Meet Maria

Hello all, I’m Maria Novotny and am a current M.A. student at Michigan State University in Writing & Rhetoric. With a CSLP concentration (Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy), I describe myself and my studies to those typically unfamiliar with the world of rhetoric as someone who is studying writing and the teaching of writing. But to all of you who may be more familiar with this world, my concentration lies in understanding issues of critical pedagogy, especially those related to race, and implementing that in my classrooms.

This past semester teaching WRA150 I asked my students to write about their own community – attempting to bridge my students personal and community practices into the classroom. In essence, I was trying to bring in Gere’s (1994) extracurriculum into my classroom. This provided students the opportunity to write about their own communities and learn about their peer’s communities, which generated great discussions regarding literacy and language. As part of the class, we created a blog where students described the class goals and posted their papers that explored their community’s in more detail.

My own intent of the blog was to create a space where students had an outside audience to consider. For every paper, they were invited to consider how what they wrote would be interpreted by the outside blogging world. Students were asked to consider that their papers had more of a purpose than simply fulfilling an assignment. Instead, they were attempts to educate and inform others of their community and it’s importance.  If you are interested, you can view the blog here: http://writingourcommunities.wordpress.com/

While it was great in theory to have a blog where students could express their connections to their community and attempt to create a space where community issues could be explored, I wished that I used the blog for more than simply a site to publically post revised papers. The blog tended to only deal with issues of audience and failed to engage students and their peers in actually reading these papers and learning about other’s communities. Further, I wish there was a way to generate more traffic to our site as well. This I think would have better energized and enthused my students.

Therefore, I hope for AL881 to provide the opportunity to ponder and reevaluate the use of technology in my first-year writing classrooms. As a teacher, I wonder how can I adopt a digital pedagogy in a classroom in order to better voice student’s communities with the outside world? How can you use technology to bring in the extracurriculum into the classroom?  Further, I need to better understand how students view technology. How do students view technology use, especially in a writing classroom? How do you use technology as a tool for effective scaffolding? And overall, how can teachers use technology as a learning tool rather than simply as a new medium for the classroom?

These questions guide my digital pedagogical journey this summer and I’m excited to generate new ideas and strengthen my pedagogy by learning from all of you!