Monday, October 21, 2013

The Amy Tan Blogs, Take 2 (SFSU IRW)


A teacher who aligns with SFSU’s IRW philosophies...

The IRW course at SFSU would assign Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue to align with a possible course theme on code-switching. As pre-reading, students will free-write a dialogue about a funny thing that happened at school first to a close friend and then to their grandparent (or other respected elder). There would be some class discussion of these free-writes before the reading is assigned. While reading, students will keep a dialectical journal with quotes from the essay on one side of a page and their reactions to the passage on the other side. This may even be a three-way entry that includes links to previous readings/other author’s ideas as a third column.

In class, the students will create group definitions of “code switching” based on Amy Tan’s experiences and their own. This definition will be written on the board. A paper will then be assigned that synthesizes the student’s personal experiences of code-switching with Amy Tan’s experiences, grounded by the class definition of the topic. 

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