As a teacher and as a lifelong learner, I try to aim for that golden ZPD every day. And remembering Vygotsky’s concepts about the importance of social interactions in education, it is important to remember the guidance in the Zone can come from peers, teachers, and mentors.
In the AP English classroom, the mentors quite often are the texts we experience as an academic community. In my mind, those who constantly push themselves into the ZPD are living the heroic life and are on a wondrous archetypal quest worthy of emulation.
“Student Journalism Provides Literacy Learning and Motivation to Write” is the perfect headline for Sean Thompson’s two-part series about the importance of journalism. And for me as a journalism teacher and adviser, Thompsons gets at the true essence of why journalism students do better than their peers: “When a student journalist writes an article that will be published and distributed, they are doing so with the knowledge that it will be read by a number of potential authentic audiences.”
When authentic student voice and choice meet authentic audiences, true learning occurs because such occasions have the potential of producing excellence. Such occasions demand close reading and a deeper understanding of facts and supporting details. And at the best moments, student writers who are in the zone discover truths and write with clarity and balance that is often neglected when they find themselves writing for their teacher.
Last week I sent out this two-minute promotional video to encourage students to register to join the high school newspaper staff or the yearbook staff:
Two months ago I shared a synthesis of reading strategies I had been using with my high school students in the May 11 session of Virtual Viral Hangouts through the Media Education Lab. In the presentation, I had participants focus on three of Beers and Probst’s signposts and one of their disruptive heart questions with Jennifer Fletcher’s ideas about having students do a PAPA Square with some of Renee Hobbs’s ideas about structure.
I had originally envisioned that I would add to this work, make this presentation better, and possibly share it at the Fall Conference of the Iowa Council of Teachers of English. Sadly, Covid-19 has changed many of our plans for having large group meetings this fall. And Covid-19 also cut short more frequent use of these reading strategies.
Priority 1 for my school district involves “Education Equity and Improvement,” and I was working on these guiding questions with ALL of my students when the governor suspended school:
How can I broaden my perspectives?
How can I improve my reading skills?
How can I transfer essential rhetorical ideas to my own writing?
The presentation below attempts to bring together four writers and six works to analyze Justin Baldon’s TED Talk “Why I’m done trying to be ‘man enough’”:
Renee Hobbs’s Create to Learn (2017): “What are the consequences of your creative work as it may affect the attitudes and behaviors of others?” (p. 19). In essence, this driving question for my students also became a driving question for me. What disruptive teaching practices am I creating to affect the attitudes and behaviors of others? How am I creating a “lifelong learning process that involves accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action, using the power of communication and information to make a difference in the world” (p 18)?
Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst’s Notice & Note (2013), Reading Nonfiction (2016), and Disrupting Thinking (2017): “Reading ought to lead to thinking that is disrupting, that shakes us up, that makes us wonder, that challenges us. Such thinking sets us on a path to change, if not the world, then at least ourselves” (2017, pp. 160-1).
Jennifer Fletcher’s Teaching Arguments (2015): Teaching for transfer to “enable writers to write for diverse audiences, purposes, and occasions.” This touches on a core standard in Multimedia Composition. Fletcher’s Teaching Literature Rhetorically (2018): “Teaching for transfer prepares twenty-first-century learners for a changing world” (p. XVI).
References
Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2017). Disrupting thinking: why how we read matters. Scholastic teaching resources (teaching strategies).
Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2013). Notice & note: strategies for close reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2016). Reading nonfiction: notice & note stances, signposts, and strategies. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Fletcher, J. (2015). Teaching arguments: rhetorical comprehension, critique, and response. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
Fletcher, J. (2018). Teaching literature rhetorically: transferable literacy skills for 21st century students. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers.
