Today, Manny finished the essay portion of his tribute to Michael Jordan. He and Henry revised the written piece together and Manny’s excited to present it to the whole group. We also finished our tribute video! We worked on fine-tuning the clips so that they’d flow well with the background music. We must say, it looks pretty good 🙂
Triplett’s article on struggling readers seemed, to me, to be stating the obvious. When teachers establish personal relationships with their students, the students are more likely to engage. When a student feels like they have agency in the classroom and some level of control over the texts they are reading and using, they are more likely to have a positive, productive school experience. The fact that this article was published, however, made me think that these ideas, ones that I take for granted, might not be valued by many teachers. It seems like teachers often end up categorized as that friendly teacher who pals around with kids, doesn’t have high expectations for them, and doesn’t really challenge them, or they get categorized as the demanding teacher with high expectations who doesn’t foster personal relationships with students, wanting to be their teacher more than their friend. In my fieldwork at the high school and middle school, the teachers that kids liked tended to be less demanding, while the teachers they didn’t like were the ones that had high expectations, but little empathy for their students. I hope to avoid falling into either category. I think that students can enjoy being in class and have positive relationships with their teachers even when the teacher is demanding. Making school easy can win over students, but so can making school engaging.
One thing I found really interesting in the struggling readers article was Mitchell’s perception of his teachers as not enjoying teaching. I had never really thought about this. If a teacher clearly doesn’t want to be in the classroom, how can they expect the students to want to be there either? Looking back on my own experience, the teachers that I liked the most and from whom I think I learned the most were always engaged and excited to be in the classroom. The article made me think about first impressions both at the beginning of the year and at the start of every class. When I have a class of my own, I want to use my body language and energy level to immediately communicate to my students that I am excited to be there. I want to treat school like something interesting and exciting that we all get to do together instead of treating it like a chore we all have to deal with. In my fieldwork, a lot of the teachers took the attitude of, “Well we’re both stuck here. I don’t want to do this just as badly as you don’t want to do this. Don’t be mad at me, I hate this too.” While this definitely had a positive impact on how the students treated the teacher, it also made the entirety of school a chore, and nobody likes doing chores. Commiserating with students can be helpful sometimes, but I think empathizing is more effective. Instead of saying “this sucks for everyone”, I think it would be more productive to say, “I understand why you’re upset/struggling/angry, what can we do to make this more positive?”
All of this might seem really simple or overly optimistic, but I think that the little things like body language and a positive attitude, when communicated genuinely, can be really impactful.
I really like the idea Dunn brings forth in the section “Use literary and other texts as a springboard for informed discussions of disability and ableism.” She talks about giving students reading that highlights ideas of self destructive view, stereotypes of the disabled and society’s misconceptions of the disabled. It is important for students to become “resisting readers”. This teaches them to be critical of everything they read and not accept one author’s opinion to be the only legitimate view. This made me think of a book that I have read called Should We Burn Babar?. In the book, Kohl argues that due to Babar’s messages of racism, sexism and the legitimization of colonialism, children should not be exposed to these books. However, Kohl did take the Babar books into a third grade classroom to have a critical discussion about the book series. After reading the books, he talked to the students about colonialism and other historical/social issues that come up in the book and how the author portrays these ideas as positive things. Even though these students are still very young, they were really effected by this lesson. The images of Babar as a clothed, upper class elephant, leaving behind his naked elephant friends and family members became a disturbing and uncomfortable image for the third graders to look at. Kohl’s conclusion in the introductory chapter was that this book should not be read to children. However, I think that his lesson in the third grade classroom is proof that these books can be used as an introduction to looking critically at literature. It is all up to the teacher to lead discussion and make sure that the students are receiving the right messages and using their own experience/knowledge to critique the author’s writing.
In our most recent meeting, Isabella and IÂ got to work on putting together her digital story about crew. We now have videos and pictures of professional rowers and their coaches, photographs of Vassar’s crew team, and a few images from Poughkeepsie High School. Isabella brought in the transcripts from her interviews with her teammates. We began to extract quotes from those interviews and spliced the text in between the images. We found some other entertaining quotes about crew on this website. Isabella liked these three in particular:
“Rowers do more before 8:00am than most people do all day.” — Rowing Shirt Logo
“Real athletes row. Everyone else just plays games.” — Rowing Shirt Logo
“Crew is life … everything else is just details.” — Racing Shirt Logo
We also interviewed Fiona about her experiences rowing. (Shout out to Emily and Fiona who are making an awesome movie trailer – Isabella and I got to try out our acting skills, which are sorely lacking on my part, and play supporting roles! You can read more about their project here). Next class we are going to put in the last of the quotes and photos and write Isabella’s narration! We still have a lot of work to do but I am so happy about all the progress we made!
In Emily Skinner’s article “Writing Workshop Meets Critical Media Literacy: Using Magazines and Movies as Mentor Texts,” she writes about Teenage Addiction, an after-school writing club that uses popular media as a spring-board for critical writing projects. Skinner cites Freire and Macedo’s concept of “reading the world” as grounding philosophy for Teenage Addiction. “Reading the world” is described as “reading not only words (and images) in texts, but also critically interpreting the ideologies that underlie the words and images (p. 30). Skinner provides the example of Raquel’s project- looking at fashion magazines in a critical way. I thought this project was great because it harnessed the interest Raquel already had in fashion magazines and helped direct it toward critical thinking and literacy skills.
I think this idea of “reading the world” is really powerful! Showing students the connection between what they are reading, looking at, or watching and the wider world is not only inherently interesting, but also teaches an invaluable life skill. Katie Wood Ray’s article about “Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop” echoes these ideas- encouraging students to constantly ask question and search for hidden meanings in texts. I loved the idea of students writing Op-Eds!
