McCormick - Blog 3

PRACTICE: What might your theory look like in practice? What kind of teaching activities would we see in such a classroom? Would any of the Discovery of Competence activities fit with your theory?  Would any of the Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts activities fit with your theory? (Make sure that your read and comment on your group-mates' blog postings.)

Expressivism in Practice:

An expressivist classroom revolves around reader-response and close readings of texts. For FYC, students may write a lot of “journal entries” that respond in general terms to a reading prior to coming to class. The prompts for such entries may be as general as “What is your reaction to the text? What stood out to you in particular and why?” Class discussion may ask students to express their opinions about a text’s meanings. Differing viewpoints are encouraged and no reading is “wrong” or “better.” Writing assignments may include close readings where students explain their reactions based on a careful look at the text:  “The writer meant x because he wrote y.” In a literature class, such assignments will be written after students have been taught how to read a text, such as a poetry explication based solely on literary devices and form.

I think both Discovery of Competence and Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts have some underpinnings in expressivism. Assigning dialectical journals begins as an expressivist act in that it asks students to give personal responses to passages that the reader found significant. Also, I think the idea that writing should come from the writer’s own experience—having students generate the majority of the texts for the semester, beginning with a lot of personal narrative, etc.—is an expressivist concept of education. Both DOC and FAC do move toward contextualizing the texts students produce into reflections of social and cultural constructs, but the early assignments in particular fall under the expressivist model, and an uncareful instructor could forget to re-ground the students in more socio-cultural and metacognitive practices as the semester goes on.