UCLA Writing Program lecturer emphasizes interactive learning, exploration of the unknown to engage students
Lauri Mattenson, a lecturer with the UCLA Writing Program, places a high emphasis on interactive learning and engaging her students through methods like acting out literary works.
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By molly montgomery
June 6, 2011 1:08 a.m.
On her birthday every year, Lauri Mattenson tries something new, whether it is taking surfing lessons or volunteering in Peru.
In her English Composition 3 classes, Mattenson, a lecturer with the UCLA Writing Program, also challenges her students to dive into the unfamiliar.
She has asked her students to visit museums, take a slow walk around campus without talking to anyone and draw with their eyes closed.
“I think education should be uncomfortable sometimes,” Mattenson said.
To enrich students’ educational experience, Mattenson has taken a more interactive approach to teaching, which has captured the notice of administrators.
“She doesn’t allow people to sit in nice little rows, waiting to listen to the teacher,” said Bruce Beiderwell, director of UCLA Writing Programs. “She forces them to engage with each other.”
In many lecture courses, students are only required to listen, not to respond, Mattenson said. She aims to hold her students accountable by actively involving them in class, she said.
She does this through what she calls “experiential education.” As she reads literary works with her students, she has them act out the plot.
In one short story her classes read, a blind man draws a picture by placing his hand on another person’s hand. Mattenson had her students re-enact the scene in pairs, said Grant Hartwig, a first-year undeclared student who took her class this quarter.
At the end, the person closing his or her eyes guessed what the picture was, Hartwig said. He said the exercise was powerful because it enabled him to step into the blind character’s shoes.
In another instance, Mattenson had her students take a slow, deliberate walk around campus to simulate the type of stroll described in a Henry David Thoreau essay called “Walking.” She asked them not to speak to anyone during the walk or to use their cell phones, to make the experience more authentic. When her students discussed the essay in class, they had a tangible idea of what they were talking about, she said.
Tova Suissa, a first-year art student, said the class was different from any writing or reading class she had taken before because Mattenson focused so much on the process of writing and helped her students develop their skills.
“She just really wants us to articulate better how we feel after a certain experience,” said Ivan Yip, another of Mattenson’s students.
But Mattenson goes beyond just teaching about writing, asking her students to challenge their worldviews, said Yip, a second-year economics student.
Mattenson said her teaching style tries to battle what she perceives as a lack of consciousness among students.
“Some people realize they were on auto-pilot until I asked them for a different type of participation,” Mattenson said.
When Mattenson attended UCLA as an undergraduate and then a graduate student, she felt she was feeding her brain but ignoring the rest of herself, she said.
To keep her students attentive, Mattenson changes around the arrangement of the classroom often. She is sensitive to how the classroom setup can direct students’ focus, Beiderwell said. She also constantly moves about the classroom.
Since Mattenson teaches a required class, she often encounters students who would rather not be taking it, she said. At first, this discouraged her, but she has learned to invite students into her subject.
She said she gives her students a lot of freedom, often asking them to choose what they will write about. Above all, Mattenson’s class has influenced Hartwig, Suissa and Yip to be more open-minded, the students said.
Hartwig, who said he had no interest in modern art prior to Mattenson’s class, visited the Hammer Museum as an assignment. He had always been skeptical of modern art, but Mattenson taught him to look at it in a different way. Now he enjoys modern art and he plans on seeing more art exhibits in the future, he said.
Mattenson succeeded in impacting Hartwig, but she acknowledges that is not always the case. Students have to be willing to try new things for her methods to be effective, she said.
