In the last decade or so, most teachers have opened their classrooms to students' need for self-determination in very many ways. Most educators tolerate -- if not enjoy -- a great deal of student freedom and room for choice through work in small groups, s tudent-led discussions both in the traditional classroom and in the computer lab, self-selection of topics for papers, student-taught classes, etc.
But there is what can be called the last bastion: we still determine the contents of our syllabi. Though most of us do feel comfortable, I would propose, with allowing our students to make the small-scale decisions ("What do you want to do your paper on, Eve?"), I would suspect more than a few educators might find themselves in agreement with my colleague who critiqued a student-determined syllabus I had prepared by asking who I thought was the teacher for the course.
She believed I was abdicating my role as teacher simply by allowing students to choose the readings for the course though I had chosen the text and even the subject matter. But I would, of course, disagree with my colleague, as much as I respect her teac hing. My experience is that student-self determination opens up a class in a way I had not experienced before in my teaching, that students do more self-assigned reading than they did my teacher-centered reading, and that they read more carefully. Furth er, they seem to be more involved in both class discussion and in their own writing.
My presentation for the CCCC will attempt to develop a philosophy and a rationale for such student-determined syllabi that goes beyond the anecdotic, to egin to show how I create syllabi in ways that preserve the integrity of my discipline and to speculat e on how far the student-determined syllabus could be taken given new technologies such as word processing programs, computer networks and texts generated for and by a particular teacher or class.
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Last Modified: February 12, 1996