Next Steps Using What Stands Out For Me

Articulating My Ideas and Critical Literacy

I am getting closer to being able to articulate why I am doing what I am doing, but have found that it seems easier to discuss why I am not doing certain things and more importantly, why I have stopped doing things that I use to do. I am feeling motivated with where I am, although still overwhelmed. I definitely feel progress and forward momentum and that makes me want to push further and do more, or as Jerry put it “I want to take my students to Europe”, although I am still unsure of exactly what we will see or do while we are there, I am excited to follow the students lead and see where it might take us. My goal over the next 2 months is to really begin to use critical literacy in my classroom. I want my students to have a critical disposition and a sense of agency as Luke discussed. I just bought 8 children’s birthday cards and will begin to look at them with my students. I have also asked for students to bring in flyers so that we can begin to look critically at ads for toys, as well as look at gender roles in regards to gifts for women and men/moms and dads. My next step after that is to get going with critical literacy within books and begin to use some riskier texts like we discussed at our last session. I really want to get into these books with my students and see what happens.

James Gee and Video Games

Since our first readings on Gee back in our Research Methods class, I have been quite interested in the idea of big “D” Discourse and how it means so much more than just the language we use. I first heard of Gee three years ago when I heard him speak at a conference I went to. I was immediately engaged when he started speaking about the many ‘literacies’ and included video games as one of them. After our reading I see he maybe meant that it was a semiotic domain that uses many of the ‘literacies’, but regardless, I was hooked. I am a ‘gamer’ and I definitely see the benefit that game playing has on me and I imagine there would be similar benefits for students.

            To dive further into some of what we read, I can also see how there is an affinity group that forms within this domain. Recently I was at a rehearsal dinner and my fiancé and I were standing and talking with a couple of my friends. Her fiancé was nearby, but we had never really had a lot in common or much to talk about. We would make small talk, but after that we would not really have much else to say. My friend made a side comment about how the guys would be getting together the following day to play video games. Later in the night I found myself speaking with this man and instead of our usual niceties, we engaged in a 20 minute long discussion on games. I had formed an ‘affinity group’ and 3 of us spoke rapidly about the internal and external components, our favourite games and genres, strategies, likes/dislikes, etc. Without me knowing, I was engaged in a critical discussion with like-minded people. My fiancé at this point left the discussion as he would not classify himself as a ‘gamer’, but by the end of the night I was offering up 4 of my games to my friend’s fiancé. While he did not see himself as an RPG player, as mentioned in the article, one genre can be a precursor to another one and through my description and possible convincing, he decided to give a couple of them a try. So while I am a Playstation 3, RPG player, I can certainly shift between platforms and do find enjoyment in different genres like First Person Shooters and various simulation games.

            The readings also couldn’t have come at a better time. I have been trying to think of an interesting club to run at school that would be fun for me and the students, but also rooted in what the school and parents would deem educational. After recently speaking with a boy about what video games we were both playing I decided that I wanted to run a club around video games. My idea around this stems from something Gee said at the conference I attended and that was that some students were being deemed ‘illiterate’ in school, but were writing video game manuals and coding programs at home. So I was thinking that I could meet with the students who were interested in gaming (an affinity group) and spend time talking about which games we like and why and delve into whatever conversations came up about them. From here I was thinking that students could write up manuals on how to play certain games, tips and strategies, and how to find the ‘Easter Eggs’ throughout the game. I thought the students could sign out the manuals and take them home to help them get through levels and then add to them as they found out new information. This article now gives me some backup as to the benefits of running a club like this, as I think it might be a hard sell based on the fact that some games, even rated “E” games can still have some violence. If this club encourages students to be active participants, problem solvers, critical thinkers, reflectors, as well as encourage students to read, write, communicate and analyze through various modalities/sign systems, I can’t see how it wouldn’t be allowed. I am really excited by this!

My Thoughts

EQAO and Social Practices

After reading the articles I am left thinking about a couple of things. One thing in particular is in regards to a discussion our school was having at a staff meeting. Our EQAO scores had gone down and we were now tasked with the responsibility to figure out how we could increase them. Several headings were given and we had to spend 20 minutes working in large groups to come up with various ideas. All of the teachers worked hard to think of new and innovative ways that we could reach our students and at one point our specific goal was to think of ways for us to increase parent involvement or ‘buy-in’. Again many ideas came up, but after reading several of the articles, it is clear to me that we are still really trying to increase literacy skills from inside the school and rarely using the parents as a resource as discussed in our articles. We are trying to educate the parents on what ‘we’ want the child to do, but we have not taken the time to look at it from the other side. We need to work with our families and get the parents to let us know what they are doing and what practices they are using at home, what their ideas of education are/look like, who the ‘important people’ in their children’s lives are who are working with them and helping the children to develop their multi-faceted literacy skills. I think that we really need to embrace these ideas and get the community working with us and really valuing and respecting the ideas and wealth of knowledge that our students come to us with.  

