How does your investment in your RQ and the students’ background about your topic affect the research?
I think it hugely affects the book club research, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing as long as we come clean about it. During Jason’s Researcher’s Chair yesterday, he verbally sketched out an outline for an article on his topic, and he was adamant about starting with the “why.” As he explained his rationale for this approach, I remember thinking that his passion (think positive connotation here) for this subject would drive the piece, its voice, and, eventually, its impact on the reader.
Teacher research is just too intensive (again, think positively) to take on if you aren’t invested in the topic. And while this goes against the traditional notions of the Researcher in the white coat with the pocket protector and his (and, yes, the image has historically been male) supposed objectivity, there’s got to be some passion back there somewhere.
In the physics wing of the engineering building where we’re holding the summer institute, there’s a terrific quotation by Einstein that I’ll get and post here, but the gist of it is that his outlook was driven by passionate curiosity, something he considered a terrific strength. So, yeah, I think the passion’s gotta be there, both to prompt and sustain the work.
In the case of the students’ background on engaging in civil discourse via book clubs, again, we’ve discovered that this is hugely important. One thing that’s been interesting to me is that the premise I had going in to this work—that students don’t have a plethora of civil discourse models to glean from in this culture—is proving to be true. At first, Rebecca and I actually tried to emulate the traditional white-coat mentality, I suppose, because we didn’t let the kids in on what we were doing. We just observed while they read edgy books to see what happened. And basically, what happened was that they while they did have mostly well-behaved book club conversations, when edgy topics came up, they either giggled their way through them or ignored them altogether. So our more distanced approach was useful in this regard.
But the next semester we ran book clubs, we wondered why we’d been so secretive. Why not tell them what we’re interested in, see how they respond to that premise, and let them reflect those thoughts from the very beginning as they set their book club norms?
It made a difference, so it did shape our research, but deliberately so. And our documentation of that process is part of our data set, so it’s something we can account for as we share our findings. We learned more from that book club sequence that we want to shape our next round of our teaching and research as well. But that’s what teacher research is all about. Teaching to understand and make well-informed adjustments as a result.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
if your research were a color...
During Morning Pages time today, Stacey posed a series of prompts to us to help us think about our research in metaphorical terms. Here's what I wrote:
If our book club research were a color, it would be the muddy grey that Easter Egg water becomes when you dip all the eggs in all the water. I was watching family videos recently, and that’s how toddlers dye Easter Eggs—one egg, all colors because those bowls of tinted water are just too irresistible for one. Even the most patient parents eventually give up and let ‘em go at it because no degree of explanation works in advance. Kids just have to be okay with the mottled outcome or wind up being comforted, learning their lesson, and going the more conventional route—one dye vat per Easter egg. Eventually, they might get clever and figure out how to suspend the egg in one vat until that color sets and then move it to another for a nifty two-tone effect. Or they might learn how to create secondary colors by taking it a vat at a time—red + blue = purple. Or if the multi-color temptation persists, they learn to use crayolas and let the dye take the backseat as a background color.
I wonder if teacher research methods are similar? My approach is generally to deliberately collect certain kinds of data and then keep everything else for context “just in case.” This can be overwhelming, but it also allows me to be selective later.
I’ve also used layered forms of data analysis if I get a richer picture that way. If different filters give me different views, then I’ll do it, methodological purists be damned. Generally, though, I take a first pass through and then at least another, much like a two-step Easter egg process.
The same has been true for the book club research because each BC sequence has resulted in new questions and adjustments that we need to pursue for another round. I hope the vats of dye are infinite because I know this Easter egg will never be finished.
If our book club research were a color, it would be the muddy grey that Easter Egg water becomes when you dip all the eggs in all the water. I was watching family videos recently, and that’s how toddlers dye Easter Eggs—one egg, all colors because those bowls of tinted water are just too irresistible for one. Even the most patient parents eventually give up and let ‘em go at it because no degree of explanation works in advance. Kids just have to be okay with the mottled outcome or wind up being comforted, learning their lesson, and going the more conventional route—one dye vat per Easter egg. Eventually, they might get clever and figure out how to suspend the egg in one vat until that color sets and then move it to another for a nifty two-tone effect. Or they might learn how to create secondary colors by taking it a vat at a time—red + blue = purple. Or if the multi-color temptation persists, they learn to use crayolas and let the dye take the backseat as a background color.
