Terrence Foushee - On classroom engagement (clip)

Kathryn Wall (KW): It seems like English class, thinking back to my own experiences in English class, like there's a lot of story in English class, you’re talking about the stories that are in the literature, whether you're talking about people telling their own story, students recording their own experiences, when every kid in that class has a different story, how do you get people to engage with the same story, or engage with the same process of story-telling, knowing that every single kid in that class has a different story?

Terrence Foushee (TF): I think that's interesting, because I think that for myself as somebody who didn't necessarily enjoy reading, who later found a passion and a joy for reading, I had to figure out what kind of genres fit best for me, like what do I enjoy reading? And my approach to the classroom was really about how do, even if this text, and there's a lot of text that teachers teach that they don't necessarily like, or they don't like everything about it, or they know that it's not completely accessible for all of the students that are gonna be reading it, is how can I, instead of just focusing on making sure that you understand what this story was about, how can I take themes or ideas from these stories and relate them to your own personal experiences. Where, even if you don't do the assigned reading, you still can contribute to class conversations, that we can build some sort of relational capacity where I might not have enjoyed this book at all, I might not even have read a page out of this book, but I can still come into class and feel like I can be a part of the class because I know that my teacher is gonna ask me something that does relate to me, that I actually care about to a certain extent. And I think that those were some of the most fun moments in my class is having these conversations, especially Romeo and Juliet, which I love, and I know it’s not one of Shakespeare’s best works, but I enjoyed it because while we were trying to uncover the language of the text, the biggest problem with Shakespeare for students is what is this, “thou”, “unknownst”, words that I’m not familiar with, but once we were able to uncover the language and understand what the story was about especially when we were talking about teenage relationships, how can we make this a bit more modern, right, like even if you haven’t been in a relationship in high school, you’re observing relationships all the time, so one of the assignments that I used to have was the balcony scene, I used to have my students turn that into a text message conversation, and it used to be so much fun especially having the students use emojis, and watching how there would be 15, 20 different interpretations of the same pieces of conversations, some of them were so funny that the students would look for opportunities, there would be students who might not have been engaged in the story, might not have been doing their assignment, and those students would have the most hilarious and sometimes the best representations of the actual balcony scene conversation. So it’s like we're definitely learning skills that you might need for an EOC but y’all are also showing how creative y’all are, and making me laugh like I'm trying to keep some of these so I can show them to the next class but every now and then just to read it, and it’s like this was a ninth grader that did this, but it's a lot of fun.

KW: That’s awesome.