Critical Literacy and the “Neutral Curriculum”

On another topic, I took part in a network meeting this past week and we spent some time discussing social justice math. One of the first statements made by the lead speaker was that we are working with “curriculum that is culturally neutral” and then continued on discussing a critical cross-curriculum approach and how we could work with our students’ various backgrounds and look critically at all areas that we are teaching. I feel like I almost jumped out of my seat in a need to tell him that nothing about our curriculum, or literacy in general, is neutral. Throughout our course work and especially because of our most recent readings, nothing about what we teach or how we teach is neutral. And as these articles suggested, as soon as we realize this and encourage students to realize this, we will all be in a better place to look at literacy critically and really begin to unpack what is really there, the voices present or missing, the messages/agendas under the surface, who is it serving and how can we cause change to shift what we see. The rest of the session did provide a lot of ideas about implementing a critical literacy discourse in the classroom and I did feel better by the end, but I was surprised with how quick my reaction was and how my need to tell someone about this was so great.

Application In My Classroom

One area that I am specifically working on in my classroom right now is the attempt to get a better writing program underway. One that does not emphasize a checklist of skills to be taught, prompts to be given or one size fits all graphic organizers to use. As discussed in chapter 12 of Finn’s text, the idea of shifting the power from teacher to student and encouraging the students to take ownership and no longer having the teacher as the gatekeeper really resonated with me and reinforced what I am trying to do in my grade 1 class. I am trying to implement my literacy program in the “new literacy” format where I attempt to be more of a facilitator and provide choice to the students. The text that I am using to help guide my writing program is called No More “I’m Done!”, by Jennifer Jacobson. I have found her book to be very helpful in me moving away from the text forms we have had to do over the past 6-8 years and allow students to write based on their interests and really focusing on their message and not the correctness of writing (which is something I have always tried to do, but this text really reinforces the importance of it). I am finding that this method of teaching really allows the students to take control, even in a grade 1 classroom and I predict will end up with students being much more engaged and active participants in their writing. And this can only lead to good things, especially the idea of powerful literacy.

What I Continue To Think About

I do find that much of our reading really intrigued me this past seminar. Ideas such as meritocracy, logic of deficit, the status quo, no one best approach to teaching literacy, powerful literacy vs functional literacy, primary/school discourses, capital D discourse, social practices and the class system, have continued to linger with me and I have gone back again to reread parts of the texts, especially chapter 13 in Finn’s text. I have even begun discussions with groups of teachers during grade, staff and network meetings that I hope will encourage people to think about literacy and our approaches to teaching. I certainly am no where close to having answers to much of what I am thinking, but the exciting thing is that our readings are making me think and I want to share that and open up discussions with other colleagues. I feel like I am in a good place and most of the time wish I had more time to really sink into the readings and the application of them in my own practice. I recently said to someone that my brain feels so full of what I am learning and working through, that I almost wish I could repeat this year again next year so that I don’t miss out on anything.

A New Year!

Our session provided me with lots to think about as usual. One particular idea that I continue to come back to is the idea around assumptions. During our session we spent some time talking about this and all I could keep thinking about was how our assumptions effect our expectations, which then leads to making/giving excuses, causing lowered expectations and inaction. I sadly see this regularly at school and with only being back in the classroom for 1 month after 3 years, I am seeming to have little tolerance for those whose first response to any idea is “Well that’s not going to work in our community because…..”. I understand that all communities are varied and therefore engage in school related activities differently, but there are so many amazing opportunities out there that we really should not settle for assuming something about a group of people and then making sweeping decisions based around this belief. This thinking is a huge disservice to our students.