I wonder if teacher research methods are similar? My approach is generally to deliberately collect certain kinds of data and then keep everything else for context “just in case.” This can be overwhelming, but it also allows me to be selective later.
I’ve also used layered forms of data analysis if I get a richer picture that way. If different filters give me different views, then I’ll do it, methodological purists be damned. Generally, though, I take a first pass through and then at least another, much like a two-step Easter egg process.
The same has been true for the book club research because each BC sequence has resulted in new questions and adjustments that we need to pursue for another round. I hope the vats of dye are infinite because I know this Easter egg will never be finished.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
a little ditty I like to call "reality, perception, and the nature of truth"
Okay, so Natalie has set the bar REALLY high with her individual morning pages prompts (AND pictures—really, we’re all kind of hating her right now, but in a good-natured writing project kind of way). And I’d probably be tapping right away except that Stacey made the fruit dip that is so yummy, you really need your own bowl to stick your whole face in. But enough stalling…
Natalie’s posed a real doozy of a prompt for me:
“How do you tell what’s real from what’s perception? What I mean is, how do we determine the changes that occur as a result of what we do as t-rs and changes that would have naturally occurred anyway? How do we know what’s real—or does it really matter?”
Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking about the last question in particular, and Jason (Malone) and I were just talking about it yesterday in reference to students’ reactions to The Life of Pi, which Rebecca’s kids have been reading to mixed reviews in book clubs for the past couple of years. Well, you get the picture—more groovy serendipity in CSUWP. So it may be hard for me to think of these questions in the broader sense of t-r, but I’m going to try in the next 8 minutes.
This question really has to do with the nature of truth, I think (oh, yeah, like I’m gonna solve that problem in 8 minutes…). Okay, so I’ll take a stand. I do think that truth is in the eye of the beholder to a large extent, but I also think it does matter. Yes, there is such a thing as empirical truth, at least when it comes to inanimate objects, but as soon as something moves, well, so does the nature of truth. One of the things I’ve learned in my years as a qualitative researcher (and a human being) is that truth is to a large extent the story we tell to make sense of what happened (cf. Life of Pi again).
Maybe applying this to my recovery from back injury would be helpful here. Thankfully, I’m having more good days than bad days now, but the task of late for my physical therapist and me is often to figure out why that is and how to avoid more pain on the bad days or to replicate more wellbeing on the good days. She’s encouraged me to keep a daily journal to note what I did, what my pain level was, what adjustments I’ve had to make in my activities, and so forth. As a result of that journal, I’ve started paying attention to my body more than I did prior to the injury so that even on the days I don’t have time to make a journal entry, I still am writing one in my head.
The conclusion we almost always come to is that in both cases, we can’t pin down a single cause. Almost always, it’s a combination—I didn’t rest enough or was experiencing high levels of stress or did a handstand in the swimming pool (okay, that was pretty stupid), therefore I had a bad day. While we can both see the results of the bad day—visible spasms in my back—we aren’t always able to pinpoint the cause. However, because of I’m more aware of potential variables overall and am able to make accommodations to avoid them, I’m beginning to have more good days as a result.
So how does that connect to t-r? (I have 5 whole minutes to go here, so be kind if I miss the mark ☺) I think that one of the differences that teacher research and its concomitant methods make is that I become more mindful. I wonder more. I document my observations, so that I can reflect on them and draw conclusions that result in deliberate changes I make to my teaching and to my thinking about it.
The result for me as a teacher has been that I have more good days than bad. But more significantly, I think that my definitions of “good” and “bad” have changed. In fact, both have nearly been replaced altogether with “interesting.” To borrow an idea from Maclean and Mohr, the teacher-researcher mindset has allowed me to approach my teaching with more professional distance rather than automatically (and rather self-centeredly) assuming that I am responsible for every behavior or event that occurs in my classroom.
No matter how many classroom management books we read, we don’t have near as much control as we’d like to think we have (and this is also true in life, I’m afraid). Sure, we can set a tone and do what we can to help students maintain it, but kids are agents, too, and we can no more determine the exact experience they will have as individuals in our classroom than we can make sure everyone has a fabulous time at our next dinner party. We can work within our own set of variables to make one possible, but in the end, everyone is responsible for having her or his own fabulous time.
