Monday 10/10
I got to class today prepared and excited to talk about Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue." Much to my surprise, the students were equally as excited to give opinions and make connections to the text. First off, the students and I wrote down some key conversations that Tan addresses: language, dialects, and identity. I introduced the students to the term discourse community and I wanted to make sure I made it as concrete as possible. My activity for today started with getting the students to pair up with someone they have not yet worked with in the class. I had the students sit silently for one minute and think of all the many discourse communities that each individual student belongs to. After the minute was over, and the students seemed eager for that silent minute to be over, I gave the students the following directions:
1) Introduce yourselves to your partner
2) Share some of your discourse communities with your partner
3) Find a mutual discourse community that you and your partner both belong to
4) Collaboratively write your own definition for that community
Most of the students, about 99% of them, seemed to really enjoy talking about themselves and finding out that they had similar interests/backgrounds as their partners. I had each pair share their mutually-agreed-upon discourse community with the class along with their definition of that community. After each pair spoke, I asked the class who would "like" this post if it were on Facebook and who would "dislike" it. The students, and I, really got a kick out of the whole activity. They seemed to be genuinely engaged and enthusiastic about discourse communities, which was a term I introduced to them at the beginning of class.
For the first time, I couldn't get my students to STOP talking! It was truly great. Elisa, who just so happened to be sitting in on my class, said I was a liar for complaining about my silent students. Well, I'm glad that they made me into a liar and that they choose to become talkative on a day when a fellow TA could be witness to it!
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Sounds terrific!
ReplyDeleteOne thing I have done when doing discourse communities is put up a simple sentence and then we all write it in professory discourse and another non-academic one (of our choosing). The student love it.