Teacher-to-Teacher

Flexible grouping at the high school level

2010-01-25T05:54:00.000-08:00

Overview:

Classroom teachers who use flexible grouping structures are able to select higher level and higher interest grade level materials, as students become co-teachers and co-learners. Because the teacher as facilitator designs groups based on a variety of factors, such as student reading/ writing/ thinking/ public speaking ability, gender, interest, engagement/ enthusiasm, the groups draw out the strengths of every student and enhance the overall learning potential of all students.

When teachers move from teacher-driven to student-centered classrooms, they shift the responsibility of the curriculum to all learners. Flexible grouping infuses curriculum adaptation, extension, and innovation. Flexible grouping is an opportunity to reconceptualize curriculum materials for 21st century learners due to the powerful models for collaboration and problem-solving inherent in its design. Flexible grouping is a means to increase expectations for all students due to peer interaction and targeted learning. Effects of grouping vary by how it is implemented, as flexible grouping is most effective when teachers target a specific learning event concept, when teachers vary instructional delivery, and when the teacher reflects on and reevaluates the dynamics of the group assignments.

Direct instruction:
Direct instruction at the beginning of a new learning event is imperative within the flexible grouping model. Direct instruction is the jumping off point of a teacher’s backwards planning, as it offers outlines of objectives, cognitive structures necessary for accommodation of new learning, and access to prior knowledge as prerequisites for achievement of objectives. Direct instruction at the beginning of class offers review of previous learning events or previews of new learning events. The direct instruction should contain ideas and information that meet the needs of all learners: “top” students and special needs students.

Terminology as integral to direct instruction:
Direct instruction should introduce terminology that is applicable and important conceptually to the new learning event. Research suggests that students do not make the new terms part of their own inner vocabularies when they solely write down the words, such as in a divided page context. Instead, the teacher should pronounce all new vocabulary words to assist those students with decoding problems. To assist all students to build a base of meanings, the teacher should help the students to create a schematic. The teacher might ask the students to create a graphic organizer of relationships among terms; to visualize the terms and draw them as applicable to real-life situations; to dramatize the words in quick skits. Subsequent class periods of direct instruction may be used to review the terminology, link with reading assignments, or to help the students to pronounce the terms.

Learning events and flexible grouping:
When the students move into learning events in their flexible groups to deconstruct an assigned reading, the teacher should provide guidance toward the learning objective. That guidance might be a set of conceptual reading questions [i.e. Why does the protagonist behave in this manner? What is the viewpoint of the author, and how does this particular worldview filter the information contained in this reading?]. The guidance might be a cognitive map that the students create together. The guidance might be a compilation of information that each student has composed and take on the format of poster or wiki, for instance.

Comprehension strategies might include SQ3R [survey, question, read/ recite/ review], summarizing at key places, designing graphic organizers or cognitive maps, building sequencing charts/ timelines, working through study guides, highlighting key ideas, taking Cornell notes, devising mnemonics, participating in oral discussions, or journaling.

Each group member assumes a role: discussion director, recorder, visualizer, researcher, or other expert roles. The roles are rotated each day. The group is "done" when all members of the group have successfully completed the series of learning process events.

While the students work in their flexible groups, the teacher constantly circulates the room, offering feedback and positive reinforcement. Additionally, the teacher should compile a series of observational notes about the findings of the class. These observational notes will be the foundation for the subsequent whole class activity.

Classroom management:
The teacher must develop routines for the students to follow for flexible grouping to be a success means to enhance learning for all students. The teacher should model the expected process and behaviors of flexible groups prior to implementation. Modeling can be accomplished through direct instruction, dramatization, or simulation. The teacher should move from whole group to flexible group by reminding students of the instructions for that particular learning event before students form their groups and to ‘dipstick,’ or ask one student to clarify for the entire class so the teacher can sure students understand what they are going to do. The teacher should post an outline of the tasks, create a time clock of efficient task completion, and have a "quiet" signal that students have mechanisms for self-monitoring and optimal efficiency.

Whole class renewal:
After the flexible grouping learning event, the teacher should reconvene the whole class and deconstruct the learning events. Rather than having each flexible group share their responses --- which may become repetitious rather than reinforcing --- the teacher should share observations of the significant findings of the class. The observations may be in the format of a bulleted list, a cognitive map, an interactive presentation, or a short film, for example.

While discussing the findings orally, the teacher should offer a visual summary as well: a transparency on an overhead, a graphic organizer on a poster, a webpage with hyperlinks to areas of additional information and ideas, or a blog that the students can visit after class to review. The overarching goal of whole class renewal is to build comprehension.

Post learning event assessment:
The assessment after the learning event should be utilized to determine the extent of each student’s learning during the flexible grouping time. It is ungraded and focuses on inferential applications of critical questions.

Conclusion:
Flexible groupings in the high school classroom require excellent classroom management skills, the ability to multitask, and significant amounts of preparation time. In an era of larger class sizes than ever juxtaposed against standards-based education mandates, flexible grouping allows students and teachers to work together toward common learning goals.

Resources
Irujo, S. “Flexible grouping: Nobody ever said it was easy!” The ELL Outlook. March/ April, 2006. http://www.coursecrafters.com/ELL-Outlook/2006/mar_apr/ELLOutlookITIArticle3.htm

Porcaro, K. “Heterogeneous grouping.” Educational Performance Systems, Inc. Woburn, MA. 1995.

Genre and Voice: Transformations of Authority

2010-01-15T19:28:00.001-08:00

Carolyn Fortuna and Joe Piazza

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Franklin High School

Home base: B107

Workshop Goals

Examine how recontextualization --- a process that extracts text, signs, or meaning from its original context and molds it into another context --- has applicability to the secondary English subject area public school classroom.
Expand student authority over writing by breaking expectations and genre restrictions.
Immerse self in writing experiences that merge choice, authorial voice, and academic transformations.
Consider how shifts in authority can open up compositional voice.

Morning Agenda

8:00 Welcome, housekeeping, and continental breakfast (Room B107) [Joe and Carolyn]

8:15 Introductions: Icebreaker about our Favorite Composers and Texts [Carolyn]

8:30 Writing selves, identity, and genre (Joe)

Define genre expectations in a classroom
Discuss Burke's Trout and how expectation governs experience
Problems with students in writing research essays
Expand student authority over writing by breaking expectations and genre restrictions
Percy's "The Loss of the Creature"

Preview of second morning session (Carolyn)

"Author Presents: Author Files"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h4rm57UIg

9:30
Break

9:45 Writers' Retreat (B107, B209, B210) [Carolyn, Joe, Marissa = Facilitators]

10:45 Facilitators share the writing prompts they chose; participants discuss their responses to the prompts, the sharing session, and the possible applicability to their students (B107) [Carolyn, Joe, Marissa]; opportunity to post to the Wiki [Thanks, MJ.]

11:00-12:00 Break for Lunch/ Exercise/ Meditation

Afternoon Agenda

12:00 Welcome back from lunch (B107) [Joe]: View "Crows" sequence from Kurusawa's film, Dreams

The role of the layman and expert

1:00 Discuss how transformations can occur when we personalize a text and release authority

Spin the Wheel! "Transformations of genre"

Small group writing activities (B107, B209, B210) [Carolyn, Joe, Marissa = Facilitators]

1:45 Break

2:00 Recontextualization Slam (B107): Small groups share their collaborative, transformational writing pieces

2:30 Final thoughts: Reflections about the ways that teachers can release authority to students and what the consequences of that release can be to students as thinkers and evaluators

2:45 PDD District Evaluations [Marissa]

Writer's Retreat Assignments

B209	B211	B107
Joe	Marissa	Carolyn F.
Lucille	Carolyn B.	Cathy
Ron	John	Lori Y.
Jen	Colleen W.	Dawn
Erin	Janet	MJ
Helen	Lori C.	Jamie
Ellen M.	Carol	Kate
Gale	Colleen M.	Brian

Grammar for real life

2009-04-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

I often find myself torn between competing forces as a high school English teacher. I want students to learn to use the grammar of their own language as part of their daily life; to know the rules is to be able to break the rules. Yet I also recognize that students who do not receive formal instruction in the rules of grammar do not implicitly learn the codes of formal language that are so prized in middle class society.

Ah, what is one to do?

I've taken the time to cull some interesting ideas from the Internet which I hope will help if you, too, are uncertain about what grammar instruction should constitute for the 21st century learner.

The excerpts that follow asks questions that allow each of us to figure out what grammar is and why we should find it important. It is taken from a website called Learning Space at http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=195327

The importance of grammar
We want you to start thinking about what exactly we mean by a term like ‘grammar’ and how and why grammar differs in speech and writing. For some of you this will revise and build on your knowledge of previous study. Activity 1 is a way of raising questions in your mind and you will find some answers or explanations in the rest of the unit.

Activity 1
You should allow 0 hour(s), 10 minute(s).
Write down a few sentences which explain what you think grammar is about and why it is important. What do you expect to learn by studying English grammar? We shall come back to this activity again at the end of the unit.

I started off many years ago as a teacher of English in various countries around the world, using a form of grammatical description which highlighted ‘correct’ usage such as knowing when to say I have gone and when to say I went. More recently, in analysing academic writing, I have applied a different model of grammar, one which foregrounds the idea of grammar as choosing forms to express different types of meaning. I have discovered other grammatical systems and applications. You might be surprised to realise how many different areas of life utilise an understanding of grammar. Computer scientists involved in creating voice-recognition software need to understand grammar and the frequency of the likely patterns of the language; police experts need to trace typical language patterns used by individuals if they are to detect lies and forged documents; doctors and specialists in language disorders in children or in patients with head injuries need to know the typical grammar associated with particular contexts in order to understand where disruption or dysfunction is taking place. Of course, knowing grammar is a basic part of language learning and teaching and is also necessary in professions such as translating and lexicography (compiling dictionaries).

Many of the uses to which a knowledge of grammar is put are also starting to rely on the application of computer technology to language analysis.

Many linguists are exploring ways of grounding their description of language in cultural, geographical, social and economic conditions. These factors are seen as influencing how language is used in context; that is, how variations in what we are doing, who we are communicating with, whether we are face to face or separated in time and space from our listener/reader and so on affect the grammatical and other language choices we make. This is a wide definition of context, and is sometimes called sociocultural context.

The following excerpt is taken from "Effective Grammar Instruction" at yourdictionary.com. It seemed to make sense because it offered its audience of parents and guardians a balance of rules, positive reinforcement, and real-world applications.

A Change in Teaching Philosophies
The way grammar is typically taught in schools today is most likely very different from how you learned basic grammar rules. Although declarative knowledge was once the primary goal of grammar instruction, today's teachers now place a greater importance on helping students develop procedural knowledge.
Traditionally, English grammar was viewed as a separate part of the educational experience. Teachers helped students learn by requiring regular substitution or pattern practice drills and diagramming sentences. Memorization was a key part of grammar instruction, with frequent quizzes and worksheets available to test a student's mastery of grammar rules. This philosophy is sometimes referred to as prescriptive grammar instruction.

Today, grammar is viewed as an essential communication tool. Instead of viewing grammar as a separate area of study, teachers often strive to integrate grammar instruction into other subject areas. Drills are minimal, often replaced by a practical discussion of how grammar can be used to aid in effective communication or how grammar is used in a particular piece of literature. This philosophy is sometimes referred to as descriptive grammar instruction.

Even though the hands-on knowledge students gain from descriptive grammar instruction can be quite valuable, it is interesting to note that this modern approach to teaching English grammar is not without its critics. In fact, many people believe the current pedagogical approach has led to an overall loosening of grammar standards. However, this has yet to be conclusively proven.

Tips for Teaching Grammar
If you're interested in helping your child develop a better understanding of English grammar, remember the following tips:

Don't use worksheets to measure knowledge. Grammar worksheets are fine for practicing basic concepts, but worksheets place too much emphasis on simple memorization. They fail to help students develop the critical thinking skills necessary for applying the rules of grammar to real life situations.