Hobbs, R. (2017). Create to learn: Introduction to digital literacy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
As I’m creating to learn, I’ve been exploring concepts of creativity. Following my own directions to students, I did a brain dump followed by switching to “creativity” as I explored Quora, Google Scholar, and Google. I found several posts on Quora. Gunjan Mehta writes: “Creativity is nothing but the connectivity. It’s all about how we can connect the mechanisms of different products and apply those mechanisms to solve the other problems. You are not creating actually. You are just connecting things.” Supporting his argument, Mehta then includes this gem from Steve Jobs: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”
Image by Darin Johnson
In Multimedia Composition, we’ve been trying to connect ideas and immerse ourselves in media. In the last month, we’ve read about creativity in Create to Learn (2017) by Renee Hobbs. (And, yes, I have thought about the irony of reading about creativity rather than creating.) In Create to Learn, Hobbs writes: “Creative people are voracious readers, viewers, and do‐ers. But it’s worth thinking about the quality of choices you make. If you want to learn by creating great stuff, seek out and find great stuff,” (p. 20). So I’ve been trying to surround myself with great stuff, and I’ve been wrapping my mind around the idea of learning by creating versus learning to create. To me, this is a subtle but essential distinction. When learning, too many think “one and done” is “won and done.”
Last week I met with the district’s Literacy Curriculum Review group, where we touched on such concepts of endurance and leverage as we prepared once again to review essential standards. For me, creativity is an enduring concept with timeless leverage. And I must not be the only one with this thought because Creativity is a Universal Construct of the Iowa Core. And one of the greatest challenges I see before us in education is that it takes a creative mindset to truly grow and make connections in the modern age. We “create to learn” and through that creation we improve our learning and our creativity.
Last week I was having students in Multimedia Composition work on their first blog post after reviewing the Characteristics of a Blog Post (Thank you, Professor Troy Hicks, for your part of that lesson!) when an administrator did a walkthrough evaluation.
Principal: What are you learning today?
Student: What a blog post is and looks like.
Principal: What does success of that learning look like to you?
Student: When I post the blog.
Now while some would have preferred the Student to say: “Today we’re producing clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. . . .” And while I support this core standard, I believe that a dedication to the Universal Constructs is equally essential. And so in Multimedia Composition, I will push students toward clear and coherent writing, AND we will continue our immersion in good things and push ourselves to make connections. Our blogs will not be a “one and done” activity.
Image by Darin Johnson
And as we move to an evaluation stage of our second unit, I’ll borrow Prof. Hobbs’s questions for reflection this week: “How are you adding value to the world with your creation? How will audiences react? What are the consequences of your creative work as it may affect the attitudes and behaviors of others? What have you learned about yourself through the creative process?” (p. 19).
Creating to learn is how we strengthen our core in this amazing “network of mutuality.”
Friends and neighbors gather to caucus at one site in Ames, Iowa. (Image by Darin Johnson)
NBC’s Jonathan Allen writes at 12:31 a.m. on Feb. 4 from Des Moines: “All the top Democrats are moving on to New Hampshire, because Iowa failed to do the one job it had.
A colossal caucus night technological foul-up — straight out of a dystopian political novel — will make it harder for the state’s Democratic Party to justify its prized status as the first in the nation to hold a presidential election contest every four years.”
There are plenty of calls for Iowa to lose its status, and perhaps we no longer deserve to be in the electoral limelight. As an Iowan, I’m embarrassed the technology failed, and I’m surprised that the backup plan was so painfully slow in tabulating results.
Is it time to kill the Iowa Caucus? Personally, I would rather have us reform some of the caucus procedures, find highly dependable technology, and figure out a way to increase participation rather than killing the tradition of a caucus.
I see two clear advantages to a caucus. First, for me a caucus is more visceral than a quick and easy vote on the way home from work. I felt a sense of catharsis as I saw neighbors and friends sitting around me and neighbors and friends sitting across the room. I felt deep appreciation for the genuine respect for differences in opinion.
As we prepared to vote, I thought of the earliest days of democracy in ancient Athens when men would sometimes have public votes using a white pebble for “yes” and a black pebble for “no.” In a caucus as each group huddles together and physically takes a count, it just feels like democracy in action. Public voting like this requires the coordination of mind, body, and spirit. It is a powerful communal experience unlike the cold efficiency of filling in a series of dots on a paper ballot.
