Week 7: Reflection

Sorry! Late for this one! Computer trouble!
This week has been productive and satisfying for me both professionally and in terms of the webskills course. As a part of professional practice, this week my students made 20-minute presentations on a poetry project that they were working on. It never stops amazing me how creative students can be if you can motivate them to do something interesting. As a part of their course on ‘Literature and Language Teaching’, they had a unit on ‘Teaching poetry’. The technophile that I am I thought of asking them to go out and interview poets that are there on the campus. We developed a semi-structured interview after a lot of discussions. This is what it finally looked like:
Interview Questions (Please translate the questions into Gujarati):
a) When did you start writing poetry?
b) Which were the magazines/ journals in which you were published? Which are the books you have published?
c) What are the awards that you have got?
d) Which form/ genre of poetry do you like the most?
e) Do you think poetry should be taught in the classroom?
f) How do you think poetry should be taught in the classroom?
g) If you teach poetry, how do you do it? (This question is to be asked to poets who actually teach)
h) Do you think technology should be used in the teaching of poetry?
i) Could you please recite a poem that is one of your favourites?
Most of these poets write in the local language Gujarati. So the interviews were in Gujarati, they were video-recorded, transcribed, translated into English and then a short presentation was the outcome. Some of the students were amazing since they put in pieces of the interview with sub-titles during the presentation, added visuals, researched the web on whether some of the views of the poets matched with other poets (and quoted them), translated some of the pieces that the poets recited etc. A good satisfying week for a teacher, I guess
For the webskills course, I read the articles by Thanasoulas, Sheu and Smith and posted my comments on the Discussion forum. I was surprised that none of the authors discussed technology as a part of learner autonomy. I personally believe that it can be liberating if used judiciously. Also the activities for the one-computer classroom took me back memory lane when we did not have the resources that we have now. I talked about two experiences that I had while computers were still a novelty in pedagogy in India.

Also found a partner in Pradheep and Omar for the next week and since we are working on the same topic, I think this is going to be exciting.
Looking forward to the next week when we start working on our Project Plans:)
Atanu