When I got my first job as an adjunct at the community college where I am now full time faculty member, I was not at all prepared. I learned to be flexible and “roll with it” fairly quickly, but the learning curve was steep to say the least. One important lesson I learned very early on was not to be afraid of new ideas, technology, or formats when it came to teaching. In the year and half I spent as an adjunct (2007/2008) these are some of the “new things” I tried:
- Blackboard
- 8 week courses
- 12 week courses
- Guest speakers
- Student Presentations
- Group Presentations
- Computer Labs
- Power Point Presentations
- Using media in class (video & audio)
- Using supplemental material outside of the required textbook
- Using film
- Becoming a faculty advisor for a student creative writing group
- Subbing for other English courses/instructors
- Incorporating creative writing techniques into my comp courses
- Copy editing the student lit mag, New Voices
- Mentoring new adjuncts
- Using short stories for the in class essay assignment. Among my favorites were The Lottery, The Yellow Wallpaper and A Good Man is Hard to Find.
- Using Annie Dillard’s opening paragraph from A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to introduce the narrative essay assignment.
- Using movie/music reviews from The New Yorker to introduce the evaluation essay assignment.
- Requiring students to pick a local non profit as the subject for their evaluation essay.
- Requiring students to interview a faculty member to practice interview skills for evaluation essay.
- Requiring students to prepare a 5 minute informative presentation over their research paper topic. This included a brief power point presentation, so they could learn what and what not to do.
- Using current periodicals such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Nature, The Christian Science Monitor, etc to find topics for their research paper.
- Creating an evaluation guide for online sources (still fairly new territory at the time)
- Creating APA Guides and worksheets
- Developing an annotated bibliography assignment
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Giselle Potter
- Committee work
- Online classes
- Academic panels and/or presentations
- Participating in some professional development activities (cooking class & faculty book club)
- Advising for Phi Theta Kappa
- Working with the Honors College
- Re-writing English 111 (comp)
- Attending conferences
- Organizing events for National Poetry Month
- Co-advising for our student lit mag, New Voices
- Continuing to advise for our creative writing group, The Blank Page
This entire post is sparked by yet another new endeavor I am embarking on this spring. I will be teaching a section of Honors World Lit I on a new platform. This new project is allowing me to design a course using brand new technology, which means I have to learn said technology. Today, I had a meeting with course designer who is my partner in crime on this project, and I left the meeting feeling a tad overwhelmed but mostly I felt excited to start something new.
The face of education is constantly changing, and as a result, the role of the professor in the classroom is also changing. However, I would argue that instead of becoming less important, as some people seem to fear is the case, I think we are becoming more important. That being said, we need to be willing to stretch and learn along with our students.
Brianna Pike 