Mckenzie Bergan is a PhD student at the University of Connecticut studying gothic fiction, young adult literature, and the campus novel. She explores how students and instructors form their identities within educational institutions, both individually and in relationship to those around them. She is the Assistant Director of First-Year Writing and is writing a textbook with the Director of UConn's FYW program. In this role, she also plans professional development opportunities for instructors and helps plan and host the Conference on the Teaching of Writing. She has taught English 1007, Writing and Multimodal Composition over the past several years and in the summer. She is the co-host of the “Reading Shirley Jackson Podcast” and has published “Theorising the Uncanny Adaptation through Hamlet” in Adaptation.
What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?
The most important thing I hope to instill in my students is the ability to recognize and hone their own curiosity. For so many students, school becomes a series of check boxes, and they often don’t have time to linger on questions or ideas that excite them. And that’s not necessarily anyone’s fault! Of course, students become overwhelmed with all they are expected to do in order to gain entry into a university and to graduate from one, and educators have those same responsibilities, especially when so many students face gaps in access and instructional time from the pandemic. That's why I feel it is so vital to give students space to be curious, to recognize when an idea sparks something in them, and further, to give them tools to practice their curiosity. Google and Wikipedia are amazing resources that give us more access to information than anyone has had in the history of our world (!!!), but helping to guide them through the process of navigating those resources, how to be on the lookout for information, and how to process different information in intuitive ways are all skills I work on in the classroom. Further, exposing them to the resources they have through the university and how to use them while they can is central to my work in the classrooms.
What is your greatest teaching challenge?
It might be cliche, but my biggest teaching challenge right now is how to engage with AI ethically. Not only is it a technology that will necessarily change the course of my teaching forever, but I struggle to navigate the ethical concerns I have about it, like the environmental impact it causes, and the lack of credit given to the writers and artists whose work AI uses to create its products. While I’m deeply interested in ways AI can be utilized in the classroom, I don’t feel comfortable asking students to play with AI or asking it to do the same thing multiple ways, as many class activities suggest, because creating one AI generated image is the same as completely charging your phone, according to the MIT Technology Review. In addition, AI draws from resources that it does not credit. How can I ask my students to think about ethical citation methods while using a technology that fails to follow the methods I teach?
And yet, it feels like if I don’t embrace AI in my classroom, I’ll become a dinosaur and lose the opportunity to bring an exciting new technology into the classroom. It also obviously won’t stop students from using AI technology in a variety of ways. Is a “I’d rather you do it in the house” mentality a better way of teaching them how to navigate this development even with my ethical concerns? These are the questions that take up most of my teaching thinking at this point. And while they are difficult, it’s also exciting to be at an important turning point in the way we think about teaching, the composition classroom, and writing itself.
Mckenzie's Assignment That Works
Below is a brief synopsis of Mckenzie's assignment. For the full activity, see the Freewriting Portfolio assignment prompt.
For Assignments That Work, I shared my “Freewriting Portfolio” assignment. This assignment emerges out of a daily practice of freewriting that I do in my First-Year Writing classroom. For 10 minutes each class, students respond to a prompt I create. The prompt may be on the content of the class that day, a question about writing or composing, or a reflection on the project they're currently creating. Every student then shares one thing they thought about in the freewriting time, even if it’s just one sentence. I find starting the day with writing and sharing not only sets a concrete expectation of what class will be like, but it also helps to create a classroom community in which every student’s ideas are valued and heard.
By the end of the semester, students have almost 30 freewriting responses. Our final project, the Freewriting Portfolio, asks students to create a multimodal collage of their freewriting artifacts. They must select 5 excerpts from their writing and then combine them with images that represent their thinking throughout the course. By combining visual and linguistic modes, students can reflectively think about their experience in the class in new ways. Students then create three footnotes that explain how their thinking has evolved throughout the course, and how their projects might have grown out of these preliminary meditations. It also asks them to consciously consider how they navigated their writing processes. I find reflective writing at the end of the semester to be very meaningful, and italso asks me to think about how I want to frame the course for future students.