The second advantage to the caucus system is that it provides additional data beyond placement. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out: “What makes the Iowa caucuses unique, besides serving as an inadvertent software beta-testing laboratory, is that they include voters’ second picks in their calculus. . . . The biggest overall shift was from businessman Andrew Yang to former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.” We saw this same Buttigieg Bump at our own caucus site. In teaching we talk about the importance of Visible Learning. Likewise, a caucus provides Visible Voting and analysis.
And so I’m left with more questions than answers. In a vote where so many had second thoughts, what do second choices reveal? And what other applicable lessons can we find in the results from Monday night?
Last week I returned to two pages from one of the core texts of our 2019 summer course on the Secondary Reading and Writing Workshop.
On p. 8 of Workshopping the Canon (2017), Mary E. Styslinger writes:
Along with the above, when structuring reading and writing workshops around classical works in middle and high school classrooms, it is important to keep in mind the stages of reading literature suggested by Milner, Milner, and Mitchell (2012). They proposed four stages of reading literature: (1) reader response, (2) interpretive community, (3) formal analysis, and (4) critical synthesis. This four-stage construct moves student readers from responding personally to sharing and deepening these responses within an interpretive community, to illuminating them through formal analysis, and toward synthesizing critical perspectives into their own interpretation. Milner et al. (2012) explained the teacher’s role during the initial stage of reading as nurturing unmediated, unencumbered, felt responses to the text. Once students have responded to the text personally, they are ready to move into an interpretive community, as teachers facilitate engagements that bring students together to unravel the text. During formal analysis, we help students explore the craft of the text read, noting such elements as plot, character, setting, point of view, tone, style, themes, or symbols.In the final stage of reading literature, critical synthesis, the text is considered from the perspectives of varied schools of literary criticism, such as historical/ biographical, moral/philosophical, archetypal, feminist, Marxist, or Freudian.
And on p. 49 of Workshopping the Canon (2017) Styslinger continues:
While the more text-centered theory/pedagogy of New Criticism may seem at odds with reader response, it does not have to be. As Rosenblatt (2003) clarified, “Emphasis on the reader need not exclude teaching criteria of valid interpretation or application of various approaches, literary and social, to the process of critical interpretation and evaluation” (p. 7). In the workshopping classroom, we begin with reader response, allowing and encouraging students to bring prior knowledge—their personality traits, past events, present needs, physical conditions, moods, and preoccupations—to the text. These initial associations form the foundation on which we build, establishing an interpretive classroom community through sharing of personal responses, then engaging in more formal analysis and critical study. During formal analysis, we guide students in understanding how a text achieves its effects and, often, its meaning.When we embark on critical study, we view a text through one or more literary theories (e.g., historical/biographical, moral/philosophical, Freudian, feminist, archetypal, Marxist, formalist, rhetorical, deconstructionist, new historical, etc.).
As I look at these different lenses, I find that I am more comfortable using the Feminist and the Social Class lenses. When I was teaching AP Literature & Composition, I used the Postcolonial Lens during our critical study of The Heart of Darkness. Now as I’m confronted with an Equity Challenge by my administration, I’m thinking that my application of the Postcolonial lens to justThe Heart of Darkness was too limiting. So I’ve been re-viewing my teaching practices. What teaching strategies do I need to return to and to strengthen for contemporary use? How can these lenses work with nonfiction? If my teaching is too myopic, perhaps this is just the prescription that I need.
One text that influenced me in the past was Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015). In her third edition, Appleman includes these two strategies for exploring the Postcolonial lens:
Search the text for references to colonization or current and formerly colonized people. In these references, how are the colonized people portrayed? How is the process of colonization portrayed?
Consider what images of “others” or processes of “othering” are present in the text. How are these “others” portrayed?
And Appleman goes on to write: “Analyze how the text deals with cultural conflicts between the colonizing culture and colonized or traditional culture” (p. 203).
So this week I’m turning my attention to the “processes of othering” that are present in our culture, in my school and in my classroom. I’ll try to give a vision update soon.
