Writers' Workshop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.