Digital Is Improv?

“Point to something and say what it’s not.”  When Lacy said this to start our Digital Is planning meeting, I laughed a little bit.  What did she say?  It would be a difficult task, but I’d give it a shot.  “Large green chandelier,” I said while pointing at the red velvet curtains.  “Those are markers” (It really was my laptop).  Then I stopped.  I found myself staring at the two-toned blue walls of our hangout spot, pointing at it, unable to name the object.

It’s a blue wall.  It is not anything but a blue wall.  It was strange to point to something and describe what it was not, and we all had difficulty trying.  But that was the point: “to make the familiar strange,” as Lil later said.

This improv activity is indicative of our work with Digital Is.  Our site’s mission is to understand/deconstruct/critically investigate our personal histories and interactions with technology and literacies.  We want to bring together our personal experiences and make connections with others based on these experiences.  We also want to question—we always question.  This is a good thing.

After this activity jump-started our thinking, we began thinking about the different events along our literacy journeys.  Specifically, we created timelines of our experiences with digital literacies in our daybooks, taking note of the years and events we felt were significant.  Lacy asked us to transfer these events to sticky notes, and together we created a group timeline of significant events.  Technologies such as the Atari game system, instant messaging, our first cell phones, etc. all made the list.  “Oh yeah, I remember that…” accompanied by a smile or a laugh was a common response for many of these examples.

Our timeline of sticky notes covered our table; there were so many, in fact, that the amount of yellow sticky notes over the table formed a U-shape rather than a straight line.  As we read each sticky note in chronological order, we began to deconstruct why these events were significant to us, making connections to each other’s experiences.  We then challenged these events by asking ourselves what dominant narratives were present or affected these experiences.  Capitalism, competition, authority—these were just some of the ideas that came out of that discussion.  Next month, we will meet again for a writing retreat in which we will delve deeper into these topics and discussions.  If our retreat is anything like our planning meeting (and I know it will be), it’s going to be awesome!

Zooming In/Blogging Out About Summer Institute

Dear Blog-reader,
This post is a combination of zooming in on one day and then reflecting back through the pages and pages (lightyears of thoughts) of the past two weeks. If today were a book, the title would be: Teachers Taking Back Education. Through our discussions, the Summer Institute shared some very emotional and inspiring stories of the moments that keep us going as teachers. An outsider may be amazed to learn that summer vacation, spring break, state pensions, and killer benefits were never mentioned. You see, teaching is a heart thing. Maybe THAT is what makes the rationale so hard to grasp. Maybe that is what makes the world so jealous that over and over again, the “system” finds a way to antagonize us, undermine our authority, exclude us from the process, and challenge our commitment.

Looking back through the co-created texts and subtexts of the past two weeks, I see many worlds. Digital worlds of online picture book autobiographies and storified politics (hey if it’s going to be a verb it must have tenses, right?)– the “real world” where people subsist on $1 (or less) each day and where “the great democracy” reduces children to test scores– the “green world”: leaves and pages of captive bird ideas– and the “possible worlds” where teachers support and might even L-O-V-E each other (shhhh. keep it on the DL!), where children are nurtured and their personhood is respected, where everyone bubbles the words “shame on you” on their answer sheet and then mass mails their portfolio to the corporate evaluation tycoons.

I hope no one resents me labeling you a summer institutional. It seems appropriate because from here I am forever changed. In a way that one is changed and shaped by any environment. Moving from the assault of unhealthy “real world” seductions into the “possible world” of summer institute was a walk in the ocean, but moving back into the “real world” from here will be significantly more challenging. Like returning from vacation, there will be some transition, but I take comfort in the awareness that you are all one rant, one riff, one digital navigation away, and doing what you do best: being you.

See you at the revolution,
Jen

Urban Sites Conference: Boston!

On Thursday, April 28th, Lacy Manship, Dana Sutcliffe, Amy Brewer, Shaftina Allen, Alicia Wright, and Jennifer Ward boarded a plane for Boston, MA, to attend the National Writing Project’s Urban Sites Network Conference, Nurturing Student Writing: Navigating Urban Literacies. While there, they attended two days of interactive sessions that focused on using technology to empower student learning and writing. On Friday, Dana, Amy, Shaftina, Alicia, and Jennifer went on a writing marathon around Boston, complete with a rubber duck from the hotel that is now featured in the digital renderings of their journey. By far the most impressive place on the marathon was the Boston Public Library, with a close second being the multi-colored tulips in the park, planted in time to bloom for the royal wedding.

