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!