Slash/Scholar

I wasted a whole day yesterday, says my graduate student self. The complexity of my life as a doctoral student/community college teacher is evident in what I have surrounding me at the library while my sons, husband and the whole world watches the UM-MSU game: one journal article on teaching with "second life," another about general education course outcomes, another on studying rapport building in online classes, a journal reviewing Indian poetry (since I adore Jumpha Lahiri I thought I would check out Indian poetry as well), plus the myriad piles of student papers from 4 courses and reading homework for my graduate courses.

The hats we have to wear as community college/high school teachers are many. I had two meetings yesterday: one in which 8 of us--many of them adjuncts and two from the art and computer information systems dept.--reviewed and edited the general education goals for our gen ed humanities course, a lunch where I mentored a new faculty member, and then an English meeting where we "normed" for our portfolio assessment with many brand new adjunct faculty. Two high school teachers told me last week that along with their teaching they had to spend time with the Student Council in preparation for Homecoming.

But yet, I am learning how to develop yet a new identity: the reseaching scholar. We have been doing our local assessment research for nearly twenty years, but there is so much I want to learn about researching differently, for a wider audience than our department. On top of it, I am not, as a full time teacher, not part of a graduate research project. I met two researchers this week though: Punya Mishra and Julie Lindquist. (Check her out if you love Graff's "Hidden Intellectualism" article.) Their research is fascinating and inspirational. I am learning about the positioning of the researcher by reading ethnographer Clifford Geertz and others. Gentle reader, do you have reading recommendations?

Can you tell I have figured out how to link websites to my posts? :) New technology learning every day on top of everything else.

The leaves are gorgeous outside my window. More change is on its way.

Casting: Multiple Roles for the English Teacher

I had the chance to go to the Stratford Festival this summer.

http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/ It wasn't easy squeezing it in with graduate school, my kids' summer jobs, a "refreshment" trip to the Leelaneau Penninsula with family and friends, and preparations for a new school year. But it was worth it!

First of all, I learned a new work strategy. Our work is very serious, very important. Sometimes though I get freaked out, considering some misshap a "tragic" event. But after I saw A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, I remembered that mishaps are comedic, without the singing and dancing, but certainly with costumes! My son (the college wrestler) threatened to "break out in interpretive dance" while he was talking. Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight!

More importantly, it was fascinating to watch the young woman who played the bride, who was paid for and awaiting pickup, in this comedy also play Maria in the tragedy West Side Story. In fact, all of the actors play two or more roles in other plays. Tony played a minor role as a jousting soldier in Cyrano de Bergerac. Colm Feore playe Cyrano but also played Macbeth. (You can see him in a video on the website. He was fantastic!)

It makes me think of all the roles we play--sometimes bit parts, another time a magnanimous hero, other times a clown or in disguise--often in the same season! And we as teachers and learners all have the potential to play all of those roles.

My professor, Louise Cowan, told us at the Dallas Insitute of Humanities and Culture where an academy of teachers were studying "classics" and learning how to integrate them into the classroom that comedy and tragedy have different flavors, that the whole of each "tastes" or "feels" differently from the beginning scene. I hope that this school year will have its own distinctive flavor and that it includes lots of learning and laughter.

http://www.dallasinstitute.org/

Lucia

Best Kept Secret: Kids Are Reading

I have spent the last two weeks at the Chippewa River Writing Project. Wow, we are writers! http://chippewariverwp.wikispaces.com/ We've been doing teaching demo's, writing critical responses, and doing lots and lots of writing. I have written a science fiction piece about a girl on a hot air balloon which is the mass transportation, a monologue from the perspective of my cat, a story about characters on a deserted island, a story about my house like Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street, and another about my cultural heritage. Today I presented activities on analysis and synthesis in academic writing.

I've had two conflicting issues. K-12 English teachers spend a lot of time on fiction (while I spend none at the college level), and K-12 students read a lot. These teachers are constantly talking and telling stories about the books their students are reading! Yet there is the common understanding at the college level that "kids don't read anymore." What do I make of this?

Perhaps these teachers are extraordinary. Perhaps reading is happening in the lower grades but not in high school. Perhaps college teachers are out of touch. I haven't decided which it is. But it is certainly wonderful to be surrounded by such enthusiastic, knowledgeable, open teachers.

