English 101- Essay Three
Teaching Methods: Using an Educator’s Lens to Reflect on Your Experiences

Composing Schedule:
Heuristics: see syllabus
First draft for peer review: Wed Nov 3
Second draft for peer review: Fri Nov 5
Polished draft for submission: Wed Nov 10

Assignment
Background
So far you have evaluated an author by testing his views against your own experience in assignment one. Next you applied what we have learned about the expectations college teachers have for academic literacies to your own experiences to talk about the transitions or changes you have made or are making (assignment two). Now you are going to use the arguments made by educator and writer Paulo Freire as a lens to evaluate your education to date.

This semester, you have read many articles about college education and one thing that we’ve discovered is that a number of writers feel that students are not as prepared for college education as they should be. However, many of the authors have pointed out that students are not entirely to blame. High schools don’t prepare students, in part because high school students are sometimes only required to memorize information rather than apply and question it. Is it the teaching method that is to blame?

Paulo Freire would argue that too often all we do is require that you merely memorize; we want you to sit back and just accept what we have to say and then regurgitate that material for a test. So can we blame students for believing that learning is just memorizing if that is all we have asked them to do?

How then should students be educated? How would you describe the major teaching strategies of your secondary education? What should the purposes of a college education be? In your next paper, you will continue to build on this knowledge by discussing what is wrong with some teaching methods employed either in high school or college and suggesting how they should be improved.

Your Task
Since you are a thoughtful, informed, and involved student, you have been invited by The Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly publication for teachers and educators, to write an article about the problematic teaching methods used in high school or in college. The Chronicle of Higher Education, wants you to analyze specific teaching methods that you have encountered in your classes and suggest specific changes that would improve teaching and learning. To show your knowledge of the issue, beyond the anecdotal, you will use Freire as a lens.

Therefore, you will extract the fundamental principles from his argument and apply those key principles to your own experience in education (either at ASU if you are focusing on college or at your old high school if you want to focus on high school). You will also need to incorporate the views of other students to add weight to your discussion (for even if they did not attend the same high school as you, you may find that you share common experiences of teaching methods and common reactions). And you should try to add to your own credibility by using the other authors we have read as further proof for your judgments. Remember that when discussing ways to improve teaching you can use examples of successful strategies you have experienced. You do not have to focus solely on negative examples.

Your Audience
Your readers are teachers and administrators involved in high school and college education . So they are interested in hearing your perspective as a student. They will be especially impressed with your article as you are incorporating the views of a well-known educator (Freire). Since members of your audience are educators, you should not simply “bash” the current educational systems or teaching methods. Besides being sensitive to audience, we know that educational issues are more complex than “good” and “bad.”

Organization
You have many options for how to organize your paper. But as you did in the first assignment, you will