I found a later draft of this paper. I edited as I went, so this draft is also responds to the in-text comments of Dr. Nickoson-Massey, the instructor for whom this paper was written.
Rachel Wycoff
Lee Nickoson-Massey
ENG 484
6 February 2008
Student-centered education was not on my mind the first time I walked into Stacey Osborne’s English 345 class in University Hall. I was ready for forty students whose names wouldn’t be learned, lectures, some notes, and a woman who wrote the way I spoke, judging from what I had read on her syllabus. Instead, I was greeted by the twelve hopeful faces of my classmates and an educational experience that has changed the way I think about teaching literature and writing. Over the course of my education, and in many classrooms I have observed through this university, the general rule is that the teacher teaches the student. That is her job. She is there to expound knowledge and to bestow said knowledge on young brains that are supposed to soak up her every word like a sponge. However, Ms. Osborne has demonstrated with her classes an approach that is not particularly revolutionary, but one that is not often seen in classrooms at the university level, or even at the high school level for that matter. Her plan for education is based on what students find interesting, and through her students’ interests she teaches what they need to know.
The main goal of student-centered education as applied by Stacey Osborn is “to get students to question then to see that they can answer their questions.” Every paper written for her class begins with three related questions. These questions are posed by the student, and then the student takes these questions to the text; each student, then, answers their own questions using the text for support or their assertions. This simple process, while effective, was difficult to learn to some degree because it is not generally taught past the elementary school level. In fact, Ms. Osborn has an entire lesson based on teaching each class what she has deemed, “The Art of Critical Questioning” in which she explains to students what their questions may look like, the process by which they can arrive at questions to ask, and how the questions that they pose can be formulated into a thesis. She believes that this art, the ability to question for oneself, has been lost into the abyss of education because it seems as students grow older, they gradually lose control of their own education, and before they realize it their thoughts and writing assignments are controlled by an instructor. Ms. Osborn even confessed that critical questioning is the one thing that she wished she had been taught in school but wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why she introduces a process into each of her classrooms which she didn’t learn until later and which she describes as, “how to ask questions; and answer them; and find joy in that process.”
The joy in the process of Ms. Osborn’s classes, in my opinion as a current and former student of hers, comes from the manner in which she presents topics for discussion, and, in fact, the way she presents herself. She sets a tone in the classroom on the first day with the way in which she introduces herself: “I’m Stacey,” she says, “Not Mrs. Osborn, that is my mother-in-law. Not Professor Osborn, I don’t want tenure or the ensuing politics. If you can’t call me Stacey, please call me Ms. Osborn, and then I will laugh at you.” She uses humor to make the students in her classroom feel comfortable, and with that comfort comes a greater ability to facilitate discussion about texts, to allow students to ask questions that can be answered not only by their fellow classmates but themselves, and to define herself as an educator. The most important day of class, in my opinion, is the first one. The first day of class sets the bar for what each of the classes thereafter should be like. I think humor is one of the easiest ways to get the attention of students and to make them feel a part of the classroom. However, humor can also be misconstrued, not to mention spiral rapidly into topics that probably ought not be discussing in a classroom, so any teacher must be careful. However, bringing students into the circle of the classroom is highly important, and a tool to use for that purpose is humor.
Along with verbal humor, Ms. Osborn appreciates written humor from her students. This humor always comes from what most teachers of writing call “voice.” The author’s voice, although present in every form of academic writing, tends to be diminished as students must take on a much more authoritative role in their own writing. They must write assertions not opinions. They must use pointless large words like extraneous and superfluous simply to sound more intelligent. In this process, the author of a paper generally loses herself somewhere between the extraneous commas and superfluous words. Ms. Osborn encourages the writer’s own voice to be present. In fact she believes, “It’s always there. Always. You’re an author? You say your fingers hit the keyboard? Voila. Voice.” To me, allowing me to write as I think makes much more sense than my having to tailor my style to any professor’s. In this sense, Ms. Osborn’s policy of voice is very much student-centered. She allows her students to explore the things that they would like to explore topics in the manner in which they would like to explore them. This allowance creates a willingness to pursue topics that may have been overlooked in previous readings, or perhaps that would have been denied as plausible paper topics by others.