Teach grammar in the context of good writing. Encourage your child to write stories and poems, using his work as a starting point for grammar instruction. Relating grammar to a subject that interests your child will help him see grammatical rules as both practical and relevant.

Stress communicative competence. If you are reading a story with your child, use the text as an opportunity to discuss irregular verbs, proper pronunciation, and any other related grammar concepts. Reading also provides a chance to reinforce that good grammar is a building block writers use to effectively communicate their ideas.

Use error correction to support language acquisition. If your child is discussing his day at school and makes a grammatical error, respond by using the correct grammar form and providing a brief explanation if necessary. However, it's best to avoid overstressing minor mistakes that don't interfere with communication. You don't want your child to view learning grammar as something to be reprimanded.

Some people take grammar very seriously! Here's a cute article found on http://www.poormojo.org/pmjadaily/archives/021548.php

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson have not wasted their lives.

They fight a losing battle, an unyielding tide of misplaced apostrophes and poor spelling. But still, they fight. Why, you ask. Because, they say. Because, they must.

For the last three months, they have circled the nation in search of awkward grammar construction. They have ferreted out bad subject-verb agreements, and they have faced stone-faced opposition everywhere. They have shone a light on typos in public places, and they have traveled by a GPS-guided '97 Nissan Sentra, sleeping on the couches of college friends and sticking around just long enough to do right by the English language. Then it's on the road again, off to a new town with new typos.

Picture a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation—holding back a flood of mixed metaphors and spelling mistakes and extraneous punctuation so commonplace we rarely notice it anymore. But they are 28 and idealistic. Graduates of Dartmouth College, they are old friends with a schoolmarm's irritation at conspicuous errors, and despite their mild and somewhat nerdy exteriors, they have serious nerve. Deck lives outside Boston; Herson lives outside Washington. And together, they are TEAL—the Typo Eradication Advancement League—and they are between jobs.

Even President Obama, who is known for good grammar, cannot evade the grammar police: See the article at ...

http://translation-blog.trustedtranslations.com/obama-and-the-grammar-police-2009-02-27.html.

Happy grammar day to you!

Writers' Workshop

2009-03-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

Composing is thinking; thinking is composing. One of the best ways to figure what we know is to write about it. Even in the 21st century, with so many new modalities for publication and so many new ways of representing our ideas, humans engage in a process to create meaning.

When humans confront new ideas through new experiences, we engage in a cognitive process in order to make those new experiences meaningful. While all composers do not engage in the same steps in the same sequence, essence within the composition process emerges when composer/ writers work from an experience to a final product through a process of conceptualization, reflection, and renewal. As teachers, we can assist our students --- our co-learners --- to engage in a process workshop through which ideas become meaning.

The outline of the writers’ workshop looks like this:
1. Mini-Lesson (5-10 min.): model how to think of an idea, punctuation, or anything that will help students on their writing; teachers often shares own writing of similar project(s) to that of the students
2. Status of the Class (2-3 min.): students report in on their current step in their writing; teacher records note of progress
3. Writing (20-40 min.) & Conferencing: individual ideas about topics; motivation and innovation; revision and editing; hear works in progress; peer editing
4. Sharing (10 min.)

Teacher's Role in the Writing Process
Prewriting: Provide background experiences so students will have the prerequisite knowledge to write about the topic; allow students to participate in decisions about topic, function, audience, and form; define the writing project clearly; specify how the writing will eventually be assessed; information about writing genre; provides opportunities for students to participate in idea gathering and organizing activities; write a class collaboration with students.

Drafting: Provides support, encouragement, and feedback; emphasize ideas first, then wording; teach students how to draft; encourage students to cycle back to prewriting to gather more ideas or ahead to revise when needed.

Revising: Organize writing groups; teach how to function in writing groups; participates in a writing group as any listener and reactor would; provides feedback about the content of the writing and makes suggestions for revision; insists that students make revisions; encourages students to cycle back to prewriting or drafting when necessary.

Editing: Teach students how to edit with partners; prepare editing checklists for students; assists students in locating and correcting mechanical errors; diagnoses students errors and provides appropriate instruction; corrects remaining errors that students cannot correct; shares.

Publishing: Arranges for genuine audiences for student writing; does not serve only as a judge when receiving student writing; creates celebration session for students’ writing release.

Students’ Roles in the Writing Process
Prewriting: Writes on topics based on own experiences; engages in reversal activities before writing (teacher/ student = co-learner); identify the audience; identify the purpose of the writing activity; choose appropriate genre and modality for their compositions based on audience and purpose.

Drafting: Writes a rough draft; focuses on ideas and voice.

Revising: Shares writing in writing groups; expresses thoughts about areas of confusion; participates constructively in discussions about classmates’ writing; makes changes to reflect the reactions and comments of both teacher and peers. More information about sharing/ revising with adults is available at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/writersworkshop.html

Editing: Proofreads own compositions; helps to proofread peers’ compositions; identifies and corrects own mechanical errors. Tools to assist in editing are available at http://www.teenlit.com/workshop/default.htm

Sharing: publishes own writing in a form appropriate to genre and modality; shares finished writing with an appropriate audience; reviews celebration session response; reflects on final composition as beginning point for next composition.

Sample Writing Prompts
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource_topic/writing_prompts

Foundational theorists of the Writing Process:
Donald Murray, Read to Write
Nanci Atwell, In the Middle
Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins
National Writing Project, where teachers can participate in a Summer Institute and become Fellows
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource_topic/teaching_writing?gclid=CNqftMPNgZkCFSHyDAodIDmwmg

Resources
Morris, J. “How to start a writers’ workshop.” Teachers.net. Nov. 1, 1998. http://teachers.net/lessonplans/posts/681.html
National Writing Project. www.NWP.org
Schmit, D. “How to hold a writers’ workshop.” September, 2006. http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/writersworkshop.html
TeenLit.com. “Writers Workshop.” http://www.teenlit.com/workshop/default.htm

To Kill a Mockingbird Learning Event Ideas

2009-01-04T15:39:00.000-08:00

Recently, I met with my protegee, who was about to teach Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. To offer him a helping hand, I surfed the web and culled out a series of learning events that I felt had real possibilities. I thought I would share this list with you all. I place the url first and an annotated description afterward.

:) Carolyn

http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=265

While this lesson plan uses the quotation from To Kill a Mockingbird as a springboard and ties nicely to discussions of the novel, it can be completed even if students are not currently reading the book.

http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/98/mock/intro.html
Students gain a sense of the living history that surrounds the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Through studying primary source materials from American Memory and other online resources, students of all backgrounds may better grasp how historical events and human forces have shaped relationships between black and white, and rich and poor cultures of our country.

http://www.aresearchguide.com/mock.html
This unit guides students on a journey through the Depression Era in the 1930s. Activities familiarize the students with Southern experiences through the study of the novel and African American experiences through the examination of primary sources.

http://www.lessonplanspage.com/printables/PLAKillAMockingbird89.htm
This is a database of all types of information regarding the text.

http://clem.mscd.edu/~pekarekr/greatbks/gtkmunit1.html
Included in this book are a lot of racial issues and sexuality issues. To teach lessons throughout the book, the teacher must be prepared to deal with the thoughts of a society that is different than what we are used to right now.

The objective of this first lesson is to introduce the unit and motivate careful reading of To Kill a Mockingbird. The objective of the anticipation guide is to introduce the themes of the novel via implications of the mockingbird imagery. The Elements of Fiction chart introduces the literary tools an author can employ to convey profound truth about human nature. Thus, this lesson invites discussion of book awards and "classic" literature.

http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=525
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=526
How does To Kill A Mockingbird frame issues of courage and cowardice against the backdrop of the American South in the 1930s? Includes templates from the text of character traits of courage and cowardice.
Learning Objectives: To expose the students to the history and cultural milieu of the deep South in 1935 America; To demonstrate close textual reading; To gain an awareness of how one’s society might force its citizens to take unpopular, but moral, stances in order to promote change.

http://tewt.org/tokillamockingbird.html
A 9th grade English teacher put together a website with many resources: chapter guides, quote quizzes, chapter quizzes, plot & character worksheets, vocabulary flashcards, vocabulary quizzes, internet resources, and more. Most are in Word or PDF Format. Project ideas may interest you as well as Internet resources: Novel, Historical Context, Great Depression, Harper Lee, and other topics.

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/icp/lessonplan/TKAM/tkam_home.html
This is an integrated curriculum project with each of several phases explicitly outlined. It seems an excellent route to take for a first time of teaching the novel.

http://www.pbs.org/theblues/classroom/intidentity.html
OverviewAfrican American history during the Jim Crow era includes encounters with poverty, racism, disrespect, and protest. Harper Lee develops all four of these themes in her famous 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. To help students understand these ideas, this lesson incorporates the blues and other literature of the time. Ultimately, students will be asked to consider both African American oppression and activism through a variety of lenses.

Learning ObjectivesBy completing this lesson, the student will:
Explore life for African Americans during the Jim Crow era
Consider terms of respect and disrespect
Analyze the effectiveness of different forms of cultural protest

Ibsen's A Doll's House: Questions to inspire sociocultural interpretations

2008-12-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

December is the time of solstice, celebration, and rituals. It is a time to look at who we are as the days grow dark and the winter casts its long shadow. It's the time for a teacher with responsibility for the English subject area to offer students a glimpse into Victorian acculturation through Ibsen's A Doll's House.

But I'm very interested in interrogating the play through critical theory and pedagogy. I'm asking students to 'play forward' Ibsen's themes to that of contemporary western, and particularly, American society. What does life look like in comparison? To my knowledge, Ibsen was no feminist nor radical. Instead, he sought to use theater as a forum to discuss what is in the hopes of securing discussions of what might be. Questions to drive this unit include:

What is significant about Torvald’s reaction to Krogstad’s crime?

Nora lies several times in the play. Why does she lie?

What information is revealed during the opening scene of Act II between Nora and Anna, her nurse? Frame their discussion against the larger backdrop of Victorian society and culture.

What makes this play fall within the genre of realism?

What is Krogstad’s significance in the play?

Compare and contrast Mrs. Linde and Nora. How does Mrs. Linde contribute to Nora’s personal growth?

How does the relationship between Mrs. Linde and Krogstad illuminate the relationship between Nora and Torvald?

Dr. Rank tells Nora that he will not have Torvald in his sickroom because “Helmer’s delicate nature shrinks from all that is horrible.” How are these words proven to be true? What does this statement suggest about males in the Victorian age? Can this statement be applied in full or part to males in today’s society? How?

What is Dr. Rank’s function in the Helmer household --- really?

To what extent is Nora’s problem due to her and Torvald’s personalities, and to what extent is it due to the values of the society in which they live? To what extent has Nora solved her problems at the end of the play?

How convincing is Krogstad’s rationale not to reveal Nora’s complicity in the forgery? Is his shift from villain to altruist realistic? Consider the backdrop of Victorian society and culture as you decide.

Does Nora have a greater responsibility to herself or to her family?

Who is the more important character: Nora or Torvald? Why? Offer support.

Find three examples of dramatic irony (in which a character makes a comment that the audience knows to be contrary to the full truth) and explain how they contribute to the total effect of the play.

Find three examples of verbal irony (in which there is a contrast between what is said and what is actually meant) and explain how they contribute to the impact of the given scene, or to the audience’ understanding of the events and meaning of the whole play.

Ibsen believed that “a dramatist’s business is not to answer questions but only to ask them.” What questions does Ibsen ask in the play? Does he offer any solutions?

My goals are to infuse popular and media texts alongside the western canon to integrate semiotic knowledge into traditional literacy and alter what student engagement looks like in the English classroom. Literacy is tied inextricably to personal, relational experiences formed through multimodal text experiences, so, when popular and media texts became center stage, interconnections among language, literacy, and culture became stronger (2000; Strauss & Irvin, 2000).

How do privileged youth in today’s U.S. society express their identity in public versus private settings? How do institutional contexts like public education create multiple privileged youth performances of identity? How does the cultural script of privilege create students’ worldviews and assumptions about their identities? These are the questions that interest me as I begin to discuss gender and class with 21st century students.

