Graduate assistant Emma White interviews UALR' Dr. Brian Ray about teaching at the collegiate level, his methods and preferred modalities, and his experiences with asynchronous class development. Conducted on 11/11/2022.
Hello Dr. Ray! Thank you for agreeing to this remote interview; I appreciate you taking the time to help me out with my practicum assignment.
Q. What led you to choose to pursue professorship in the field of Rhetoric and Writing? (Did you grow up knowing you wanted your career to be involved with writing or teaching or was this a decision that came up later in life after pursuing degrees?)
A. For most of my life, I knew I wanted to write. At first, I thought I was going to be a medical doctor who wrote best-selling novels, like Michael Crichton. As I grew up, my career aspirations became more realistic. In college I started out thinking I’d be an economist who wrote on the side, but halfway through I realized I was mainly interested in just writing. I gravitated toward creative writing and journalism and worked for newspapers while writing short stories. Then I started teaching writing simply because it was part of my MFA funding. It wasn’t until I started teaching that I realized being a professor was a viable career path for me, and closer to my actual calling.
Q. How long have you been involved with teaching? How much of this time has been teaching at the collegiate level?
A. I started tutoring ESL students in college and started teaching at the college level in my early 20s in graduate school. That was back in 2005, almost 20 years ago now. My views on teaching have evolved quite a lot since then.
Q. Do you have a particular philosophy that guides how you approach teaching?
A. Yes, my current view on teaching draws on self-directed learning (SDL), something that’s gotten some attention in K-12 education but not much at the college-level yet. The idea is that you assign fewer readings, at least for entry-level courses, and give students more freedom and autonomy to choose their own topics. This works best for first-year comp and mid-level writing courses. I post content focused mainly on the “how-to” aspects of writing and research.
Q. What are your preferred topics to teach and what about them do you enjoy that sets them apart from other course subjects?
A. The courses I enjoy teaching most are research methods. Aside from that, I’m not sure I have a preference. I’ve found that if you structure the course the right way, everyone can have a good time and do meaningful work.
Q. The 2019 pandemic had a significant impact on the implementation of hybrid and asynchronous courses in all academic settings. Did you have any relevant experience with digital teaching or content creation before the big cultural switch to digital learning?
A. I had a little bit of experience teaching online courses before the pandemic, but not much. Early on, I learned that a lot of online writing instruction pedagogy applies to F2F learning contexts as well, and I was already doing some of that. Since then, I’ve taught online exclusively, and I’ve found a new appreciation for asynchronous instruction. I think it’s stereotyped as flat, non-dynamic, and less rewarding for students, but that’s a myth that over-glorifies the role of the instructor. I think the instructor’s job is to set up a productive learning environment. If you set up the right environment, then students will engage themselves and each other–and they don’t need an instructor to feed them “interesting” readings and discussion questions.
In 2020, SkillShare became incredibly popular, and I got curious and watched a handful of courses. I was blown away by their quality. I’d say that had a pretty profound influence on my approach to online writing instruction.
Q. In working at UALR, you’ve previously had to design and then teach online courses. Do you have a particular process for transposing an in-person curriculum to a digital format? What differences are there, if any, between that process and developing a new course that hasn’t been taught before?
A. I think trying to replicate a F2F class in an online environment isn’t the best approach. The last couple of years have shown me that students sign up for F2F and online classes for different reasons, and they want different experiences. Those experiences can meet the same basic learning outcomes, but one doesn’t have to reflect the other. That said, online instruction has come a long way in giving instructors and students more tools. We have video chats with breakout rooms now, etc. So, at this point in my career, I think it’s really about giving students the experience they want/need in order to succeed. If anything, teaching online has made me reevaluate what F2F classes can/should do. If I teach F2F again, I’ll plan much less discussion and more active, self-engaged assignments or more open-ended collaborative activities. I’m definitely not going to make them read an essay I think they should find interesting and then make them sit in circles for an hour answering discussion questions. In retrospect, that really hasn’t worked well for several years now.