The Scores of Summer

Two local teams won their state title last week in baseball. The strategy in baseball fascinates me--steals, sacrifice flies, the suicide squeeze--ever since I sat down to watch Boston beat New York in 2004 in the ALCS when they were down 3 games to 0 and down by a lot in the 7th inning. They won the game, and I kept watching until they won the World Series, taking credit for it, of course. I didn't work with my kids on baseball, and they didn't end up playing it for long.

Parents are amazing. As I worked in the garden this week, I listened to a neighborhood dad working with his kids on one of the many sports they practice in their back yard. The junior high daughter is trying out for a travel soccer team 70 miles away. An Iranian family in the neighborhood works on high level math every day during the summer. Kids are on hockey teams, in orchestras, swim teams, and go to wrestling and band camps. One family I know is sending their daughter to a medical camp in Houston to shadow different medical professionals. All of these activities, and others like vacations and computers provide opportunites for literacy development. And even finding toads!

In his new book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell discusses JHU sociologist Karl Alexander's discovery about kids reading scores in the summer based on socioeconomic class. There was a lot of similarity in growth except for what happens between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next where the scores increase for weathy kids by 15 points and the poorer kids' scores dropped by 5 points. The literacy environment makes a difference.

What can be done about this?

Check this out: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39writing.htm

Responding to Writing

Not only do we do a lot of "norming" by reading students' papers together and discussing it at my work at our community college, I am also involved in reading students' papers in my doctoral studies and discussing them. As it turns out, these students are actually teachers! But it is the same process--the professor and other graduate students read and discuss a student's paper and through the discussion we come to terms with how we are each responding. We learn from one another in the reading and responding. Here is an article that we are discussing.
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2868
Most of you are probably on break from responding to student writing! Enjoy!

Conflicting Assumptions about Literacies

This week I interviewed a high school student on his Internet use. I think college teachers are making a lot of assumptions about what kids know.
1. This student only looks at the "first page" of the website and is pretty sure that everything he needs is there. He does not go to links.
2. This student almost exclusively uses Wikipedia because it comes first in a Google search; in his mind, first is best.
3. High schools block almost everything, but Wikipedia is not blocked. Thus, they have fewer choices to make.
Knowing these points, and interviewing other students, will help me with incoming college freshman. The Leu et al article on the following website, argues for the idea of framing the Internet as a literacy issue.
http://www.aera.net/publications/Default.aspx?menu_id=38&id=7886

One of my roles as a High School Liaison is to understand the differences between English educators at the high school, community college, and university and to try to help bridge those differences. This is important for high school teachers so they will better understand what their students might face; for university teachers, so they know what students are bringing with them to college and to better prepare future teachers; and for community college teachers who are in the middle. As an interviewer of prospective community college faculty, I think this article does an excellent job of explaining what community college faculty face, which is not always understood by university faculty. http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/05/2009052901c.htm

What differences have you noticed?

P.S. As I was finishing up this post, a recent GVSU graduate and former student of mine excitedly called me from Houston to tell me that she just got a teaching job at a diverse elementary school. Congratulations, Ali!

Teen Transition

The transition from high school to college is amazing. How do kids do it? Those of us who teach college freshman don't think about this challenge enough. In Tim Clydesdale's observations in The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School, several points stand out:

1. Seniors and college freshman are so focused on "daily life management" that they are not, for now, interested in larger social, cultural, political issues. Teachers might need to "let go of" the expectation of these students having "worldly curiosity" (p. 201). Instead sophomores and juniors in both high school and college, might be more apt to consider their community or global context.

2. Teachers of college freshman underestimate what students can learn and should raise standard/upgrade expectations. Students expect college to be hard.

3. Teachers should begin with what students want to learn (engage interest, connect it to bodies of knowledge, and apply knowledge, p. 203). For example, Clydesdale teaches sociology, and he decided to teach research on relationships because that is a big part of their "daily life management" and he covers the introduction of the field later in the semester.

4. Teachers "overestimate" what students can "meaningful integrate on their own" (p. 40). This one needs further explanation.

What are your observations?

Adventurous Teaching

"Adventurous instruction makes distinctive demands on teachers...It increases the difficulty of academic work for students, partly because the work becomes riskier...Teachers who take this path must work harder, concentrate more, and embrace larger pedagogical responsibilities than if they only assigned text chapters and seat work. They also must have unusual knowledge and skills. They require, for instance, a deep understanding of the material and modes of discourse about it. They must be able to comprehend students; thinking, their interpretations of problems their mistakes, and their puzzles." (David K. Cohen, 1988,"Teaching Practice: Plus Que Ca Change," p. 73-75) Thoughtful responses to reading cannot occur, Cohen says, with worksheets, and subjects should be taught as "fields of inquiry" to be adventurous.