So going back to Natalie’s prompt, my perception—the story I tell myself—is also my reality to some extent. But teacher research provides me with some tools I can use to hone that perception so that I arrive at a more complex understanding of teaching and learning (both mine and my students’) and the nature of truth in both realms.
Natalie’s posed a real doozy of a prompt for me:
“How do you tell what’s real from what’s perception? What I mean is, how do we determine the changes that occur as a result of what we do as t-rs and changes that would have naturally occurred anyway? How do we know what’s real—or does it really matter?”
Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking about the last question in particular, and Jason (Malone) and I were just talking about it yesterday in reference to students’ reactions to The Life of Pi, which Rebecca’s kids have been reading to mixed reviews in book clubs for the past couple of years. Well, you get the picture—more groovy serendipity in CSUWP. So it may be hard for me to think of these questions in the broader sense of t-r, but I’m going to try in the next 8 minutes.
This question really has to do with the nature of truth, I think (oh, yeah, like I’m gonna solve that problem in 8 minutes…). Okay, so I’ll take a stand. I do think that truth is in the eye of the beholder to a large extent, but I also think it does matter. Yes, there is such a thing as empirical truth, at least when it comes to inanimate objects, but as soon as something moves, well, so does the nature of truth. One of the things I’ve learned in my years as a qualitative researcher (and a human being) is that truth is to a large extent the story we tell to make sense of what happened (cf. Life of Pi again).
Maybe applying this to my recovery from back injury would be helpful here. Thankfully, I’m having more good days than bad days now, but the task of late for my physical therapist and me is often to figure out why that is and how to avoid more pain on the bad days or to replicate more wellbeing on the good days. She’s encouraged me to keep a daily journal to note what I did, what my pain level was, what adjustments I’ve had to make in my activities, and so forth. As a result of that journal, I’ve started paying attention to my body more than I did prior to the injury so that even on the days I don’t have time to make a journal entry, I still am writing one in my head.
The conclusion we almost always come to is that in both cases, we can’t pin down a single cause. Almost always, it’s a combination—I didn’t rest enough or was experiencing high levels of stress or did a handstand in the swimming pool (okay, that was pretty stupid), therefore I had a bad day. While we can both see the results of the bad day—visible spasms in my back—we aren’t always able to pinpoint the cause. However, because of I’m more aware of potential variables overall and am able to make accommodations to avoid them, I’m beginning to have more good days as a result.
So how does that connect to t-r? (I have 5 whole minutes to go here, so be kind if I miss the mark ☺) I think that one of the differences that teacher research and its concomitant methods make is that I become more mindful. I wonder more. I document my observations, so that I can reflect on them and draw conclusions that result in deliberate changes I make to my teaching and to my thinking about it.
The result for me as a teacher has been that I have more good days than bad. But more significantly, I think that my definitions of “good” and “bad” have changed. In fact, both have nearly been replaced altogether with “interesting.” To borrow an idea from Maclean and Mohr, the teacher-researcher mindset has allowed me to approach my teaching with more professional distance rather than automatically (and rather self-centeredly) assuming that I am responsible for every behavior or event that occurs in my classroom.
No matter how many classroom management books we read, we don’t have near as much control as we’d like to think we have (and this is also true in life, I’m afraid). Sure, we can set a tone and do what we can to help students maintain it, but kids are agents, too, and we can no more determine the exact experience they will have as individuals in our classroom than we can make sure everyone has a fabulous time at our next dinner party. We can work within our own set of variables to make one possible, but in the end, everyone is responsible for having her or his own fabulous time.
So going back to Natalie’s prompt, my perception—the story I tell myself—is also my reality to some extent. But teacher research provides me with some tools I can use to hone that perception so that I arrive at a more complex understanding of teaching and learning (both mine and my students’) and the nature of truth in both realms.
Monday, June 25, 2007
checking back in
Okay, so it took longer than a week to get back here, but as I just told everyone in the AI (sorry for looking directly at you, Steph), our first mantra for the next 2 weeks is "no guilt." Also, swearing is okay, and sometimes to be expected, during CSUWP activities and teacher research in general.
So no guilt.
