Mark's Samples (Week 1): Why did I decide to (m)ake this course?

For students, the blogging topic is "Why did you decide to take this class?" but I'll change it slightly to explain why decided to create this course.

For ELP teachers, Sophomore English (SE) is a chance to create any kind of course they want. There is total freedom. For the past four years, my SE course was titled Issues in English Education in Japan, and students researched and debated various challenges that English teachers and learners in Japan are facing.

I enjoyed teaching that course very much, but I was ready for a change.

Around the time that I had to update my course content for SE, I was participating in a research group with a number of professors around Japan who were researching better ways to teach reading and writing. One idea that came out of that group very strongly was that students need to develop IDENTITIES as real "writers" and "readers" from a very early age. This is different from being a "student" who writes for homework, often in a forced way. My feeling was that the ELP and other classes at ICU tend to do writing as an "exercise" for practicing English or some skill, but self-directed writing (and reading, for that matter) is not developed, and students are only taught one limited genre called "academic writing".

Academic Writing

In other words, students in the ELP basically never have a chance to think like a real author...a real author who is given freedom to choose genres (including research writing genres, if they want to go that direction), topics, possibly even deadlines...and to engage in writing for the sake of communicating what they want to communicate in the format that they want to communicate. I agree that academic writing skills are useful for training how to research, think, and organize ideas, but I wanted to push open some new possibilities for developing English writing skills as a set of life-long skill that will go beyond writing a good senior thesis that nobody will read.


In short, this course mainly developed from my desire to see how non-academic writing, creative writing, personal writing, and an very open choice of genre and topic could enrich the learning of ICU students. What would it be like if we gave these talented and motivated students a chance to express themselves in a wide open field rather than to keep them focused on academic writing only (like a race) and to help them write to publish rather than just get a grade.

Free, Creative Expression

And another reason was that, as an ELP instructor, despite my efforts, I had a feeling that I was often never really getting to know my students and what they are thinking in real sense and I wondered what it would be like to really push students to focus on communicating who they are and what thoughts are on their minds. The ELP is designed to rapidly rush through a series of readings and writing skills with little time for students to express themselves in personal ways and begin to thoughtfully connect their own personal development with their interests to various fields of research or society. I have a working theory that our learning here will be richer and deeper if we integrate more personal writing throughout the two years.

We will see how this experiment goes!