Teaching – Allan Johnson, PhD

Refining Technique in Academic Writing

Posted on March 31, 2014March 31, 2014 by Allan Johnson in Observations, Research, Teaching

Typewriters

I wrote briefly last week about the importance of technique in academic writing. Academic writing is, above all else, a specialised form of communication, which remains true whether we are teaching essay writing to first year students or working on a journal article addressing our research. Articles, essays, theses, and dissertations are all modes of communication that serve to share with readers how we have approached our topic and the conclusions to which we have come. And the success of this communication is dependent each writer’s display of technical mastery. This does not, of course, mean mindlessly following the model, although many writing teachers would agree that is preferable to write with good technique and be a bit monotonous than to write with no technique and lose the reader from the outset.

The aim of good technique is to create a fluid and organic microcosmic structure. What this means is, simply: 1) each paragraph is a self-contained unit, 2) which contributes to the argument of its individual section, 3) which contributes to the argument of its chapter, 4) which contributes to the argument of the work as a whole. No matter the length of the writing, these key building blocks will always stay the same, and should always help your reader to enter into your analysis with the tools to engage meaningfully with what you have to say.

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Developing Student Self-Reflexivity In Secondary Source Research

Posted on July 8, 2013July 8, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

Library Word Find Puzzle #2 — (Photo credit: herzogbr)

Yesterday I wrote about how I introduce secondary source research to students. Those 7 questions, are, of course, only the starting point for helping students to get the full benefit from engaging with the work of other thinkers.

When our students are working with secondary source material in their writing, we should be encouraging them to use their sources to explicitly support, develop, or refine their own argument. We sometimes forget that student writers can become part of the wider critical conversation on a topic. By helping them to use their sources to develop their argument, rather than simply reiterating the arguments of others, we can help them to enter that conversation as well.

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7 Questions to Help Students Use and Understand Secondary Sources

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

May 2009: Academic Writing & ESL Resources Display — (Photo credit: tclibrary)

The university-level study of English is paradoxically both an individual and collaborative effort, with students developing their own analytical skills while simultaneously learning to think in collaborative ways with tutors and fellow students. What this paradox demonstrates, of course, is that communicating with those around you plays a significant role in the development of ideas, including communicating with the critical body of material surrounding the topic (even if the line of communication is, in this case, distinctly one-way).

Academic writing, even at the most introductory level, is not created in a vacuum. Indeed, any piece of writing that students produce will be be a conglomeration of voices—some contemporary, some more distant—and their success in that writing will be dependent upon how well they harness this mass.

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“How Do You Consume Your Media?” It’s Time to Get Serious

Posted on March 15, 2013July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

This week I reminded my students that if they are serious about getting a good job in writing or communications then they need to get serious about their media consumption. That means: a daily newspaper with an international focus, a weekly news magazine, and two to three high-quality monthly magazines. ‘But that doesn’t require you to read everything cover-to-cover’, I assured 22 horrified faces. Rather, a good media consumption strategy gives you the framework to dip in and out of the most important events in the world, and allows you to feel connected to ideas bigger than yourself. During interviews for the jobs that students with an English Studies degree will go into–marketing, journalism, PR, publishing, teaching, to name merely a few–the question of ‘how do you consume your media?’ is becoming an increasingly common starting point. And the response needs to be a bit more developed than ‘oh, I read Heat every Tuesday.’

It is advice that I give to students every year, but with the recent announcement that later this summer Google will be dropping Google Reader–their pleasingly functional and well-connected RSS reading platform–I began to think once again about how I consume my media. I will be the first to admit that my methods of media consumption have been, until recently, what might be called… shady. I’m of the generation of Napster and torrents, after all. I’m part of the first generation of people who had computers in their bedrooms as children, paving the way for a bit of illegal downloading beginning with the era of Sugar Ray and Savage Garden and moving onward. When a good friend of mine introduced me to the world of illegal .epub files for my Kindle, I was hooked. But putting aside all the economic and moral arguments against illegal file sharing–and I do have a profound respect for musicians and writers, and believe they are owed fair compensation for their work–I have my own personal reasons for recently taking my media consumption more seriously. And by that, I mean, exchanging cold, hard (digital) cash for the pleasure of consuming.

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Making the Most Out of Experiential Learning: 5 Things That Work for Me

Posted on November 10, 2012July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

Over the past several years I have experimented with experiential learning in my teaching: how it’s presented, how it’s managed, and how it’s evaluated. This semester I have rolled out a full-scale experiential learning component for my module on the Twentieth-Century British Novel–and this has only come after a great deal of trial and error. For this part of the module assessment, students are required to write an essay reflecting on one of the several experiential learning activities taking place over the course of the semester. In this essay they must first identify how they understood one specific aspect of a text we studied before the experiential learning activity, and then how their understanding of that aspect changed or was modified after the activity. This type of critical analysis demands a great deal of self-reflexivity from students, but I have been extremely pleased with how the work has gone so far. In previous years, students haven’t so easily taken to the challenges of self-reflexive thinking, but there have been five key lessons that I have learned along the way:

1) Explicitly introduce the goals of experiential learning

It is often students–rather than faculty boards or senior colleagues–who are most resistant to innovation in learning and teaching. Students generally begin university with a clear preconception of what learning will entail (e.g. read book, listen to lecture, discuss in seminar, write essay), and breaking from this anticipated course of learning can quickly create confusion or concern. This confusion is an issue that I address head-on. When introducing experiential learning assignments or activities, I very explicitly explain the goals and objectives. ‘We are working on recognizing that the literature we study doesn’t exist in a vacuum–it is still being molded and changed by our perceptions of the world around us. As we begin to recognize how our daily lives impact upon our understanding of literature, we not only become stronger readers of literature, but stronger readers of everything that surrounds us.’ This big-picture overview really does help students to understand how experiential learning fits into their programme as a whole, and what they might hope to get out of it.

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