It is incredibly beneficial for students to see the connection between things that they read and the world around them, and both of these articles do a great job of providing examples of how to help students realize the way the word reflects the world. This is important, because it both allows them to understand problems of the world, and allows them to develop the skills they will need to create change. I was reminded of this book by Linda Christensen (a Rethinking Schools publication) which includes essays, lesson ideas, and student writing that help show the connection between language arts and social justice: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ProdDetails.asp?ID=0942961250
Emily Skinner’s text explores using popular magazines and movies as ‘mentor texts’ through which students could practice numerous skills. Â Skinner explains that students can be encouraged to critically consume popular texts and to use these texts to examine various social issues and aspects of there personal lives on a deeper level. Â Using popular texts not only can easily motivate normally reluctant students but can also allow students to enjoy learning something which I believe has been lost in many school systems. Â The ability to instill genuine intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn and improve can be accomplished in several ways, one of these ways being through using popular texts and images in the classroom. Â Basing writing exercises on popular materials encourages critical examination both of texts and of the writing and planning process in general. Â Although the use of these texts in the classroom would seem to be a wholly positive experience for students, their use would definitely need to be carefully monitored in order to keep students on task.
I loved Gee’s article on video games and learning. I hadn’t realized that every new game has to teach you how to play it through the experience of playing the game. I’ve played many video games in my life, and whether or not I enjoyed the game and continued to play it often was a result of the quality of each game’s early tutorials. When they feel too cumbersome and don’t feel situated in a meaningful context, I (and others, I imagine) give up before even making it to the actual gameplay.
While I appreciate the connections Gee makes, I also think he may be overstating the connection between video game learning and academic/intellectual learning. Many of his examples have to do with strategies and decision making. Questions like, “should I make my character a wizard or an orc?” or, “Which troops should I advance, and where?” are complex decisions that have a lasting impact on the game-life of whoever is playing. Video games that teach you how to make these decisions effectively teach broader skills of decision making and make people aware of the fact that their decisions will have lasting impacts while teaching them how to identify the structures that dictate their decision’s lasting effects. Many of the skills taught in video games, though, are simple motor skills. In my experience, much of the learning that happens in games has to do with wanting your character to do a certain physical action, and figuring out how to manipulate the subtle mechanisms of the controller to consistently produce that motion. Currently, I mostly play sports video games. These have no story lines and are exclusively about fine motor skills. These motor skills form the foundation of almost all games, including story based ones. Games that involve role playing and strategy combine motor skills with character, emotion, and story.
I think this is where the the learning potential of video games is strongest. Humans love having a feeling of agency. We like to see our thoughts and decisions affect the world around us. The physical manipulation part of every video game satisfies this. It gets us hooked. Then, as we work our way through the physical worlds of games, we learn skills, practice making decisions, and get experience decoding complex systems of information. If we want students to do these same things in the classroom, it all starts with a feeling of agency, the feeling that connects us to the world around us. When students’ actions in the classroom affect the environment of the classroom, they cease to be an isolated individual temporarily placed in the classroom and become a citizen of the classroom.
A good game makes us feel like we’re immersed in the world of the game. When the user/game interface is too salient, we feel separated from the game and thus it is harder to invest in the game. The classroom should reflect this, allowing kids to take on the identity of “student” and immerse themselves in “the game”.
What happens, though, at the end of any story based video game? You beat it. All of the learning that happens in a video game has an end goal of beating the game. What does it mean to beat the school game? If we view the end goal of school as graduation, then the skills we teach in school will reflect that. Then we run the risk of making school too much of a game (something I think many of us can sympathize with regarding our high school experiences), and the incentive of winning may supersede the kind of learning we want to foster. No matter how we structure our “tutorial” at the beginning of the “school game”, no matter what skills we promote as the most desirable and useful, students ultimately want to beat the game, and will adopt whatever strategies are easiest and most successful. In the world of video games, that means cheat codes, but what does that mean in the classroom?
The podcast I have attached is an introduction to Chinese tones. It includes examples of the different tones, why they are so important in speaking and instruction on how to keep practicing to achieve fluency in speech. This podcast is meant to be used at home when students are practicing their speaking. I have found that the best way to master tones is to listen to other people speak and repeat after them.
In “Constructing Anne Frank” Spector and Jones argue that historical fiction, while engaging, threatens to distort students’ perception of real events. As an alternative, they suggest that teachers supplement interpretive works like the Goodrich and Hackett play, with primary sources and real life accounts of the historical events, so that students can recognize the optimistic slant of the play. I agree with the authors’ teaching tips, and think it’s a great way to teach students to critically analyze any movie, play, or book that claims to be “based on true events.” Rather than choosing to exclude these works of historical fiction, teachers should allow their students to confront these interpretations and learn to view them as inherently biased and one-sided. From Freedom Writers to Pearl Harbor, there is so much in the popular media that claims to depict real life events. If viewers are not taught to critically analyze the films as a works of art, they fall into the trap of forgetting that the work is an interpretation rather than a primary source.
As I was reading this piece, I was thinking that it might be interesting to ask students to write their own short plays that take on a particular slant and interpret the historical events in a way that promotes a narrow understanding. When students take on the roll playwright, they will discover the creative freedom that an artist has in creating a work of historical fiction. Because a play is technically artwork, there is no pressure to depict events exactly according to fact. I think such an assignment would help students view images, films, and plays in the popular media as interpretative works of art rather than historically accurate sources.
Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.