Final Posting: Visual Essay

After reading Selfe's text, I decided to create and practice the Visual Essay assignment. I focused on the teaching-related issue of literacy. In other words, what does it mean to practice literacy? Check out my Visual Essay in order to find out my opinion....



VISUAL ESSAY: MY "TO-DO LIST" FOR LITERACY


Task 1: Find a Community of Learners


Task 2: Balance Modern Texts and Classic Texts


Task 3: Read Across Genres


Task 4: Facilitate and Participate in Discussions


Task 5. Practice Media Literacy By Utilizing Technology and "New Literacies"


Task 6: Start Literacy Practices Early and Continue them Throughout Life



Reflection on Composing the Visual Essay:

As a result of this program, my definition of "literacy" has certainly expanded to include technology-related "new" or visual literacies. However, as a teacher, I believe that the majority of what I will be dealing with, at least at first, will be print literacies, so I gave those priority in my essay. I really enjoyed composing this mini-project. I used photos of my family and friends posing in various "literacy-related" scenes in order to personalize the message. The overall theme of literacy allows me to showcase a wide range of images while still remaining relatively coherent. In terms of visual organization, I feel as though the images could have been successful in almost any order, since all 6 are of equal importance. However, I felt strongly about placing the image of the older woman reading to the baby last, because I wanted to emphasize that literacy is definitely NOT something that happens at school alone. Rather, it is a lifelong process that should be strengthened and practiced every day. We interact with the world through literacies, so why should we confine them to the classroom? The fact that I did this project with the theme of literacy in mind makes it quite simple to view the visual essay through the lens of visual literacy. I think that these types of literacies will become increasingly important in the future. Though access and school funding issues make me hesitant about incorporating technology as the framework for a digital literacy project such as this (in a classroom I would definitely allow students to do a "hard copy" version if they chose), visual literacy more generally is a great way to engage students and break up the monotonous, irrelevant ways in which some students view school. Assignments such as those proposed by Selfe assist students in building visual literacy skills, which will help them in all areas of life, both inside and outside the classroom.

Week Five!

I have to admit that I’m kind of old school in terms of digital literacy. I hate reading long texts on a computer screen (I always print out the like 15 articles we’re all assigned to read each week for our classes), I just recently caved and joined Facebook, my TV has rabbit ears, and I love the way a new book smells. I’m not embarrassed to admit that my car has a cassette player, and that’s it. So I guess you could say that I’m living in the past in terms of digital technology. But it seems like an inevitability at this point, and if I’m going to be an effective teacher for the digital creatures that populate today’s high schools, then I better climb on board and join the revolution, right?

Wrong. Though I have listened intently during this program as the various “colleagues…” who have taught our classes have tried to convince us to incorporate technology into our classrooms in just about every way, from blogs and wikis to the dreaded “clicker quizzes,” I think the biggest lesson for me has been one of balance. Sure, I’ll incorporate some technology into my classrooms, but let’s just put it this way, I won’t be having my students blog anytime soon. Maybe I’m living in the past. If my school was equipped with a computer for each student or several computers in each classroom, then I would feel very differently, but that is not the technological reality for the vast majority of school. Realistically, we fight all other teachers for lab time in a couple of classroom sized labs, or maybe the school has one or two mobile labs. At that point, the issue is not only convenience but also access. If we cannot secure a lab at least once a week or so, then I can’t justify having my students finish this stuff up at home, where they have differing levels of access to these tools.

In my planning for student teaching, I have seen the combative nature of teachers as they jockey for lab time. I have to teach the research paper, so lab time is a must-have for researching during the month-long project. My lab times have been shuffled around over and over again, and the whole thing has become a huge hassle. Available lab time now dictates the path of my research paper unit. To be honest, I have been willing to deal with the frustrations of fighting for lab time because it is absolutely necessary for the research paper. I don’t think that I would necessarily have the same patience if the project at stake was a wiki or blog. Once schools invest more in these technologies, it will be easier for teachers to take advantage of them, but at this point I feel that my time is better spent creating quality lessons rather than dealing with the mysteries of media center scheduling.

