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.