Q. What special considerations need to be kept in mind when designing for students you don’t get to personally interact with in a physical setting? I imagine the process of engaging others through text and gauging their knowledge comprehension is a different ballgame.
A. Maybe it was the time I spent on Skillshare, but I’ve found that short clear videos that walk students through the basics of using a platform takes care of 95 percent of problems. It also helps that Google Classroom is way easier to use than Blackboard. So, from a design perspective, I’ve been making my courses simpler and leaner.
Q. What platforms do you prefer to host your class content on? Why?
A. I like Google Classroom best. I host the syllabus and schedule, etc, on a Google Site
and then embed that in the GC platform. It’s simple. It works with the gmail system we already use. It’s pretty seamless. I honestly don’t know why the university is paying for Blackboard *and* Google when Google does everything.
Q. Multimedia use seems to be a key factor in disseminating information to students digitally. What strategies have you used to incorporate different mediums into your lessons?
A. Yes, I think modality is key. Students learn via different modes. Every week, I make slides with a detailed outline of readings (for an upper-level course like rhetorical theory) and assignments. Then I make a video and post it. (I need to get better with captions.) I post the slides along with the video. I especially like using videos and screenshots to illustrate how to use Google Classroom, etc. Students also post some kind of short assignment every single week. It might be a topic proposal, a response or reflection on a reading, or an update on a project they’re working on. So, students are getting the content via textual, visual, and aural modes.
Q. How do you motivate your asynchronous students to increase their classroom engagement with one another? Online discussion boards are a frequently used option but can become repetitive after weeks of use for students.
A. Yes, engagement in asynchronous courses is a challenge. My graduate students show more inherent motivation here. Honestly, I’m still working on this. I think forcing it can backfire, and actually make students less likely to complete other work, so I haven’t been pushing it very hard lately. I’m reminded of Kevin Roozen’s work on extracurricular literacy, and I think it applies to engagement. Just because students aren’t officially engaging on my course platform, that doesn’t even remotely mean they don’t know how to build social networks and engage each other in other contexts. By forcing them to complete time-consuming activities that make me feel good as an instructor, I might be taking time and energy away from other things they’re doing outside of the classroom space that extend what they’re learning from me.
Q. Have there been any significant or repeating difficulties you’ve encountered either on your end as an educator or on the other end for your students with digital learning? If so, how did you try to resolve them?
A. A while back, I did start to get tired of repeating the same instructions and clarifications over and over. Making a video and/or writing a short blog post introducing assignments changed all of that. I hardly ever have to repeat myself anymore.
Q. What benefits or limitations does learning or teaching asynchronously have compared to a hybrid module?
A. I think it depends on the student’s own situation. Asynchronous courses work great if they’re well-built, and students are self-driven. Hybrid courses work better when there’s material that merits some discussion. What I think works best: Students can complete a course asynchronously if they want to, but they can attend optional “check in” meetings where the instructor and students can discuss assignments, or even just talk. Unstructured talk probably plays a major, under-valued role in learning.
Q. What sources do you frequently use for finding useful (free!) materials online for your students? Do you have a particular site or database you prefer that you could suggest I look into?
A. Believe it or not, Twitter is a fascinating place for rhetoricians. When I make videos illuminating rhetorical concepts for undergraduates and graduates, I can always pull examples from articles posted there, or major current events, or trends. From a purely rhetorical perspective, what’s been going on there with free speech is worth a thousand lesson plans. Same thing with TikTok and Instagram. Telling them to go on a social media app and report back what they’re observing with regard to ethos or exigence is a whole assignment.
Q. What advice would you give your younger self at the start of your UALR teaching career?
A. I’d tell myself to stop imposing my own personal quirks and idiosyncrasies about what I think is important, or what they should be learning. Ease up. Relax. Let them explore what’s interesting to them, and then teach that to you with their writing. That makes everyone’s lives easier, and it makes for a better class.
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