Showing posts with label Instructional Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Instructional Design. Show all posts

Sunday, April 1, 2012

3:00 AM - , 1 comment

Urban Writing Classroom Framework


Culturally Inclusive Framework

for the Urban Writing Classroom



Core Theme: Community

Core Practice: Foster and maintain a safe and respectful environment where young people are free to be themselves, free to take chances, and free from fear of making mistakes.

Core Theme: Cultural Relevance

Core Practice: Locate the curriculum in learners’ lives through content that is personally and socially relevant to them. Make the classroom a place of personal empowerment.

Core Theme: Conversation

Core Practice: Find ways to promote and sustain an ongoing class conversation. Encourage personal reflection through writing and discussing.

Core Theme: Routines & Rituals
 
 Core Practice: Establish familiar classroom writing routines, group-building rituals and room rules.

Core Theme: Feedback / Critique 

Core Practice: All students are capable of brilliance. Carefully measure critique, illuminating their gifts instead of burying learners in corrections and rules.
 
Core Theme: Teacher Sharing

Core Practice: Thoughtfully-chosen, pointedly shared writing from the instructor can be beneficial to understanding the writing process and building community.

Core Theme: Spatial Justice

Core Practice: Design flexible floor plans that accommodate diverse young learners and facilitate communication during a variety of individual and group activities.

Core Theme: Professional Development

Core Practice: Stay current on the best research-proven strategies of great writing teachers.















Tuesday, March 13, 2012

1:26 AM - , No comments

Digital Writing Workshop II

Troy Hicks 




Deep Revision with
Collaborative Word Processors

What is collaborative editing?
http://www.educause.edu/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutColla/156812

Taken together, the opportunities that blogs, wikis, collaborative word processors, and even recorded responses offer to you as you confer with student writers are numerous. While students are able to track their own revisions and directly comment on the ways in which they have incorporated your responses, there are no more lost disks or postdated rough drafts. These features allow for more comprehensive conferring and deeper reflection, thus encouraging our students to engage more fully in their writing, both during our workshop time in school as well as for their own purposes outside of school.


Reading the “MAPS” to Examine Author’s Craft

As outlined by Swenson and Mitchell (2006), there is a simple acronym that offers teachers a heuristic to help students think critically about the texts they are reading and writing: MAPS. The original acronym was built from mode, audience, purpose, and situation, both for the writer as an individual as well as the context of the writing; I add a second M to this heuristic: media. Like Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001), I make the distinction between the mode (or, to use a synonym more common to writing teachers, genre) of a particular text and media (that is, according to Kress and Van Leeuwen, “the tools and the materials” used to create a particular text) (22). For instance, a writer can compose in the mode of a memoir or, as in the following example, a persuasive text, yet present that memoir or persuasive text through different media, such as a digital movie or podcast. A digital writer constantly questions the ways in which a text is being produced . . .



Multimodal Authoring
"How do I incorporate digital storytelling into my curriculum in a way that meets students where they’re at, complements their knowledge, thoughts, and feelings, and challenges each student in meaningful ways … and still ensure that I teach my entire curriculum? “Should a digital story begin with an idea/assignment or with photos? “How can I possibly get enough computers often enough to create digital stories? “How many digital stories do I need to create before I feel competent enough to lead my students in the process? “Is teaching the writing part of a digital story different than teaching writing as I usually teach it? And if so, how?”

Screencasting
Portfolios

Audio Anthologies

No matter what the tool and the approach, in terms of MAPS, one of the primary tasks of formative assessment is to help writers frame their writing project. To reiterate:
  • Mode and media: What genre am I attempting to write in and what medium (or media) will help me best convey my message?
  • Audience: Who is the intended audience? What other audiences might I reach, intentionally or unintentionally?
  • Purpose: What is my purpose? How does the broad choice of mode and media as well as specific choices about the topic, organization, and even words I use affect my purpose?
  • Situation for the writer and the writing: What do I know about this topic and the digital writing tool I hope to employ? How much time and training might I need to create this piece of digital writing?

Another interesting way to think about design, and how to create pieces of digital writing, comes from Robin Williams and her Non-Designer’s Design Book (2008). In this text, she outlines four principles of design:

  1. Contrast: creating visual elements such as type, color, and shape that are very different from one another so as to have them stand out in the text
  2. Repetition: using the visual elements multiple times in effective manners to organize the text
  3. Alignment: visually connecting every element of the text with real or imagined lines
  4. Proximity: grouping elements together that are related in order to organize information in the text.


