Who
Both of us are studying classes we especially like because they are challenging (for us and the students) and we enjoy seeing the students experience the thrill of overcoming those challenges.
Both of us were inspired to begin these projects by seeing others' work and we hope that our work and even more our collaboration will inspire others to begin and to examine similar projects.
Course context
I teach ECE 102, the first class in a sequence of six courses designed to prepare prospective assistant teachers in early childhood (birth through second grade) programs. Due to a shortage of certified teachers, with an A.S. degree in ECE, BMCC graduates may work as head teachers if they are continuing their educations at the Bachelors degree level. This situation and the fact that most incoming BMCC ECE students want to continue their educations beyond the A.S. to become certified teachers leads me and the other early childhood instructors to combine preparation for work with children with the skills students need to succeed in an academic environment.
ECE 102 is a smorgasbord course that offers an overview of the field of early childhood. In this class, students touch lightly upon the history of thought in early childhood education, careers in the field, program models, child development and other theoretical foundations for early childhood, observation and other methods of learning about children, guidance and discipline, classroom environments for young children, play and learning, literacy, working with families, and the politics of early childhood education and child advocacy - all in one semester! As the first ECE course students take, it also initiates them into the academic aspects of the discipline, such as research and writing. To give students some depth as well as breadth and to provide experience using academic skills, they choose from the smorgasbord of topics and investigate one in depth.
Several years ago I began to use computers with ECE 102 students and then joined VKP and after that COI. I investigated how our technology use interfaced with my goals of students' increasing understanding of the complexity of early childhood education (please see poster) and their grappling with theoretical concepts that ground ECE to develop and situate their own theories (see Susannah's write up).
Course context
I teach all the levels of English we offer at BMCC, from the lowest level of developmental writing, to our most advanced literature and composition electives. One of the most challenging courses to teach, but also one that I enjoy the most, is our English 201-Composition II/Introduction to Literature. For the majority of our students, this course is not only the second semester of the composition sequence, but the last English course, and the only college-level literature course, they will ever take. In one short semester, this course has to continue the work of teaching students to write coherent, developed, grammatical essays, introduce the basics of the research paper, and teach them to read and analyze drama, fiction, and poetry.
I've found, through the years, that one of the most difficult elements of this task, is in the teaching of poetry. For most of my students, when the class begins, even for those students who write their own poetry (and there are many), reading poetry and even more importantly, thinking about and working to understand poetry below the surface level, is something for lovers, or for girls, or for people in pain. Or it's a big waste of time. A nuisance. While all of these may be true, they're not really sufficient. So a major goal of mine in the course, every time I teach it, has been to move students beyond these responses, to see poetry as something worth their investment.
Another element of this has been one that I know all teachers struggle with, in all subjects. For many students, "understanding" a poem never really gets beyond defining the "vocabulary words"-trying to get the literal meaning. In teaching literature, one of the major skills I'm working on with my students is critical thinking-looking beyond the surface understanding, into the deeper analysis. Not just "what happens" in a poem or play or story, but how and why an author is making that happen.
So it was with these two goals in mind, having students connect to and involve with poetry, and having students analyze and think about poetry critically and deeply, that I began to develop the Digital Poetry Project. My process of developing the Digital Poetry Project as a module to be used in my classes began with some exciting work I had seen from some of the classes of my colleagues in the Visible Knowledge Project.
My initial work in the project was on asynchronous discussion in an online class, but as I saw what my colleagues from other campuses were doing in other contexts, I became fascinated with the possibilities of Digital Storytelling. I wanted to see, and began researching through VKP and COI, whether a similar type of project could help with the goals for teaching poetry in my course.
