Post #7 Multiple Personality Pedagogy

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Multiple_Personality_Pedagogy.html

The interesting aspect of this story is the teacher’s desire for his students to understand the concepts fundamentally, not simply engage in rote memorization and regurgitation of what he teaches. A way of checking for this competence also happens to be a way to reinforce it using what the author refers to as “Multiple Personality Pedagogy.” This type of learning is meant to create a richer dialogue by coercing more students into participating in class discussion. Essentially the teacher creates caricature personas that he knows will cause a reaction in the classroom. For example one of the personas he creates is the “grumpy old man” who is dismissive and uncompromising. In one example when the old man challenges the work the students were reading they were quick to defend and praise it, even though it was a poet who is taught to death in English classrooms.

The teacher found that incorporating challenging characters into the classroom was an organic way to allow the students to be the teachers because they were bringing up key concepts on their own. Even the students who were typically quit were roused by the desire to defend the text and engage in the debate. Other personas the author created included “Big Dummy” wherein the students had to explain even the simplest concepts thereby reinforcing the basics to themselves which would increase their memory and further utilization.  Ultimately by stirring up his teaching style the author was able to generate excitement in the subject matter. As the author puts it, “…it’s the unexpected variation in voice that provides dimension to the classroom experience and allows for the presentation of information in more involved ways.” The students learned more from being challenged to recreate the information themselves than they would have simply sitting in the classroom listening.

This relates to everything we’ve been reading in the class so far that has to do with bringing interest back into the subject of literacy. It is a way to reach out to the individual students and excite them as opposed to demanding they learn a specific way. One of the main questions in literacy studies is how do we encourage our youth to embrace a multifaceted literacy. Approaches advocate interweaving literacy with the day-to-day lives of its learners. It is a holistic approach founded in the desire to motivate generations of students and make literacy accessible. Multiple Personality Pedagogy taps into this idea by stimulating an organic of speaking that a student may use with a peer or another person in their life. It connects literacy to the individual. Putting aside the obvious cheesiness of the characters the teacher becomes its fundamental idea is quite powerful for the future of literacy studies. That teaching is dynamic, and there are ways to engage students so that they are eager, rather than passive, participants in their learning.