What is andragogy, and how might that approach help teaching in FYC?

Most adults that do come back to college seem to me to be the most passionate students about their newest attempt at college. Those that are given this second chance often have all of the readings done, are very engaged in class and often have questions they are ready to ask and discuss with the class. That being said, I think these are the traditional idea of adults but 99% of the students that we will teach in college are actually adults, even if we may not think of them as such.
These students don't always understand that they are adults because our society does often view them as such until they complete college. But, in the eyes of the law, they are considered adults. Coming to college is often their first opportunity to live alone and away from their parents which gives them more freedom than ever to decide upon what is important for them to do.
A quick search for andragogy online brought me to a website dealing with instructional methods for teaching adults and I think they will be very helpful though I will take my own stance on each. The website is http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/andragogy.html .
The first step is to make sure they feel like they are included in the design of the class. The way I would incorporate this would be to allow my students to pick between doing a quiz every week for grading or posting a blog post on the reading over blackboard or something along those lines. You could also incorporate this in to class every day, allowing the students to choose between group work and working together or in just partners.
Adults also like to learn from what they've done wrong. The easiest way to work on this is to pick out work and issues that I've noticed that I can show to the class. Students will notice when the mistakes shown are the same ones that they have made in their own work. This is a great place to start any lecture as it will get them interested in the day's work.
Arguably the hardest part of andragogy is how to show our students that this is relevant. I think the only real way to show them would be either show them papers in their fields or just prove to them that writing correct through mass media will show them that appearances anywhere and everywhere are important. If they can understand how they are judged based on their writing, I think we will see them be more interested in learning how to write properly in these freshman classes.
Adults also want to look at the world and see how what we are doing can affect the world around us. I think offering them readings and studying the writing in class of major political figures of today talking about these subjects. These can be good examples of ways to write with authority and purpose. I have noticed that many of our students struggle with writing that makes them appear unsure if they are right or not. What should be more important for them is the understanding that trusting you are right will help you to write more efficiently.

Philosophy of Teaching

I think this will almost certainly change over the next few years as I have yet to begin teaching and have a feeling that will change my way of thinking. But I am a Film and Media Studies specialist and I want that to be incorporated in the way I teach. Through great advancement thanks to large amounts of research, we have learned that not all students learn the same and so they must be taught differently as well. But, this does not mean that we should separate students based on their learning habits, instead I would like to use this knowledge to my advantage and attempt to incorporate this in to my teaching. Inventions like the radio and video have increased the number of ways students can learn the same material and gives more students the chance to succeed than ever before.
With the sudden advancements in technology that we currently have, I hope to further incorporate those technologies into the classes I teach in an attempt to provide knowledge to as many students as possible in as many ways as possible.
The three main ways that we learn are auditory, visual and kinesthetic. I hope to incorporate these ideas into all of my classes. The first two, auditory and visual, are easy to incorporate thanks in large part to the internet, readily accessible by the public only in the last 30 years. This will allow me to easily add audio podcasts of just about anything and sites like Youtube will allow me to show video clips to help incorporate the visual learners in the class. The final model, kinesthetic, will be the hardest to help but some kind of handout will likely help the students that fit this model the best. Another good idea for the kinesthetic students would be to try to add some form of group work every class period. It may not always be easy to incorporate them all every class but trying to find an even amount of time for all three will hopefully help the students to be engaged and learning something new every class period.
As mentioned previously, I do not have any true teaching experience but that does not mean that I haven't had some practice teaching people in the past. I have always enjoyed helping to work with some of the students in my classes who were struggling with the work we were learning.
I also attended and staffed twice a leadership training course for Boy Scouts. In it, the big emphasis is not only how to lead others but also how to teach people to learn new things. We constantly worked on strategies for how to effectively teach other scouts the skills they would need.
In the last year when I took a break between undergrad and grad school, I worked as a server and spent over half my time as a server trainer. Many of you who have met me know that I can talk, a lot, and I attacked that by explaining things to the new employees and took a very hands-approach. These previous experiences do remind me a lot of what we do in teaching so I'm hoping to be able to carry on those experiences in to my work in the classroom. The leadership training will help with teaching in front of the class and the server training should help with teaching students one on one in office hours.

