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Faculty Experiences - Marjorie Goodwin
MARJORIE GOODWIN
Anthropology
| Interview Topics What matters most to you in your teaching? How are you using technology as a tool to achieve your teaching goals? How have your students responded to your use of technology? What new goals do you have for using technology in teaching? | Pedagogy Exercises & assignments Focus on the learning process Relate theory to practice Show what you're talking about Student participation Work with real data | Technology Acrobat PDF Audio Final Cut Pro (software) Games InDesign (software) Peak (software) Photoshop (software) PitchWorks (software) Video |
Involving Students in the Process of Learning
I want to make sure that students are very involved in the process of learning. They should be active participants
in the acquisition of knowledge. It's very much a give and take between
professor and student. In almost every class it is important to have
students relate theory to practice. How a student tries to relate the content of a class to particular situations that they have investments in is important.
I value having students become competent researchers with original ideas because it will help them in graduate school and the employment field they choose to get into. It's easy for me write letters of recommendation for those students who have presented original and creative analysis in term papers.
I teach linguistic anthropology. I use computers to show the different ways people talk and interact (look under Current Projects; Embodied Language Games on my website). I show video images to help demonstrate how the social organization of a group is constituted through language ( for example, in the midst of a child's game). In class when talking about institutional discourse, we may analyze footage of the Rodney King hearings to show how within institutions such as the courts lawyers present their case in a certain way to argue that Rodney King rather than the police was the aggressor. At the time of the trials I recorded from the cable show Court T.V. the proceedings of the trial and I have used it in to classes to discuss how language influences our perceptions of reality.
With respect to various programs, Peak is used to digitize sound, replay it, and fine-tune audio transcripts, which I prepare in InDesign. I use PitchWorks (a program designed at UCLA which allows one to get pictures of audio pitch tracks) when I want to show intonation contours of utterances. I use Final Cut Pro to make short movies, Photoshop to import pictures and InDesign for text. I use Adobe Acrobat to import text images and movies into final presentations I make. It's convenient to have my computer set up to show the class data which relates to the topic or readings of the day.
You can tell how much the students like or dislike the way the material is presented in class by looking at the products they turn in for their final assignment. They like the idea of having technology so accessible. It provides a guide for how maybe they can do their projects. Students have done projects in my Language in Culture class on "Beauty and Acceptance: Language and socialization in an Upscale Salon", which discussed language in an African-American beauty shop, marathon runners as a speech community, the language of hypnobirthing, the language used to coach football, the apprenticeship of ironworkers.
I give my graduate class in Ethnography of Communication a CD with data extracts, assignments, and articles of mine. One of the assignments is to have students transcribe audio data to give practice in transcribing. They do exercises using the data on this CD to prepare them for their final project.
What would be ideal for me in the future is to have video streaming more reliable for me to put on a web site. Right now it's kind of difficult because the images break down.
Oral Interview, May 2, 2003