Adapted from D. Rosenberg in World Literature and M. Meyer in The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature

Melville and critical literacy

2008-11-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

Within critical literacy pedagogy, readers can examine, analyze, and deconstruct social and cultural messages embedded in the text. As Linn (1996) argues, “the Great White Story” also means “misogyny and slavery,” and, unlike modernist theory, contemporary postmodern theory looks to “who has the money and power” (p. 136). Billy Budd, by Herman Melville has inspired a range of readings from the triumph of justice to the justice's miscarriage (Yanella, 2002).

Among others, interpretations of Billy Budd less commonly shared with students in the public school classroom refer to homosexuality in primarily male environments (Phillips, 2000). Melville scrutinized the rights of humans, the innocent against the backdrop of civilization, the value of an individual life, and the nature of social conflicts. Milder (2002) suggests the novella is an "ever-deepening inquiry" (p. 102) for truth through alluding to contemporaneous poetry, mostly Whitman's and Dickinson's verses. Coffler (2002) uses an aesthetic lens to claim that Billy as the actor of "the Handsome Sailor myth" is connected to joyous ancient Greeks and biblical martyrs while also celebrating the "mating of Hellenism and Hebraism" (p. 63) as a dialectic response to crisis of the western civilization. Reynolds (2002) argues that Melville's novella is a literary answer to the social and political events of 18th- and 19th-century Europe and America. Revolutionary riots correlate with Billy Budd's characters and plot: Harper's Weekly and New York Times editorials and illustrations about New York massive street strikes and the 1886 Chicago Haymarket tragedy.

During times of crisis, leaders use dominant language culture to supply a whole range of ways of talking about or constructing an object or event (Edley, 2003; Fairclough, 2003; Giroux, 2008). Melville’s interrogation of historical context, normalization, and hegemonic Western world in Billy Budd paralleled much discourse around the 2008 U.S. democratic state. Students in this study were invited into specific learning spaces where they could question what survival of the fittest was for the 30 million people in the United States who lived in poverty (Howard, 2007). They could deconstruct what life was like for children of one or more parents who served in the American wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They could frame an argument around the dissolution of Glass-Steagle Act banking regulations, the forfeiture of civil rights via the PATRIOT Act, the weakening of the American dollar, or the inflated fuel prices as consequence of a military-industrial economy.

But, after analysis of a Disney film that reimagined maritime and military life, would privileged students connect fantasy to reality across time and space? Would privileged students link Billy Budd critically to contemporary U.S. political discourse around national security, terrorism, and militarism? Would privileged students debate democracy’s potential as a collective civic language and as a unifying device for inclusivity? Or, would privileged students recapitulate arguments from dominant ideologies through established and comfortable Judeo-Christian, individualistic, and historical lenses through which their privilege rose and was perpetuated?

Offer your insights on the nature of contemporary discourse at this pivotal time in U.S. history. How would you reconcile the messages of Melville in our postmodern U.S. society?

Senior honors English syllabus

2008-09-01T14:16:00.000-07:00

Syllabus for Senior Honors English
2008-2009

Instructor: Carolyn L. Fortuna
http://www.societyissuesidentity.blogspot.com/

“… (E)ducating students to be critical rather than merely good citizens must recognize the multiple narratives and histories that make pluralistic societies” (Freire & Giroux, 1989).

Course overview
English 12 Honors will respect grammar (examination of the component parts of language --- semantics, pragmatics, and syntax), rhetoric (the art of persuasion through language), and dialectics (questioning and argumentation as a means to interrogate the structures of the society in which we live). Our goals are to become more fully literate and to deepen our understanding of ways that society and culture contribute to identity formation and worldviews. The cultural aspect of literacy asks readers to consider texts in relation to context and to recognize the socially constructed components in all human acts and practices.

Called critical literacy, this education will draw from Freire’s model of critical pedagogy and encourage you to ask questions and dialogue with Ms. Fortuna about what you watch, see, and read. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, because you respond in authentic ways when engaged in inquiry. Evaluation of sources comprises a significant role in critical literacy education, so you will examine structures and framing of messages.

Course description
This course introduces students to critical literacy, cultural studies, and communication research through classic texts of the western canon. By examining identity, society, and culture as interrelated constructs, we’ll focus on the role of communication, generally, and of mass media and popular culture, specifically, in ways that illuminate Intertextuality. With respect to these materials, students should expect to be able to do the following by the end of the course:
· Name and define key constructs of critical literacy;
· Compare and contrast different theoretical frameworks;
· Define structural features and intents of multimodal texts;
· Explain and appraise central questions in the field of critical literacy.

Language choices have tremendous power to shape a reader’s conceptualization of reading. Texts in this course will include all forms of symbolic expression that create meaning for readers. As a result, texts will transcend print and include visual, digital, and audio sources. This definition of literacy is sometimes referred to as multimodality (Bourdieu, 1977; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).

Course objectives
· To consider what it means “to read”
· To reconceptualize learning as a long-term, thinking-centered process
· To grow as literate learners
· To familiarize yourself with critical literacy constructs and processes
· To speak, listen, interpret, read, and write as significant means in which to reflect on our own thinking processes
· To develop structures for discussing and analyzing texts
· To learn how to plan, draft, and revise a memoir, critical analyses, public speaking presentations, and research poster
· To prepare and deliver several presentations to the class of varying lengths
· To survey online research databases
· To write with peer-reviewed, scholarly research as support
· To help you write in commonly accepted academic style and MLA formatting
· To help you think more clearly and effectively by:
n Organizing your ideas in a well-structured, succinct, and creative manner
n Designing argument statements
n Realizing that what you write is an extension of you and your ideas
n Understanding that good writing comes from rewriting
n Improving your writing and thinking and rethinking

Critical literacy theory
This class will adopt critical literacy theory that includes the following components:

· Content integration: Topics will include examples and content from variety of cultures.
· Knowledge construction: Implicit cultural assumptions and frames of knowing within a subject area do influence the ways that knowledge is constructed. We’ll interrogate those cultural assumptions and frames of knowing.
· Equity pedagogy: Academic achievement of students from diverse cultural, gender, racial, and socio-economic groups will be one of Ms. Fortuna’s goals.
· Empowerment: Regardless of previous high school English class track, senior honors English will seek to accentuate the success of all students, regardless of previous academic performance. (Banks & Banks, 1993).

Course reading texts
Senior honors English requires that you read and analyze text 30 to 45 minutes every school night. The following texts are required in the curriculum.

Your curriculum literature assignments will encompass Chaim Potek’s The Chosen, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and A doll’s house, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness and The secret sharer, Edward Albee’s American dream and The zoo story, William Shakespeare’s Othello, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching god, Thornton Wilder’s Our town, and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering heights.

Sharing these texts in American public schools is often called a cultural transmission process (Banks & Banks, 1993), by which a system of signs and symbols pass on knowledge and meanings to each new generation. In keeping with critical literacy pedagogy, each curriculum text will be accompanied by various peer-reviewed, scholarly companion pieces as well as numerous multimodal texts.

Critical literacy pedagogy also asks readers to distance Self from text in order to interrogate motivations.

Five critical questions for critical literacy (Hobbs, 2006)
#1) Who is the author, what is the author’s background, and what is the author’s purpose in composing this message?
#2) What techniques are used to attract and hold the reader’s attention?
#3) What cultural values and points of vie are represented in this text?
#4) How might different people interpret the messages in this text differently?
#5) What is omitted from this text?

Five core concepts of multimodal literacy (Hobbs, 2006)
#1) All messages are designed carefully through language and images.
#2) Texts contain symbol systems with codes and conventions.
#3) Texts have messages that are embedded with cultural values and points of view.
#4) Different people interpret messages in text differently.
#5) Text messages are constructed to obtain objectives like cultural transmission of knowledge, profit, and/ or power.

Curriculum policies
The senior honors English curriculum contains several core writing assignments. Among them are:

· A style and language analysis, based on Othello by Shakespeare
· A characterization as a reflection of culture analysis, based on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
· A critique of contemporary society after reading Ibsen and Albee
· A 10-page paper, comprised of discussion of two independent reading texts, one curriculum text, and a literature review with ten (minimum) peer-reviewed scholarly research sources

Unless otherwise stated, all assignments are due at the beginning of class. You should have the assignment printed prior to class and ready to turn in. If you’re late to class, so is your paper.

A composer’s digital portfolio
You will keep throughout the year a record of your progress as a writer, thinker, analyst, learner, visualizer, and composer. Aside from full-length curriculum assignments, your digital portfolio is an open field. Here are a few samples of how your thinking might be captured in digital form.

· 25 minute timed writings
· Sample memoirs
· Visualizations
· Cartoons and captions
· Freewrites and notes taken in response to prompts, discussions, readings, and other texts
· Responses to assignments
· Responses to readers’ comments about your writing
· Lecture notes
· Reading notes
· Self-sponsored writing, including personal writing and reflection

All writing for English class must be saved in digital form. This means that certain student materials are necessary for this class:

· Access to Microsoft Office Word
· Travel drive/ memory stick
· Pens
· Spiral notebook
· Folder

Student rights, responsibilities, policies, and procedures

Please note that all Student Handbook rights, responsibilities, policies, and procedures apply to Ms. Fortuna’s senior honor English classes.

Conferences
You will have abundant opportunities for in-class help with individual conferences. In addition, while we’re working in the library or in one of the computer labs, you and Ms. Fortuna will conference. Ms. Fortuna can also schedule occasional conferences before or after school [by appointment only]. Conferences are intended to individualize your learning experience, to give your personal time to brainstorm ideas with an adult, and to give you practical help. It is highly encouraged that you plan for and take advantage of these conferences.

I also highly encourage you to visit the National Honor Society before and after school sessions that take place in Ms. Lawson’s room, B202. I can honestly say this always leads you to getting a better grade on your multimodal compositions. Please bring written documentation of your visit including NHS response, and you will receive 5 points extra credit.

Grading
Grading is typically as follows:

One day assignments: 5 points
Extended day/ process assignments: 10 points
Quizzes: 20- 25 points
Projects: 50 - 100 points (depending on complexity)
Presentations to the class: 20- 100 points (depending on time requirements)
Research paper: 250 points

Resources

Banks, J., & Banks, C. M. (1993). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Karable & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Freire, P., & Giroux, H. (1989). Pedagogy, popular culture, and public life: An introduction. In H. Giroux & R. Simon (Eds.), Popular culture: Schooling and everyday life. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.
Hobbs, R. (2006). Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold.

Critical discourse of youth in education

2008-07-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

What is “identity?” How do youth in today U.S. society express their identity in public versus private settings? How do institutional contexts like public education create multiple youth performances of identity?

These are questions of interest to me lately as I begin to explore data I collected over the last year as a teacher researcher. Identity is typically defined as a series of qualities that distinguish one individual from another. In psychological terms, identity reflects a series of mental features such as beliefs, memories, preferences, and the capacity for rational thought. However, society and culture impress upon individuals many different characteristics and pressures and create complex relations between sociocultural groups. Thus, sociocultural identity, as marked by ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, race, gender, heritage, or combinations of these, creates a particular type youth discourse in the public school classroom.

I propose that youth identity in the public school classroom transcends individual manifestations of psychological phenomenon and emerges through the accumulation of social and cultural capital. While psychological, social, and cultural structures may overlap, the relation of self to sociocultural structures creates students’ negotiation between peers and teachers in a dance of similarity, indifference, difference, compliance, acquiescence, and opposition.

Individuals’ sense of self is certainly an important element of identity. However, students’ identity is more significantly dependent on ways that students position themselves and are positioned through roles dependent on hierarchies within the social and cultural structures of the institution of education. Bourdieu (1977) argues that the role of education is to reproduce “the structure of power relationships and symbolic relationships between classes” (p. 487). Interactional student negotiations are constructions of others’ perceptions and representations and are byproducts of larger ideological processes and structures. Students’ self-conceptions surface in the social world of the classroom through discourse.