These four principles can help digital writers structure the visual elements of their texts so that they have the maximum effect on the viewer or reader. Design, then, is an essential component of digital writing. For instance, the Writing in Digital Environments Research Collective, in its article “Why Teach Digital Writing?” (2005), argues that “[w]riting isn’t just scripting text anymore. Writing requires carefully and critically analyzing and selecting among multiple media elements.” During the process of formative assessment, digital writing teachers help their students do this careful and critical analysis. Keeping this principle, as well as these broad questions from MAPS, in mind, teachers can focus on more specific traits to consider for digital writing, which build on a set of traits articulated by teacher and author Jim Burke in his book Writing Reminders (2003).



Imagining a Framework for Instruction
in Your Digital Writing Workshop

No question, assessment is complicated, as is the process of digital writing. Unlike other “Looking Ahead” sections of this book, where I offer a particular technology tool for thinking about how to use digital writing, the best suggestion that I can offer here is that you ask your students to document their work over time in a variety of ways and, ideally, in a centralized location such as a class wiki where they can embed media or link to other work they have online.

The process of multimedia composing can become, unfortunately, rather artificial once we try to make it more “academic” requiring certain steps and outcomes. Any proposal for a pedagogy of teaching digital writing, indeed for structuring a digital writing workshop, must account for the formative and the summative, the process and the product, not to mention both the tools and the techniques. It is with this idea in mind that I developed the framework in Chapter 7 for creating your digital writing workshop, which I hope will guide your instruction by looking at the students you teach, the subject of digital writing itself, and the spaces in which digital writing occurs, both physical and virtual.




TPACK – Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge
http://tpack.org

. . . a concept of “technological pedagogical content knowledge” (TPACK) that suggests there is no single technological solution that applies for every teacher, every course, or every view of teaching. Quality teaching requires developing a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships between technology, content, and pedagogy, and using this understanding to develop appropriate, context-specific strategies and representations.


The Read/Write Web 

The read/write web finally delivered the promise of having a real audience and varied purposes that writing teachers had so long looked to bring to their classrooms. Suddenly, writing teachers felt as if their students could have a purpose and audience beyond the classroom and school.


Digital Writing

Not only do they need to understand the technical aspects of creating hyperlinks, posting to a blog, or collaborating with a wiki, but they need to have the intentional focus as a writer to understand the audience and purpose for which they are writing. Moreover, they need to consider the ways in which we can compose with multiple modes and media.



Understanding when, why, and how to use different forms of media to convey a particular message requires a working knowledge of the mode -- that is, what an audience expects from a piece of writing in order to be moved to action -- and how to effectively manipulate the media in which it is composed.



In short, students must be made aware of the ways in which their writing is distributed and perceived across the many networks in which they participate, in school and out. And writing teachers need to consider the many ways in which students see themselves as writers . . .  and invite them to be intentional about how they read and write in a digital age.

Thus, writing has always been a complex act, and relying on our long history of understanding the writing process as well as the writing workshop approach helps us now understand how newer technologies can offer writers numerous opportunities to get their message across. Writing in a digital world means that, as writers and teachers of writing, we need to be aware of these choices and how we can best utilize them to have the intended effect on our various audiences.

We need to understand the ways in which writing has been taught in order to better understand our students, the subject matter of writing, and the spaces in which digital writing happens.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

7:52 AM - ,,,,, No comments

Morrell / Urban Literacy Ed - 1


Associate Professor of Urban Schooling
 
Associate Director of Youth Research,
Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA) 




Linking Literacy

Ernest Morrell covers a great deal of material in his brief introductory chapter to Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning. Along with a summary of his background and an overview of the book’s format, Morrell shares his assessment of current urban school challenges, articulates his passion and purpose, and previews important concepts about the social role of the urban literacy educator.

The book begins with a hard look at the hurdles, obstacles and the radically changed reality now confronting the learners and teachers in our nation’s urban literacy classrooms. Our current economic picture presents a far different employment situation than one Americans have faced throughout the last century. Finding success in today’s workplace requires a young person to be a multi-literate individual.  

