How to create a syllabus and andragogy are two of the most
significant things I’ve learned about in this this course. Both of these will
be of use to me in the future as I would like to teach at some point and hope
to have a significant amount of adult learners.
In the near future, I anticipate being in a position where I
am planning training sessions and instructing employees on best practices. For
these sessions, I anticipate needing to design course materials that are designed
with consideration being made for who my audience is, just as I would for a
college course. As we’ve discussed in class, adult learners often have
different expectations for a course and require a different sort of interaction
than students in their late teens and early twenties. From my previous
experiences training adults, most want a lesson to relate directly to their job
functions and to be easily executable. Rather than providing abstract concepts,
or delivering “good to know” bits of information, the big question is, “why is
this important to me?”
In addition to learning about syllabi and andragogy, I learned
about the importance of teaching students about how important their newly
learned rhetorical analysis skills are to assessing real life situations. One
situation that Dr. Rice mentioned was the process of buying a car, an exciting
and stressful task for most adults. After researching the car you are
interested in and deciding on the price range you are willing to pay, stepping
into a car dealership to make your purchase seems to be the hardest part. I’ve
had many people tell me that they had their whole car buying experience planned
out but ended up leaving the dealership unsatisfied and somehow feeling duped.
Car salesmen are notorious for selling customers what they believe is the best
for them rather than what the customer requests. Some car salesman have no problem
“lying” to customers in order to make sales. Students who understand what
rhetorical analysis is would be better equipped to combat a situation of being
misled in a sales transaction.
The last significant thing I’ve [re]learned this semester is
the importance of helping immigrants and visitors to America transition into
their new lives. Working with students at the ELS center was a very rewarding
experience and one that I think all Americans should experience. Since many of
our ancestors immigrated to this country, Americans should be more welcoming of
newcomers. Instead, much of the new stories you hear today are about
intolerance and hate. I’d like to think sharing in the immigrant experience
with someone starting a new life here would help to change people’s minds.
Shayla, I'd love to hear about your work experiences sometime. It sounds like you've offered corporate training to some extent -- I kept thinking this as you contributed to 5371 too. I think you're right that, "most want a lesson to relate directly to their job functions and to be easily executable." I often think this is the difference between the skills of critical thinking we seek to teach through higher education and vocational training. One of my biggest challenges is taking my students from thinking about writing as a boring formulaic and pre-determined act to something more abstract and process-based. I'm also aware that much of my own appreciation for my writing comes from my childhood writing instruction which was heavily formed by theories of the belles lettres (writing for aesthetics) and product writing. This leads me to teach as you seem to have alluded to: First discussing the expected outcome, then recursively and reiteratively teaching the process of arriving at a common-looking destination.
ReplyDeleteWhile it takes time, you could develop syllabi out of class if you like. Think about the value: if you had a portfolio of a range of syllabi you've developed, that could be compelling when moving to a place beyond your MATC. Yes, we went through the car buying process and it was rhetorically rich and made us think a lot about what we teach students. Real-world, for sure. Nice to see that you took advantage of the ELS opportunity. A very meaningful semester!
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