The face-to-face part of the AI began today, and despite the fact that CSUWP is running (count them) NINE programs this summer and I'm as tired as I look, I'm really excited to be here. Right now, we're writing morning pages via our blogs, so if anyone wants to check in on us over the next 2 weeks, you can get a play-by-play of our thinking and hopefully our progress in our own work. Our morning pages prompt today is simply to check in and think about what's next for us this week. What have we already done, and what do we want to do now?
As I said a couple of entries back, Cam and Rebecca and I have got a whole lot of data--fieldnotes, book club discussion records, mandalas (I think), freewrites, and a taped discussion, I'm hoping to:
* get caught up on the AI blog
* get all that data organized and begin analyzing it with Rebecca (and Cam, too, if possible), and
* get some outside reading done about civil discourse
* make a sabbatical plan
Oh, yeah, and also to work our way through our AI schedule by learning more together about teacher research.
That plan may be too ambitious, but it's a place to start, and the good news about it is that I'll have a to-do list when I leave here, too.
So no guilt.
The face-to-face part of the AI began today, and despite the fact that CSUWP is running (count them) NINE programs this summer and I'm as tired as I look, I'm really excited to be here. Right now, we're writing morning pages via our blogs, so if anyone wants to check in on us over the next 2 weeks, you can get a play-by-play of our thinking and hopefully our progress in our own work. Our morning pages prompt today is simply to check in and think about what's next for us this week. What have we already done, and what do we want to do now?
As I said a couple of entries back, Cam and Rebecca and I have got a whole lot of data--fieldnotes, book club discussion records, mandalas (I think), freewrites, and a taped discussion, I'm hoping to:
* get caught up on the AI blog
* get all that data organized and begin analyzing it with Rebecca (and Cam, too, if possible), and
* get some outside reading done about civil discourse
* make a sabbatical plan
Oh, yeah, and also to work our way through our AI schedule by learning more together about teacher research.
That plan may be too ambitious, but it's a place to start, and the good news about it is that I'll have a to-do list when I leave here, too.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
i need to take a week or so off
I won't be blogging this week. Two of my h.s. daughter's best friends were in a car accident on Friday night, and one of them was killed. The other was injured but is out of the hospital. We know both families very well and are helping with many of the arrangements this week, so blogging's not at the top of my list. I'll be back in a week or so.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
this is the good part
I am blissfully awash in data. I'm working in both Rebecca and Cameron's classes now, so I have double the fun--fieldnotes, student freewrites, book club norming sheets, discussion records. And all of it wonderfully surprising and stimulating.
I should update you on my and Rebecca's experiment the last couple of weeks. It worked. And I don't mean that in the sense that I often say the phrase when I'm talking about my teaching. It worked in a teacher research sense, meaning that we got good data out of the deal. (NOTE TO SELF: I want to come back to this notion of what it means to say something "works" as a teacher researcher in a later post.)
If you scroll down to a post I made a couple of weeks ago ("Dragon Drawings and Other Social Postures"), you'll see that we wanted to try to cue kids to talk more about the difficult, controversial, or challenging aspects of their book club texts, and we also wanted to hear whether or not their book club interactions influenced their understanding and interpretations of their books. So for their last two book club sessions, we've tried using the freewrites to book-end the period. A week ago, immediately prior to their book clubs, Rebecca asked them to free write for a few minutes to this prompt:
"What challenges, controversies, or difficulties did you encounter in this section of your reading? How did you react to them?"
After students had written for several minutes, they moved into book clubs and began their discussion. As usual, she asked them to talk as they wished and at some point to record each members' best contribution on a discussion record. At the bottom of that record, we also ask them to consider a question common to every book club in the room. For the question on the discussion record that day, we asked them to make a bulleted list of some of the ideas they had written about in their individual free writes and to briefly consider how others in their group reacted to the same issues. Again, the point of this was to help them actually discuss these if they hadn't done so previously.
Then after book clubs wound down, Rebecca asked students to draw a line across the middle of the page where their previous free write ended and write this time about how they now felt about the same issues after having discussed them with their other book club members and why.