Cohen says other interesting things about adventurous teachers, including how math teachers need to be comfortable with uncertainty in allowing students to have multiple representations. http://ncrtl.msu.edu/http/ipapers/html/pdf/ip883.pdf I would like to share observations of two adventurous high school teachers I have seen recently.

But first, a comment about my previous post. Yesterday I went to the grand opening of a new museum: http://www.mynorth.com/My-North/May-2009/Eyaawing-Museum-amp-Cultural-Center-Opening-Peshawbestown/ We are lucky in Mt. Pleasant to have an award-winning museum: http://www.sagchip.org/ziibiwing/ We often take humanities students, and it gives them a different perspective, a critical perspective about our local tribe, and sometimes it shifts their perspective significantly. In the bookstore, I looked at Louise Erdrich's new book. I have been a fan of Erdrich since the 80's, but I had forgotten that she, like Debra Marquart, was from North Dakota. It struck me that Marquette's story never mentioned American Indians. I am not sure whether it is because she had no contact with them, had not learned anything of significance about them, or something else. Perhaps, they didn't "count" for her, as Jane Tompkins' problematizes about historical sources in her article "'Indians': Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History." Perhaps, that is overly critical, since Marquart focuses on her German-Russian heritage.

The two adventurous teachers are so different that it strikes me as so interesting. One teacher, I'll call her Beth, has created a curriculum for her students which is based on classic texts. Within one school year, her seniors understand the historical context of literature and how themes connect from the beginnings of literature to the present. Her students read a lot! It is risky; the students are not used to it; there are no computers involved. The other teacher, I'll call her Terri, developed a wiki with her students, after one wiki demonstration in our local Dinner & Dialogue with high school, college, and university English teachers. She admitted that she just jumped into it even with uncertainty. The wiki had hundreds of posts by students; students began voluntarily writing in rhetorically sensitive ways.

How amazing that in this practice of "human improvement" (Cohen, p. 55), where we are dependent on students for our success, teachers can still be so adventurous, and in different ways.

Do you have a story about adventurous teaching?

May is my Reading Month

After a long school year, I usually spend May reading. It helps to move out of all of the details and dialogue (some of it in my head!) of teaching. I often have to read to choose books for the fall semester, but I also try to "get away" through fiction.

This May I have read two novels. An adolescent novel, A Northern Light, was recommended to me by my son's friend, Sarah. http://www.jenniferdonnelly.com/jd_books.htm I enjoyed hearing the perspective of a farm girl from the 1908. Another story about a farm girl is the horizontal world: growing up in the middle of nowhere by Debra Marquart. I love how she weaves together her own autobiography about growing up in North Dakota, her experiences in multiple rock and punk bands across the West, and her explanations about local geology and geography. Here is a snippet I love:

"How strange it seems to me now, an adult woman so far from that life on the farm, that the struggle I face each day when I approach my writing desk--to bring to language the stories pushing up beneath my feet--feels so much like the hard labor of unearthing those half-exposed rocks in my father's fields. And no matter how fiercely I struggled to evade my fate as a farmer's wife, becoming a writer instead, how strange it is to realize that writing, the act of arranging language in neat horizontal furrows, is a great deal like farming."

I hope you have a chance to find rich stories to read this summer and have the time to relish them.

National Writing Project ahead

Today is the orientation day of the Chippewa River Writing Project, of which I will be participating in June and July. If you have participated in a Writing Project, please comment about your experience. I'm very excited about all the middle school and high school teachers that I will have the opportunity to meet and work with. Here's a page from the NWP site:
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2848 And here I am with a colleague!

Listening In

The semester and my sabbatical are over. I wrote 10 critical reviews and 4 10-30 long papers. I gave 4 presentations and participated on 3 wikis. It was a blast! Yesterday, as a year-end test, my classmates in my cohort and I had 24 hours to read an article and write a critical review about it. After all the well-deserved criticism on my papers, I think I have improved in having more carefully constructed single point paragraphs with better transitions between. :)

Here is a wiki that two of my classmates--Paul Morsink and Abu Bakar Razali--created. They interviewed MSU professors about what they are thinking about lately. You can see (and hear!)my professors from this semester--Angie Barton, Lynn Fendler, Raven McCrory, Doug Hartman.

http://hobnob.wiki.educ.msu.edu/

And here is a link to a classmates' blog. Michelle has amazing links about literacy and technology. She is so neat--from Canada, taught French, interested in the changing, deictic nature of technology. Check it out:

http://www.deicticdescant.blogspot.com/

enjoy the spring!

