Week 11: A Translated Learning Objective

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job?

After taking into consideration the objectives for this course, I find that the objective titled “Audience Awareness” is most important to consider for my future job. I ultimately desire to write for a living, which is wonderfully idealistic and highly improbable; therefore, I wish to teach creative writing and literature courses to students while pursuing my own interests at a University somewhere (anywhere). With teaching college students as my professional goal, I think that maintaining an awareness of their age, learning methods, current skills, and knowledge of the world is of utmost importance when attempting to communicate with them. This means that I place a high value on the ability to understand the group of people to which I present information and on the ability to manipulate information in ways to appeal to different audiences. I find this consideration important within the classroom, and, even though I have written several posts regarding andragogy (which places a main emphasis upon the type of audience being taught), I think that it is one of the most important styles of teaching to consider when engaged in a college classroom. 

By being aware of the audience that we, as instructors, are given to teach, we allow ourselves to consider how to best present information and how to best go about teaching these students.  By being able to analyze the demographic composition of the audience, it is much easier to select contact zones through which this audience will learn.  Being aware of our audience within the classroom allows us to select topics that are most relevantly linked with the students, which will further allow us to best teach the topics required of us by the curriculum.  Without a thorough understanding of the audience and the issue that most closely relate to them, it is nearly impossible to engage in successfully teaching a class.

            The ideas supporting andragogy are grounded in the conception of the audience as group of adults. By taking this into careful consideration when approaching lesson plans and activities for my classes, I will try to make the purpose of the assignments clear and concise, and I will try to provide multiple options/prompts to which students can respond.  I believe that, without knowing the type of people within the audience to which texts are addressed or to which lesson plans are directed, neither teaching nor writing can be executed effectively. This is one of our learning objectives that I value and appreciate, allowing me to understand both the importance of applying it and the importance of teaching it as well.