A Re-Vision of Teaching: Portrait of a Teacher in Process

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A Re-Vision of Teaching: Portrait of a Teacher in Process

In Adrienne Rich's essay, When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision, Rich writes about re-vision as the act of seeing with fresh eyes, of entertaining an old text from a new critical direction (629). RichƒÎs idea of looking at a subject with fresh eyes is a strategy that I decided to employ to reflect on my own teaching practices. In using re-vision to examine one particular lesson that I taught on Adrienne Rich/feminism and another lesson on revision source integration, I was able to see my lessons from a new perspective. Just as Alice Walker looked at her mother unconventional piece of art, a garden, in her essay, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, I began to see my lessons as unconventional pieces of artwork in this same way (746). Examining my lessons from this artistic perspective enabled me not only to explain the process itself, but also to discover what was missing from my first lesson, the role of the student. Looking at my process ultimately helped me to redefine studentsƒÎ roles in the classroom.

If I had recorded my feminism Adrienne Rich lesson this is what it would look like: fifteen minutes of me talking. This talk begins with me introducing an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which was written by a first-year composition teacher, Kate Dube. I bring the class attention to the observations she discovers from her class when they discuss feminism. I mention a few misconceptions about feminism, some students' thoughts on feminism, and reasons that Dube thinks feminism is a necessity due to the fact that there is still inequality between men and women today. Reading the class a statistic ...

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