance

· Nietzsche

Limitations: 3-5 pages

-          Anecdotal through my own experience

· Didn’t always do this (philosophy)

· 10 years of teaching

· Not verifiable or testable data

-          Could be other reasons for student comfort

· Might be age

· Might be appearance

· Might be other parts of teaching style

-          Personal bias

· Teaching more fun/more interesting for me

· Only seeing things from the inside

· Bias from teaching evaluations

-          No control groups

· No way to test the difference

· Starting off cursing and stopping

· Currently trying that

· First impression sticks

· Starting to curse later

· Maybe?

Conclusion: 1-3 pages

-          It can be helpful to curse in class because

· It disrupts student expectations

· Lowers the barriers between student and teacher

· Treats students as adults

· Identification

-          Directions for future research

· Important factors for experimentation

· Frequency of use

· Direction/focus of use (Cussing with vs. cussing AT)

· Ways to limit bias

· Objective standard: grades, not teaching evaluations

· Simultaneous testing (same time of day, same point in the semester

· Control groups

· Same teacher, same subject, same material. Only variable being the language

-          In the end, it’s a good idea.

· Getting students involved makes for better teaching

· Power structures (Foucault) that need to be challenged for critical thinking

· Cussing is a ‘quick and dirty’ method for breaking the barrier.

D.T.M.

16-30 pages total.