Discourse comprises the ways that people communicate in verbal and non-verbal ways: spoken, written, signed, and body language and through multimodal and multigenre forms of communication. Discourse is a dynamic that creates tensions between language, structure, and agency. The relationship between discourse and social practices is dialectical in that elements are internalized by other elements. Students’ past practices and imaginative futures become embedded in social practices and networks.

Buckholtz and Hall state that identity is emergent in discourse, does not precede it, and is an intersubjectively achieved social and cultural phenomenon (2005). Students’ experiences can be deeply felt yet unnamed, even unnamable, within discourse, as dominant ideologies drive and deepen discoursal tentions. Fairclough (2003) says that ideologies are representations that “contribute to establishing, maintaining, and changing social relations of power, domination, and exploitation” (p. 9). Such a definition of identity as a construct of dominant ideologies challenges essentialist definitions of identity, or definitions in which identity is viewed as fixed, singular, or binary, or in which concepts of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation exclusively create self-concepts. Addressing sociocultural identity is part of the work of critical pedagogy, in that critical pedagogy explores new identity categories and the development of relatively new discourses for addressing sociocultural identity, difference, and diversity. Discourse within contexts of social and global justice advocates equity in representation for marginalized groups locally, nationally and internationally.

Fairclough (1995; 2001) outlines a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse, moving from analysis of language texts, to analysis of discourse practices, and, finally, to analysis of discursive events as sociocultural practice. In the public school classroom, critical discourse analysis can help to unveil the culture of student voice and silence, of advocacy and resistance. For example, how do youth negotiate difference and come to understand democracy? To what degree do youth today understand themselves to be citizens who participate altruistically in community-based duties and responsibilities? How are youth today developing national and political identifications? What does it mean for a new generation of U.S. citizens to share common democratic values? How does identity play into definitions of national, regional, and group identifications?

Use this forum to respond, either as a teacher, youth, or interested observer. And keep peeking in on this blog as my data analysis takes on life through my own reflection.

Resources
Bourdieu. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Karable & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buckholtz, & Hall. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.
Fairclough. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2001). Language and power. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York, NY: Routledge.

Looking back at public school as a rite of passage

2008-05-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

At the end of this month, many high school seniors around the country will complete their twelve years of formal and mandatory education. Ahead will come a series of new decisions about career and identity. This rite of passage can be invigorating, illuminating, and illusory.

To the high school seniors who read this blog, you are a child no more. You are an adult who’s made many initial decisions about your life and future. You’ve traveled a very long path to be at this sometimes tenuous, sometimes wonderful moment in time. Before you take that last step off your high school campus, I’d ask you to take a few moments to think about life as it was for you as one of America’s children, especially in your former role as a student. You can also help those of us in the field of education to know your generation a little bit more, if you will. (Please note that the comments to this blog are pseudonyms. Anonymity offers a certain freedom.)

Consider the Native American proverb, “No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.” How do you look back on the twelve years of formal education? Are you nostalgic? Relieved? Reticent? Why? Do fond memories of simpler times resonate? Or was life never really simple? Do life lessons that once seemed traumatic now seem just an awkward stage, even cathartic? What was it like for you to be a learner at the cusp of a new millennium?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist, said, “Not in his goals but in his transitions is man great.” Life when Emerson wrote surrounded small New England community enclaves; discourse rose primarily from family and religion. Your life is very different. How did the society and culture in which you were nurtured create pathways for your academic integration into school culture? What is life like when you are ready to graduate high school? Pesky calls you “a digital native” due to the ubiquitous technology in which you have been emerged. He says:

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Do you agree with his statement? What advise to you have to offer to educators? If you were given the power, what institutional changes would you incorporate for other students in public schools who follow you? To what degree do you feel that school has been a microcosm of society? What were the best parts of school? What challenges continue even though you will no longer be a participant?

Dr. Michael Welch, a cultural anthropologist and digital enthnographer from Kansas State University, recently uploaded a short video to YouTube called Web 2.0, the Machine is Using Us. The video discusses how the Web is changing how and how fast humans around the globe communicate. After you view the film, offer a socio-cultural critique of Wesch’ argument. Is his view accurate? Why or why not?

As you think about your answers to these questions, I’d like to thank you on behalf of educators in the United States everywhere. You have offered us vicarious links to the energy and enthusiasm of our own youth. You’ve also introduced us to many new ways of knowing our own worlds. A part of you will live on with us and in the students we’ll help to grow as learners in the future to come.

Blogging as part of classroom learning

2008-05-03T04:54:00.000-07:00

What is a blog?

The word “blog” is short for "Web log." A blog is a specialized site that allows an individual or group of individuals to share a running log of events and personal insights with online audiences. (www.pvt.com/oth/glossary.htm) It offers readers the opportunity to reply to opinions and link to their own blogs. (www.iab.ie/FAQs/DefinitionofTerms/) Some blogs have definite authors who disclose their names, and some has anonymous authors who use a nickname.(www.searchenginegenie.com/search-engine-glossary-b.htm)

Why am I requiring students to post on a blog?

As part of a “Society, Issues, and Identity” unit, two of my classes will post occasionally to a classroom blog. Because it is important for them to be safe and protected when using the Internet for classroom purposes, they are posting on the classroom blog using pseudonyms.

What is a pseudonym?

A pseudonym is a "false name" or alias used by a writer desiring not to use his or her real name. Sometimes called a nom de plume or "pen name. (home.cfl.rr.com/eghsap/apterms.html) A pseudonym serves many purposes. An assumed name protects the anonymity of an author.(www.reddeerbookexchange.com/terminology.htm) Fictitious names are often used when the person performs a particular social role. (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn) In this situation, students are using a blog to publish their classroom learning experiences.

Do all students have to post to the blog for every assignment?

No. Several windows for extra credit opportunity will open and close for students to post. In a privileged community where grades are intertwined as status and pathways to academic capital, grades are very important to my students. They like extra credit opportunities.

Periodically, however, all students will be required to post as part of scaffolded learning events. Upcoming, for example, is an assignment called, “Citing Your Sources: Ancient Greece Society and Life.” Each student will submit a post in conjunction with a self-selected Issues Group.

Who is the moderator for our sophomore blog?

I am the moderator for the blog. This means that I review and sometimes abbreviate posts from the students. Some posts that are submitted to the blog may not be accepted, and yet other posts may be accepted without any editing. It is likely that most submissions will get posted with some editing.

What is the address for the blog?

http://societyissuesidentity.blogspot.com/

What has been the reaction to the blog so far?

In the week since the students have become aware of it and its potential for digital discourse, nine students have posted on a voluntary basis. Several of those students have sought me out in person to ask, “What did you think of my blog?” The blog has invited conversations around topics that a teacher might not freely address in this era of restricted teacher freedom of expression.

What do you think about incorporating blogs as part of classroom instruction? Add your own ideas.

Submit a comment to this blog in which you describe your own experiences using blogs in the classroom. Did you seek administrative approval, like I did? Was it approved (my questions were never answered, so I went ahead, anyway)? Have students or families resented the requirement to publish their work for a wider audience than teachers or classroom peers? Have students who live in a Web 2.0 world embraced the opportunity to reconcile their inside/ outside school personas, at least to a small degree? Has manipulation of form ever exceeded unveiling of students’ learning content and making links among ideas? If so, what did you do to streamline that learning process?

New Digital Media: Teachers' Roles as Trustees

2008-03-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

The GoodWork® Project at Harvard University has been studying how individuals strive to achieve work that is “excellent in quality, ethical, and engaging to the worker” (http://www.goodworkproject.org/research/digital.htm). Much of their recent work has turned to digital media --- cyberspace --- in which youth engage in social as well as work activities.

Pettingill (2006) reports on the trust that youth place in internet sources. She found that participants who engaged in social networking sites daily were “more likely to cite Wikipedia as a trusted source for information. Subjects in this subset also had a tendency to search for content that has a perspective similar to theirs and exhibits consistency with other sites” (p. 7). Moreover, the researcher determined that teachers are regarded as trustees, “particularly regarding how to choose credible sources of information” (p. 9).

All right, teachers: raise your hands if you are comfortable with new digital media. Hands down.

Okay, I’ll start again. What is new digital media?

When digital computers became ubiquitous, our homes became sites for the Internet and computer games. Yet those media were only the beginning of new media, however. Online publications have emerged. Typographic press has been transformed through image manipulation software and desktop publishing tools.

Thus, new media represent new forms of digital media and remake traditional media forms. Think of CD players and their reincarnation, IPODs. VCRs became DVD players, and those are being supplanted by fascinating applications of video and audio streaming. Most importantly, information is shared and modifed by a number of users. No longer do intellectual property rights carry sacrosanct, individualistic meanings for composers.

In a recent study, ETS ("ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings", 2006) found that most students possess undeveloped Internet comprehension. Additionally, students seemed unable to critically reframe traditional media into new digital media genres.

Students rely on their teachers as guides to collective mapping as to what is and is not credible in the new digital media world. So, teachers, raise your hands if you agree with the following statement: “Teachers in the 21st century need to gain fluency in use of the tools of new digital media in order to help students ascertain credibility of the information they encounter online.”

I, for one, have my hand raised skyward. I’m starting tomorrow. I’m going to take a risk. I’m writing an e-mail to the Technology Coordinator in my building to inquire if our school has any policies about teachers and students blogging as part of public school instruction. Yes, again I will be extending past the curriculum mandates. Yes, my rebel status will rise in conversations. And, more pragmatically, my time as an English teacher will have a new layer of response added in what is already a time management nightmare. Sure, I will have to spend careful time monitoring students’ comments. Yes, I anticipate that I will receive phone calls, e-mails, and maybe even a few personal visits from parents and guardians who will voice concern about public posting of student work. But my instincts and pedagogical beliefs tell me it will be worth it.

I feel that more important than collegial critique is my role in Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development as someone who can scaffold students’ learning. Who knows? Maybe, someday, when my students have long forgotten my name and face, they may encounter an Internet scam and know how to assess its value. Maybe one of my students will figure how to distinguish between sources as entertainment or superficial information from those of scholarly research when a personal crisis occurs.

In all likelihood, my influence in asking students to participate in a classroom social networking website will have more immediate results. New digital media in the classroom may introduce opportunities for us to have conversations about ourselves, the various personas we all embrace, and the occasional vulnerabilities we all feel in our lives and world.

Those chances to reach out transcend any classroom risk or traditional and new media applications: real conversations about lives lived penetrate the heart of lifelong learning.

Resources

ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings. (2006, 03.31.08). from http://www.etc.org/ictliteracy
Pettingill. (2006). Trust Without Knowledge: How Young Persons Carry out Research on the Internet [Electronic Version]. The Goodworks Project Papers, 48, 1-17. Retrieved 03.31.08 from http://pzweb.harvard.edu/eBookstore/PDFs/GoodWork48.pdf.
Vygotsky. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hard versus soft data?

2008-03-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

Eighteen months ago, I was really lucky: I received a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation. In my technology-deprived high school, SMART Interactive Whiteboards are more myth than mainstream. Yet I was going to receive one due to a research project I had proposed! It was titled, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” I wanted to study whether students’ overall literacy levels could improve by utilizing both print and visual texts, with the SMART Interactive Whiteboard as delivery vehicle within the traditional public school classroom.

Since the Call for Proposals included the criterion “should have a sound, rigorous research methodology,” I designed a mixed method research design.

Now let it be said: as a qualitative researcher, I was most interested in analyzing data on students’ learning processes. I like to observe then tell the stories of students’ lives as learners. This project would take most of an entire school year, and I was keenly interested to compose four narratives about students who fit the description of “the children we worry about the most” (Hankins, 2003).

However, I was conscious that quantitative research is still more highly prized. Thus, I offered to code and analyze via SPSS to describe frequencies of identified variables; one sample T-test with test variable “curriculum track in English class;” paired sample T-test, with variables “score on previous standardized test” and “think of self as literate;” and, comparisons of pre- and post-test assessment indicators. Ultimately, I wondered, “Would incorporating SMART Interactive Whiteboard Technology enhance student performance on mandated statewide testing?”

