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Return to Natalie
Kononenko's Home Page
TEACHING METHODS
Making the bridge between the classroom and personal experience
Fieldwork: My first goal is to teach flexibility of mind and to encourage students to look for complex relationships by showing them how folklore works. I also have many subsidiary goals. Perhaps the foremost among these is getting students to apply what they learn in the classroom to their lives. Personal experience made me a folklorist and I would like folklore to impact the personal lives of my students. There is no point in my putting as much effort as I do into my teaching, or my demanding as much as I do from my students, if it will not benefit them in all aspects of their lives. Thus, I have tried to get students to apply the material they learn in class. Every class has a fieldwork component. In courses on folk narrative, I have students collect stories from their roommates, their family, members of the community. In courses on ritual, in addition to studying Slavic rites, students document ritual activity in their own lives or they participate in an unfamiliar ritual and record their observations. They apply the analytical techniques learned in class to the material they collect. This creates a crucial bridge between the classroom and life. Having applied the techniques and theories learned my classroom to their personal lives at least once, they can use critical thinking in all aspects of life. I hope to set a pattern where those who have been my students approach everything analytically.
Response papers on E-folio: In addition to having students do fieldwork, I often ask for short response papers (approximately one to two paragraphs) using a new digital tool called E-folio. This is a software program on the web which lets students post what they write and allows students to read each other's work and respond to it. Usually, I assign either partners or teams to make sure that all students get a response from a peer. Through e-folio, students share their work with one another. They help each other and see the perspectives of their peers. (see appendix 3)
Opinion surveys: A year ago I started doing opinion surveys. Before we start a unit, I ask students to anonymously fill out a bubble sheet giving their opinions on material such as proper ritual behavior, or proper gender roles. I then present anonymous student responses in class and post them on the course web page. We discuss student responses and compare to student expectations and to the Slavic material that is in our readings and in lecture. Sample surveys from a recent course are in appendix 3. Opinion surveys are another way of increasing student "ownership" of a course, of making the connection between theoretical and foreign material and the lives of my students.
Staying current
Digital technology: To me, staying current involves not just keeping up with my field, but being aware of what is going on in the world around me and in the lives of students. My interest in digital media comes not just from its applicability to folklore, but also from its importance in the lives of the people in my classes. My courses have web pages. A sample web page may be viewed at: http://faculty.virginia.edu/kononenko. The web pages use assorted teaching and other digital tools such as E-folio and Toolkit. There are links to relevant sites such as a site giving maps of the former Soviet union, a site reporting on folklore field expeditions south of Moscow, and a site which publishes journal articles related to folklore. Soon, set of images, the project sponsored by the Teaching and Technology Initiative, will be available for student research. A good indication of the success of my work with digital media is the fact that several of my PhD's and many of my undergraduates work in information technology.
Teaching and other workshops: Students change with time: pre-college teaching has changed significantly over the time that I have been a professor and the personal experiences of today's students are very different from those of students attending the University of Virginia twenty years ago. I feel I should have a good idea of what I am dealing with before I enter the classroom, and because students do change, I attend Teaching Resource Center and other workshops to stay current. During the past year, for example, I attended:
Being sensitive, imaginative, and flexible
Folklore exists in variants. A singer will perform a lyric song one way before a group of elderly women and another way before a group of school-age children. If the singer is in a happy mood, her song will change accordingly. As she ages and grows in wisdom and experience, the depth of her feeling will come through in her song. I would like to think that the many folk performers whom I have studied have taught me well and that I, too, can do what they do. Certainly, sensitivity to the audience and readiness to adjust and meet the demands of the situation are very important to me. I have, over the years, developed an ability to read my audience, even an audience of 150 students. From their facial expressions, from their body postures, from their eyes I can get a good sense of what students do and to not understand, what interests them and what does not. I have also developed the ability to adjust my lecture, often in the middle of the lecture, accordingly. I also change my courses, not just from year to year and in response to student evaluations, but sometimes in mid-course, to enhance learning. The student surveys, for example, were something I had not planned on using when I first introduced them, but rather a response to the need to make a new connection between the lives of my students and the material presented in class.
Graduate level teaching
With graduate students, I feel it is most important to train them to do research and to present their research orally and in writing. Thus, in graduate seminars, I try to keep as quiet as possible and to let students do as much work as possible on their own. I feel that I orchestrate when it comes to graduate level teaching. Students learn how to use the library. They present the work of others, reporting on scholarly documents. They present their own work, based both on the scholarship of others and on primary sources: folklore texts, rituals, folk art. I feel that the more students can do on their own, the better able they will be to make the material their own, to internalize concepts and techniques. Independent work will make students the best possible scholars in the most expeditious manner. (see appendix 4)
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