Sharing Stories and Experience 2

Throughout my tenure in the Sharing Cultures Project, I have been concerned that in trying to teach so much about culture, the primary objective of teaching basic writing skills would be lost. I have been the team member who harangues about making sure the students are actually prepared to move on to their first semester of College Composition 1. In my first semester of teaching in the Sharing Cultures Project, I finished the semester feeling a sense of disappointment. As I read my student's final papers, I could not help but feel that I hadn't done enough to ensure they'd learned as much about writing as they'd learned about South Africa. I realized that this project is very much a work-in-progress, and each semester we go back to the drawing boards to resolve this issue. Maybe it's too much to try to do in one semester, but as academics, we are committed to figuring out how to make things work in a way where most, if not all, of our objectives are met. We pare down, change assignments, reassess our objectives, and talk long and hard about what we're trying to do, what we're learning from our students, and how to manage this vastness.

One of the things I most appreciate about the way we've progressed is that each of us has gravitated toward an area wherein we feel most capable and interested. For my part, I took on the task of reorganizing the curriculum for this semester. Essentially, I envisioned a more organized structure wherein there would be segments devoted to themes around culture, beginning with explorations of self-identity, and progressing through issues of family, community, cultural and educational considerations, spiritual and religious culture, and then more global issues of politics, history, economics, and social and political revolution. And while this still sounds like a lot to accomplish in one semester, there is a lot of flexibility built into this paradigm, and individual faculty are free to choose a focus, to include or not include various aspects of it.

This new design also included appropriate readings for each area and the online discussion forums were set up to accommodate focused discussions of each area. Students are expected to do some formal writing and revision each week based on the themes discussed. While we are currently evaluating whether this paradigm works better than what we've done in previous semesters, the consensus on our side is that it seems, so far, to be more effective.