One of the highlights of Saturday was the keynote address by Ernest Morrell, an associate professor at UCLA who has worked with high school teens in Los Angeles for the past twelve years. He focused on what it means for students today to have voice and how to motivate students to find their writing voice in the digital age. Morrell emphasized that, as teachers, we must ask students what it is that they want to say, and then find ways to help them say it more powerfully. By doing so, we are helping students find their voices and, in turn, their identities. As Morrell said, students today are not suffering from an “ability crisis,” but rather an “identity crisis.” We must let students know that their voice matters.

After Morrell’s keynote, we attended various sessions that gave us bountiful resources to take back to our classrooms. Some of the session topics included ways to incorporate pop culture into lessons, using students’ technology to help them find their voice, and how to help students compose digitally. Of course, the best session of the day was in the third session, as Lacy, Shaftina, Alicia, and Jennifer presented “Reaching Students: Developing Narrative Skills through High-Interest Mentor Texts and Digital Compositions.” In their session, they highlighted the work of the Urban Sites branch of the UNCC Writing Project, as they focused on digital narratives composed over the summer of 2010 by UNCCWP TCs, and how this narrative project was brought into the classrooms of Shaftina, Alicia, and Jennifer in the 2010-2011 school year. The examples were shown to participants via Prezi. The presentation showed how the project evolved to fit each classroom and that each classroom’s digital narratives were unique yet powerful because each student had found her voice.

On Saturday evening, April 30th, Lacy, Dana, Amy, Shaftina, Alicia, and Jennifer arrived in Charlotte with many new strategies to use in their classrooms and feedback for their students’ digital narratives from teachers across the United States. With this feedback, they plan to help their students analyze their learning narratives to move past the dominant narratives and focus more on the counter-narratives within their digital compositions.

Revisioned Student Blogging

students sharing blog drafts in thier writing group

When I was first presented with the idea of using blogs in the classroom, it was suggested that they be used as a way for students to respond to a question or text and the ideas of others. I set up a classroom blog, had my students use it as a space to respond to a story we read, and quickly decided that I wasn’t impressed.  Physical class discussions elicited greater depth and participation, and besides, online venues such as threaded discussion forums, chat, and microblogging were better digital options for students to interact and share.

Recently, however, something happened that has caused me to rethink the blog and its potential in my classroom.  I started blogging for myself.

I created my own blog where I write about what matters to me, and enter into a conversation with others of the same interest.  I learn from these other bloggers and integrate their ideas into my own, composing my new knowledge in a digital space where writing is no longer constrained to a pencil and daybook, where the world is my audience.  Blogging has taken me to a new level as a writer.

How I have come to know blogging hardly resembles my initial conception of it, as a teacher-centered space for student response.  Real bloggers are engaged writers because they write about what is important to them, and while in retrospect it may be painfully obvious, this realization helped me understand that any successful experience with student blogging must characterized by student ownership and the opportunity to create meaningful writing.

Empowered by a new-found awareness and identity as a blogger, I decided this year that I would make a second attempt at using blogs in my classroom.   Fortunately, I knew just the place to start.  This year, like in years past, my students were writing in the context of our writing workshop, where they created, developed, and shared writing pieces of their choice.  After a couple months, our workshop seemed like it was off to a pretty good start, and not wanting our venture into blogging to distract students from our still fragile writing-focused environment, I kept the first steps of our journey simple.  We would use blogs simply as spaces to publish the writing composed in writing workshop.

During class time that we devoted to writing workshop, I made sure to have computers on hand so that students could write their final drafts to their blog when they were ready.  Every two or three weeks students would publish a new piece to their blogs and also take time in class to read and post comments on the published posts of their classmates.  The process was fairly simple and on the surface wasn’t much different than how we did things before blogs.  What happened after we began these digital sharing sessions, though, was pretty exciting.

I noticed it on our first commenting day when a student turned around and told her friend about a post she read that was really good.  After she made this comment, I noticed that every student within earshot was reading the piece the student mentioned.  By the time I got to my computer and read it, seven students had posted comments.  By the time the author arrived to my class (the last of the day), 25 comments had been posted on it.  She came in the next day with the sequel to that post in hand, and her enthusiasm for writing has only grown since.  And she was just the first.

As we continued to blog, so did this trend of students talking during class and in the hall about student writing.  Students gained reputations for their writing and began to identify themselves as writers.  They stated thinking like writers, too, borrowing ideas from the posts of others and viewing the events that unfolded in their lives and in the world as new topics to write about.  They jotted down notes in their daybooks and freewrote with purpose. Revision was taken seriously, and proofreading gained a new significance.

In years past, I’ve observed my students growing in such ways as writers over the course of the year through writer’s workshop,  but the scale at which this growth took place this year was unlike anything I had seen before, and I’m confident that blogging had a lot to do with it.  Sure, I am a better teacher of writing this year thanks to participating in SI last summer (shout out UNCC Writing Project!), and without question my students’ experience would not have been near as powerful it were not for my improved practice.   That being said, writing as bloggers afforded my students opportunities not available to writers in physical spaces alone.

