Instructor: Jessica Gasiorek

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 12 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: I think one of the things that I found most challenging is the... grammar and mechanics of writing... The baseline... of where's the average student as far as grammar and mechanics, and things like that, frankly is lower here than it was at Santa Barbara. And so something I am trying to kind of balance... I don't want to turn a college level, in this case, elective upper division course into talking about grammar rules. And at the same time, I don't want to let slip by... things that are basically what standard English prescribes as the way that you put the sentence together... One of the things that I've noticed a lot here is that just in general... there's much more quote unquote non-standard English, as far as constructions go, as far as the way people put words together, the way that people pronounce things... This is pure speculation on my part... I have felt like that makes it more of a challenge for students... One of the kind of go-to things that I would say to my students at Santa Barbara for example is, 'If you are not sure how something sounds, read it out loud. Read it to a friend... Say it verbally, and if it doesn't make sense verbally, then that tells you that you need to rework the structure on paper.' But if you're entire soundscape is non-standard constructions, then telling people to read something out loud as a checkpoint becomes a much less useful checkpoint because it may sound fine, but it still may not conform to... Standard English written conventions... I haven't found a solution to that frankly... I've been strongly encouraging students to go to the Writing Center... to involve others in the writing process. Have your roommate read it over. Have a friend read it over... For all but the final assignment... I return them with... fairly extensive comments... 'You've got a structure issue here. You've got a word use issue here.' And they have the option to rewrite their paper to improve their grade.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 11 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: I have taught Cultural Influences on Communications class in Santa Barbara. UCSB where I was is very white, I mean, it's very white. One of the things that I'm really struck by and that I love about being here so far... one of the things Iʻve tremendously appreciated so far is the diversity of experiences that people are coming from and the richness as far as... the linguistic experiences that people are drawing on... Frankly my students at UCSB probably would have scored higher on their exams, but I, particularly teaching a culture class, or when I was talking about language last semester teaching a verbal communications class... talking a lot about language and what's the social meaning behind language and things like that... I think it was very abstract to my students at UCSB. I think they would sit there, and they would dutifully take notes about what is the social meaning of talking in different ways... But working with students here, I feel like on a very fundamental level, they get that. They just get it. It is their everyday lived experience. For myself, having lived in other places, language has social meaning in Europe in a very different way than it does in most of the United States... Language means something different [in Europe] than it does in the Mainland U.S. where it's predominantly monolingual and people don't think twice about it. I think in my own case also, having grown up in the San Francisco bay area, I'd have to say that demographically, this is much more comfortable to me and much more like what I what I grew up than anywhere I have lived like since growing up. Princeton felt so white. Santa Barbara was so white. I had a really strong Asian influence from early. I mean most of my friends in high school were Asian. I played badminton fairly seriously, and people used to joke that I was easy to find in the gym because I was the only white person there... One thing that has been an adjustment for me here, as trying to gauge this class, is that in picking examples, and things to draw on, Iʻve have been trying, to the extent that I can, bring it back again to student's experiences. But in doing so, it's been very much a learning experience for me... In the verbal communications class last semester, I made a point to going out and finding... empirical articles that dealt with Pidgin, as opposed to any other language that I could have chosen. If I were in Santa Barbara, I probably would have picked something that was Spanish English, because of the... ethnic composition there. But... to the extent that I can and more and more really, I am trying to just open it up to them to give me examples... As far as my own learning and my own gaining and understanding of a place, I feel like I'm learning a tremendous amount from my students just listening, asking them these questions of: ʻwhat does it mean to have this?,' 'where did you learn this?'... Last week in 385 we were talking about world view, and I said ʻokay, what are different... ideas we could have about people's relationship with nature?... A couple of my local students had really interesting things to say about local attitudes toward nature and contrast that to... a more stereotypical, Western Christian dominion over the land kind of approach. I'm trying... to come with a couple of examples in my pocket, but really to let them provide the examples, because the examples that I would come up with are not necessarily the ones the ones that are the most relevant here.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 10 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: In the major theory courses we don't cover cultural stuff, we cover more interpersonal... more media, and a few organizational kinds of theories... I think in this case just having a course that lets us go in depth more on a lot of those kinds of ideas... we are going to talk about individualism and collectivism as dimensions of culture. We already spent time talking about this notion of similarity and difference between, but also within, cultures. How do we understand variance within a culture? We're slotted to spend much more time on things like self construal. How do you understand yourself in relation to other people? That's one of the components of the first writing assignment... having them talk about, in that cultural autobiography... How do you see your self-construal? Do you see it as more independent. Do you see it as more interdependent? And how do you link that to culture? By about week three of first semester, I stopped expecting to find anything... and I just started seeing what happened, because it was clear that expecting anything wasn't getting me anywhere.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 9 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: [Regarding class demographics...] I'd say we are fairly even split on gender, maybe a few more women than men... probably fairly even split on local versus mainland, if we are talking local as also being student... I've got one student from Maui, one student from Kauaʻi... Interisland differences have definitely been a topic of discussion already... [Students say...] 'Well on Maui we do it this way, and on Kauaʻi we do it this way, and then I came here and people were asking me why I was doing this strange thing.' Most of my students from the mainland are from California, although I've got one from Connecticut and one from I think Oregon.