Move to the Center 2

As I actually started teaching the course and watched the levels of board discussion that was taking place, coverage quickly lost its importance, and we, the teaching team, began to have conversations in the hallways not about"covering" but about focusing on how the board activity really encompassed the course's communication skills. Students were communicating by writing in a space where they posited their own ideas, read and reflected on others' ideas, responded to those ideas, made connections, and moved to new thinking and writing. Such development was, afterall, what we hoped that a class designed to prepare students for their two-semester college writing sequence might do.

During that semester, the teaching teams began to really shift the role of the online discussion to a more central, in-class, and graded role. Because we had the opportunity as a team from CCC to travel to Port Elizabeth to meet face-to-face with our NMMU colleagues in March 2004, we were able to share our reflections on this issue and found that they were having similar experiences and ideas. For 2005, we were able to formalize the central role of the discussion board as worthy, important, and justifiable to outside administrators. We built additional lab and discussion board time into the classes themselves and expected students to spend a large amount of time reading and responding to the other students. The discussion board was as rich as ever, and students were then able to use the board as source material in their more traditional academic writings in very interesting ways.

Next year – 2006 – looks even more promising as we shift further to create a discussion board sharing space without demanding a shared “course syllabus.” Instead, the classes involved will all use a heuristic that starts with the self and local culture and moves out to global considerations. In this way, we will incorporate students from multiple areas in the CCC basic writing program and the NMMU Foundations Programme as well as students in humanities classes at both institutions. It will be interesting to examine how the experience of the sharing discussions are used in these different classrooms and also to continue to interrogate, in this wider space, how and when the students help each other to broaden the ways in which they see and experience the world.