“The bottom line for today’s students is that in order to contend for the American Dream,” writes Morrell, “students need to develop a high level of literacy in school, placing increasing pressure on literacy educators to help them acquire those skills.” While urban schools are struggling to understand how to meet the demands of a postindustrial, techo-literate society, Morrell notes, educators are also challenged by “the overwhelming social, linguistic, cultural, and economic diversity in America’s classrooms.” Speaking to the relationship between cultural diversity and the culture of schools, Morrell says:

Too often, what happens in literacy classrooms is that the students whose experiences, practices, and preferences most closely resemble the demands of academic literacy are rewarded while those whose experiences, practices, and preferences are less congruent struggle with the development of academic literacy.

Much of Morrell’s introduction details his professional passions and his purpose for writing Linking Literacy. Morrell contends that, “by building upon students’ literacy experiences with popular culture in non-school settings, teachers can make authentic and powerful connections between students’ worlds and the demands of the classroom.” 

The book is previewed as a text designed to provide “a comprehensive, theoretically grounded and empirically tested approach to teaching popular culture in schools that promotes academic and critical literacy development.” Morrell explains that Linking Literacy models a process for “learning from and with students that is situated in the literacy practices accompanying participation in everyday activity.”

Morrell’s first chapter partially serves to introduce his perspective on the social role of the urban literacy educator. The great economic, educational and social challenges of our time are seen by Morrell as also being a great opportunity for critical educators who hold teaching to be “a revolutionary and political act.” 

Morrell frames teachers, as “informed cultural workers.” He suggests that educators acknowledge and embrace their work as:

"ethnographers of the language and literacy practices in the neighborhoods and homes of students."

Ethnography, in this sense, is not a process of discovering how cultures are different. It is an investigation of how different cultures, on their own terms, “make sense of the world.” Morrell advises urban teacher-ethnographers to examine “the everyday language and literacy practices of their students that are associated with membership in particular cultures and communities.”

Having discussed urban school challenges, his professional purpose and his outlook on the educator’s social role, Morrell concludes his introduction with a detailed outline of coming chapters.











Challenge and Opportunity

The concepts in Ernest Morrell’s intense introductory paragraphs inform my thinking about literacy and language arts and impact my practice as an urban literacy educator in three respects: in my professional position as a classroom manager, in my pedagogical persona as a lesson plan designer, and in my social role as a culturally competent advocate for social justice in a community of diverse families.

Ideas and information in Morrell’s Chapter One will leave an impression on my practice as urban classroom manager. Morrell provides a mandate for me to “create cohesive classroom communities” that maximize the learning of diverse students with diverse needs. Devising a unified learning environment of dissimilar individuals will involve, not just respecting difference, but expecting it – welcoming it. This welcoming approach must be echoed in the physical design and décor of the workspace, as well as in the emotional atmosphere of the room.

Morrell points out that the critical first step in the creation of a cohesive learning community begins before any learners have actually walked through the door. It begins with me, my reflection on the student body as valued individuals, and my active contemplation on educing and eduction. The first step is to commit anew to the reality that all students enter the literacy classroom as uniquely skilled and talented users of language and literacy who possess a great deal of cultural-linguistic knowledge.

My practice as a lesson plan designer is directly affected by the collection of concepts delineated in the beginning of Morrell’s book. I am empowered by Morrell’s words to act on my impulse to connect popular culture to content. To be an effective instructional planner, I must design lessons that are inviting for students other than just those who know how to “do school.” The curriculum must be related and made accessible to young people who do not adhere to the dominant culture in society or the mainstream academic culture of educational institutions.

Academic literacy skills can be taught in many ways using many different types of texts – including texts associated with pop media. As a teacher, Morrell used popular culture as the bridge between the “local literacy practices” of his pupils and “the academic, professional, critical, and civic literacies required for success in school and society.” Morrell’s research led him to conclude that “teaching popular culture in schools promotes academic and critical literacy development” among urban youth.

Morrell’s opening chapter influences my urban literacy educator practice as a culturally competent community advocate for social justice. His language gives me a way to think about and express the social aspects of my position as a “cultural worker.” Morrell sees urban educators as key architects in the forming of responsive and responsible citizens. He invites me to change the world through classrooms that are culturally affirming. As informed cultural workers, Morrell explains that teachers can create “the conditions whereby all students can develop the necessary tools for enacting critical citizenship and obtaining competitive employment in a techo-cultural, postmodern global economy.”

