COLLOQUY

As presenter, I am responsible for analyzing my audience to determine what kinds of presentations have the best chance of engaging them. To this end, I need to be aware of such issues as how students learn and process information and how knowledgeable they are of the course content when they come into class.

It strikes me that students currently coming into our classrooms, having been raised on TV, MTV, and video games, are less likely to have done as much reading as many of have come to expect and are more likely to need different kinds of stimulus (sorry about the behaviorist connotations) in order for us to engage their attention. As much as this realization might gall us (after all, we are teachers, not entertainers, right?), we need to take greater responsibility to do whatever we need to do to engage students in areas of study we have come to value.

For example, we need to ensure that our presentations are well thought out and well organized and, if such technology is available to us at our institution, prepare visual support, such as Power Point slides, to supplement our verbal presentations. Not only might such support help with decorum by at least entertaining those few who seem to know how to behave appropriately when bored, we also provide learning support for the students in our classes who learn best visually.

We also need to consider the socialization process students have experienced before they enter our classrooms. Confrontational oratory, from the put downs of Beavis and Butthead and TV talk shows which encourage uncivil discourse to so-called civil interchanges among members of Congress, is the order of the day. And some students come well versed in it.

So an additional responsibility is to set up a classroom community (forgive the problems with that term) in which mutual respect is expected from day one. Depending on class size and configuration, such mechanisms for community building include a consistently respectful teacher demeanor, exemplified by learning student names and addressing them by name; varying ways for students to engage in the course material; and a syllabus that clearly states course expectations. Such expectations could include a participation grade, which could mean not only physical attendance in the class but civil behavior as well.

Certainly such mechanisms would be more easily enacted in different class settings. Still, to the extent that a teacher is proactive in setting up an engaging course in which civil behavior is expected, s/he has a greater chance of preventing some of the egregious problems about which we have been reading.

-- Ruth Fischer, Associate Director of Composition & WAC, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (posted 3/25, 11:19 a.m., E.S.T.)

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