This posting was not initially meant as a rant against technology in the classroom. Far from it, actually. Used properly, it can be a great way to engage students. Though recently I have seen the difficulties first-hand, I have had many wonderful experiences with technology in the classroom. As a teacher, though, my goal is to introduce students to new experiences that will help them grow as people. After all, isn’t the goal of education (as noted in the Jenkins piece) to “ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [creative] and economic life?” The Pew research study states that already “more than one-half of all American teens—and 57 percent of teens who use the internet—could be considered media creators” (Jenkins 6). Today’s students are familiar with technology. They use it outside of school. Beach’s article even admits that one of the challenges of the digital technology push in the schools is that teachers need to come to terms with the fact that they are no longer experts (meaning that the students are more tech-savvy than they are). So if the job of teachers is, in part, to introduce students to novel, life-changin’ stuff, then we need to stop thinking that technology is the automatic answer. Teens are already doing technology outside of the classroom, and in my opinion, there doesn’t always have to be congruence between the in-school and out-of-school activities of students. Yes, this can create relevancy, but a good teacher doesn’t need to rely on the “hey you guys do this outside of school so we’re gonna do it here” factor in order to create relevance for students.

So let’s give students some different kinds of experiences. Let’s help them read a novel, appreciate the way it feels in their hands and the way the pages curl from previous readers. Didn’t one of our readings suggest that reading is a social act, because passing on a recommendation for a good book and sharing in that experience with someone else is rewarding? The same is true for writing. How about helping students appreciate the feeling of a pen as it goes across paper, looking back at your work after an hour or so and seeing pages and pages of creative work in your own handwriting? This is a very fulfilling experience, and I don’t think it translates to the computer screen. If students are not going to get these sensory experiences in an English class, then where else will it happen? Again, I’m not hating on technology, but these old school pleasures are something to keep in mind.


My resource link for this week is: http://teacher2b.com/

This site has lots of lesson plans and guides for teaching creative writing, literature, etc., and is pretty basic and user-friendly in design.

Week Four!

“High-stakes testing is a failure of democracy: it presents unequal structures of opportunity, it closes off inquiry, it allows the corporatization of education, it disenfranchises the people most affected by it because the public sphere is no longer available, and it creates an oppressive school environment” (Dornan 213).

Standardized tests are the black sheep of the assessment world. They are here to stay, a necessary evil in the minds of some, but many teachers (and authors such as Dornan) rant and complain about their inherent problems to no end. Many of the points discussed in the Dornan text are meant to get teachers fired up and angry about high-stakes testing, since these tests disturb the nurturing, sheltered world of the process-oriented “writer’s workshop” classroom. Though I agree with certain parts of chapter 7’s war cry against standardized tests, I think the text presents a somewhat dry and almost laughably one-sided representation of standardized tests.

I don’t know. I guess I think that endless complaining and highlighting the ills of standardized testing doesn’t do much to help our students. If Dornan is correct that “regardless of where teachers stand on the issue of high-stakes assessments, they are here to stay,” then I think we’re spinning our wheels to a certain extent by moaning and groaning about them (213). I’m not suggesting that we simply give up and turn our students into test-taking robots. I’m also not saying that informed criticisms aimed at the right audience won’t help us make assessment more relevant and appropriate for students. There has to be some compromise, however, and since these tests are indeed incredibly important for the students for college, scholarships, etc. (whether we think they should be or not), then we ought to help our students play the game and “navigate the rivers” (as Tracey would say) of the standardized testing universe.

As I was reading this chapter, I was thinking to myself, “How do I really feel about high-stakes testing? Is it really as bad as Dornan wants me to think? Are there any positives to standardized testing?” I realized that standardized tests are indeed useful in many ways that Dornan fails to mention. Sure, I prefer frequent formative assessment under the direction of the teacher (with the occasional graded summative assessment) as the best option for creating a student writing environment, but there is a need for comparative analysis between schools, districts, states, and even nations for that matter. And in that case, individualized, teacher-based assessments are a necessity. With the massive number of students in the equation at this point, performance-based, customized assessments prove to be costly for cash-strapped school districts, and in some cases machine-read tests are a more realistic alternative. They aren’t perfect and they aren’t ideal, but they may be necessary. And they’re better than having no basis of comparison on a large scale.