While I have not yet fully digested all of Professor Morrell’s meanings, I am as thrilled and inspired by the things in the opening chapter that I comprehend as the things that confound. Morrell’s powerfully realized voice and vision re-shapes my conceptual framework for considering multi-literacy and connects to the managerial, the instructional and the social aspects of my work as an urban literacy educator in a multicultural community.



 

Friday, January 20, 2012

7:49 AM - ,,,,, No comments

Morrell / Urban Literacy Ed - 2

Popular Culture in Theory and Practice


In Chapter Two of Linking Literacy and Popular Culture – an introduction to popular culture – Ernest Morrell considers what literacy educators can learn from having a clear definition, a theoretical framework and an historical perspective of cultural theory. The chapter serves to demonstrate why “the relationship between mainstream media and social attitudes” has been central to Morrell’s research and teaching. Morrell argues that an “understanding of popular culture . . . is needed for effective teaching, and for critical citizenship.”

Chapter Two provides definitions of concepts connected with popular culture, including the Neo-Gramscian Hegemony Theory – outlines the chronological development of cultural studies – and examines the need for literacy educators to develop a broad understanding of cultural theory.

Gramsci


Neo-Gramscian Hegemony Theory


Morrell attributes the term hegemony to Antonio Gramsci, a theorist who “pushed upon Marx’s idea of ideology as false consciousness.” The OED defines hegemony as “Leadership, predominance, preponderance; esp. the leadership or predominant authority of one state of a confederacy or union over the others” and cites its original use as a “reference to the states of ancient Greece, whence transferred to the German states, and in other modern applications.”

In the context of cultural studies and pop culture, Morrell initially describes hegemony as referring generally to “the strategies, ideas, and beliefs that the dominant class would promote in order to manufacture consent among subordinate classes.”  The word is tied a political concept developed by Gramsci and other theorists to talk about pop culture and explain “the absence of socialist revolutions in Western capitalist democracies.”

Later in the chapter, hegemony is fully defined in the specific context of neo-Gramscian hegemony theory (NGHT) – where popular culture is seen as “a site of struggle between the forces of resistance of subordinate groups in society, and the forces of incorporation of dominant groups in society.”

Ernest Morrell
So hegemony here is meant to imply “a process in which a dominant class . . .  leads [society] through the exercise of moral and intellectual leadership.” Morrell emphasizes that popular culture, as related to NGHT, “is not an imposed 'mass culture', or a 'people's culture', it is more of a terrain of exchange between the two.”

Morrell’s focus on NGHT is found to be a concept central to the information in Chapter Two as it concerns understanding critical theory. Morrell elegantly speaks to the basis of critical theory with the following: “Rather than accept any knowledge as absolute, critical theorists assumed that all knowledge was ideological and, therefore, sought to unpack the inherent power relations in all knowledge asking constantly, whose interests were being served and at what cost.”



History of Cultural Studies

In his review of the historical development of cultural studies, Morrell reviews the efforts and conceptual contributions of several researchers. He begins with two of the most famous Frankfurt School theorists, Ted Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and their view that the culture industries (which include popular music, film, television, and print media) were “tools by which the dominant classes could standardize art and culture, thereby constraining critical thought and controlling the actions of the masses.” Adorno, Horkheimer and others studied the ill effects of mass consumption of popular music, television, and film, and the ways in which “media culture could be used as propaganda to sway the public mood.”

Morrell speaks of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall as theorists who “sought to develop a tradition that celebrated the everyday mass culture of the working class that was denigrated in elite social contexts and in dominant social institutions such as schools.” These British theorists saw pop culture as “a celebration and site of resistance.” Hoggart is noted as author of the seminal book, The Uses of Literacy and as founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).

Pointing to a key difference between the theories of the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham Centre, Morrell writes:

“While Adorno and Horkheimer located popular culture in the works of the culture industries, Hoggart, Hall, and Williams located popular culture in the everyday activities of working class peoples. Whereas the Frankfurt theorists saw popular culture as a tool for social control, the British cultural theorists saw popular culture as a celebration and site of resistance.”

Morrell stresses this central dynamic in cultural studies. “The same culture that represents working class resistance can also be marketed to reinforce social inequality,” he says, explaining, “the two sides to this discussion of popular culture as each having something important to offer to educators interested in teaching popular culture.”

