125 (Spring 2000): 56
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Humanities Out There: A Resource Library for Teachers
STEPHANIE KEEFER
I TEACH theater and American literature at Santa Ana High School. Over the past two years, I have worked on three different curriculum modules with the graduate students in the Humanities Out There program. HOT has provided my students and me with resources we would not otherwise have. Having other minds to help build curriculum, research it, and teach it helps me build a richer and more diverse environment for my students. And so I have to come to look on HOT as a resource library. It is a resource library of curriculum modules, of academic research, and of role models for my students.
The modules I have worked on with HOT concerned gender, telemedia literacy, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the last of which was designed specifically around the curriculum I was currently teaching. In each case, I have found the module form of HOT particularly liberating. I know that whatever I am teaching on a daily basis does not have to be directly related to the module that HOT brings to my classroom. However, I found that the modules are more effective if their content connects to what the students are doing the rest of the week. I have worked with the gender module twice, once when the topic had no pedagogical connection to the literature I was teaching and once when I specifically chose texts that had gender issues as significant themes. Students generally make deeper connections to material when it is reinforced through a variety of media, texts, and methodologies; however, the gender module was also successful when it was taught independently of the concurrent curriculum, as it was when I specifically designed material to connect with it.
HOT is also useful because it enables me to expose students to the knowledge provided by academic research. When I taught The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I knew I wanted the students to have a sense of the historical grounding of the novel. The graduate students who planned and developed this module made suggestions about aspects of the novel that they could research and bring into the classroom. We ended up exploring the feuding Hatfields and McCoys, the historical families that were the models for Twain's Shepherdsons and Grangerfords. We also shared with students the literary reviews of that time, comparing the calls for censorship then to the different, but recurring, demands to censor the novel today. By teaching this text in collaboration with HOT, I was able to give my students access to the research resources provided by a university.
At Santa Ana High School, the number of students who plan to attend four-year colleges is far fewer than the number actually qualified to do so. Although there are students at our school who would thrive in a university's academic setting, they face social, fiscal, and psychological pressures that prevent them from attending. Many of our students assume that they will attend the local junior college, having only a vague notion that they will at some time transfer to a university. One of my goals is to help students who are interested in attending a four-year college to do so. HOT helps me achieve this goal by providing role models in the undergraduates who participate in the modules. Like my students, the undergraduate tutors are both ethnically and academically diverse. They come from a variety of backgrounds and major in a variety of subjects. When my students see someone similar to them who has decided to attend a four-year school, they can more easily imagine themselves as potential college graduates.
A surprising by-product of collaborating with HOT is the way in which working with the graduate and undergraduate students validated my own strength in teaching. At first I believed I would primarily be facilitating in such logistical capacities as passing out papers and getting students into groups. However, I soon realized that I had a more important role: assisting the graduate students and undergraduates in developing their own teaching methodologies. Although the HOT modules are designed to function independently of the classroom teacher, true collaboration between the university students and the classroom teacher is necessary for them to succeed.
The author is a teacher of English and theater at Santa Ana High School, California. This paper was presented at the 1999 CCCC Annual Convention in Atlanta.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
ADE Bulletin 125 (Spring 2000): 56 |
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