So, my opinion in regard to standardized tests is as follows: they serve a useful purpose, and the actual tests and test format are not ideal but they are usually not the problem. Rather, the problem is what schools, districts, states, etc. do with the results. They cannot be used to diagnose individual learning difficulties. They cannot be used as determiners of funding. They cannot be used to punish underachieving students or districts, nor should they be used as determiners of academic tracking for specific students. They cannot be used to say anything specific at all, in fact. They are too blunt of a tool for those purposes, and the fact that they are often used for those purposes is an issue that must be resolved (are you listening, Obama?). But they are, believe it or not, quite useful for seeing the big picture, comparative, overall patterns of achievement across the board. And since they “are here to stay,” as Dornan suggests, let’s see the silver lining and remind ourselves as teachers that they can be a useful tool when the results are used properly. If we have a negative attitude about standardized tests, our students will smell it a mile away, and perhaps our negative attitude will rub off on them, perhaps even impacting their performance. Let’s do our students a favor by teaching them test-taking tools and helping them play the game. Forget about Dornan’s example of Michigan teachers accused of helping students cheat on standardized exams. Giving students the skills to get through the stressful challenge of a lengthy standardized test is a worthwhile cause, and we should not shrug off this task simply because we aren’t fans of the testing system.

My resource link is: http://www.folger.edu/index_sa.cfm?specaudid=2

It is a must-see if you are ever planning on teaching Shakespeare...so basically for all of us. It is the website of the publisher of the Folger edition of Shakespeare. They have a ton of lesson plans, resources, etc. All kinds of good stuff.

Week Three!

I was never a believer in revision. Even now, I don’t really revise as much as I probably should, and I’ve been nervous that I won’t be able to teach it well because I don’t practice what I preach. I’m a total revision hypocrite. I’ll be teaching revision as part of the old-school research paper that I’ll be doing during student teacher, so I was glad to see that it was the topic of this week’s readings. Particularly after reading the Harper piece, I feel as though I have a few revision methods in my teacher’s toolbox. I don’t think I ever had a teacher in middle or high school who ever seemed enthusiastic or “into” revision, which perhaps explains my distaste for it, but with these methods I think that I can at least be a good resource for my students.

Harper’s methods have the potential to really get students excited about revision. The five tools are logical, easy to remember, and really take the “mystery” out of revision. One of the biggest reasons that I struggle with revision is that I’ve never been instructed on any concrete way to do it. In my case, revision became a game—make enough little changes to trick the teacher into thinking I have really revised my piece. I now believe that I can give students more explicit instruction and tips for the revision process, so my students will actually revise their pieces rather than try to BS me.

I like Harper’s approach for a few reasons:

It gives students a physical place to turn to during the revising process. A set of instructions in a manila folder in their notebook may be simple, but students are much more likely to see a big manila folder and remember some revision strategies than they are to pull out some notes they took from a PowerPoint or a worksheet. The fact that students participate in making the rules for the five tools as well as creating their notecards and manila folder also help to cement these ideas in their minds. I know that this type of organization would have been effective for me. Students are willing to do the work if they have the tools easily accessible.

This sounds ridiculous, but the fact that some of the titles of the tools “sound cool” goes a long way with students: Questions, Snapshots, Thoughtshots, Exploding a Moment, and Making a Scene. They do not sound difficult or daunting. Instead, they invite the student to be creative. They entice the student to think of their writing differently—there is no wrong answer. The little icons that the students use to represent them are equally effective, particularly in terms of student confidence. Seeing red corrections (or “making a paper bleed,” as Kim suggests) deters students from writing further, but seeing a funny question mark, dynamite stick, or camera drawing does not incite the same sense of panic and ‘wrongdoing’ among students.

These techniques are practical for the teacher because they are so student-centered. The students read each others’ papers and put the little illustrations where they are necessary. One of my concerns with peer editing is that it can sometimes be “the blind leading the blind.” Students may listen to the suggestions of peers who are lacking in important skills, and as a result the student may make detrimental changes to their own work. Harper’s approach resolves this issue. Peer editing becomes more of an exchange of ideas in this case, as students highlight places in the text that could be expanded or altered. Revision becomes a conversation between students instead of a simple paper exchange. And since one of the themes running throughout this program is that an effective English classroom is a talkative one, Harper’s plan seems as though it could be quite successful.