Detailing the work of Raymond Williams, Morrell notes the import of his book, Sociology of Culture – “an historical analysis of the social organization of culture in terms of its institutions and formations.” Williams demonstrated that “the concept of culture had come into existence as a holistic protest against the fragmenting effects of industrialism,” and therefore concluded that all pop culture “belonged to a common heritage of opposition.”

Morrell documents pop culture as examined in American cultural studies and educational research, citing the contributions of Docker, Storey, McCarthy, Mahiri and Giroux. These theorists situate pop culture “in its resonance with oppressed groups while arguing for its position at the center of discussions of education and social change” and promote the study of popular culture “as a mechanism for social change.” Many of the American cultural theorists describe the “multiple, conflicting purposes of popular culture in contemporary society.” Morrell believes:

“that the more young people are given opportunities to explore these various roles, the better consumers and producers of popular culture they’ll be.” 


Henry Giroux is pointed out as having addressed “the crisis confronting youth . . .  where they are enmeshed in a culture of violence coded by race and class.” Giroux argued for a critical media literacy and examined “the negative connotations of youth culture promoted in popular media that propel youth toward mistrust, alienation, misogyny, violence, apathy, and the development of fugitive cultures.”


The Need for a Broad Understanding
of Cultural Theory in Literacy Education


In the final pages of Chapter Two, Morrell makes the case that, “it is important for English teachers to develop a broad understanding of the history and development of popular culture.” He lists several reasons, chief among them – to enable productive discussions between teachers and learners about pop culture “as a simultaneous site of resistance to and cooptation by the culture industries,” and to help literacy educators make the case for the inclusion of popular culture in the mainstream curriculum.






Link to the Henry Giroux Home Page



Quotes from Henry Giroux


As a concept, youth represents an inescapable intersection of the personal, social, political, and pedagogical.
-- from Fugitive Cultures


The futures we inherit are not of our own making, but the futures we create for generations of young people who follow us arise out of our ability to imagine a better world, recognize our responsibility to others, and define the success of a society to the degree that it can address the needs of coming generations to live in a world in which the obligations of a global democracy and individual responsibility mutually inform each other.


Justice is the merging of hope, reason, imagination, and moral responsibility tempered by the recognition that the pursuit of happiness and the good life is a collective affair.


Where I grew up learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working-class experience didn't count. Not only did it not count, it was disparaged.
-- from Border Crossings


The class and racial war being waged against young people is most evident in the ways in which schools are being militarized with the addition of armed guards, barbed-wired security fences, and "lock down drills." As educators turn over their responsibility for school safety to the police, the new security culture in public schools has turned them into "learning prisons." It would be a tragic mistake for those of us on the left either to separate the war in Iraq from the many problems Americans, young people in particular, face at home, or fail to recognize how war is being waged by this government on multiple fronts.


Instead of providing a decent education to poor young people, American society offers them the growing potential of being incarcerated; buttressed by the fact that the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that sentences minors to death and spends three times more on each incarcerated citizen than on each public school pupil.


Any discourse about the future has to begin with the issue of youth because more than any other group they embody the projected dreams, desires, and commitment of a society's obligations to the future.
-- from The Terror of Neoliberalism






Monday, January 2, 2012

6:45 PM - ,,,,, No comments

Morrell - Urban Lit Ed - 3



Multiliteracy and Motivation:

Morrell’s Case for
Popular Culture in Urban Literacy Education


Ernest Morrell gets down to (what in my old neighborhood, people called) the “nitty gritty” in his third chapter of Linking Literacy and Popular Culture. Here, Morrell is asking urban literacy educators to discover the connections – not between popular culture and urban schools – but between urban language arts learners and learning.

What is the case for popular culture in urban literacy education? Even if one views literacy in the broadest sense – why focus on Lady Gaga instead of Lady Macbeth? Why hoops over Hamlet? While pop culture may be a valid specialty area of “media studies,” considering time limitations, what justifies its use in the general language arts classroom?

Morrell suggests that in light of our understanding of multiple literacies, popular culture solves the problem of engagement. Language arts educators can ‘meet students where they are,’ so to speak. It’s not a matter of one type of text being better than another – it’s about motivating students. Additionally, Morrell says it’s about relevance, and cultural relevance. Popular culture stands at the intersection between multicultural ideals – and the intentional diversity, equity-seeking and empowerment aspects of the social justice framework.

