Spotlight On... Blaire Zeiders
Blaire Zeiders is in her second semester of teaching English 100. Last semester, she introduced a fun and fascinating assignment to her students near the beginning of Sequence 2, titled "Dangerous Ideas," that she has generously agreed to share and discuss. (Click here to download the assignment in Word format). The English 100 admin team interviewed Blaire about her interests and experiences, both in and out of the classroom:
1) Tell us a little about yourself, particularly about your teaching experience and the direction(s) of your research.
This is my fourth year of teaching, but my first at UW-Madison. I've taught a number of composition and literature courses at the University of Pittsburgh, from freshman composition to a critical reading course required for English majors. I like teaching composition because it reminds me that reading and writing are inextricably linked--something that applies to my own interests in the early history of the printed book, whose readership was exemplified by the marks left in the margins. There are times when there isn't much overlap between my research interests in Arthurian book history and freshman composition in terms of content, but there is plenty of ideological continuity in that my work constantly focuses on readers, how they read, and what they wrote about--and in--the texts that mattered to them.
2) Tell us more about your "Dangerous Ideas" assignment: how did you come up with it? How did you implement it within your classroom?
When I taught a course on critical reading in 2007, I used Edward Said's "Representations of the Intellectual" to get students thinking about what the role of the critical thinker should be. One of Said's larger points was that the intellectual was the public figure who asked the "embarrassing questions" of orthodoxy. Students really seemed to respond to this idea that, as critical thinkers, it was their job to interrogate the status quo. I thought this would work well in English 100; however, I didn't want to rely wholly on Said anymore, because that was rather vague. Instead, I found "What is Your Dangerous Idea?", a collection of responses to the Edge Foundation's call for submissions, in "The Best Nonrequired Reading (2007), ed. Dave Eggers. This text has a number of radical ideas, such as "We Have No Souls" and "A Political System Based on Empathy," ideas that ask the question "what if...?" of various systems and/or beliefs and predict the implications of those ide as. I asked the students to come up with their own "dangerous idea" and predict the consequences, in an attempt to get them thinking about their own originality, their capacity to think critically, and their ability to cause change by their proposals.
3) What kinds of papers did you receive, in response to this assignment? Were any particularly memorable or interesting?
I got a lot of great papers in response to this assignment, and I actually just received a batch of them today, containing such provocative ideas as the creation of the "DNA: Designing Newborns Association" (choose the genetics of your baby); a proposal to eliminate the process of checking a box for one's "ethnicity"; the idea of a global communism; the suggestion that the continents will all collide, etc. What makes these papers even better is their sense of what might change as a result of this idea. This assignment allowed students to be a little radical, but asked them to assign real consequences, and therefore meaning, to those proposals.
4) Hindsight being 20-20, is there anything about the assignment or your presentation of it that you would change now, or have changed for the spring semester?
This semester I added something: since we had talked about advertising's appeals earlier in the week, I asked each student to design an advertisement as a cover page for the final draft of their "dangerous idea" paper. The submissions were absolutely fantastic: the advertisements were undiluted, in-you-face appeals to the reader, and showed an awareness not only of the students' topics, but even hinted at the (often sinister) implications. Plus, they were so fun for me to read!
5) What do you enjoy about teaching writing, and English 100 specifically?
I love the small class size, which makes it possible for us not only to have intimate class discussions, but it allows me to give a lot of feedback on papers and portfolios. Although I have a certain relationship with the class as a whole, I think that a large factor in the success or failure of my class is the relationship I have with each individual student in the margins of their essays. The ability to establish a substantial dialogue through comments and their revision is, in my opinion, the most enjoyable--and, for me, productive--aspect of teaching English 100. And if I get to read papers about designing newborns, well, that's a perk.