Introducing A Week in the Life of Teaching Faculty (#1)
The first week of the semester has come and gone, and with it I’m publishing the first post in my new blog series about my work as teaching faculty at Indiana University Bloomington. This series is intended to document the hidden labor of teaching faculty that often goes unseen, as well as celebrate wins & milestones inside and outside of the classroom. I’ll also use this as a space to share strategies & resources that are newly published or in development.
Want to hear more about my course load, a first-day activity spotlight, and how I use Canva to level up my learning management system? Keep reading!
Balancing 3 Preps, 5 Sections
It was a busy first week back— possibly my busiest yet, balancing service commitments (campus committee work, journal peer reviewing, etc.) with the start of classes and welcoming a new class of students to IU.
This semester, I’m teaching five sections with three different preps: two sections of intro to poetry, one section of intro to fiction (for English majors & Honors students), and two sections of “Education and Its Aims,” a new course in the Hutton Honors College. The intro to literature courses fall under the Intensive Writing requirement for the College of Arts & Sciences.
This schedule is a major departure from the 2-2 load from previous years when I was released from one course per semester for administrative work. Getting back into the swing of teaching after having the summer off to plan, write, and decompress is always a bit of a challenge, but going into a semester of four back-to-back sections each Tuesday and Thursday is no joke! I deeply admire all of my teaching track colleagues who teach four or more courses a semester; these educators don’t get enough credit for how mentally and physically challenging this can be.
I’m still getting into the swing of things and figuring out what the weekly rhythms will feel like: what time blocks make the most sense for lesson planning and grading? How do I streamline both processes to be both efficient and creatively fulfilling? This is something I plan to write about as we move through the next couple of weeks, with an emphasis on how I am making use of digital tools like Notion and Canva to keep my head on straight.
Teaching Spotlight: “Why are you here?”
This summer, I had the absolute pleasure of starting work on my Instructional Leadership Certificate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. One of the two courses I took centralized articulating our mission and goals in our work as instructional coaches and leaders, and I immediately began to think about how some of the strategies could transfer to the Honors context.
“Education & Its Aims,” a new Hutton Honors Notation course, is intended to get students thinking critically about their educational experiences and the theories, ideals, and assumptions that shape them. Beyond that, the course will prompt them to set intellectual goals for their time at IU and in Hutton. Many Honors students come into this course seeing it as a box to check, but the sooner we can break them of this thinking and push them to articulate their bigger purpose, the better.
For the first day of class, then, I adapted an activity I learned from Dr. Houmon Harouni during the first certificate course. The activity may sound simple, but its results are profound for both teacher and student. This is the very exercise that helped me to rewrite my own mission statement (the one you see on my About page!).
In this exercise, participants are asked four questions:
Why are you here?
Why are you here?
Why are you here?
Why are you really here?
It might sound simple, but the repetition forces participants to dig deep, and move beyond people-pleasing, putting into words (often for the first time) the passions, promises, fears, and insecurities that drive them. With each round, students learn more about themselves and their reasons for being in college, for being in Honors, and for pursuing the careers they have their eyes on.
Two students model the exercise as I guide them through it, and part of the fun is them not knowing they will be answering the same questions back and forth, over and over again. Then, the rest of the students pair up to complete the exercise before writing a reflective letter capturing their responses.
Below, I have excerpted pieces (with permission) from some of the submissions to demonstrate how they responded to this activity:
“This letter really surprised me with how deep it went and how emotional it ended up making me. I still don’t really feel like I’ve gotten to the bottom of why I’m actually here, and I’ve been struggling with that question quite a lot lately. I certainly made progress though and feel like I can at least clearly see now that I’ve been feeling demotivated because I’ve lost sight of what my goals are.”
“When first doing this exercise I did not expect myself to get that “deep.” As when I first was invited into Hutton I did not want to do it at all. I did not want to experience another four years of unnecessary stress, but here I am. I now feel a sense of relief that I did take this class. I am now more proud and happy with myself for taking it, even when everything in me was telling to just drop the Hutton Honors College altogether. This exercise has helped me regain focus on why I stress myself the way I do. It is astonishing how something as simple as asking someone the same question repeatedly forces them to take a step back and look within.”
“When I kept being asked why I was here, I thought I gave an honest and appropriate answer every time. However, as I went down the reasons why I was here, it wasn’t really because my parents thought I should be... The true reason why I am here had nothing to do with my parents. The true reason was because I wanted to put my future self in the best possible position later in college and after college. I found myself ignoring my reluctance of being here and instead focused on what I want to get out of my college experience and how I want to use it to help me achieve my goals later in life. This exercise really helped me to put aside my desire to go back to my dorm and instead helped my refocus on achieving my academic goals. Overall, it really helped me think big picture about my life and what I want to do with it.”
I am appreciative of my students’ vulnerability and honesty in their responses. Moving beyond the sometimes awkward and silly icebreakers, this exercise was a great opportunity for us all to connect on a deeper level.
As our warm-up at the start of next week’s class, I’ll compile their responses to create a word cloud that will help us visualize and start to unpack shared values and concerns. Additionally, these letters will be helpful documentation to return to at the end of the semester as students compose their final multimodal reflective essays.
Leveling Up Canvas with Canva
The first engagement (classwork) activity students complete in my IW courses is a reflective letter in which they set goals for the semester, think critically about who they are as a reader, writer, and creator, and provide their initial thoughts — expressions of excitement or concern — about course content. These letters provide me a glimpse into their relationships with writing, digital tools, and literature, which is especially helpful for identifying the types of skills (peer review, revision, developing research questions, etc.) that students already know they will want extra support for.
One of the patterns that emerged in these letters and in our introductory class discussions was a deep appreciation for the organization of the course LMS and how I intentionally use digital tools to make course materials as engaging and accessible as possible.
I have invested much time learning how to customize my Canvas sites in the last year and a half. When I came to IU, I was new to Canvas; my previous institution used Brightspace. A lot of learning came through the trial and error of helping my colleague Miranda Rodak realize her vision for the Teaching Hub, a central resource for onboarding and supporting new and current graduate student instructors in the Department of English. Some HTML knowledge goes a long way, as does knowing how to create custom buttons using tools like Canva.
I first experimented with building a new Canvas site template from scratch last fall for my digital composition courses. You can click here to watch a video preview of how I structured the pages.
Beginning in spring 2024, I experimented with a new version in my IW courses that aligns with my personal brand and better leverages Canva, my tool of choice for designing course materials and open educational resources.
I used Canva to design buttons that look like old-school binder tabs to house important course resources. Resources like syllabi and course calendars are hosted as Canva Docs, rather than my previously beloved Google Docs. This allows me to customize well-designed templates for course materials and easily duplicate and organize them using Canva’s project folders. I will share more about this type of file design and management in a future post.
I also used Canva to create custom buttons for the weekly module pages. Previously, I was designing buttons using Google Slides, which does place limits on the kinds of customization you might be looking for.
Preview of Coming Attractions
A big part of next week’s blog post will be how I am using Notion to design courses and organize my lesson plans.
As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