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 8 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: Grounding things in [the student's] own experience and grounding things in... what they are, seeing the world... makes these things more real. You can sit down and take notes on any topic, but as far as retaining it, certainly over time, to the extent that you can link it to other things that are going on... from a neural network perspective, the more things you can link to, the better it's gonna stick... One of the major goals of this course [is] giving students tools or lenses... through which to understand their experience. I think you have to be connecting back to what they're experiencing, and that is inherently place-based.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 7 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: Last semester my other course was a verbal communications course, so the focus was basically... how do we use language. Place via culture and language became actually quite relevant in that class because we were talking a lot about how does language define our identities, and how do we use language strategically... to be different kinds of people in different kinds of situations? And how does language link to identity? And so we had a number of interesting conversations about language here on the islands, about using Pidgin, about code switching with Pidgin and using Pidgin strategically. They had a reading on that... people talking about their experiences in the workplace... When would they use it? When wouldn't they use it? And what does it mean to use it? We spent awhile talking about language attitudes... How are different languages perceived and evaluated? What are kinds of attitudes towards pidgin? What does it mean to speak different languages, and what are the social consequences of speaking in different ways? That came back to place. That course had exams, and then it had a group project, and so they did a group project where they went out and collected data about some topic related to verbal communication... and one paper actually looked at language attitudes related to Pidgin... They recorded somebody doing a job interview, talking about...'Here's why I would be a good candidate for this job' in a very generic kind of way, not a specific job... and they had one in kind of Standard English... and one in... a local dialect, essentially. And then their project was that they played those for different people and asked them, you know, would you hire this person as a teacher, as a maintenance worker, as a CEO, as an etc... and compared the results.They were striking and depressing and highly statistically significant. Huge differences in terms of basically, what you would expect... which is when you have a local dialect, people say, yeah, you're fine to be a maintenance worker, and you're fine to be a janitor. We would definitely not hire you to be any kind of high status profession.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 6 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: The assignments in this class are much more personal experience based, contrasted with in the theory class being much more of a general analysis kind of approach. The assignments in the theory class were to talk about what kind of researcher you would like to be, so we spent... the first part of the class talking about more objective approaches versus more interpretive approaches, kind of qualitative/quantitative, and the philosophy of science underlying those. The first assignments asked students... 'What would you like to do if you were to go out and be a researcher? Would you prefer to do more interpretive kinds of work? Would you prefer to do more objective, social scientific kind of work? And back that up.' And then they had a couple of theory application papers. 'How do you... pick a theory from a class? Apply it to... a scene from a television show or something like that.' And then their final was to look at a theory and evaluate it to say what does it do well and not do well, and to provide some ideas for how to improve it. And so those are all fairly abstract things. Those are not really grounded in people's personal experiences, in contrast to this course, where every assignment is deliberately grounded in their personal experiences.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 5 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: I've been for the most part pleasantly surprised by the extent to which students are willing to share... their own experiences with the class as far as culture... Students seem fairly willing to talk and to share. I deliberately structured some of the activities to be a kind of think-pair-share kind of format, and so they talk in groups before coming back to the class, and I have noticed that there are a number of students very willing to talk in those groups, but are less willing to come to the class. I haven't pushed them to come [share their small group cultural discussion with] the class at this point, because... I can hear that when they are in their groups they are engaging with that, and I want them to feel comfortable in the classroom setting. Last semester I saw a similar trend... some of those students that weren't talking in the beginning were talking by the end.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 4 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: I'd say if there's an overarching goal, it's for students to gain a framework for understanding their own experience. What's most important and what I want students to take away from this course is an understanding of how these frameworks and these ideas and these concepts can help them make sense of their everyday experiences. When I'm walking down the street and somebody does this thing that I think is strange, what's going on? Why am I reacting in the way that I do? Recognizing, for example, the symptoms of culture shock when you go somewhere else... I talk about theory and constructs and classes being like a pair of glasses that you can put on... as a lens that you can see things through, a way to understand your experience more clearly... We are the only Communicology department in the nation.
  • Item
    Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 3 of 12
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Gasiorek, Jessica ; Henry, Jim ; Bost, Dawne
    Brief excerpt from interview: I really want students to be connecting what we're talking about in class with their own experiences. Being a smaller class, we can do this, which is one of the things I really like about teaching [Writing Intensive] classes. We do a lot of think-pair-share kinds of activities. We do a lot of class discussions. I try to have them talking as much as they can and then making the connections with their own experiences. So that motivates the content of all of those assignments. They understand the material better. They connect to the material better. If they can ground it in their own experiences and things they've had happen to them. [In the assignment of analyzing a culture that they belong to...] part of what I'm hoping that we'll be able to talk about in class is... some of these cultural values, some of these dimensions of culture, and not have them be just abstract notions of, 'This is what it means to be individualistic. This is what it means to be collectivistic. This is what it means to be high context or low context or something like that.' But to be able to connect that to experiences they've had of being in a situation where that was relevant or salient or determined the nature of the interaction... We've had a lot of good discussions around intercultural interactions in situations where they didn't realize, for example, that a particular dimension of culture was different until having a certain kind of interaction or encounter.