Fall 1991

Creating Your Own Departmental Teaching Sourcebook
Marjorie Raley, Graduate Instructor, Department of English

Does this scenario sound familiar? A graduate student, hearing she has been assigned a certain course, wants to learn what it's like to teach it, specifically its particular conditions or challenges. She finds, however, that there are no syllabuses or comments on file in her department. Nor are there previous instructors available to consult: they have graduated or left town, taking their experience with them, as our not-so-hypothetical student will do.

Because I realize how difficult exchanging information can be and how impoverished we become as this wealth of teaching experience, innovation, and imagination disperses in May, I proposed a TRC TA Development Grant project to conserve it. Why not get these instructors to make a deposit in, say, some kind of "sourcebook"? Equally important, why not provide a forum for exchange? Of course, many pedagogical discussions occur, generally among small groups of friends facing similar challenges and anxious to find ways to reach students. Why not channel this energy and interest in a formal setting, say a workshop, and record the ideas it generates in the sourcebook?

The project, "Teaching Workshops and a Teaching Sourcebook by and for Instructors of English," ultimately produced five hours of discussion and a seventy-five-page booklet of strategies, teaching tips, classroom issues, sample assignments, and pedagogical theory. Both the workshops and the Sourcebook exceeded our (admittedly high) expectations. What none of the grant team realized, though, was how all participants--we included--would respond. Many, many participants have told me that they discovered in the workshops a community of teachers. And we can hardly keep pace with requests for the Sourcebook.

Now, to come to the point: How can you adapt this project to meet your needs? What challenges and obstacles will you face? How did we do it? I'll briefly describe the two phases of the project.

PHASE I: THE WORKSHOPS. We scheduled workshops for two consecutive afternoons and invited all graduate students and faculty members to attend. (Our chief difficulty proved to be scheduling. Any date we considered conflicted with at least one lecture, meeting, or course.) Sessions were organized under four headings--"Teaching Strategies," "Student-Teacher Dynamics, including the Multicultural Classroom," "Managing the Discussion," and "Teaching Textual Analysis"--and oriented toward discussion and problem- solving. Moderators (one or two per topic) prepared scenarios and sample texts for the workshop but soon dis- pensed with them: discussion proved loud and intense, provocative and informative, as participants brought forward their concerns and shared anecdotes, issues, problems, and successes. Many participants told me afterward that they were glad to find others so concerned about pedagogy, while many students who couldn't attend said they'd be interested in future sessions.

PHASE II: THE SOURCEBOOK. The booklet is structured according to the workshop topics, with the addition of a chapter called "Support Services for English Instructors." Each chapter has an introductory "digest" and specific cases and examples. While it was easy to ask workshop moderators to revise their session handouts into digests, it proved more difficult to convince people to contribute to a booklet that didn't yet exist in tangible, fully defined form or even to contribute at all. Many people I talked to were busy, bashful, or bemused. The last was the hardest to overcome: how could I satisfy anyone who asked for a model when I didn't know what to expect? This disadvantage ultimately served us well because the submissions range widely in approach and content.

In its current form, The English Instructor's Sourcebook offers what we want: concrete tips, strategies, specific assignments, and ways of dealing with classroom situations. Several submissions, for instance, detail different ways to teach material by using group work. Others discuss how to lead a discussion without falling into lecture or into the vague query, "What do you think about this work?" For example, the "Thirty-Second Pause" describes a way to make "safe" the awkward quiet time students must have to process a difficult question. "Levels of Reading, Levels of Discussing" offers a framework for questioning that teaches students through class discussion how to analyze a text both in class and on papers. The section on the multicultural classroom, both theoretical and highly practical, ranges from basic premises to seating arrangements. The Sourcebook, in short, is practical, usable, and tailored to our materials, methods, and challenges.

To insure its usefulness, we have designed it to be updatable. While the booklet now focuses on discussion- leading, we will alter it as needed and cover other topics in supplemental volumes. Perhaps this sounds expensive--it's not. The Electronic Text staff in Alderman Library are installing the Sourcebook online on the university Grounds-wide Information System (GWIS) where it can be easily updated.

Having seen this project through to completion (of a sort), I can assure you that it takes far less time than it seems and that it is worth it (replace "it" with any antecedent). Most of my time was spent, not planning or typing, but advertising, making calls, or twisting arms for submissions. To get started, you must simply decide that the project needs to be done and then find a few people to see that it is. Remember that the TRC can help you plan a workshop (I imitated their setup) and that, in these days of computers, putting together a book involves copying contributors' files on one disk. If you want to know more about this project, you can contact me at the English Department. You can examine The Sourcebook at the TRC or on university computers connected to the LAN.