Shortening Up For Spring

I learned this week that in the genre of blogging, entries are supposed to be short. I need to work on that! Also, that part of blogging is anticipating responses and not including all thoughts at once. I have a lot to learn about new literacies!

Here are some of my new friends in graduate school. They inspire me and I am grateful that they came all the way here to Michigan and made it through the winter with me!

Resources We Take For Granted

“Hidden” Resources to Support Education
A working class child does not do their homework (or bring a note back signed or their folks do not go to the parent-teacher conference), and people sometimes decide that the parents do not “care” about their child’s educational achievement. It is not that they care less, but that they may not have the social and linguistic resources to help. Many researchers use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” in trying to explain the broad net of resources that middle class kids bring to the classroom to support their school work. Annette Lareau (2000) is one of these researchers. In her book Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education, she compares working class families to middle and upper class families of first and second graders.
Here is a list of “cultural” resources, which I have compiled from the book. I can provide page numbers if you need them! Imagine if this was expanded beyond first and second graders! In addition, this list does not include all of the potential computer and media literacy opportunities some kids have. Obviously, middle class parents have a range of this “capital,” and they use it at differing levels, and working class kids have these resources at differing levels. I do not think, however, that middle class teachers and policy makers realize what some kids bring to the classroom.
Resources of Middle Class Families
· Educational aspirations
· Understanding that educational responsibility is shared between school and home
· Comfortable with their own educational competence
· Sharing with children the connection between school success and career
· Understanding of bureaucracies from work and how to apply it to school system
· Feels comfortable walking in and out of classrooms
· Feels relaxed around school and teachers but assertive
· Feels comfortable asking a lot of questions to teachers
· Feels comfortable responding with lengthy responses
· Having educational rituals at home which support school
· Coordinating home activities to reinforce school learning
· Time to volunteer, thus gleaning information—monitoring teacher and studies
· Sharing the idea with children that learning and school is fun
· Verbal ability and confidence to critique the teacher
· Verbal ability and confidence to complain to the principal effectively
· Grammatical confidence of Standard “school” English and linguistic structures
· Promote verbal abilities with the children
· Comfortable with amount of eye contact necessary in communicating with teachers
· Understanding the meanings of stars and stickers as self esteem boosters but not academic
· Attention to whether child receives homework
· Expectations of and attentive to all notes coming home, attending to directions for signature
· Understand, support, and promote the conforming to school rules
· Understanding authority patterns
· Information about the span of the educational process K-16
· Information about standards and policies new in education
· Understand the role of test scores
· Attentive and knowledgeable about cognitive development
· Time and attention to attend parent-teacher conferences
· Time and attention and ability to hire tutors and other educational professionals
· Supplementing or reinforcing lessons in class, figuring out ways
· Reading to the child, child reading to parent
· Having reading materials at home, including encyclopedias
· Helping with spelling words
· Helping with penmanship
· Attention to keeping children home from friends or play if they don’t complete work
· Time and attention to supervise homework completion
· Stressing to children how important working hard is in school
· Encouraging words (and sometimes stress) about achievement
· Helping children to read billboards, labels
· Practicing math skills in cooking together, shopping together
· Confident with math and science material and resources to find out
· Knowing how to request extra materials to be done at home
· Time and attention to take children to the library
· Enrolling children in summer school programs
· Learning opportunities— art lessons, music lessons, language lessons, scouts, sports activities
· Learning opportunities at museums, parks
· Learning opportunities on educational vacations
· Knowing and playing education games with children
· Understanding that attending school events is a symbolic act (especially for fathers)
· Confident in communicating about canceling appointments with teacher
· Understanding how to request a particular teacher
· Understanding how to request a gifted/talented program or special service
· Understanding how to request a special conference
· Knowing how to discern a child’s strengths and weaknesses and the value of knowing
· Knowing how to discern a child’s reading group and what it means
· Knowing the aide’s names, and other support services names
· Comfortable talking to staff at the school in an informal way, gleaning information
· Knowing how to create a network of information from other parents
· Time, attention and resources to provides materials for class projects
· Time and attention to make sure children get to school every day and on time
· Time and attention to make sure children are prepared for the day—washed, clean, well-rested


Compiled by Lucia Elden, Mid Michigan Community College
Lareau, Annette. (2000). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

I'd like to know what you think of this!