Blogging gave students a chance to do more than tack their final drafts to the classroom wall.  It broke down these walls, and entered students into a new type of writing community, one where their words could be read by anyone at any time, where their ideas were widely received and could be disseminated instantly, and most importantly, one where they were able to feel that writing about what mattered, mattered.

*Want to know more about our blogging journey,  including how it was organized, how it evolved, how it incorporated digital storytelling, as well as links to student posts and digital resources? Check out the extended version of this piece that I posted on my blog on my here.  You may also be interested in my post, Writing into the Student Blogging Challenge, which explains how we approached connecting with student bloggers around the world through a global blogging event.

Redesigning Classroom Instruction: A review of Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry out Instructional Units by Shana V. Hartman

In our ever-changing and highly pressured classroom climate, planning for instruction can often drift far away from those that are impacted most by our decisions as teachers: our students. Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units, by Peter Smagorinsky, a professor of English Education at University of Georgia, helps teachers of reading and writing take a step back, remember that we are in the business of helping foster student learning, and allows us to rethink our classrooms in a way that meets important learning outcomes and fosters meaning making for our students. Based upon social constuctivism and ideas of scaffolding (via Vygotsky), this book asks teachers “to consider the possibilities of teaching students in ways that challenge them to draw on a wide range of their intellectual resources to construct new knowledge and meaning in relation to the English curriculum” (18).

The book guides the reader towards understanding the “conceptual unit.” Smagorinsky provides in-depth, but easily accessible, guidance on how to set up the “construction zone” and a constructivist classroom through the design of the conceptual unit. A conceptual unit is defined as a unit of instruction that provides students with “sustained attention to a related set of ideas” (111). This definition is not groundbreaking, but the components of what makes a strong conceptual unit and the theoretical framework underpinning the design of the unit are. Smagorinsky presents seven types of units from themes, such as social justice in the U.S, to a key learning strategy, such as how to decode and interpret literary elements. The conceptual unit has several key components that allow a teacher to deeply ponder his/her classroom, and the book provides in-depth discussion and resources for each of the following:

• A rationale for the unit: “the argument you [the teacher] make to justify your selection of unit topic and its contents ” (112),
• Student inventory: “a vehicle that helps you learn about your students” before beginning the conceptual unit (112),
• Well-designed unit goals: “the unit’s destination,” incorporating but certainly not limited to grade-level standards (113),
• Introductory activities: “designed to help students develop the kind of schematic knowledge they need to understand the unit’s key concepts and problems” and prepare students for the unit (173),
• Clear and meaningful assessments: “culminating texts” students create that “correspond to students’ learning” and unit goals (114), and
• Integrated and sequenced lessons: “identifiable pieces of the larger unit…[that] are related…to the overall conceptual knowledge that students construct” (114).

One critique of the text might be that Smagorinsky tries to tackle more than just a “how to” for designing conceptual units. His arguments against traditional, teacher-led transmissions of knowledge in school, via discussions of everything from education psychology to writing instruction, are all in an effort to defend the conceptual unit and construction zone model for learning. Knowing that lesson and unit planning for English/Language arts often stem from lists of skills, vocabulary words, literary terms, and literature that the teacher must be able to check off, Smagorinsky’s approach clearly acknowledges what students know first and then guides teachers in finding processes for discovering new concepts and makes new knowledge collaboratively. Learning becomes more than checking items off on a list. Students are asked to be active members of their learning. The text is full of resources that teachers will find useful when designing such units or when just looking for a quick idea, like how to foster authentic discussion in a classroom. However, since he is an English educator, most of Smagorinsky’s examples focus on working with older students. The “Virtual Library of Conceptual Units” website provides numerous sample conceptual units from pre-service and in-service teachers at the University of Georgia (the link is provided in the book, but also easy to find via Google). Overall, this text helps teachers find a way to negotiate the need for well-formed learning goals, effective teaching strategies, and authentic assessments, but it does so on the terms of the most important stakeholders in the classroom—the teachers and the students.

2011 SI Writing Marathon…

Jack Kerouac…my favorite writer once said, “Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.” Today’s writing marathon was just what I needed. A space to sit and ‘struggle to sketch.’ I really enjoyed moving from place to place with my two writing buddies. I knew going into the marathon what today’s struggle was going to entail and to borrow from another one of Kerouac’s phrases, “Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better.” That’s just what I did and it felt good! It was so cool to see this year’s group of TCs come out on a day when they could have been doing 1,000 other things with 1,000 other people! Thanks UNCCWP SI 2011 for a great day of thinking, writing and conversation!