Another topic that some of our group discussed was how there is a frustration that the same topics that were being written about in our articles from the 70’s and 80’s are still being discussed now. For example, the idea around the difficulty of breaking the cycle of poverty. While the standards/level of what equals poverty might have changed, it seems like we are no closer to actually ending it. Also, the ideas around class, exclusion, being literate, assumptions, a failing school system, power, status quo, school systems based on conformity and labeling are still very much present in our current discussions. I understand that we have likely made gains, but why is it that we are still asking ourselves these questions and not being able to figure out a solution or a better way of doing something? This also brings me back to our readings/discussion on Foucault. The ideas of governmentality and power seem to be connected through all of these articles I read for this session and the interest of the government to maintain the status quo. The ideas of what is knowledge and therefore what does it mean to be literate seem so closely controlled by the powers in charge, I wonder some days if any real effort is being put into causing real change, as if that might actually occur, would the power then shift dramatically causing a shift of who was in power and what type of knowledge was then seen as important?

Finally I am feeling really excited and motivated to try out many of the ideas and discussions we have had over the past year. Now that I am back in the classroom I feel I am able to apply much of what we learned and see what happens. I am centering an entire unit on Rules, Relationships and Responsibilities on the idea of artifacts and will be having the students engage in many of the similar activities that we did at the summer institute. I have also bought several digital cameras for the students to take home to take photos of their life and we will then take part in various activities around personal narratives. I plan on taking advantage of Voice Thread for this, as well as some other software (Pixie 3) at our school for students to both record their thoughts orally and in written format. I am also hoping to run a more inquiry based learning program this year once I get a better handle on how to do this. At the moment I am starting with a guided inquiry on snails. We currently have 9 snails in our room (in a makeshift habitat) and I am going to be working with my students on anything and everything related to snails. As I am part of a group of 10 teachers in our board who are doing this investigation, I am also engaging in a blog and going to attempt a podcast using audacity with my students. I am very excited and can’t wait to see where this goes. My hope is that with some guided inquiry, my grade 1 class will be able to take part in more independent or at least less guided inquiry within a short period of time that allows and encourages students to be curious, ask questions, think critically, become engaged and know ways in which they can find information to answer these questions. I truly believe that this will lead to students feeling empowered and really believe that school and education will support them and be purposeful and meaningful. I am also really excited to finally get to try out the activities related to critical discourse analysis using various sources, such as birthday cards, advertisements (both print and video) and books. We were recently discussing at what age we thought we could start doing this, and someone mentioned grade 3. I strongly believe that with enough guidance and discussion that my grade 1 students will also be able to make meaningful connections and share their own personal ideas and beliefs regarding these various text forms and such issues as equality, gender norms/roles and social pressures/ideas that exist. I know that my students will be able to begin to analyze what messages are underneath the cards/books/pictures, etc., ask the bigger questions and look for ways to cause change and be aware of the impact that these mediums have on them.

I am really looking forward to the rest of this year and seeing what other ideas I can begin to use in my classroom that encourage critical literacy and integrate technology and a multi-modal approach to literacy learning.

Reflection - Seminar 3

          I think I am at a point in this course where I feel equal parts confused and motivated.  I don’t think I have every felt this way.  I came into this Masters program with questions I wanted to explore, a desire for facts/research to back up my current beliefs and a pursuit for new ideas and thinking to extend my ability to teach more effectively.  While I think I have been able to hit all of these areas, I don’t think I would have ever felt that the idea of confusion and an inability to properly articulate or fully communicate my current thinking would be a good thing.  My current state of confusion and motivation has left me feeling uplifted.  I have spent some time over the past week rereading some articles and reviewing my summary notes and I feel excitement around my ability to understand the readings and the way in which my thinking and understanding is developing.  Less of it seems foreign and more is becoming repetitious and helping me to further clarify what I believe.  I don’t think I could yet properly articulate my beliefs in a coherent manner, but I am getting there….even more so than just 3 weeks ago.  I feel progress and increased clarity and feel good about my learning and current line of questioning.  I know I will never have an answer and be able to give a concise statement on my knowledge, but this just reinforces our readings that knowledge is not static and limitless.  

           

With that being said, I have recently found out that I will be changing my teaching role next year and will be heading back into the classroom to teach grade 1.  Communicating this excitement to others seems strange as I have only been out of that role for 3 years, but with all of the new ideas and thoughts in my head, both from my Reading Recovery role and this Masters course, I can’t wait to get in and try so much of my thinking and ideas out.  One idea this week that really has me motivated is the discourse analysis activity.  I had mentioned this during our session with Rita Armitage and our readings around discourse analysis and really thought that a lot could be done with media literacy and this particular idea.  I had a few ideas on where to start, but after this week with the easy to understand handout and the greeting cards, I felt that this was a perfect introduction to discourse analysis with students.  To be honest, I am a little overwhelmed with all of the different terms and am still trying to properly understand them (e.g., situated meaning, social languages, cultural models, discourses, place-based pedagogies, performative realities, etc.), but with this handout and the guiding questions, I feel more confident in their meaning and really feel that children of all ages would be able to tackle this concept with the right levels of support.  I look forward to trying this out, but also hope to hear back from the couple of teachers who were planning on using this activity over the coming weeks.

