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.