Morrell makes his case in Chapter Three by addressing two questions: (1) What is literacy education? (2) How do we motivate urban language arts learners? While the chapter is obliged to follow an academic structure of research references, these notes freely reflect on Morrell’s main message: we can motivate urban learners by connecting to the sophisticated cognitive activity young people already employ in their relationship to popular culture, and use the immediate relevance pop culture has in young people’s real lives to build bridges back to great literature and traditional language arts standards.



“No systematic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of morals, the Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor. The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved. When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.”
– Carter G. Woodson



Multiliteracy



Morrell explores several arguments that lay a conceptual foundation for the theory of multiple literacies and the potential for utilizing film, sports, music, gaming and other forms of pop media to promote literacy development in urban schools. The point being made is that there are many kinds of literacies. Pinning down the precise number and individual scope of the multiplicity of newly understood literacies is difficult. This is due to what Jim Burke characterized as our “evolving notions of literacy.”

There are so many literacies, the lifelong learner must now possess literacy - literacy. Burke, referring to the general area of critical media literacy, says that in our “increasingly complex world of multiple literacies” urban learners need to develop “textual intelligence.” Importantly, his concept of text implies a definition that sees it, as Heather Coffey generously defines text: “[any] vehicle through which individuals communicate with one another using the codes and conventions of society.” Books, yes – but movies, songs, pictures, conversations, and even attitudes are considered texts.

So communications literacy is textual intelligence that includes the realm of the cultural and the socio-physical – leading Judith Langer to describe literacy as, “the ability to think and reason like a literate person within a particular society.” Along with the artifactual, documentary component to popular culture, Morrell contemplates popular culture’s ideal component – ideas, values and attitudes as well as everyday life and language. While not spelled out in his third chapter of Linking Literacy, in subsequent writing and speeches, Morrell has clarified his thinking on the five key literacies, listing:

  • Academic Literacies
  • Critical Literacies
  • Civic Literacies
  • Community Literacies
  • New Media Literacies

Morrell advises that young people are already involved in “many rigorous and relevant literacy activities that are related to their participation in youth popular culture.”



“While acknowledgment of the relationship between education and culture is important, unless the relationship between culture and the socioeconomic conditions within which it is produced is recognized, the so-called at-risk conditions common to peoples living under siege will persist.”
– Sandy Grande (Red Pedagogy)





Motivation



A theory of educational psychology central to Morrell’s work is the Expectancy - Value Theory of Motivation. This Eccles and Wigfield model holds that motivation is a function of two characteristics.  The first one is confidence. Confident in their ability to perform a task, people are more likely to be motivated to do it.  The second characteristic is relevance.  When a person feels that an activity is relevant, he or she will be more inclined to participate.  So, to motivate urban learners, the questions literacy educators must ask are these:

  • What is it that urban learners already do well, and have a high degree of confidence in, that I can draw from? 
  • How can I situate the content in something that is relevant to students in a real way?

Morrell notes that incorporating popular culture in the literacy classroom is also motivating because it promotes critical consciousness. This work positions young people as intellectuals and researchers, investigating the things that they care about in the community. 

“Popular culture involves intellectually rigorous literate activity,” writes Morrell. While many in education claim there is a distinction between popular culture and high culture, “obviously deciding to focus on the latter given its superior rigor, content, and worth to humanity” – Morrell challenges these ideas, insisting “popular cultural consumption and production are intellectual activities that coordinate with the goals of secondary English teaching.”

Beyond academic value, Morrell makes the case that popular culture addresses the issues of multiliteracy and motivation in urban literacy education.













Tuesday, October 18, 2011

1:00 PM - , No comments

Projects & Exhibitions

Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe:

 
"So this is the little lady whose book started the Civil War."





It is difficult for most students – and teachers – to imagine 
that an entire semester could be  spent examining just what
President Lincoln meant by those words. . .



Notes on Jim Burke's  -- Chapter 14
The English Teacher's Companion
"Integrating Projects & Exhibitions"



If we are to be effective urban educators we must devise lesson plans that address three things: the problem of engagement, the problem of comprehension, and the problem of retention.