Fast forward to 2008. I’ve completed the qualitative aspects of the report and am now beginning collaboration with a colleague who will check (and probably heavily edit) my quantitative data. You can view the qualitative component of my report at http://smarterkids.org/research/library_subject.asp.

This week, I received my first response to the article I wrote. The response was, honestly, a backdoor compliment at best. Yes, the person who found me through the internet was delighted that my students had received and learned through the SMART Board so positively. She knew of many qualitative and anecdotal reports with similar findings. Yet, she required “hard data” to sell her own district on the merits of capital investing toward SMART Boards in their district classrooms.

Hard versus soft data, hhhmmm? There's that issue of researcher bias emerging again. And the targets seem to be almost exclusively qualitative researchers.

Regardless of socio-economic class, race, or gender, all students have tremendous abilities to be critical readers of their worlds when offered the tools for success. Drawing from a Freirian (1992) perspective, I help learners to struggle for academic success “not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (p. 34). This social justice orientation raises complicated issues about power and knowledge and does contain bias. As a teacher-researcher, I must constantly identify ethical dilemmas. Our lives as practitioners and our lives as partners, members of cultural communities, and political citizens are intertwined richly. As Haraway (1988) argues,

“…only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (p.583).

I believe a false dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity, between the personal and professional, pervades educational thinking. Actions in many domains of all teachers’ lives contribute to praxis. While I argue that a teacher cannot leave one identity at the public classroom door and assume another elsewhere, I also recognize that teachers, students, and their families do not always share the same values. We live in a pluralistic society. Values are a community standard. I constantly debate issues of justice versus caring (Noddings, 1984), and I reconcile the two by creating a classroom climate that is safe, meaningful, and consistent with community contexts.

I will leave you with questions to ponder. How many quantitative researchers offer climates where all students have chances to be successful? In what ways do quantitative researchers really know the humans they are studying and, so, live in conscious states between personal and professional --- never really leaving one to become solely the other? To what extent do quantitative researchers accept and identify their own areas of biases?

Hard data versus soft data are jargon, and distinctions between the two rise from an accepted American binary cultural system. Do quantitative researchers seek to escape binary thought and attempt to navigate the multiplicity of learning possibilities in our postmodern world? Let's just say it: all researchers have bias. As teacher-researchers, our focus must become how to reconcile that bias with the humans we observe in the constant goal to foster educational reform.

Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Generational divides

2008-03-01T06:09:00.000-08:00

Texts that changed our lives are not our students’ texts

A recent professional development seminar for our high school English department asked me to consider and write for twenty minutes about the following question:

“What book changed your life?”

I couldn’t remember one particular book, but a vivid story did come back to me. Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood was spent in the same way: my mother, my younger brother, and I would visit my maternal grandmother, a widow. I can still see my perch on her brown couch with its red diamond pattern and the oil painting of the brunette woman at the piano over my head. I imagined that the pianist was my mother.

Certain, very specific rules accompanied my brother and me on those Sunday excursions. Television and radio were forbidden. We were required to sit politely, listen attentively, and talk when asked a question. We were not to play games, run around, or cause any commotion, and we were absolutely not to divulge the inner workings of our own 1000 square foot home, three miles away.

We were allowed, however, to read.

I took full advantage of what I perceived as this exception to civility. I read all of my mother’s Nancy Drew mysteries, and then inhaled my brother’s Hardy Boy series. I read --- albeit abridged --- Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I cried when the spider died at the end of Charlotte’s Web.

And I learned to yearn for those Sundays spent reading, for dedicated times to explore ways of seeing and knowing and living beyond my very provincial small town, whose boundaries even then seemed to kick the breath out of me.

I liked that writing assignment a lot, and I considered asking my students to complete the same assignment. But then it occurred to me: I was a Vietnam War child. Mine was the first generation to watch a war broadcast live on the evening news. The mass media as we know it today existed only in the imaginations of a rare few: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Marshall McLuhan.

Which media would my contemporary students remember with nostalgic fondness? I suspect their texts are a lot closer to Barney than Isaac Bashevis Singer, more Simpsons than Sounder.

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) executive committee has asked its members to think more intently about shifts in literacy.

Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

In an era when our students are blogging, adding to wikis, accessing podcasts, watching webcasts, and social networking, what are we, as teachers, doing in our classrooms to enrich their full literate lives?

We need to move beyond fear of our own inabilities to access new media. We need to treat literacy as more than a functional skill -- one's ability to read and write --- and, instead, as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces.

Finding the Middle in the Curriculum Versus New Literacies Wars

2008-02-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

As I begin to make decisions about a framework for the data I’m collecting for my dissertation, I continually question how traditional literacy instruction can meet the world of new literacies. The answer circles back, over and over, to Freire’s (1992) critical pedagogy, in which teachers and students are co-learners. Thus, through critical literacy, students’ and I together recontextualize literacy processes through translation of symbols, analysis of social constructs, and negotiation of meaning.

When my senior classes read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1997), they also sort through intertextual layers and connections: Chinua Achebe’s essay, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1977); the film, Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979); documentary footage of the Vietnam War; articles from the progressive community website, CommonDreams.org on US colonialism; and a Google search using the text keywords to analyze the effect of Conrad’s text on modern American society.

After sifting through a variety of peer-reviewed research sources, students decide which frames of knowing, observing, and interpreting they will incorporate into their final projects. “Frames are powerful not only because we have internalized them from media, but because they have become second nature to us --- they allow us to process information efficiently and get about our lives” (Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom, 2002, p. 4). The frame is a portrait of trends rather than a particular individual’s identity. The concept of frame is constant as I incorporate a critical literacy framework into the classroom.

Due to the efficacious means of producing, circulating, and exchanging information, popular and media cultures are central ways in which my students can learn about themselves, their relationship to others, and the world beyond their homes (Giroux, H., 1999). I seek to create critical readers who can identify ways that body, power, and gender messages contribute to discourse (Gee, 2003). I want students to “read” their worlds in new and increasingly reflective ways, to add a metacognitive layer to learning, to adopt an outsider perspective in order to become analytical; and to interrogate the media as major political, pedagogical, and social forces (Giroux, H., 1999; Giroux, H. & Simon, 1989).

If my students own these strategies, then my influence will have transcended one school year. I teach students to question textual authority and use reasoning to come to autonomous decisions. Rather than trying to superimpose a particular world view on my students, I attempt to help them to achieve critical distance as they read their worlds in order to make independent and informed decisions as to whether to support or refute messages about identity within economic, social, political, historical, and aesthetic contexts.

For example, a senior honors female related a narrative to me about her maternal influences. “My mother refused to wear a veil on her wedding day,” Kelly Leigh began, “because her mother did, too. My grandmother said it was a sign of being submissive to her husband. She wasn’t having any of that.” A huge smile burst onto her face. “I’ve decided to wear one, anyway.”

Kelly Leigh had constructed “meaning through the integration of existing and new knowledge and the flexible use of strategies to foster, monitor, regulate, and maintain comprehension” (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991). Through a critical literacy classroom, she was able to express and reconcile hegemonic gender messages. She made her own decision in light of evidence and after reflection.

Students like Kelly Leigh who become critically literate will question hegemony in its various forms and have the wherewithal to choose to accept or reject the mythology of the American Dream. It is a critical means to reconcile curriculum and embedded messages of cultural transmission.

Resources
Achebe. (1977). An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Massachusetts Review, 18, 782-794.
Conrad. (1997). Heart of darkness: Signet Classics.
Coppola (Writer) (1979). Apocalypse now. In Z. Studios (Producer). United States: Paramount.
Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson. (1991). Moving from the old to the new: Research on reading comprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 239-264.
Freire. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Gee. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom. (2002). Framing public issues. Washington, D.C.
: Frameworks Institute.
Giroux. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Giroux, & Simon. (1989). Popular culture as a pedagogy of pleasure and meaning. In H. Giroux & R. Simon (Eds.), Popular culture: Schooling and everyday life. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.

Media Literacy Teen Council

2008-02-13T14:52:00.000-08:00

Shifting the Landscape of Literacy at High School

I’ve been thinking lately about what media literacy in school must look like through the eyes of teens. I’ve decided that, with the exception of segregated units in Health classes, the primary function of media texts in education is as rainy day fillers [the movie version of Chapter 22 of Wuthering Heights” (Wyler, 1939)] or vehicles for substitute teacher lesson plans [Grammar Rock (Warburton, 1995)]. Media literacy is not viewed as essential to literacy instruction.

Media systems provide the majority of texts through which students view themselves. Modern communications media include television, cinema, video, radio, photography, advertising, newspapers, magazines, recorded music, video games, and the Internet. “Children have gained power, not merely as citizens but also as consumers; and indeed the two may have become impossible to separate,” argues Buckingham (2003). Yet most public school classrooms do not interrogate media texts, even though all fifty American states incorporate media standards into frameworks.

How might media literacy evolve in schools across the United States? Maybe it needs to come from the teens themselves. All too often, teachers experience discomfort when called upon to use new technologies, which go hand-in-hand with new literacies. Maybe the teens could teach the teachers.

I’ve decided to propose a Media Literacy Teen Council (MLTC) at my high school for the 2008-2009 school year. If accepted, the project will invite youth interns to learn media production, media literacy education, peer teaching, and entrepreneurial skills during the first term and then share their learning during the remainder of the 08/09 year with other students, faculty, and governmental institutions.

The MLTC project will enrich the curriculum through student exposure to tools to analyze messages in media texts and to understand how structural features -- such as media ownership --- mythologize the world. Students will be encouraged to solve as well as to pose problems. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, so the MLTC will respond in authentic ways when engaged in inquiry. The MLTC will become skillful creators and producers of media messages to facilitate understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium.

“There’s always something decentred about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures,” argues Hall (2003). By transforming media consumption into an active process, the MLTC will gain critical distance from the pervasive texts of their lives in order to acknowledge reasons for enjoyment, potential for persuasion through symbolic representations, and media’s ability to re-create the world in fictional and non-fictional ways.

The MLTC will offer guidance to students and teachers about ways that media in the classroom make space for conversations as a means to build relationships, negotiate learning and teaching, and analyze processes and strategies.

Project Description: Who will participate? Students will learn of the project during a publicity drive in June 2007. Each of the 100+ staff persons will be asked to nominate two students. Of particular interest will be students who may not achieve academic distinctions but who may have keen interest in media texts and who could benefit from belongingness that will emerge from participation in the project. The MLTC can be a place for students to have voices.

While 20-30 students will participate on the MLTC, the larger impact is on the students and staff members who will be invited to attend workshops, improvisations, simulations, and seminars led by the MLTC after initial leadership training.

What will the teachers and students do? The following are sample activities:

Leadership Essentials. Come to this workshop to explore essential skills of leadership: really listening to others and finding effective ways to talk with peers to get things done. Learn aspects of civics responsibility; outreach techniques through phone calls, mailings, presentations and public speaking; work with other school leadership groups and committees See how a teen council model could work for you.

Acting Out Against Big Media. What is the impact of advertising? How does it influence us? In this workshop we will find answers through exciting theater improvisation games. Be prepared for an extremely interactive workshop, seeking to educate, empower and inspire people to become leaders for positive change!
Spam. Spam. Spam. Do you feel like you live in a spam culture? Learn how teens can oppose corporate efforts to dangle an ad in front of our eyes at every moment. Corporations claim the right to pester us with marketing, telemarketing, spam, ad creep, etc. Fight for the right to be let alone.

"That's so Gay." Come talk about how to make your school a safer place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning students, staff, and families. Analyze media representations of heterosexuality and homosexuality. This workshop breaks down the myths & stereotypes of LGBTQQ people & really gets at the root of what homophobia is & what we can ALL do about it. Be prepared to move around, participate and believe it or not, laugh.

Drumming toward Teamwork through Music. Come hear what it takes to make music from western and other cultures with 20 strangers. Definitely a hands-on workshop! Conducted in cooperation with the Music Department.