Because we liked the rhythm of this process last Monday (and the data it produced), we tried it again yesterday, but changed the questions slightly. In the first freewrite, we asked students to also identify the issues they felt most passionately about from those had listed, to explain why, and then to consider how their understanding of that particular issue was influenced by their personal background (e.g., social class, gender, ethnicity, upbringing, where you live, etc.). Students were again cued by our discussion record question to discuss these issues, and then for the final free write, Rebecca asked them to do a couple of things:
1) to think about how others in their book club had influenced their reading experiences, and
2) to rate their book club experience overall (thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or somewhere in between) and describe how reading in a book club was different from reading alone.
Through this series of questions on students' freewrite, we're trying to cue students to think about how their responses to text are shaped by both their own backgrounds and their interactions with others. We're also asking them to rehearse these ideas before they have to share them with other members in their book clubs, and we're attempting to collect data in these areas as well.
We haven't formally analyzed either set of free writes yet, though we did skim them after both classes, and they're practically burning a hole in my backpack. On that cursory read, however, I've been fascinated to see how kids are defining "tough topics" (i.e., what they found "difficult, controversial, or challenging"). The one response that's stuck with me for two weeks now was by a kid Rebecca says is incredibly bright. He's reading _Cry the Beloved Country_ by Alan Paton.
If you don't know that book, it's set in the forties in South Africa just prior to apartheid legislation. The narrator is omniscient, but most of the action centers on the life of a black minister from a small village whose son murders a white anti-apartheid activist during a botched burglary in Johannesburg. Rebecca and I chose this book because it's what I call a "green-light text" in _The Book Club Companion_. In other words, because the book is a classic, most students and parents accept it without question as a book appropriate to be read in school. As I argue in my book, I think it's important to include at least one of these in any book club book set so that kids can opt out of more in-your-face texts and topics if they aren't ready for them yet. In my and Rebecca's minds, though, this book still qualifies as a tough text because of its subject matter and its difficulty level.
Now back to the kid and his first free write. Let's call him Jack.
Rebecca and I have observed over this book club cycle that the students reading this book have been detached from it overall. That has played out across the data we've collected so far as well. In his first free write, Jack commented that he knew that race was *supposed to be* the controversial topic in this book, but honestly, it hadn't been personally controversial for him, partially because he didn't have to deal with it in his own life (not surprising since this is a white kid writing in a mostly white school and community) but also because of the way the story was told. In the latter case, the narrator's voice had distanced him from the story. Jack went on to say, however, that WHAT MIGHT BE CONTROVERSIAL IS THE FACT THAT HE AND OTHERS IN SOCIETY FEEL DISTANCED FROM RACISM, PERIOD.
Wow.
I mean WOW. How insightful is that? Remember, this is a fifteen-year-old talking.
Except that I'm out of time, I could keep writing. I don't know if Jack shared his insight with the rest of his book club or if he just discovered it during the moment of writing or if he's thought about it since. Suffice it to say that I have, though. Even in the cursory first read of data analysis, that insight alone has kept me thinking, has generated more conversations with Rebecca and Cam, and has resulted in my hunch that we need to provide even more curricular scaffolding than I'd anticipated when we're asking kids to read tough texts. My conversations with Cam and Rebecca have resulted in the generation of some new curricular materials that I'm pretty excited to try out and a whole lot of new questions.
So stay tuned. This is getting good.
I should update you on my and Rebecca's experiment the last couple of weeks. It worked. And I don't mean that in the sense that I often say the phrase when I'm talking about my teaching. It worked in a teacher research sense, meaning that we got good data out of the deal. (NOTE TO SELF: I want to come back to this notion of what it means to say something "works" as a teacher researcher in a later post.)
If you scroll down to a post I made a couple of weeks ago ("Dragon Drawings and Other Social Postures"), you'll see that we wanted to try to cue kids to talk more about the difficult, controversial, or challenging aspects of their book club texts, and we also wanted to hear whether or not their book club interactions influenced their understanding and interpretations of their books. So for their last two book club sessions, we've tried using the freewrites to book-end the period. A week ago, immediately prior to their book clubs, Rebecca asked them to free write for a few minutes to this prompt:
"What challenges, controversies, or difficulties did you encounter in this section of your reading? How did you react to them?"
After students had written for several minutes, they moved into book clubs and began their discussion. As usual, she asked them to talk as they wished and at some point to record each members' best contribution on a discussion record. At the bottom of that record, we also ask them to consider a question common to every book club in the room. For the question on the discussion record that day, we asked them to make a bulleted list of some of the ideas they had written about in their individual free writes and to briefly consider how others in their group reacted to the same issues. Again, the point of this was to help them actually discuss these if they hadn't done so previously.