Jim Burke invites us to explore the powerful possibility – and the empowering potential – of the long-term project. He encourages us to design lessons around big ideas – to look at the big picture – to ask essential questions.


There are three main types of projects have emerged.

  • Senior Exit Projects: These projects are sometimes required as part of a larger school program and are not necessarily done in the English class. They may, however, involve the study of literature, or depend heavily on English teachers to help with certain parts of a project.
     
  • Exhibitions: These projects are traditionally done as part of a class, but represent a culminating activity for a quarter or semester. They are often used as a performance assessment, providing students an opportunity to demonstrate what they know and have learned to do over the course of the term.
     
  • Class Projects: These projects last anywhere from one to four weeks. While they are related to the other two types, class projects tend to focus on one particular unit of study to which the teacher wants to bring some closure.

 

  Link Me!


"Our challenge as urban educators" Burke explains,"is finding high-leverage strategies that meet the demands of our texts and the needs of our students." As you’re looking to devise lesson plans that solve the problems of engagement, comprehension and retention – consider integrating projects and exhibitions into the curriculum.





Sunday, October 16, 2011

11:47 AM - No comments

Joy and Justice

Notes from Linda Christensen’s
Introduction to Teaching for Joy and Justice

What does Linda Christensen mean when she talks of teaching for joy and justice?
“My curriculum” writes Linda Christensen “uses students’ lives as critical texts we mine for stories, celebrate with poetry, and analyze through essays that affirm their right to a place in our society.” Christensen explains that teaching for joy and justice means locating the curriculum in students’ lives. For her, the language arts classroom is a place of personal empowerment where students can look at their lives, examine why things are unfair or unjust, and use their writing to respond.

The fact that a learner lacks skills does not mean he or she lacks intelligence. Teaching for joy and justice, says Christensen, begins with “the non-negotiable belief that all students are capable of brilliance.” The educator’s duty is to attempt to “coax the brilliance out of them.” Christensen advocates connecting skill acquisition through content that is personally and socially relevant to the learner. Within this process, she says there is joy in recognizing the learning and justice in recognizing the learner. Christensen speaks of a breakthrough essay from of a student named Michael and explains, “There’s joy because he finally nails this form of academic writing, but there is also justice in talking back to years of essays filled with red marks and scarred with low grades.”

What does Christensen mean when she says she longs “teach the writer not the paper?” 
Christensen states her belief that all students can write and have something important to say. She insists educators must “build writers by illuminating their gifts instead of burying them” in corrections and rules. This involves carefully measuring critique -- exploring one or two feedback items that the learner can truly grasp and incorporate into his or her work.

Students naturally resist a curriculum of correction and fault fixing. Christensen insists our students’ language is an inherited history to be discovered and celebrated. It is “a treasure of words and memories and the sounds of home, not a social fungus to be scraped from their mouths and papers.” When we start by thinking learners need to be "fixed," our curriculum seeks to erase students' home language. Such a curriculum fails to find the “strength and beauty in the experience and heritage” learners bring with them to school.

What is Christensen’s Reading Without Words assignment?
Linda Christensen speaks of recognizing and valuing the multiple literacies in learners’ daily lives. In her Reading Without Words lesson, she asked learners to interview family members about ways they “read” the world. She describes how students shared their findings: “Troy wrote about how his father, a long-haul truck driver, read his engine and the highway. Mario wrote about how his mother, a hairdresser, read hair and heads. Carl wrote about how his grandfather read rivers when he took him fishing.” Christensen is convinced that when learners write about their lives, “they have more incentive to revise the paper, and they care more about learning about mechanics.”

According to Christensen, educators need to construct curriculum around ideas that matter and that connect students to their community and world. Teachers should employ books, stories, poems, and essays that “help students critically examine the world.”

What are the benefits of using poetry in the classroom?
“Poetry levels the writing playing field,” Christensen writes. “Students who struggle in other areas of literacy education often succeed in poetry.” According to Christensen poetry is of benefit in the classroom in the following ways: unleashes verbal dexterity; helps build community; teaches literary analysis; is a means of sharing our hardships and joys; turns pain into art; teaches us how to be a human. 

Christensen
References

Christensen, L. (2009). Teaching for joy and justice: Re-Imaging the language arts classroom.  Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Rethinking Schools Publications.

Friday, September 16, 2011

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