Based on your teaching philosophy (which may change over time) what are types of assignments which you would included in a first year syllabus

             One of the big problems I think that the students in the first year writing program here at Tech have/ will have (either in their current assignments or in their drafts later) is the ability to accurately identify the audience and purpose of the article they read. So, I think my assignments would be trying to help students to learn how to easily recognize it. As a film and media studies specialization, much of this would be through the use of film and the internet.
                In my first class, I would do a class workshop on it where I would show different types of mediums and we would work through it to get to the audience and purpose. The first would be a simple one where we would look at a tweet on twitter of someone famous. This would be a simple reading example that should be rather simple for most of the students. The second example would be a clip from Youtube of a speech from a movie or TV show. This would be a bit more in depth as you have to focus on the surroundings of the speaker as well as what he/she is saying. The speech that comes to mind for me from a TV series (and admittedly I am not sure which one) is one where three political candidates are being asked what makes America so great and the first two say the generic, "Freedom!" response while the third calls them out that and says that America really isn't that great when you look at the numbers and statistics. This would be an excellent piece for them to analyze while also introducing them to some higher level thinking. My third would be an audio podcast, something short and likely from a sports website. These would require the most focus (at least for me because auditory learning is my worst learning mode) and attention in order for the students to accurately gauge audience and purpose. Doing these three different styles, audio, visual and written, would also be useful as it gives me a chance to work toward covering all different styles of learning in the classroom.
                 I think a couple weeks later, say between BA 3 and 4 I would give the kids an assignment where I would send tweet, video and audio podcast links to my students that they would need to do outside of class and would then have them emailed to me a day or two ahead of time. I would then randomly pick from among them from which we would look at in class the next week. With having two classes, I would switch the classes responses so the kids would be reading the other classes. This anonymity would then allow them to critique the work without them having to worry too much about the grade and being embarrassed in the class if their works is particularly below the others. But, I think that this will also help them to see from our perspective and that may help them learn something they may not have otherwise.

What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing and how do you go about teaching that?

       To me, it seems like one of the biggest problems students are facing is a lack of confidence. Many students feel that they are under prepared for college and writing in college. They are terrified of writing so they often just write what they think and submit it. For many, the idea of editing simply does not exist. Their high schools do not often make them go back and look at their work. Many have said that the classes just have them submit the paper and then they are told their grades. They get away with writing it once, get a good grade and then move on to the next assignment. There is never any reworking of their assignments and that makes their work more inferior. this lack of practice also leads to a lack in confidence, especially when they begin to see their grades in English 1301 and other papers from other classes. There are a number of students who have already tentatively expressed less confidence in their writing despite having written over a dozen papers in high school. Maybe its fear or maybe its humility, either way, I think this lack of confidence is something we should work on.
           In a way, I'm not sure there is necessarily a way to combat this other than teaching and practice. Confidence is a mental state so there most likely is not one singular lesson plans that can in fact teach confidence. Practice is the only thing that really comes to mind that would be able to help. The more they work on their papers and assignments throughout college the easier they will become and the more likely they will be to enjoy what they are doing. The easier and the more they enjoy their assignments, the more confidence they will have in their writing. Hopefully, this will come with the work they do in our 1301 classes. We, as graders and teachers of the classes, attempt to work with the students to build that confidence through our comments. I think the problem we run in to is that without having them look back over this work throughout the semester, most of their issues and insecurities will not be addressed on their own time. Few students that are not English majors will be willing to put in the effort to actually learn how to solve their writing problems in this class.
              That being said, I also believe that we should be able to successfully instill that confidence into students. If we can do this with our students they will learn how to be more successful and believe in themselves. I think once they work hard on that one assignment and get the grade they want, they will begin to have the confidence to work harder. Our comments while grading and teaching students should be continuously supportive and rewarding and not degrading or mocking. Many of the mistakes these students are making have never been fixed before so they have no idea they are making the mistakes if we are not there to help them along. We are a shepherd of good grammar and they are our flock, we must lead them to the Promised Land. Onward ho, good scholars!