Activity Theory, or as I understand it, the igniter to the Project Based Learning philosophy that has had a wild fire like spread through public education, is of particular interest to me. I have spent the three years of my teaching career looking for ways I can implement more of the philosophies of Activity Theory into my classroom. I have entire folders dedicated to stories, articles, blog, ideas, etc., that all surround the idea the we learn by doing, not by sitting listening to someone tell us what to do. I am not sure what this looks like at the college level, but at the high school level it looks like a ton of different things, but they have one thing in common; they cost money. Public high schools do not like to spend money, and so I have done modified versions of these things.
One of the challenges of Activity Theory I think, is that there is a lot more upfront work for the instructor. It makes it seem like it is so much more difficult, but the reality is, once the front loaded work is done, the instructor takes sort of a backseat. I first became interested in the ideas in my teaching credential program when I was assigned to give a presentation on Lev Vygotsky, and decided to center my presentation around the Zone of Proximal Development. This became the driving force in my personal teaching philosophy at the high school level. Everything I did started with Me doing an activity, then the class doing it, then small groups it, then the individual doing it. Even that though, did not do it for me. I felt I was still lecturing too much, creating too many lecture slides, and having too much rote note taking going on.
Now, if you came into my classroom, you will find almost no straight lecturing, and I have not used a single PowerPoint presentation this year. Students need to do things to learn them. School should be hands-on. I am even in the process of trying to get all of the desks removed from my classroom and replaced with tables and chairs, so the students have more space to do things.
The struggle I am having is thinking about using this idea in a writing course. I see how it works for projects and presentations, but in the scope of crafting essays, or other written genres, I am unsure how to translate this theory. I guess I need to keep thinking about it!
Hi Kyle, not sure if this was your reading response for week twelve, but I am commenting because I think it is?
ReplyDeleteActivity theory for me means not the act of moving around physically, but the act of writing. Writing is an activity. To me the question is: what sorts of writing should I assign to my future students? What I took from the Activity Theory reading is that teaching students about rhetoric is important. At the college level, we would have to assign readings on the intended fields that our students are going in to. We cannot teach students how to write lab reports because we are not experts on that field, but we can expose them to read and understand the language that professionals in that field use that way when they begin to write lab reports they have an idea of the frame (genre) and discourse community (language)–social equity. In high school perhaps it would be important to teach students the same.
I think your idea about removing desk is great because this will give students the opportunity to work collaboratively. You say you don’t want to lecture much well perhaps include more class time on group activities. For example, when writing a thesis instead having students come up with a thesis on their own have them get into groups that way everyone in the group helps one another come up with a thesis. How effective that might be I am not sure, but it is a start and it is something different than lecture. You can also have students get in a group an analyze a piece of text. Have them work together on identifying the genre, purpose, audience, and rhetoric. You can have them do a quick poster on the spot to later present their results.
For me the struggle about activity theory is that it only focuses on ‘about writing’ and not on learning ‘to write.’ I think both can be used in a FYC course. Do you think both can and should be taught?
Agreed! The longer I teach, the more I realize I need to get out of my students' way and let them learn. The conference poster project (which I stole from Hogan) has been AWESOME for my kids. They've taken the idea and run with it. ALL of them are engaged, which is insane. They're learning so much more from doing research on and writing about gender than they ever would have learned from me just lecturing them or even providing readings. I want to learn more about this approach.
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