Robert Stephens
Introduction
One of the things that is most amazing, but also most challenging, about teaching in a large, diverse college such as Dawson, is the huge range of students one teaches, in terms of interest, aptitude, background, and outlook. Especially as a Humanities/Gen Ed teacher, I find that I have to design courses that somehow fulfill a fairly specific set of discipline-specific competencies, while still making contact and hopefully a meaningful connection with students from across the college: everything from First Choice Science, to Nursing; from Graphic Arts to Liberal Arts; from Computer Science to Theatre. When I first began teaching, I noticed that I was spending a lot of time simply teaching students certain conventions of writing that I thought they needed to employ in order to fulfill the assignments that I had planned. I spent a lot of time, as I am sure many teachers do, grumbling about what other teachers 鈥渉adn鈥檛 taught鈥� my students how to do, in terms of reading difficult texts, unpacking and understanding arguments, thinking critically, and writing formal essays. This has changed since my time as a WID fellow…