Media "News" on the War in Iraq. How does the media convey the news of the war in Iraq? Whose voices are heard and whose are silenced? We will screen a short film about independent media in time of war and discuss this important topic.

Anti-Racism & Institutional Oppression. Defining institutional racism, sharing your own heritage, understanding white privilege, describing lateral oppression as bullying and finding ways to take action are the core of this workshop. Interrogate media texts for hidden signification. Interactive exercises help us focus on topics that can often be hard to talk about.

Food Activism. When eating lunch, you are absorbing more than just the food on your plate. Your consumption is related to the foods and beverages you see depicted on screens. Come learn how students can make their cafeteria dining experience more sustainable.

What's Gender Got to Do With it? Ever wonder why girls wear pink & boys wear blue? This workshop focuses on exactly WHAT gender is & more importantly, what YOU can do with it, about it & to it. Be prepared to cross the gender line, more than once in fun, interactive activities that get you up and moving around!

Alcohol Laws 101. What are images of alcohol in excess like in media texts? What really happens when the cops bust up a party? This workshop will highlight the laws around alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, but more importantly, will explain in an honest and straightforward fashion what really can (and does) happen in our community.

Community Assessment and Evaluation. Be part of a Youth Survey. Learn how to construct and use surveys to find out where teens hang out on media. It's like a big scavenger hunt. Afterward, come back and do presentations on you’ve they've found as a way to inform faculty about possibilities for inclusion in the curriculum.

Politics. Travel to the state capital to advocate for enhanced media literacy in our state’s public schools. Send the message that there's a great constituency in youth and that politicians should represent them. Show them that media is an important part of literacy instruction.

What are the expected learning outcomes? Outcomes in the realm of worldview --- cognition and affect--- are likely to occur. If participation in media literacy curricula allows individuals to learn something new or something more about media messages, practices, processes, institutions, or influence, then important cognitive development will have occurred. Outcomes point to increased knowledge of key concepts or terms used in the study of media and increased awareness of media persuasion, conventions, and ubiquity.

Some examples might include knowledge of strategies used in advertising to encourage favorable responses; awareness of the ways that violence is shown in the media that make it look cool; media strategies that glamorize risk-taking behaviors; or attention to roles that women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups are given in the media. Participation might contribute to a student's approval of some media messages, practices, processes, institutions, or influence and the disapproval of others.

Overall, if a student develops the ability to deconstruct, or break down components of and closely analyze media messages, then media literacy has been effective and student are becoming critical thinkers about the media.

How will they be assessed? Outcomes will be assessed in formative and summative ways: reactions to individual workshops as well as products created by the Council members. After the project is completed, a qualitative data analysis will be completed. Results will be written and submitted to an educational journal for consideration for publication.

Conclusion What are your ideas about the ways media literacy, or a teen council, or a public school could enhance teens’ deconstruction of the pervasive media texts of their lives?

Resources

Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. Malden, MA: Polity.

Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Green Mountain Peer Project, 180 Flynn Avenue, Greenhouse Bldg. 4&5, Burlington, VT. 05401,
http://gmppvt.org/print.php?name=workshops&ID=

Hall, S. (2003). Encoding and decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 507-517). New York: Routledge.

Warburton, T. (Writer) (1995). Grammar Rock, Schoolhouse Rock. United States: ABC/ Disney.

Wyler, W. (Writer) (1939). Wuthering heights. US: Samuel Goldwin Company.

Obstacles to critical thinking in the classroom

2008-01-25T14:53:00.000-08:00

When I announce to the senior honors class that today’s learning event is to analyze a clip of the film, La Cage aux Folles (Molinaro, 1979), Larry asks, “Will we be graded on this?”

I also taught Larry four years earlier at a heterogeneous eighth grade level, and he was keenly innovative, clever, and distinguished from other students in his thinking. Even when I respond “no” to his question as to whether I will assign a grade to the lesson, he and other students react to this humorous French film in a constrained and muted manner: short giggles, some blurted-out chuckles, a few out-and-out roars. It makes no matter whether humor is based on double entendres, socio-cultural comparisons, sexual binaries, or pratfalls. The class of students consciously muffles their responses.

Larry and other high-tracked students recognize that explicit communication about learning (Sambell & MacDowell, 1998 ) --- taking academic risks---- is distinct from embodied subtexts about high-status curriculum. They do not want to jeopardize their chances for admission to prestigious universities (Rogers & Oakes, 2005) or alienate themselves from their peers in that mysterious world of adolescence, in which identifying with adults is, in and or itself, an isolating activity.

My expectations for success differ from my contemporaries’ and may not sit easily with current department, district, or even state pedagogical philosophical ties to conferring content knowledge and passing of examinations (Davies, 2006). This plays out in ways that fall on a continuum from the merely startling [the teacher in the adjacent classroom asks, “What were you watching early today in class?” after she heard Cantonese exclusively spoken during House of Flying Daggers (Zhang, 2005)], to an outright professionally frightening [after a third summons to the principal’s office, I requested a union representative to accompany me as witness to the hegemonic discussion of what instruction for the public sector should look like].

I help students synthesize their own experiences, identify suppositions, trace inferential clues, and reflect on their own thinking, among an infinite number of ways to define how humans actually think. Reflection, however, is particularly important, as reflecting on assumptions, stereotypes, and other embedded notions before, during, and after literacy events helps students to process their feelings and experiences (Wade, 1997).

Thinking about thinking is important for students to make meaning in a symbol-saturated contemporary world.

Risks for both teachers and students come when we together seek answers to hard questions. Risks are the norm because interest, enjoyment, and challenge in immediate experience to arouse student development (Dewey, 1898) receive less emphasis in the current instructional climate than does pedagogy toward cultural transmission. Dewey’s 1939 observation holds true today: “…there is much information about which (students’) judgment is not called upon to respond” (p. 41).

Students are not being invited to draw education, experience, knowing, and thinking into ways of assessing their identities within a democracy. But how can we as an educational community state that we create life-long learners if we do not actively insist on the varied process of thinking that stimulate real abilities to think about, interrogate, and know their worlds?

How do students’ thinking, reading, knowing, and learning rise from a backdrop of American enculturation? Does the ability to analyse one text transfer to another? To what degree are students able to discern communicative messages at each phase of the study? What levels of metacognition lead to student meaning making? How is student cognition related to hegemonic structures? These are the questions I am addressing with my own students this year in a teacher-researcher study.

I turn it over to you now: as a teacher or learner, how do you best accommodate new structures for thinking in this symbol-saturated world? I’d love to hear your comments.

Resources
Davies. (2006). Global citizenship: Abstraction or framework for action? . Educational Review, 58(1), 5-25.
Dewey. (1898). The primary education fetish Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Dewey. (1939). Freedom and culture. New York: Prometheus Books.
Molinaro (Writer) (1979). La cage aux folles. In L. P. A. A. Da Ma Produzione (Producer): MGM.
Rogers, & Oakes. (2005). John Dewey speaks to Brown: Research, democratic social movement strategies, and the struggle for education on equal terms. Teachers College Record, 107(9), 2178-2203.
Sambell, & MacDowell. (1998 ). The construction of the hidden curriculum: Messages and meanings in the assessment of student learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 23(4), 391-413.
Wade. (1997). Service. In R. Wade (Ed.), Community service learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum (pp. 66). Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Zhang (Writer) (2005). House of flying daggers: Sony.

Why should a teacher conduct qualitative research?

2008-01-21T04:22:00.000-08:00

In 2006, I was awarded a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation to conduct a mixed methods study called, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” Of interest was students’ discourse around literacy issues and students’ final design products after intensive visual literacy instruction. How did communicative messages and socio-cultural contexts link to social networks and meaning making in a high school English classroom?

Year 2007 state standardized testing results were returned in late autumn 2007. Literacy levels of the participant group, which had been lower in grade eight testing, were higher than the control group in grade ten testing.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods draw on the empirical process, or understandings based on observations or experiences. However, it was the qualitative data that I collected for the SMARTer Kids Foundation --- student artifacts and case study narratives--- that unveiled richness of discourse upon which students drew to describe images and create critical interpretations about their own products. Data analysis utilized social semiotic and social discourse theories. Through analysis of multimodality in this context, qualitative research encouraged perspectives denied students in “traditional research paradigms” (Bogad, 2002). Qualitative methodology revealed insights into students’ culture, literacies, and identities; qualitative methodology helped me heuristically as a researcher.

Modern qualitative research typically falls within several categories. Phenomenology occurs when a researcher attempts to understand how one or more individuals experience a particular phenomenon. Narrative analysis is story construction, a process of creating reality in a systematic way on common patterns of behavior and relationships by people in their own societies. Ethnography describes the culture of a group of people. Case study research focuses on a detailed account or one or more cases, or a single event or occurrence. Grounded theory attempts to generate and develop theory as result of data collected. Historical research looks to past events and attempts to understand them.

Whatever the type of qualitative research, the goals are to explore, describe, predict, and/or influence. Qualitative researchers experience joy from generating ideas, creating characterizations, showing why and how, anticipating trends, and/ or extending applications that might impact communities, cultures, societies, or even the world.

My rationale for qualitative research

In the 1960s and early 1970s, action research by teachers was typically carried out in collaboration with consultants, partly in response to critique that action research was not scientifically valid. Qualitative researchers today face an increasingly hostile research climate in which definitions of research are narrowing, often casting qualitative inquiry as a poor imitation of real science. As a result, American federal funding for qualitative inquiry is dwindling as researchers must struggle to articulate the legitimacy of their practices and findings (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). “Conspicuous by their absence from the literature of research on teaching are the voices of teachers themselves—the questions and problems teachers pose, the frameworks they use to interpret and improve their practice, and the ways teachers themselves define and understand their work lives,” according to Lytle & Cochran-Smith (1990, p. 83). Teacher research has the potential for application beyond that of a heuristic role for an individual teacher: it should be valued a role in the formation of the knowledge base for teaching.

My work is based in the tradition of qualitative research (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003). I function as a participant-observer in the context of my position as a public school teacher. I define teacher research as systematic, intentional inquiry by teachers. Qualitative research design involves the use of data such as analysis of documents and participant observation to understand and explain social phenomena. According to Seigel (2005), “A main task of qualitative research is an explication of the ways in which persons in a particular setting understand, account for, take action, and manage their day-to-day situations” (p. 341).

Qualitative research utilizes the inductive method to observe and to search for patterns in that world. It is a “bottom up” method that is refreshing for me as a public school teacher. Generally, teachers are immersed in a standards-based, accountability climate where numbers, not stories, reveal explanations about learning. In qualitative research, research spirals, much like the nature of teaching: one stage leads to the next, deepens with each stage, and returns to the beginning with new ideas and ways to seek further meanings. Freire calls this praxis, where, through reflection and action, people discover themselves as the world as “permanent re-creators” (1992, p. 56).

The fit of qualitative methodology to critical literacy praxis

I became interested in popular culture in the public school classroom through my academic studies as a public school teacher inspired by the literature around literacy, learning, and media. Over my career in “Taylor” at both the middle and high school levels, I came to know my own students, many of their siblings, and have kept in contact with several former students who went onto college, careers, and/or adult responsibilities.

Epistemologies refer to researchers’ broad philosophical orientations concerning knowledge and how people come to have knowledge. To some degree, then, my interest lies in the relationship between culture and social structure but also the ways in which individual youth biographies evolve out of questions of how teens know their own worlds in what might be called sociology of youth. Thus, qualitative research, where behavior is seen as fluid, dynamic, situational, contextual, and personal, is the best choice for my research.

Thought and study alone did not produce my teacher-research of how privilege collides with critical pedagogy; it is rooted in concrete situations and describes the reactions of tracked students and upper-middle class families whom I have observed directly during the course of my work. “Critical theory… is critical of social organizations that privilege some at the expense of others.. critical theorists who do qualitative research are very interested in issues of gender, race, and class because they consider these the prime means for differentiating power in society,,” according to Bogdan & Biklen (2003, p. 21).