Creating Secondary Reading/Writing Workshops:Teaching for Transfer, Transformation, and Authentic Engagement
July 8 – Aug. 2, 2019
In Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle’s afterward of 180 Days, they write: “We believe our profession needs just what our students need: less standardization and more teacher creativity. Less common ground and more radical transformations, beginning with the smart thinking and professionalism of each of you. Let us recapture the spirit of innovation that is the central ingredient in great, passionate teaching. Let us make decisions that lead to increased student engagement with reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Let us slow down and go deeper, even if this means the entire curriculum is not covered” (p. 225).
Join us as we critically examine and comment on the scholarship in 180 Days, Berit Gordan’s No More Fake Reading, and Mary E. Styslinger’s Workshopping the Canon in order to radically transform our secondary ELA classrooms into smart, innovative, and inspiring reading/writing workshops. Workshopping the Canon is an NCTE Reads summer book club selection this summer!
After taking this class, participants will form
a strengthened set of beliefs, daily practices, and the knowledge to transfer “essential reading understandings” (Gordan, p. 18) for Iowa classrooms.
a guiding philosophy that balances and/or blends independent reading, bookclubs, and core texts.
a guiding philosophy that teaches a rhythm for teaching writing (narrative, informational, argument) and research (multigenre project).
an understanding of how the workshop structure allows us to maximize profound connections with our students by providing frequent formative evaluations, supportive interventions, greater teacher clarity, and authentic feedback.
We’ll collaborate, communicate, create, and think together. Join us, enter your heroic zone of proximal development, and walk away with a renewed spirit of innovation and the knowledge to empower and engage your students this fall.
For more information or to enroll, visit AEA Online.
“Gender-swap Justice League” by randychiu is licensed under CC BY 2.0
In my mind, I thought we would be done with “Our Image-driven Culture” unit by the end of March. But now it is April, and we are just starting to look at Digital Audio and Podcasting.
For the unit on images, we examined gender using a sociological lens and did content analyses of our work. Here’s one document that we used to prepare for our analyses.
In the next few days, Multimedia Composition students will post their content analysis presentations on their blogs.
COURSE DESCRIPTION In Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy, Renee Hobbs reminds us that “Digital literacy competencies are important for learners in all fields of study” (p. vii) and that “Today, every student needs to be able to create to learn” (p. iv). This course focuses on the lifelong learning process that involves accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action, using the power of communication and information to make a difference in the world.
Create to Learn balances critical thinking about media and digital composition with digital media creation. We’ll use critical questions about the purpose, form and content of all forms of communication, and then we’ll apply our knowledge to create blogs, social media posts, digital images, podcasts, infographics, video production, screencasts, and animation.
Four Period 6 students help each other with their blogs. They were also noticing that it had been a long time since I had added a blog post to my blog.
‘BUT WHAT DO YOU DO IN THAT CLASS?’
In the last few weeks, I’ve had several students ask about Multimedia Composition. “But what do you do in that class?” one junior asked me last week. After I explained what we do, I could tell by the tilt of her head and the tone of her voice that my response was unfulfilling. I didn’t have the course overview in my short-term memory.
One Period 6 student brainstorms a possible tagline for his blog. The overall goal for the last two days has been to couple creativity and the concept of play in learning.
So far, we’ve read from six chapters in Create to Learn, and I’ve tried to create microlearning opportunities of our topics using Bookwidgets. We’ve looked at contemporary blogs, discussed the characteristics of blog posts, and then analyzed the content of blog posts. After several snow days and days away from school because of a Polar Vortex, we’re moving to the creation phase as students are creating their own blogs and their initial blog posts.
STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
One of the headings in Chapter 5 of Create to Learn is “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” As you have probably noticed, Create to Learn is an essential mentor text for me and for my students. But I’m also dependent of two other mentor texts: Kristen Hawley Turner and Troy Hick’s Argument in the Real World (2017) and Troy Hick’s Crafting Digital Writing (2013).
I came across an amazing quotation by L.S. Vygotsky this month: “Children grow into the intellectual life around them.” In reality, it’s not just children but all of us. And this is why I strive to surround myself and my students with mentors like Renee Hobbs, Kristen Hawley Turner, and Troy Hicks as we struggle to make a difference in the world.