I also enjoyed reading the Fulwiler piece. I imagine that I would have been very challenged by his class, since I usually write papers and assignments in a “one-sitting” kind of way. However, it would have made me a better writer. The amount of revision assigned to his class would never fly in a high school classroom, in my opinion, simply due to lack of time and overstuffed curriculum requirements. Nevertheless, I got some great ideas out of this piece, particularly the last couple of pages. His ideas for revision (attend to matters of conception first, allow time, start over, compose on a word processor, seek response, imagine a real audience, play with titles/intros/conclusions, imagine other points of view, and let form follow content) are important to think about throughout the writing process. Like the Harper article, they break revision down into “doable” chunks rather than adding to the mystification of the process.

I also liked Dornan chapter 4 which focused on grammar, but since I’m in the Mechanically Inclined group I’m pretty “grammar-ed out.” Get ready for a sweet presentation this week though, cohort. Team Anna is settin’ the bar high…

My resource link is:

http://www.googlelittrips.org/

This site is amazing—for English lovers and geography lovers alike. In a nutshell, this site uses Google Earth to recreate the geographical journeys that take place in literature. The maps that are available are interactive and really user-friendly, and students can click on each location and visit sites, see pictures, get info, and so on. The site has “lit trip” maps for a ton of books. They have different sections for middle school books, high school books, higher ed, etc. There are also student-created examples, so it could be a way to integrate technology into the classroom. Anyway, I think it is pretty cool, check it out. The picture is an example of part of the Lit Trip for The Odyssey.

Post Two!

The fact that I’ll be spending a month of my student teaching experience teaching the old-school research paper loomed large in my mind as I read chapter five in the Dornan text. I must admit that I am conflicted—I appreciate the idea of the whole “write to learn” and “discovering meaning in experiences” idea, but I struggle because I have such little wiggle room in terms of how I must teach the paper. Notecards and all, I am forced to teach the research paper exactly the same way as I learned it in middle school, over a decade ago, ignoring the extent to which technology has changed the way students write.

On that note, I really appreciated that Dornan addressed the whole notecard issue. The text explains, “Given the Internet and the ease of downloading material, teachers may have to rethink the role of taking notes on index cards…Many students are finding it easier to highlight and label printouts and photocopied material. They become impatient copying material by hand…We would find alternatives to the note cards because they appear to be busy work for students” (Dornan 128). I understand that notecards help student organize large amounts of material and helps them be selective about what material they choose to quote, but they are certainly outdated. If someone asked me to write a research paper using notecards, I would have a negative attitude about it too, so I guess I’ll understand where my students are coming from when I face this issue in April. When I get my own classroom, though, the notecards are going out the window if I have a say in the matter.

With these issues in mind, however, I did find a few parts of the chapter particularly useful. Pages 129-132 walked readers through helpful tips for writing openings, bodies, and conclusions of papers. Though some of it was rather intuitive, such as “The goal of the paper’s introduction should be to capture reader interest,” I found some suggestions that I will definitely pass along to my students in a couple of months (Dornan 129). Since getting off to a strong start with a strong introduction is so important to the motivation levels of students throughout the research paper process (my experience is that many of them lose interest if they think they are not “good at it” right away), the seven bulleted ideas for how to “hook” the reader immediately, found on page 129, will be a great addition to my lesson plan. The tips for helping students find topics are equally relevant. I remember being shocked when my cooperating teacher said, “You’ll be amazed at how long it takes them to write this paper. Sometimes it takes them a week just to cement a topic idea in their minds.” Now I don’t know the exact schedule or calendar for how my student teaching is going to proceed yet, but I know for sure that I won’t be having these kids spend a week choosing a topic. I hope that the ideas in the Dornan text help speed up the process a bit…

Along the lines of the research paper I’ll be teaching, I must admit that I’m pretty disappointed that I cannot incorporate the whole multigenre approach. I love the Romano text (and multigenre papers were the subject of parts of the Dornan text for this week and some of our WebCT reading), and I almost wish that I hadn’t found out about multigenre papers until after I had my whole research paper unit planned out, because now I’ll be thinking, “Man, these would be so much more engaging for students and enjoyable for me to grade if they were multigenre.” Alas, however, that is not the case, so I’ll just have to wait until I have my own classroom. After all, I do still think that the students need to write the classic research paper at least once in their K-12 lives, so I understand that I have an important role in facilitating that process.