Have you read anything interesting lately?

My friend Helen always asks me when I see her what I've been reading. It is such a great question. Last week I had a delightful conversation about books with someone with whom I thought I had nothing in common. I now see her very differently. We began talking about the Special Olympics, which she is in charge of in my state, and we ended up sharing book titles.

Today, I celebrated not having to go to our school's staff development day by going to a bookstore. I had to buy thank you cards for two interviews a classmate and I had with professors about quality teaching. Randi Stanilus' research, for example, produced three main "indicators": classroom management that produces engaged learning; worthwhile content; and scaffolding/motivating--a teacher's ability to use her content knowledge in different ways. It was amazing to learn about the challenges of research and that so many urban students have a beginning teacher every year. One huge elementary school in Atlanta had 86 new teachers in one year! Imagine that mentoring challenge!

As I checked out from the bookstore, I asked the clerk (right word?) if he had read anything interesting lately. He was happy to talk about J.C. Ramo's book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It. He said that it is about how we often reject ideas that are not from "our side." We'll see: http://www.ageoftheunthinkable.com

I talked with two high school boys over the weekend: one is a very good student, another is homebound with a tether. Neither of them read anything unless they "have to." I'm not sure whether that includes text messages on their phones or video game "literacies." I learned at last summer's NCTE New Literacies Institute that the best ways to improve reading is if kids read at their level and if they can find a series they like so they can get comfortable with the genre patterns. Anyone know any interesting series for boys?

So--have you read anything interesting lately?

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Holidays are a big part of elementary and secondary schools. In the article "Quantity Matters: Annual Instructional Time in an Urban School System" by BetsAnn Smith (Ed Admin Quarterly 36:5), she studies 8 elementary schools in Chicago and finds that of the 280 available time, and average of 23% is used for noninstructional activities--"more productive teachers" only use 14% (p. 662). By the way, noninstructional time included test days. I can send you the pdf of the article if you email me!

Critical literacy, or information literacy, can be learned through the researching of holidays in high school or college to complicate their understanding of the holiday, perhaps challenging their assumptions about national holidays. Every semester, I have pairs pick a holiday and research it online. I found that if you include the word "controversy" with the holiday in a Google search, for example, students can find more than the "simple" version of the holiday. They present a discussion from multiple perspectives on the online class discussion board--about Labor Day, Columbus Day, Yom Kippur etc.

Please share with me other information literacy activities!

Connecting the Dots to the Local

When I edited our newsletter, "Writing Transitions," I wasn't that nervous. After all, I sent it out to teachers, so I knew who was reading it! This business of writing--without knowing the whole audience--is more nerve-wracking. So I want to explore the difference.
This semester I've read new articles about similarities and differences in offline and online reading comprehension for students. Here are a couple of them: http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/event_files/IES_NRC2006_symposium.pdf
http://www.ucop.edu/elltech/leupaper010605.pdf

Also, I have been thinking about what got me into the high school liaison business: the concern in our local area that teacher education programs were not giving attention to the quality teaching of rural students. I had not thought much before about connections to the local community.
Professor Carl Leggo (in Journal of Educational Thought, 39:2) connects to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Heart: "As teachers, including student-teachers, experienced teachers, retired teachers, may we always live poetically with a playful heart, in language, in love, intimate with our local locations, growing in stillness, full of trust, always hoping. May we know constantly the heart of pedagogy" (194).

There is so much scholarship now on "urban education." Gloria Ladson-Billings (in AERJ, 32:3)found that teachers who were exemplary believed that all students were educable, that their pedagogy was an art, and that they felt connected to their local community (478).
Urban teachers are not always connected to the communities in which they teach; Ladson-Billings has inspired me to think about how rural teachers also need to be connected to the community in which their students live.

Making Connections

March 9th Spring Break



It seems right to start this weblog--which is about the connections between high school and college, between traditional literacies and new literacies, and between theories and practices--during Spring Break for the colleges and universities and during the week of the Michigan Merit Exam for the high school teachers.



This schedule emblemizes the disconnect, for sure.

In graduate school, I am immersed in theories; in my practice of teaching, I am attuned to action. I hope to help bring these two worlds together in an online space of sharing. And because reflective teaching requires dialogue, I hope that high school, college, and university teachers will make connections.