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A September Sessions Reflection: The Hulk, Spock's Brain, Deliverance, and Hillel

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As a new PWR hire, I approached this year’s September Sessions with equal parts enthusiasm and apprehension. I was excited to meet my new colleagues, to learn more about the university and this program’s approach to writing pedagogy. But I was also nervous that “training” would turn into clear directives from higher-ups to parrot teaching styles that might, perhaps, feel forced or inauthentic. And, as awful as it might sound, I was also a smidge indifferent, having attended many training sessions before at other campuses where the same ideas about writing pedagogy were recycled ad nauseam. What I wasn’t ready for was a smorgasbord of philosophical insight; we began the week considering the history of PWR at Stanford – the inspiring dedication and the high standards that have led to impressive growth. This talk concluded with the conception of our writing program as an “ethical Hulk doing good things” – a program burgeoning, bursting at the seams with talent, commitment, and a mission to teaching the art of ethical persuasion.

In our later discussion on tapping into the complex cognitive pathways of our students, we pondered Spock’s brain. As we recognized the varied learning styles, subject positions, and intelligences of our students, we explored ways to make our classrooms more inclusive and more productive spaces. Later, we contemplated student/teacher synchrony and asynchrony through Marvin’s account of the dueling banjos scene from Deliverance; a stranger and a boy on a Southern porch begin “talking” to one another through banjos, answering the other’s musical call. As the man rings out a tune on his banjo, the boy answers with his own attempt at finishing or replicating the man’s original riff. Before long, the boy surpasses what the man is capable of playing. Accepting Marvin’s invitation to take this scene as inspiration for our own teaching outcomes, we considered ways to push our students toward realizing their own strengths, even and especially when those strengths do not necessarily correlate with our own.

Departing from our week so steeped in meaningful allusions to popular culture, we ended our sessions with a reflection on the differing schools of thought from Jewish philosophers Hillel and Shammai. Marvin encouraged us to use  Hillel’s often quoted Golden Rule as an entry point to discussing best practices for approaching Peer Review. This philosophical rumination on the ethics of reciprocity ultimately reminded us of PWR’s commitment to Intention and Mindfulness. Looking back, it is clear that the overall pathos (yes, I went there) of September Sessions was this genuine commitment to Intention and Mindfulness cultivated through a week-long series of activities. Each activity, in its own way, asked us to question the assumptions we bring into the classroom - assumptions about student-teacher relationships, assumptions about difference, assumptions about classroom dynamics… assumptions about each and every one of the multifaceted aspects concerning what it means to be an educator. Furthermore, each of these activities challenged us to contemplate both the human dimension but also the intellectual dimension of teaching writing and rhetoric. The central question that began September Sessions was: What does ethical communication look like? The follow up question that we’ve all been answering and will continue to answer in our classrooms is: How do we teach this ethical communication?

As we finish up Winter quarter and head into Spring, remembering some of the great activities during September Sessions might reinvigorate our earlier energy for reflection and discovery. And because we’re all so fond of writing prompts, here is a series of questions meant to stimulate that dedication to Intention and Mindfulness. Crack open your teaching journal, choose one or two of these September Session inspired questions, and be a writing teacher that writes.

  • If you couldn’t do your favorite classroom activity/lesson plan, what would you do in its place?

  • What types of assumptions do you have about student/teacher relationships?

  • How can you generate excitement for your class (as opposed to assuming excitement)?

  • What is your teaching persona? What informs your persona? How do you see yourself? How do others see you? What steps do you take to intentionally create/communicate your persona? How does this persona contribute to your teaching and to student learning?

  • How does the Rhetorical Analysis assignment resonate with students throughout the quarter?

  • What does your syllabus design communicate to students about your course? How is your teaching philosophy communicated to your students through your syllabus design? Do students learn from your syllabus?

  • Do students see “their story” in what they’re doing in your classroom?

  • Do you consider the comments you leave on a student paper a new text in and of itself? If so, is this new text aware of the rhetorical situation (purpose, audience, relationship between writer, reader, and text) and carefully constructed to best suite this particular rhetorical situation?

  • Do you engage in “debiasing” yourself (being more conscious about your natural bias)?

  • How do you create brave spaces in your classroom (as opposed to safe spaces or, in addition to safe spaces)?

  • How do you share power in the classroom?

  • How do you stage authentic conversations across difference?

  • When providing peer review sheets, do you set clear directives and objectives?

  • Is education only supposed to be producing workers? What happens to ethics? Liberal arts? Becoming a global citizen?


Since those September days, we have continued to ponder these questions in Program Meetings and in hallway conversations. A sincere thanks to our fearless leader, Marvin Diogenes, for enriching our September Sessions with an arsenal of allusions: the Hulk, Spock’s Brain, Deliverance, and Hillel and Shammai. A hulk-sized thanks to the September Sessions team: 26 PWR folks volunteered their time and energy toward making September Sessions excellent. The sheer number of volunteers that gave of their time and efforts during the summer months speaks to the immensely collaborative environment of PWR. My initial worry of enforced pedagogical homogeneity quickly dissipated when it became quite clear that PWR celebrates the diverse teaching methods of its lecturers. And despite the varied approaches to the teaching of writing, there exists a distinctly synergetic quality amongst PWR lecturers; we may be answering the above questions in very different ways, but we’re still committed to the answering of these questions, and we hold each other accountable to this commitment through our various collaborations both in and outside of the classroom.

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