Then after book clubs wound down, Rebecca asked students to draw a line across the middle of the page where their previous free write ended and write this time about how they now felt about the same issues after having discussed them with their other book club members and why.
Because we liked the rhythm of this process last Monday (and the data it produced), we tried it again yesterday, but changed the questions slightly. In the first freewrite, we asked students to also identify the issues they felt most passionately about from those had listed, to explain why, and then to consider how their understanding of that particular issue was influenced by their personal background (e.g., social class, gender, ethnicity, upbringing, where you live, etc.). Students were again cued by our discussion record question to discuss these issues, and then for the final free write, Rebecca asked them to do a couple of things:
1) to think about how others in their book club had influenced their reading experiences, and
2) to rate their book club experience overall (thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or somewhere in between) and describe how reading in a book club was different from reading alone.
Through this series of questions on students' freewrite, we're trying to cue students to think about how their responses to text are shaped by both their own backgrounds and their interactions with others. We're also asking them to rehearse these ideas before they have to share them with other members in their book clubs, and we're attempting to collect data in these areas as well.
We haven't formally analyzed either set of free writes yet, though we did skim them after both classes, and they're practically burning a hole in my backpack. On that cursory read, however, I've been fascinated to see how kids are defining "tough topics" (i.e., what they found "difficult, controversial, or challenging"). The one response that's stuck with me for two weeks now was by a kid Rebecca says is incredibly bright. He's reading _Cry the Beloved Country_ by Alan Paton.
If you don't know that book, it's set in the forties in South Africa just prior to apartheid legislation. The narrator is omniscient, but most of the action centers on the life of a black minister from a small village whose son murders a white anti-apartheid activist during a botched burglary in Johannesburg. Rebecca and I chose this book because it's what I call a "green-light text" in _The Book Club Companion_. In other words, because the book is a classic, most students and parents accept it without question as a book appropriate to be read in school. As I argue in my book, I think it's important to include at least one of these in any book club book set so that kids can opt out of more in-your-face texts and topics if they aren't ready for them yet. In my and Rebecca's minds, though, this book still qualifies as a tough text because of its subject matter and its difficulty level.
Now back to the kid and his first free write. Let's call him Jack.
Rebecca and I have observed over this book club cycle that the students reading this book have been detached from it overall. That has played out across the data we've collected so far as well. In his first free write, Jack commented that he knew that race was *supposed to be* the controversial topic in this book, but honestly, it hadn't been personally controversial for him, partially because he didn't have to deal with it in his own life (not surprising since this is a white kid writing in a mostly white school and community) but also because of the way the story was told. In the latter case, the narrator's voice had distanced him from the story. Jack went on to say, however, that WHAT MIGHT BE CONTROVERSIAL IS THE FACT THAT HE AND OTHERS IN SOCIETY FEEL DISTANCED FROM RACISM, PERIOD.
Wow.
I mean WOW. How insightful is that? Remember, this is a fifteen-year-old talking.
Except that I'm out of time, I could keep writing. I don't know if Jack shared his insight with the rest of his book club or if he just discovered it during the moment of writing or if he's thought about it since. Suffice it to say that I have, though. Even in the cursory first read of data analysis, that insight alone has kept me thinking, has generated more conversations with Rebecca and Cam, and has resulted in my hunch that we need to provide even more curricular scaffolding than I'd anticipated when we're asking kids to read tough texts. My conversations with Cam and Rebecca have resulted in the generation of some new curricular materials that I'm pretty excited to try out and a whole lot of new questions.
So stay tuned. This is getting good.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Hi, kiddies, guess who I am today: teacher or researcher or both?
Wow, I have so much to say that I can't blog it all in one entry (SIDE NOTE: I'm trying to give myself permission to write shorter entries so that I'll post more regularly :). In fact, this entry started out as a comment on Rebecca's blog that was just going on far too long. Incidentally, you should go read that entry because it's a really good one.
Her entry brings up the question: In any given classroom situation--say, student making and commenting loudly on his dragon drawings in book club while other students are trying to talk about the book--how do you manage the observant researcher with the dutiful teacher? Because they often aren't the same thing.
