Check Out the Class Blogs

I have set up team blogs for members of my class. This term the focus is Understanding Grammar. Here is how the set-up works: I created seven blogs, naming them Writing Commons One, Writing Commons Two, and so on through seven. Blogger lets me invite others to join my blogs. So I divided the class into seven groups and invited four or five students to each blog. Then Blogger sent each of them an invitation. Once they accept the invitation, they are members of that blog and can post entries by going to http://blogger.com, signing in, and then choosing the post link.

Blogger gave me a choice of templates for setting up a blog. Just as I used variations on the name of my own blog, Writing Commons, for the student team blogs, I also used variations on the same template for the team blogs. My tech TA, Kaitlin, figured out how to change the colors on the templates and did that on all seven blogs for me. But using one color scheme would work, too.

To start the conversation on the team blogs, I posted several questions. Students can respond to any of them they want. The assignment for the first week was to post one response to the questions on the Lisa Delpit article. There were some problems with lost invitations and lost passwords, so that did not work perfectly, but overall, the process went well. The assignment for the second week is to read the postings of one's own team and respond to at least one post. Then also read the postings of one other team and post at least one comment. Comments are posted by clicking on the Comment link at the end of a particular post.

People who are not in the class are able and welcome to post comments on any of the blogs.

Readers who would like to see what the students have to say can look here:
http://writingcommonsone.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonstwo.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsthree.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsfour.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsfive.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonssix.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsseven.blogspot.com

Scroll to the bottom of the postings to see the prompts I gave for the assignment.

Language and Diversity

This week my grammar class will be considering issues of language and diversity. The Faculty Senate of this university has asked faculty to recognize the work of Dr. Martin Luther King by somehow bringing the issues he cared about into the classroom. The WR 330 assignment this week is to read Lisa Delpit's article, "The Silenced Dialogue:Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children" (Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 58 No. 3, August 1988). As soon as we get the team blogs going, students will be discussing this article and related issues in small groups on Writing Commons.

Some students have noted that the Delpit article is sixteen years old and wondered what Lisa Delpit has been doing since. Delpit is the Director of the Center for Urban Educational Excellence and the Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Educational Leadership at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Other sources for information about Lisa Delpit are:

Review of The Skin That We Speak, which contains an article by Lisa Delpit, 2003.
http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/291

An interview with Lisa Delpit on Public Radio entitled "Choosing Excellence." 15 minutes. 2000
http://www.pbs.org/merrow/tmr_radio/pgm6/guests.html#3

Several term-papers-for-sale sites also offer brief book reviews of Delpit's book, Other People's Children, which collects her articles from Harvard Educational Review. They are waiting "24-7" to sell you a book review. I'm sure this is not what Delpit had in mind when she talked about access to the "culture of power" through language.

Another important site with information about language and discrimination is:

http://tolerance.org/
This site, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, contains many resources for teaching tolerance and living a tolerant life.

On tolerance.org you will also find a teaching tool called Writing for Change, developed at Oregon State University by the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program with funding from a Writing Intensive Curriculum grant. Susan Shaw and Janet Lockhart are the authors of Writing for Change.
http://tolerance.org/teach/web/wfc/index.jsp

The history of the Southern Poverty Law Center and their role in the Civil Rights Movement is available at:
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/history.jsp

Vicki Tolar Burton

Getting Started

This blog will be the writing commons for myself and for my students. This term the class involved will be an upper-division Baccalaureate Core course called Understanding Grammar. I have not used a blog before, nor have most of my students. My inspiration was a visit to our campus by Laura Gurak from the University of Minnesota. Laura is involved in the online publication Into the Blogosphere. She talked about using blogs in her graduate seminar. Since I am trying to bring more technology to our Writing Across the Curriculum program, I want to try using blogging in my own teaching.