Voice can especially be seen in the final portion of every paper turned into Stacey Osborn: a personal writing analysis. The last page of every paper is the student’s reflection on, not only the writing itself, but the process the each student went through to arrive at their final conclusion in paper form. Ms. Osborn understands that each writer has a personal process which leads to the product she grades. Not only does she want to see the product, she wants to see the process, the thoughts that went into the paper and the thoughts that came the writer after the paper was done. “Address process,” she says, “Product will follow. Invariably.” Through the personal writing analysis, students are able to show where their opinions come from on a more personal level, rather than only though textual analysis. She has even told of students whose grades have been raised because of their personal writing analysis. Because her writing assignments are pretty much free-form, the analysis of one’s own writing process forces the student to self-examine, and to take in the text about which they are writing in a way that they perhaps did not think of it before. It forces the student to internalize what they have read and reflect on it. The only thing about the writing process that is not student-centered, per se, is Ms. Osborn’s rubric. She does, after all, have to assign grades somehow. Her rubric includes a place for comment and specifically lists each thing that she looks for in a paper, such as examples of textual analysis, and she’s quite proud of her rubric. When asked how she responds to student writing Stacey Osborn replied, “With a rubric I developed that meets my needs specifically. I love my rubric. I wanna marry it.” Personally, I just enjoy the comments. Comments help every student improve their writing. In this case, the comments that Ms. Osborn gives help students improve the content of their writing and the way in which they support it, such as asking for more detail or even a simple “why does the text say this to you,” but not necessarily addressing the process by which students arrive at their assertions.
There is one other thing about Stacey Osborn’s instruction that could be considered less than student-centered. She not only bases her instruction on what her students would be interested in, but also on what she herself feels she should learn. She said, “When I see a void in my knowledge base, I put it on the syllabus! Then we all learn!” This approach allows the students to teach the teacher. I think the idea of the students teaching each other as well as the teacher shows that learning is a constant process, that knowledge is not a finite thing. Occasionally a teacher can feel that they no longer have anything new to learn from their students, but that is intensely wrong. Students often have much deeper insights than some teachers give them credit for, and the opportunity to learn mutually breeds a respect of the teacher as a learner. Students, in this case, would be more willing to allow the teacher occasional mistakes because they know she is still learning, as still has the desire to learn, right along with them.
One thing that Stacey Osborn said said struck me as incredibly interesting, and despite the awkward segue, I think it is a very important insight into teaching in general, not just teaching writing. She said that one thing that every writing teacher should know is, “how to use the performing arts to teach.” I am a big activist for this idea, mostly because I have been involved with the performing arts, musically and theatrically, since elementary school, and have continued my involvement through today. The performing arts are a phenomenal tool for teaching anything. If students can embody something rather than just seeing it, they have a much better chance of internalizing and thinking about it after class has ended. Also, performing in class allows students a chance to get over any fear of public speaking they may have in front of people they can trust, and that they know won’t judge them negatively. Music in class can also be a highly effective tool. Ms. Osborn creates musicals out of books and plays that her have read using contemporary and classical music to illustrate new points of the text. These musicals show students that they can take any text and make it more understandable through the contemporary. The music selected often presents interesting commentary on what Ms. Osborn wants to highlight, not the mention the fact that they are very fun to participate in.
I suppose, then, that the point is to find the fun in what you are teaching, to enjoy it and to make it as enjoyable and informative as humanly possible. In order to create a fun and informative environment, a teacher must know her students. Knowing students makes it easier to create a student-based curriculum. A student-based curriculum allows the students the freedom to write as they please, creating a kind of comfort with the classroom and the teacher. That comfort breeds a willingness to perform. And performance, be it academic like writing or humorous like acting out a play, inevitably leads to fun. Through this cycle, a teacher can create a class that many students would want to be in and succeed in.