I think much of what I am currently trying to work through, and the above activity certainly helps,  is the idea of critical literacy and how do I try to fully understand it so that I can support my students with it.  I think the activities that we are taking part with during our seminars are really helping me understand what it means.  With statements/ideas that the ‘language is doing a particular kind of work’, ‘getting under the surface of the text and the underlying assumptions’ and ‘unpacking the subtext by identifying what is there and what is not there or whose voice is heard and whose is not heard’, are really helping me to see what critical literacy is, or at least I hope that I am on the right path to what it is.  I think that through continued discussions and activities, I will be much more confident in this area and will be able to support my students to become more critical in their thinking.   

Another area that I left thinking about was the transmediation activity and sketch to stretch.  I can 100% say that I am not really comfortable in this area and struggled with the activities related around it.  While I completely see the benefits and the purpose behind it, my concern lies with my lack of practice with having to articulate my thinking outside of words.  I felt very unsure of what to do when asked to draw something to communicate my understanding or to help further elicit meaning from our readings.  What I really wanted to do was write about it or talk it through with someone.  I really struggled with this.  So I started to reflect around why I felt this way and decided that much of my hesitation was because I am so accustomed to using words instead of anything else that my comfort zone lies there, and possibly my strength.  I was then thinking about how hard it must be for other people to have to consistently communicate their thinking through words all of the time and might have this same internal struggle that I have, but instead with the desire to communicate their thinking through pictures or diagrams of some kind.  Overall this just seemed like a key reminder to me that methods need to varied within a classroom and that no one form/method of communication should be considered the correct and go-to one.  All ways to communicate one’s understanding should be accepted and encouraged, as well as every student should be encouraged to try different ways, therefore allowing students to push comfort barriers and to possibly allow for different or better understanding of ideas and concepts and creation of new meaning through varied sign systems.

            Overall I think I am currently in a reflective mood in regards to everything we are learning.  I feel inspired and motivated and looking forward to what is to come in this course over the next year and a half.  I am also currently thinking about the possibility of shifting the trajectory of this program from course based to thesis based come next year, but am not yet sure.   I suppose that there is lots of time to make that decision. 

Video Games and Literacy

Just thought I would put it out there, if anyone who is reading this has any interest in using video games to support literacy in the classroom, I would love to chat with you.  I have always loved video games throughout my life, from the Commodore 64, to the various Nintendo systems, up to the PS3 now and I really want to look into ways to use children’s interest and abilities with this to boost their literacy skills.  I have a few ideas and am sure there are a lot of things you can do with this and would love any suggestions.  Look forward to hearing from you.

 

My Literacy Poem

My Literacy Poem......or at least an attempt at a poem.

I have been told I entered school reading

And haven’t stopped since.

Primary years filled with basal readers and round robin.

A member of the Bluebirds; never a Crow.

Lived for Scholastic book clubs and read to anyone who would listen.

Allowance saved to buy the next Berenstein Bear and Babysitter Club book.

A loner at times with books as my best friend. 

Many reports written, projects done and analyses completed.

The classics read, but never loved.

Mystery and detective novels are my go-to.

A one-time book reader.

Not a book collector.

Can’t put it down once I start.

Enjoyment is the goal.

My Thinking, Lately

I am not teaching in a classroom this year, and with the rate in which I am learning and reflecting, I can’t wait to get back and start up again.  But between now and then a lot will happen and a lot of literacy growth will occur.  As I hope to interview out for a different school I often lie in bed and think about how I can articulate my thinking and ideas when asked to describe my literacy and math programs and how I will achieve classroom management (exciting, I know).  I feel badly for these unsuspecting principals who will ask me these questions, as I feel like I have a world of things to tell them about my interests and passions in literacy and the endless ideas and new things I want to try out.  Somehow in the next month or so, I am going to have to articulate what my literacy program will look like.  If you had asked me 5 months ago, I had a solid answer based on past practice and the beliefs I held.  Now, I don’t feel like I could even begin to summarize what I see happening in my literacy program in a tidy 2-3 minute answer.  I feel like my brain is sending frenzied messages like lightening bolts through my head, somewhat in a concept map format, where one idea branches off to hundreds more, none of them set in stone, but more along the lines of what I am thinking now and what I want to try out.  I am not sure how a principal will respond to this, but I feel extremely excited and motivated to see how it all might work out. 

