I’ve used this example a couple times in class, but for me the easiest way for me to recognize and be able to explain legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) is at my job at a vet hospital back home. I began working at the vet in the summer after my sophomore year in high school, so 2010. When I first started working there I didn’t do much. I would help restrain the dog or cat while someone else performed procedures on it and I would clean. It was relatively boring in the beginning, but as I stood around for hours, I was observing. I was watching the other veterinarian assistants and vet techs and I was learning. By being on the outside, I was able to watch and sort of learn how to do the things. So when my boss would say, “hey Maggie, administer this vaccine or draw blood for a heart worm test,” I wouldn’t need as much instruction except on small technical ideas. It always felt like I was leveling up every time I gained a new skill, and each time I would gain a skill, it was time for me to observe more and learn something else new. Eventually we got some new hires and then they were observing me and learning by watching me from the periphery.

Besides the fact that it would give me extra work to do, I think that in teaching programs like liberal studies or english education, we should do more observations and working in actual classrooms. It’s all well and good for me to read about teaching theories and to learn information to regurgitate back at my future students, but it’s a completely different thing to watch a teacher control a classroom and teach to real human students. I’m not one hundred percent sure I want to teach, but I would feel more comfortable with the idea if I had more experience before I had to commit to the teaching credential program. I always find that I learn better by doing, maybe that’s partly because I’m a horribly lazy student so listening to lectures and doing worksheets just never cut it for me. I either have to be in on the conversation or be hands on. I’m not sure I believe all students are ever just one type of learner, but I think it would be helpful (and certainly more fun) if schools had a lot more activity based learning, or had more observational options or requirements. I had lot of friends in high school who did ROP programs, where they observed and worked with professionals in fields that they were interested in, to get more of an idea of what that work would actually look like. I’m sure they learned a lot more from their experience in the actual work, than when they were just in a classroom reading about it. It’s hard for me to not get really frustrated when I read about all these educational theories and ways to make school better, because it doesn’t seem like teachers really have that much freedom in their classrooms because of district rules and strict curriculum. That’s part of my reservations when it comes to teaching because I want my classroom to be cool and innovative and revolutionary, but it doesn’t seem like that could be something I would easily be able to achieve. I don’t know. But I do know that I think LPP is an interesting and complicated topic that I’m curious to learn more about.

I found a lot of Bartholome’s arguments in “Inventing the University” to be valid, even if I found the paper to be super boring. I mostly wanted to focus on the idea of authority in writing. This is something I have struggled with a lot in my own writing, the feeling that I’m not enough of an authority on a subject to speak about it in any position of power. It took a really long time for me to feel comfortable to take the phrase “I think” out of my arguments because I never felt that I had the privilege to have my own ideas be fact. I was not an expert on what ever topic I was writing on, whether it be a work of literature or a scientific paper, so I didn’t feel I could take a stand and argue my point as one hundred percent true. Batholome talks about this problem on the bottom of page 9 and the top of 10 when he is discussing audience awareness and how it is not always a great thing. What I think he means by this is that when you know who your audience is, say an English professor, then you know that they probably know more than you on the subject. This creates a feeling of inadequacy and lack of confidence in students, and can lead to them just believing they’re not good writers. It’s important to get students to feel like in that moment of writing that paper, that they are the expert. Bartholome uses the example of writing to explain something to an alien or to someone who knows nothing about your topic. This puts students automatically into a position of authority. I think those exercises are fine, but at some point you have to convince your students that they just have to write like they are the expert, with strong and compelling arguments, whether or not they’re writing for someone who technically has more authority than them.

I have a hard time with the idea of writing differently for various fields. Maybe because at this point in my academic career, I have found my voice and know how write effectively in different contexts. Sometimes this gets me into trouble because I get the comment a lot of times that I write too casually but I honestly don’t know how to write any differently. When I was dabbling in other majors, I always got compliments on my writing, that it was my greatest skill. But in the english department I’ve gotten a mix of A’s and B’s, which I really don’t mind, but then I don’t get the help I need to improve, or the professor isn’t as clear with what they want because they assume that as english majors we just know what they want. And that’s just not true because every professor seems to want something different, for different types of assignments even. And for me I can generally figure it out, because I am good at writing, but for students outside this environment, I think it can be a difficult thing to figure out for new writers (I mean new as in, still figuring this whole writing thing out. Not that I’m not still figuring things out, but that I’ve had a lot more practice to figure things out. You know what I mean).