This tension between the dual roles of the teacher researcher comes up on a regular basis in teacher researcher Karen Gallas's work, too [see NOTE below]. She's done her t-r in a primary classroom, and she's usually looking at some pretty hot-button issues like race, gender, and class and how these get played out among young children.
My teacher research group in Oklahoma and I used to talk about the dual-role tension in her work because we sometimes questioned whether or not the teacher in us would let a particular activity go on to the extent it did in Gallas's classroom all in the name of collecting data.
I just now looked at what "the Marians," as Bud calls them, had to say about this tension [Marion Maclean and Marian Mohr are the authors of Teacher Researchers at Work]. They describe an almost identical scenario to the one Rebecca describes where a kid is being disruptive during writing time. Here's how the Marians describe the teacher researcher's reaction:
"As a teacher researcher, you are trying to observe, describe, and reflect on what is happening in the classroom: to question, not to make assumptions. In your research log, you write your observations of Jeff's behaviour and make notes on reactions or the lack of reactions by the rest of the class. You jot down your own feelings and reaction, too. Finally, as a researcher, you make a note to ask jeff a question later that will help you understand the function of his pen-tapping during that day's journal writing.
But you are also the teacher, and in that role you have a responsibility to make the classroom an environment in whihc everyone can work...As a teacher, you want Jeff to be quiet and to get his writing done even though you may wonder why he isn't writing. In this situation you experience a tension between your responsibilitites as a classroom manager and classroom researcher, but your examination of Jeff's writing practices adds insights to your teaching as well as data to your research" (p. 107).
That pretty much hits the nail on the head, doesn't it? The Marians don't offer any easy answers, but they go on to say that the researcher stance is helpful in that it provides what they call some "involved distance" that allows the teacher researcher to view the kid's behavior at hand as "something of interest...points of change, informative shifts, and important clues to the learning process" (p. 108). They suggest, and I think I agree, that "(t)he research process, while it requires immersion in classroom tensions, helps [the teacher researcher] gain some control and authority over her work from an involved distance....For a teacher researcher, the shift in stance is not a shift away from being a teacher toward being a researcher. It is more a shift away from being only a participant, even a thoughtful and conscientious one, toward being someone who has the distance to take a look at the participant role. That means being prepared to address the tensions and questions that characterize the experience of doing both at the same time. Addressing those tensions and questions is one source of the depth of understanding that results from being a teacher-researcher. We are not teachers OR researchers, but both" (pp. 114-115).
So what should the teacher researcher do? Step in and insist that the kid quit disrupting others or keep observing as long as things don't get out of hand and see what the kids themselves will do? I'd say it depends--on what the teacher research question is to begin with (e.g., does it have to do with social interaction in a book club setting?) and what else I can predict about where this behavior is likely to head based on prior patterns I've observed in the classroom.
Regardless of the decision, however, clearly, ethics become an issue the minute you set out to conduct teacher research in your classroom.
One last word from Marian Mohr's "Teacher-Researcher Statement of Ethics" in Jane Zeni's Ethical Issues in Practitioner Research, a chapter we'll probably read in the summer session of the CSUWP Advanced Institute:
"1. The Teacher-Researcher Role. Teacher-researchers are teachers first. They respect those with whom they work, openly sharing information about their research. While they seek understanding and knolwedge, they also nurture the well-being of others, both students and professional colleagues."
So who are you today:)?
*NOTE: You can find a really interesting review of Gallas's book Sometimes I Can Be Anything in Education Review. In it, William Pawluck comments on the dual roles of a teacher researcher and also has a good deal to say about how the seeming insularity of Gallas's teacher research methodology is tempered by her involvement in the Brookline Teacher Research Group.
Her entry brings up the question: In any given classroom situation--say, student making and commenting loudly on his dragon drawings in book club while other students are trying to talk about the book--how do you manage the observant researcher with the dutiful teacher? Because they often aren't the same thing.
This tension between the dual roles of the teacher researcher comes up on a regular basis in teacher researcher Karen Gallas's work, too [see NOTE below]. She's done her t-r in a primary classroom, and she's usually looking at some pretty hot-button issues like race, gender, and class and how these get played out among young children.
My teacher research group in Oklahoma and I used to talk about the dual-role tension in her work because we sometimes questioned whether or not the teacher in us would let a particular activity go on to the extent it did in Gallas's classroom all in the name of collecting data.