After reading the whole language article, I was surprised to realize that my ideas around literacy learning are getting closer and closer to this line of thinking.  As I discussed in my “inkshed”, I have always viewed myself as sitting somewhere in the middle between whole-to-part and part-to-whole learning.  While I have never been a worksheet teacher, I still did work on learning parts outside of the whole (Chalk and Sock, Making Words, etc), while always trying to connect them back to the whole.  In my current role as a Reading Recovery teacher, which I know is not a whole language approach, I have been amazed to see the huge gains our lowest literacy achievers are able to make by reading and writing.  Some work is done around parts, but most of this is because the child is noticing it and ready for further instruction around it.  Within these 30 minutes, almost all of the time is dedicated to purely reading and writing.  I have had many teachers sit in disbelief that I have a child reading and writing on their very first day with me, and some of these children come to me knowing five letters and no words outside of their name.  With the continued exposure and time dedicated to reading good quality, authentic texts, the children I support become independent and self-extending readers and writers, without large chunks of time being taken to teach individual ‘part’ skills to them or fill them with this knowledge before we begin; they learn along the way.  I recently had a teacher come in and observe a lesson.  As a child quickly took a word apart on the run (e.g., may) put it back together and kept reading, she asked me, “When do you teach them about the ‘ay’ sound?”.  I think my response surprised her, especially as I continued to discuss how each child I work with does not learn in a linear or similar manner and I don’t program anything specifically on where or when I think they should be ready for something.  Throughout the past 2.5 years, I have worked with approximately 30 students who are at the very early stages of literacy acquisition and each child has made gains, but has gone about it in a different way.  From the rate at which the students progressed through books, the types of strategies they used to work through words and the sight and written words learned, no one did it the same way.  This is particularly important to acknowledge, especially when working in the classroom.  While I understand that it is not possible to differentiate everything, a closer look into where a child is and what they are moving toward next is important.

To continue further on this topic and from our most recent readings, I strongly agree with the articles that discussed the importance of reading and writing with someone close by who is able to support you.  I think the more time we give our children to read and write, the better they will become at it.  Especially if we give them the choice in what they want to read and write.  Nothing seems more frustrating to me than when children are expected to read during independent reading time and then respond to repetitive sentence stems such as “My favourite part was….” or “I liked when….”.  I think that this is the fastest way to get children to dislike reading and writing.  To connect it back to what we have been discussing and what I have been writing about in past blogs and ‘inksheds’, I believe that the inquiry-based approach supports this immensely. 

On a final note, our readings throughout this seminar take me back to what I have always believed in and have been made clearer over the past few months and continue on from what I wrote about last seminar.  It is the idea of the asset model.  I feel that this belief in our children is so important and one that cannot be stressed enough.  We need to believe in our students and hold high expectations for all of them.  The children need to know that we feel this way about them and their abilities and that we value the vast knowledge and experiences that they bring to school each day.  We need to share and embrace our differences and learn from each other.  The teacher needs to facilitate the learning and guide children using their strengths, instead of focusing on what they cannot do and trying to fill them up with some arbitrary knowledge that a group in power has decided on.  We must provide a curriculum that is authentic, meaningful and engaging.  I continue to feel so empowered with the idea of inquiry-based learning as it really exemplifies all of these sentiments and puts them into action.  I was particularly shocked by the article “Is It Really English For Everyone?”.  The sadness I felt with the idea of labeling students and the detriment it obviously is to them.  I know I will never look at this the same way again.  The downward spiral that happens when a teacher lowers their expectations in response to a child’s formal or informal label is tragic.  We must continue to work diligently to ensure all children have an opportunity to succeed. 

And one final thought around this that Jerry Harste discussed is how critical it is for us to respond positively and with encouragement to our children.  As he said, it can be hard to get children to view themselves positively and not just as readers and writers, but on a bigger scale as an important and valued person in the world, but it is so easy to break them down.  Jerry mentioned a comment that was said to him and I certainly to this day still battle with several things said to me in my childhood, as I am sure most of us do.  We need to choose our words carefully so that we use our role as educators to uplift and encourage our students based on their many positive assets and abilities.