Finally, I was really glad to see that Dornan included a section on plagiarism. I had never really thought much about this topic in relation to teaching high schoolers, because I had to get out of the mindset that it is common sense not to plagiarize and to know what is considered plagiarism and what isn’t. I must remember that 10th graders might not know these boundaries, and even if they think they do, it is worth refreshing. I love that the authors give ideas for how to sidestep the plagiarism issue altogether (multigenre papers, anyone?), and they also stress the importance of being proactive as a teacher. The best way to deal with plagiarism is to prevent it in the first place. Until now I had not even given this topic a second thought in regard to my research paper unit I’ll be teaching, but now I see that I will have to give plagiarism some explicit attention early on in the process.

Well, my original plan was to discuss Romano’s top-notch multigenre paper book (after finishing Romano’s book I am so excited to teach the multigenre paper eventually), but I had some strong reactions to the whole research paper thing. The reason? I’ve been stressing about it hard core ever since I found out I’d be teaching it. If you guys have any tips or ideas about how to make the research paper interesting for students, talk to me or listserve them, because I think some other people are teaching the dreaded research paper as well.

Resource Link Time:

http://www.teachersnetwork.org/dcs/cyberenglish/researchlp.htm

Figuring out how to create a daily schedule for a huge project such as the research paper is a daunting task, and this website gives an example calendar and brief daily lesson plans for how to teach the classic research paper (notecards and all) over about a four week period. I am finding it pretty helpful.

Post One!

Let me begin by saying that I was a bit skeptical when Jessie said that we would not be able to put down the book about multigenre papers. I am excited to say, however, that my skepticism was proven to be unfounded, because I love the book! I am looking forward to finishing up the last few pages, and I'll probably write my post about it for next week.

But in regard to the Dornan text, I think that the reading for this week is summed up by this quotation: “Writing must be motivated from within, tapping personal feelings, needs, and experiences, whether the piece is a research paper driven by a problem of special interest to the writer or a poem to a loved one” (37). It may be challenging for beginning teachers to incorporate this personalized approach to writing into a curriculum that may already be overstuffed with an emphasis on standards. In the end, however, the book (and common sense) suggests that creating more personalized lessons that are relevant to the lives of students is an effort that pays off in the end.

I also appreciated that the text mentioned the importance of creating a classroom environment that is conducive to writing. Classrooms can either support or extinguish creative, daring writing, and I think that we all have been in both types of classrooms—and have felt the difference in classroom atmosphere. I imagine that the type of classroom environment created would have a serious impact on the quality of writing produced by students. The ideas that the textbook suggests on page 47 were very helpful for me, as I begin to plan my student teaching. Ideas such as allowing students to choose their own writing topics, modeling intense concentration when listening to students read aloud, writing with your students and sharing your pieces with them, and refusing to allow verbal or non-verbal put-downs will all be enacted in my classroom.

One thing that was just briefly mentioned in the text that I absolutely loved was the idea of having an “Author’s Chair” in my classroom (Dornan 73). This chair would be used during regularly scheduled “read-alouds” of student writing, and would make these read-alouds a special event. First, it would be fun to have a cool old chair in my classroom. But more personally, standing up in front of a class of my peers is not something that I always look forward to, and I know that lots of students are extremely uncomfortable with it. It makes a huge difference mentally if you are sitting in front of the class presenting something rather than standing, and suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a huge deal. I think it would help ease the nerves of students while still allowing them to share their work with peers and be in the spotlight.

Finally, the text reminded me of something that I will have to keep reminding myself of as I student teach. In teacher/student writing conferences, “the teacher’s role is coach and facilitator here, not an evaluative judge or ‘fixer-upper’ of the paper” (Dornan 60). I am totally a “fixer-upper” of papers unless I keep myself in check, and I will have to constantly remind myself that the job of the teacher is to prompt the student to recognize his/her own mistakes and learn from them. Also, I need to resist the temptation to be nitpicky about grammar and mechanics at points in the writing process when ideas and “flow” should be more important.

My resource link for this week is http://www.thisibelieve.org/. It provides an awesome unit complete with daily lesson plans for a personal essay assignment which asks students to build their personal philosophies on life, allowing them to write about their own personal connections in a meaningful way. These essays are then submitted to NPR, and they may be featured on the NPR/This I Believe website or on public radio. Separate units are available for middle and high school students. I am going to do the This I Believe personal essay when I student teach, and you all should too if you have to teach the essay or personal essays or something. Bonus--all the work is done for you already! Thank you NPR!