Contact: Sasha Steinberg
STARKVILLE, Miss.— “I want students to not feel like there’s one right answer. I want them to discover what they think based on their experience,” Richard Raymond said during the recent 2016 Rabideau Lecture on Teaching Excellence at Mississippi State.
During his presentation “Assessing Educational ‘Outcomes:’ Living Deep and Daring to Write with Open Eyes,” the professor and head of the university’s English department discussed his personal experience in using writing to keep students engaged and excited about learning.
“We need to motivate our students to avoid the crime of willful ignorance,” Raymond told fellow educators gathered in Mitchell Memorial Library’s John Grisham Room.
“We need to teach them inductively to acknowledge the pain of the human condition, but at the same time, to relish the challenge to move beyond their professors by wrestling with real problems that always emerge when we dare to live deep and suck out the marrow of life.”
One way to get this process started, Raymond said, is to get students “hopelessly addicted to reading everything, not just literature.”
When motivating students to write about literature, Raymond said he has found journaling and freewriting to be very effective. Along with completing 30-minute journaling assignments outside of class, his students are able to discover their personal connections to literature by doing 5-10 minutes of constant writing, or freewriting, in class.
After completing their freewriting, students participate in class or individual group discussion. Raymond said compared to the “old-fashioned way of lecturing,” group discussion is a powerful device for teaching students how to be self-reliant, critical thinkers.
“Almost the whole 75-minute class period goes by because I’m just moderating, which is what I should be doing,” he said. “You find you have to cover a lot less because the students are learning the material inductively through your journal prompts.”
In addition to preparing them for class discussion, Raymond said journaling and freewriting help students generate content from which they can write formal academic essays. Both techniques, he said, can be especially useful when demonstrating the value of literature to non-English majors.
“In any given class, three-fourths of the students are not English majors,” Raymond said. “When they have a personal connection to the literature, they’re not just writing for a grade. They care; they agree or disagree (with what they’re reading). They’re invested in it, and they actually have something to say.”
Regardless of their field or the topic they teach, Raymond encouraged all educators in the audience to incorporate writing into their courses and see how it can help their students learn and process material on their own.
“Education ought to be about problem solving abilities,” Raymond said. “Isn’t that really where we want our students to get at some point—they don’t need us anymore. They move past us. If your students are there, you succeeded.”
The Rabideau Lecture on Teaching Excellence annually honors Peter Rabideau, former MSU provost and founder of the Center for Teaching and Learning. For more on the Center for Teaching and Learning, visit www.ctl.msstate.edu.
For more on MSU’s Department of English, visit www.english.msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.