Narrative approach to qualitative research

Narrative research is an approach located within a long tradition of qualitative interpretation and currently pushes boundaries of scholarship in education, law, and medicine with storied accounts of individuals’ lives. Indeed, narrative inquiry is grounded in notions of experience drawn from John Dewey, the American educational reformer, philosopher, and epistemologist. Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy. He favored a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment. Dewey saw inquiry as an active rather than passive process. He argues that “education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of faculties resident in mind itself… Education proceeds taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind from without” (1963, p. 69). Dewey reminds that consciously formulated methods underestimate the necessary ingredient in learning of “vital, unconscious attitudes” (p. 71).

Narration as opportunity for story constellations

My research is based in the meanings that my students make through the institutional context in which those meanings are created. As Bogdan and Biklen (2002) state, “Meaning and process are crucial in understanding human behavior” (p. 50). Of particular interest to me in qualitative research using a narrative approach are story constellations. Craig (2007, p. 63) explains: “Story constellations seek to make visible the complexities that shape school landscapes, influence the nature of educators’ experiences, and determine who knows and what is known both within, and about, the educational enterprise.”

To study students in their community school is to study behavior in a natural environment and in the context in which behavior occurs. The research is descriptive, exploratory, and full of discovery because shifts in school landscapes can be constructed and reconstructed alongside individual and collective accounts of evolution. The story constellation approach is consistent with the deep-angle methodology I use to examine the depth of phenomenon. Reality is constructed in subjective, personal, and social ways.

Instruments and tools of qualitative research

Among the instruments and tools I utilize as a teacher-researcher are a digital audio recorder, digital video recorder, and laptop computer. However, my most important data collection device is my teacher journal. A journal becomes an account of classroom life where I record our dialogic discourse, note observations, chronicle lessons, and recreate conversations. Outside the classroom, I analyze the totality of experiences and reflect on and interpret dialogic interactions over time. Similar in some ways to ethnographic field notes, a journal captures the immediacy of teaching through praxis: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1992, p. 36). Moreover, because my teacher journal becomes a permanent, written record of practice, it provides me with a vehicle to revisit experiences over time and in relation to broader frames of reference. It invites interpretive perspectives through construction and reconstruction of data from my classroom.

Through dialogic meaning-making, teachers and students can engage in critical thinking: “ thinking which discerns an invisible solidarity between the world and men and admits of no dichotomy between them --- ---thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved,” according to Freire (1992, p. 81). I capture these words in my teacher journal and mold them into categories. Data analysis becomes a search for patterns, themes, and holistic features.

Those who have come before me

Authors of narrative are expected to tell an engaging tale as well as express arguments about the field. Many researchers have relied on qualitative methodology including a narrative approach to conduct research. Rist (1970) explored teachers’ expectations toward certain kinds of children and portrayed how these attitudes were translated into daily interactions with them. Kozol (1967) attempted to capture the quality of children in the inner city. Lesko (1988) studied gender as constructed from a feminist perspective. Hankins (2003) wrote narratives about children about whom she worried in her classroom. Finders (1997) focused on the literacy experiences of girls in middle school, and Smith & Wilhelm (2002) focused on the literacy experiences of boys in a private secondary school. Currie (1999) explored discourses of femininity and consumption in teen magazines and how adolescent girls negotiate them.

I think of education as observing selves in the making.

In this postmodern era, thinking becomes linked with “responses to experiences in the shifting, multifaceted world that are more widely shared than ever before” (Greene, 1993, p. 213). I watch students as they create meanings and form identities through dialogue and narrative. I listen to their stories and come to realize that I am moved to decipher their metaphors and discover their possibilities. Qualitative research will allow me those lenses into students’ literacy identities.

Resources

Bogad, L. (2002). Feed your mind: A qualitative study of youth, power and privilege: Syracuse University.
Bogdan, R., & Biklen, S. (2003). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Clandinin, D. J. (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing.
Craig, C. (2007). Narrative inquiries of geographically close schools: Stories given, lived, and told. Teachers College Press, 109(1), 160-191.
Currie, D. (1999). Girl talk: Adolescent magazines and their readers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dewey, J. (1963). Experience and education. New York: Touchstone Press.
Finders, M. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high school. New York: Teachers College Press.
Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Greene, M. (1993). Diversity and inclusion. Teachers College Record, 95(2), 211-221.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Hayes Jacobs, H. (1997). Mapping the big picture: Integrating curriculum & assessment K-12. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Kamberelis, G., & Dimitriadis, G. (2005). On qualitative inquiry: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kozol, J. (1967). Death at an early age. New York, NY: Bantam.
Lesko, N. (1988). Symbolizing society: Rites and structure in a Catholic high school. London: Falmer Press.
Lytle, S., & Cochran-Smith, M. (1990). Learning from teacher research: A working typology. Teachers College Press, 92(1), 83=103.
Rist, R. (1970). Student social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 411-451.
Seigel, C. (2005). Implementing a research model of cooperative learning. Journal of Educational Research, 98(6), 330-349.
Smith, & Wilhelm, J. (2002). Reading don’t fix no Chevies: Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Tesch, R. (1990). Qualitative research: Analysis types and software tools. New York: Falmer Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Summer reading or reality?

2008-01-10T15:57:00.000-08:00

Our high school has a mandated summer reading policy for its students. Freshmen and sophomores, no matter the track, read one title. Juniors and seniors, no matter the track, read the other title.

The summer reading texts this year asked my sophomore students to read Breaking Through by Jiminez and senior students to read Ceremony by Silko. Each text was selected to be one part of an annual task to increase understanding of diversity among the Taylor student body, due to our lack of racial diversity. This year, the target geographic area on which to focus is The Americas; the Jiminez text looks at the experiences of a male adolescent migrant farm worker, and the Silko text moves the native American narrative to the 20th century by looking at the effects of war on an individual who lives outside the white mainstream culture.

What is “culture” about to students did I will teach? Hall (2003)says,

Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed--- the effect of an articulation between sign and referent – but to be ‘naturally’ given (p. 511).

What, then, was the effect of mandated summer reading on my upcoming students? Did they marvel at the ways that other adolescents or young adults negotiate their lives? Did they scrutinize how society affected Others differently because they were not of the white mainstream? Did striking social-economic differences emerge within coming of age events and prevent my students from appreciating the universality of shared experience?

The students I teach are imbued, as a general rule, with high self-esteem. About 2 percent each year so far have been part of families who receive state or federal assistance in the form of reduced or free lunch, Medicare, or public assisted housing. Thus, most of their experiences have not rested with the need to help support the family financially, as did the protagonist in Breaking Through. They have not been asked to acknowledge that their race implies secondary status as an American citizen. They have been surrounded by the discourse of war, however, and yet their impressions seem to rest, largely, on a patriotic sense of protecting their loved ones. How do they react to a narrative where the protagonist is tortured by the memories of death and pain he saw when a soldier in World War I?

Summer reading lessons take significant prior knowledge building to help students to know their worlds beyond that of the immediate and of personal experience. It requires allowing students to articulate their own definitions as well as to slowly help them to tear away what those definitions might imply for their social interactions as adults in the next few years.

Summer reading can inspire moments of explosion, and they are necessary moments to grow as readers, thinkers, and learners. Unfortunately, in my school district, summer reading was a farce, known to all students and most faculty. A core of us --- teachers and students both --- read and took notes and came ready to the first day of school to be learners. The remainder remembered that previous journals had not been graded; that many teachers were not familiar with the texts; that new students emerged who had not read.

Additionally, there was a significant lack of prior knowledge building: were the teachers and students to focus on the America we know, or were we to extend to other parts of the Americas, like the Canadian provinces or Mexican states or independent native American nations?

Summer reading was a farce. Journals were collected, and data was compiled as to how many total students read. Teachers were not surveyed anonymously as to their participation or vision. A core group of professional status teachers spoke up and asked for change.

What will 2008-2009 summer reading look like? Most likely, it will be more of the same, for Taylor schools are emblematic of the difficulties in schools across America. Change costs money. Teacher need to be paid to prepare new texts. Authors need to be reimbursed for site visits. Families who can’t afford books need to have scholarships.

And a vison as to what summer reading should accomplish --- whether within the mandates of diversity or outside --- need to be precisely delineated so that all participants know real expectations for learning and performance.

Hall, S. (2003). Encoding and decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 507-517). New York: Routledge.

Media is the message

2007-12-31T08:47:00.000-08:00

“Stepping into the 21st century with critical media literacy”

Scenario One: Twenty students are seated in desks that are lined in five rows and pointed at a white board. A teacher stands behind a podium and lectures about a text from the Western canon while students, using pens, fill in blanks on Xeroxed worksheets. They are studying for a multiple-choice test with an essay component.

Scenario Two: Twenty students are divided into five groups of four around a bank of computers. Each group has access to the Internet and software for audio, video, graphic, and still photography editing. Together, they are creating a ten-minute documentary, drawing from themes across a variety of texts and genres comprising high and low culture. Their products will be posted on a classroom blog for celebration.

Linking technology to instruction is just one way that teachers can incorporate new literacies in the classroom. Public schools rarely integrate semiotic knowledge into pedagogies around literacy and student engagement. Yet, literacy is tied inextricably to personal, relational experiences formed through multi-modal text experiences. Interconnections among language, literacy, and culture are becoming stronger. Literacy by achievement test is a narrow window to assess students’ learning. In an era of emerging technology and media and varied cultural practices, is reading and knowledge of Western print texts the sole, accurate, and appropriate gauge of students’ literacies? Can defining literacy in new ways enhance equity in education? Would students be more engaged and critical learners in a classroom where media and popular culture texts are constant components of instruction and dialogue?

Media education as reform

Media literacy is an expanded conceptualization of literacy. It is a process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres, and forms. Additionally, drawing from Freire’s (1992) model of critical pedagogy, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, critical media literacy is inquiry-based instruction that encourages students to ask questions and dialogue with a teacher about what they watch, see, and read. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, because students respond in authentic ways when involved in inquiry. Freire argues that “dialogue is indispensable to the act of cognition that unveils reality” (p. 71) and is companion to problem posing.

Critical media literacy education provides tools to help students analyze messages in media texts and to understand how structural features -- such as media ownership and political powers --- influence messages. Conversations with students demythologize the media world while encouraging students to solve as well as to pose problems. Critical media literacy also aims to enable students to be skillful creators and producers of media messages, both to facilitate understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium, as well as to create independent media.

“There’s always something decentred about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures,” argues Hall (2003, p. 105), in Decoding and Encoding. By transforming media consumption into an active process, students gain critical distance from the pervasive texts of their lives in order to acknowledge their reasons for enjoyment, the potential for persuasion through symbolic representations, and media’s ability to re-create the world in fictional and non-fictional ways.

How do you incorporate critical media literacy into the classroom? Do you see media literacy education as separate from the remainder of the curriculum? Are you comfortable leaving behind the teacher-as-authority role and becoming a co-learner in what Freire (1992) calls praxis?

Leave a comment and share in the conversation.

Studying Melville's Billy Budd and students' reactions to justice and morality

2007-12-16T03:28:00.000-08:00

I teach in “Taylor,” a northeastern suburban community approximately 40 miles southwest of the state capital with a population of 29,500. Its citizens are, on the whole, white, European-American, and upper-middle class. I’m conducting a study with a segment of my classes. The population comprises three rosters, or 66 tracked (Oakes, 2005) English subject area high school senior honors students. In the tradition of qualitative research (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003), I will function as a teacher-researcher, which allows me to collect data that emerges from critical literacy pedagogy.

I am required to incorporate mandated texts into instruction. Tracked classes are different due to number and complexity of text assignments. The study population’s required texts include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Potek’s The Chosen, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Albee’s American Dream and The Zoo Story, Shakespeare’s Othello, Zeale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Wilder’s Our Town, and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Ghosts; and, Melville’s Billy Budd. At Taylor High School (THS), tracking appears to be individualistic when it is, according to Oakes (2005), founded on an “intergenerational transfer of social, economic, and political status” (p. 248).

Because tracking academic ability-based but, rather, linked to family privilege, traditional whole-class instruction at THS does not meet the needs of all learners. Alternative approaches are necessary. Instruction that requires metacognitive awareness, social justice responsiveness, questioning through critical lenses, and dialogic interactions invites new meanings to the study population. Known as critical literacy, this praxis extends beyond decoding print texts and creates literate consumers who approach and discuss various meanings of the text with others. Keene and Zimmermann (1997) state literacy and life learning require that we as readers “reorganize and create our own explanations for what we are learning, our own definitions of our lives at any particular juncture” (p. 183). Critical literacy praxis grounded within postmodern theory allows a variety of learners to decode and encode an archaic text like Melville’s Billy Budd.

Set in the late eighteenth century aboard an English warship, the novella focuses on a young, handsome, and innocent sailor who, eventually, is executed. As the final text of Melville’s life, Billy Budd has aroused much interest on the author’s views on justice, morality, and religion. Readings of Billy Budd often describe an allegory of good versus evil; an examination of nature and innocence; or, analysis of Christianity in opposition to an emerging industrialized society. A non-traditional reading of Billy Budd, however, can offer insights into why leaders fail to choose justice in times of crisis.

In the novella, Captain Vere presides over a court martial. He interprets maritime rule of law in the most severe manner possible and condemns Billy to hang. In doing so, Vere deliberately distorts applicable substantive and procedural law. Billy Budd is relevant to today’s society. During times of crisis, leaders make sacrifices in the name of security, ones that future generations often question. After September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration curtailed civil liberties in many ways. Similarly, Herman Melville's Billy Budd chronicles sacrifice in the name of security and is fodder for contemporary thought about rebellion, patriotism, loyalty, camaraderie, and modern definitions of morality.

Aims, objectives, or rationale of the project
I am interested how students respond to explicit socio-cultural instruction during a curriculum-mandated study of Melville’s Billy Budd. High school students in 2007-2008 have a unique opportunity to reflect on the times in which they live. Heightened security measures, pervasive media stories of terrorism, and a looming Presidential election present many prospects to critique American society and culture.

This study will analyze students’ discourses in a final research poster presentation in which they incorporate textual and academic sources to critically analyze Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Fairclough (2003) argues that texts are elements of social events and “bring about changes” (p. 8). Will students recapitulate and create arguments through literary and historical lenses? Or will they create personal meanings and draw linkages to today’s world through socio-cultural constructs?

Results achieved or progress done work in this previously
Preliminary pilot data foreshadow three themes that are consistent with literature on critical literacy classrooms. Each theme accounts for a degree to which students exhibit anxiety or flow in academic performance (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). While the following occurrences have led to my current research questions, my study will, in all likelihood, reveal additional themes or replace the ones I have observed so far.

“Welcome to my world” group: First, a group of students acquires the ability to identify and evaluate assumptions embedded in text messages. They thrive in an academic climate where literacies of power (Macedo, 2006) are deconstructed. Their real, literate lives are finally celebrated in an academic forum.

“Academic standing is all” group: Second, a group of students acquiesces to what one student, Jerrie, called my “political” approach to instruction. They comply so as to maintain Grade Point Average (GPA) and class rank. This group is or is not influenced to make personal meaning through critical literacy praxis.

“I’ve got the power” group: Third, a group of students rebels against critical literacy praxis. This group embraces the dominant codes of society that has enculturated them. Perhaps this group possesses family values that conflict with Marxist ideology (Chandler, 2002). Or, because critical literacy praxis requires students to demonstrate new and higher levels of thinkings, this group experiences and expresses angst.

Procedures to be followed
1. Receive Human Subjects in Research approval
2. Collect Student Release and Student Assent Forms
3. Create sequential and scaffolding instruction
a. Background for reading: Social, cultural, historical, literary
b. Allusions in text, research and collaboration
c. Syntax versus semantics explicit instruction
d. Study guide questions for class discussions
e. Six academic, peer-reviewed journal articles
f. Socratic Seminar
g. Research poster presentations
4. Conduct qualitative research
a. Teacher journal
b. Audio recordings
c. Artifact analysis
5. Analyse data and draw conclusions

Most teachers do not conduct research as means for advancing educational reform.
Teachers typically approach Melville’s Billy Budd through a New Criticism approach in which close reading and attention to texts are sole means to garner implicit author messages. Teachers who adhere to a New Criticism approach reject criticism based on extra-textual sources. Vocabulary instruction, narrative identifications, quizzes on names/ dates/ places, five paragraph essays, and author research are the norm.

My research study regarding Melville’s Billy Budd is not merely a comment on traditional instruction. It is a rejection of cultural transmission approach to pedagogy (Hirsch, 1987). I contend that an ethnocentric presentation of Western civilization creates an Us versus Them binary in which European-Americans students feel superior and non-European Americans feel inferior. More importantly, though, as Linn (1996) argues, “the Great White Story” also means “misogyny and slavery.” He states that postmodern theory informs us “it is also related to who has the money and power” (p. 136).

As I remind students that Billy Budd was one of thousands of impressed sailors, I also relate stories about how today many inner city students, no matter how hard working and intellectually talented, fight impoverishment, racial stereotyping, and fewer opportunities for dominant majority successes. I broaden out to connect “prejudice, race, gender, the media’s presentation of the Other, color symbolism” (Linn, 1996, p. 137), their own discourses, definitions of physical appearance, and dominant societal structures to Melville’s text. Responding to contextual relationships among levels of texts (Fiske, 1987) is constant.

Value of the project
A great deal is known about how students develop decoding and encoding skills. Literacy progress is indicated in most classrooms by drill sheets, workbook pages, skills instruction, teacher-directed questioning, and ability group discussions (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997; Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1994; Turner, Parkes, & Meyer, 1996). Most instruction focuses on low-level facts and skills; stresses an ability to follow rules and procedures; emphasizes discipline; and, shares information through seat-work (Oakes, 2005).

In contrast, little is known about how students aged seventeen and eighteen react to critical literacy praxis within postmodern theory or how student-created messages reflect dominant ideologies. As Spiro, et al (1994) note, a dearth of research indicates how students move “from retrieval of intact, rigid, precompiled knowledge structures to assembly of knowledge from different conceptual and precedent case sources” (p. 611).

This project is of great value for a variety of reasons. First, it will offer new information of significance to students, educational policy, and reform. Second, the study will become one chapter of my dissertation. Third, acknowledgment of my teacher-research by the University Graduate Research Grant Committee may foster respect, additional materials, and opportunities for increased awareness from THS administration and faculty. Fourth, and most importantly, students will be awakened to their “white privilege” (McIntosh, 1997) and to their capability as agents of social change in the global community.

Resources

Bogdan, & Biklen. (2003). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Chandler. (2002). Semiotics: The basics. New York: Routledge.
Csikszentmihalyi. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Fairclough. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York, NY: Routledge.
Fiske. (1987). Television culture. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hirsch. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. New York, NY.
Keene, & Zimmermann. (1997). Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a reader's workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Linn. (1996). A teacher's introduction to postmodernism. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Macedo. (2006). Literacies of power. Boulder, CO: Perseus Books.
McIntosh. (1997). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In Beyond heroes and holidays: A practical guide for K-12 anti-racist, multicultural education and staff (pp. 77 - 80). Washington, D.C.: Teaching for Change.
Oakes. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson. (1994). Cognitive flexibility theory: Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. In R. Ruddell, M. Ruddell & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Turner, Parkes, & Meyer. (1996). The role of optimal challenge in students' literacy engagement. Reading Research Quarterly, 126-135.

Teaching to instill thinking structures

2007-12-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

“I hope to bring an air of authenticity,” Anne Marie begins. She is 64 years old, petite, slightly arthritic, dressed in tasteful patterned tunic jacket over black pants. “This is a reading strategy that works with our students at my high school.”

She describes why we, as thirteen English teachers (three of us are not present, having been required to attend a required Beginning Teachers’ workshop in a different location), are good readers. We visualize; we watch verb tense switches for time flashbacks; we note tags on dialogue to see tensions between speakers. She asks us to teach to the students who can’t even ask a question, as, for them, “Reading is invisible.”

“Real reading is re-reading,” Anne Marie says as her theme to model her workshop topic: The Socratic Seminar. And while some of us refresh our memories about this device to teach close reading and others are exposed to it for the first time, we listen to each other’s thoughts. It was a refreshing time: colleagues in dialogue, using a public sphere to exchange ideas about pedagogy.

At one point in the discussion, we listed “Strategies we use to develop close reading.” It is as follows: ask each other questions to clarify, to allow people to share, and to redefine meaning; Paraphrase; Sentence structure analysis; Access prior knowledge; Denotation versus connotation; Relations between words; Visualize; Create personal responses; Relations between words; Interpret; Place in personal context; Syntax and semantics (mine); Context; Repetition; Define terms; Ideal versus reality: conceptions of the world; Analogize; Synthesize in one sentence; Take another point of view and explain it; Author’s intention; Whose voice is omitted? Power at play.

So much of this is, as Anne Marie suggested, part of who we are as teachers.

After the afternoon break, we, in small group,s are assigned to identify “metaphors of playwrights.” Each group comes up with similar ideas. It's starting to feel a bit too much now like the traditional classroom: content plus content equals learning.

The lack of transition to higher level study at our professional development allowed me time to reflect. And I came back to a constant theme of mine: I’m concerned that we as teachers don’t extend often enough into conversations about teaching students to think.

For me, there is no systematic, linear unveiling of literary techniques. Rather, the students’ own language and questions allow me to lead them toward meaning making. I am a vehicle for Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, in which young people fill in gaps of knowledge with adult mediation. My primary influence lies in the cognitive domain: I help students synthesize their own experiences, identify assumptions, trace inferential clues, and reflect on their own thinking. The latter component is particularly important within a critical literacy framework, as reflecting on assumptions, stereotypes, and other embedded notions before, during, and after alternative literacy events helps students to process their feelings and experiences (Wade, 1997).

Thinking about thinking is important for students to make meaning in a symbol-saturated contemporary world. So, how do you instill in your students a way to make meaning through thinking in your classroom? Share your thoughts and we’ll develop a dialogue.

In the meantime, be well, happy, and hope-filled. I’ll “talk” to you next week,

Carolyn

Vygotsky. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wade. (1997). Service. In R. Wade (Ed.), Community service learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum (pp. 66). Albany, NY: State University of New York.

Teacher-to-Teacher Debut

2007-11-23T06:13:00.000-08:00

Welcome, teachers across the United States and the world.

As a teacher-researcher, I narrate and interpret students’ reactions to my critical literacy classroom. Literacy is the ability to read, write, communicate, and comprehend. Students have access to a wide array of literacy-based activities ranging from traditional school-based literacies to the literacies they use to make sense of their daily lives.

Yet literacy skills recognized in American public schools do not resemble literacy in the real world. American public schools do not offer students instruction or provide tools necessary to help them read, analyze, and critique embedded messages in the extensive variety of texts they “read” everyday.

I'd like to create a dialogue with you and other teachers around the world about literacy for today's students: what it is, the obligations of public schools to create literate learners, current research about multiple literacies and multimodality, and your own classroom experiences in which you have tried to extend a cultural transmission approach so asa to enhance literacy structures in students.

I'll post weekly about ideas that arise from my own classroom observations and data collection. In the meantime, allow me to share with you some comments from Amy Tan, the opening ceremonies' keynote speaker last weekend at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention in New York City.

She suggested that reading creates a certain magical reaction:

“When it happens, you feel you have gone to a different place… It is the highest moment. I can’t predict it: it just happens. Whenever you’re a write or a reader, you’ve had it. You’ve had these high moments. You found a connection between your life and this writing.”

What moment can you recall in which a text brought you to a "different place?" Was it a film, an audio story aired on radio, a poem that you memorized, a primary source digital document, an original song you wrote? Post your moment of connectedness between your life and a text.

Welcome.