I just now looked at what "the Marians," as Bud calls them, had to say about this tension [Marion Maclean and Marian Mohr are the authors of Teacher Researchers at Work]. They describe an almost identical scenario to the one Rebecca describes where a kid is being disruptive during writing time. Here's how the Marians describe the teacher researcher's reaction:
"As a teacher researcher, you are trying to observe, describe, and reflect on what is happening in the classroom: to question, not to make assumptions. In your research log, you write your observations of Jeff's behaviour and make notes on reactions or the lack of reactions by the rest of the class. You jot down your own feelings and reaction, too. Finally, as a researcher, you make a note to ask jeff a question later that will help you understand the function of his pen-tapping during that day's journal writing.
But you are also the teacher, and in that role you have a responsibility to make the classroom an environment in whihc everyone can work...As a teacher, you want Jeff to be quiet and to get his writing done even though you may wonder why he isn't writing. In this situation you experience a tension between your responsibilitites as a classroom manager and classroom researcher, but your examination of Jeff's writing practices adds insights to your teaching as well as data to your research" (p. 107).
That pretty much hits the nail on the head, doesn't it? The Marians don't offer any easy answers, but they go on to say that the researcher stance is helpful in that it provides what they call some "involved distance" that allows the teacher researcher to view the kid's behavior at hand as "something of interest...points of change, informative shifts, and important clues to the learning process" (p. 108). They suggest, and I think I agree, that "(t)he research process, while it requires immersion in classroom tensions, helps [the teacher researcher] gain some control and authority over her work from an involved distance....For a teacher researcher, the shift in stance is not a shift away from being a teacher toward being a researcher. It is more a shift away from being only a participant, even a thoughtful and conscientious one, toward being someone who has the distance to take a look at the participant role. That means being prepared to address the tensions and questions that characterize the experience of doing both at the same time. Addressing those tensions and questions is one source of the depth of understanding that results from being a teacher-researcher. We are not teachers OR researchers, but both" (pp. 114-115).
So what should the teacher researcher do? Step in and insist that the kid quit disrupting others or keep observing as long as things don't get out of hand and see what the kids themselves will do? I'd say it depends--on what the teacher research question is to begin with (e.g., does it have to do with social interaction in a book club setting?) and what else I can predict about where this behavior is likely to head based on prior patterns I've observed in the classroom.
Regardless of the decision, however, clearly, ethics become an issue the minute you set out to conduct teacher research in your classroom.
One last word from Marian Mohr's "Teacher-Researcher Statement of Ethics" in Jane Zeni's Ethical Issues in Practitioner Research, a chapter we'll probably read in the summer session of the CSUWP Advanced Institute:
"1. The Teacher-Researcher Role. Teacher-researchers are teachers first. They respect those with whom they work, openly sharing information about their research. While they seek understanding and knolwedge, they also nurture the well-being of others, both students and professional colleagues."
So who are you today:)?
*NOTE: You can find a really interesting review of Gallas's book Sometimes I Can Be Anything in Education Review. In it, William Pawluck comments on the dual roles of a teacher researcher and also has a good deal to say about how the seeming insularity of Gallas's teacher research methodology is tempered by her involvement in the Brookline Teacher Research Group.
Friday, April 20, 2007
dragon drawings and other social postures
Rebecca and I observed the first book club of this next round in her class last Monday, and it was fascinating as usual. This conclusion comes after several days of reflection and an afternoon of scintillating conversation on Wednesday (Rebecca is so dang smart).
We didn't necessarily feel that way on Monday post-book club, though. In fact, when we thought about how it went that day, both of us wound up fixating on the loud, at-first-glance off-task group in the corner who're reading a great YA sci-fi book called Feed. This group is comprised of 4 boys and 1 girl, who I'm pretty sure was ruing her book choice by the end of the period. When Rebecca and I thought about how different this group's reaction to the book was from the group's last semester, we were baffled. I mean, this is a great book, one of the best choices of those we're making available in terms of its tailoring to an adolescent audience. It should've been right up this group's alley.
Yet by the end of the book club, my fieldnotes show that these guys (and yes, it was the guys) were throwing pencils around, laughing raucously about their own clever substitution of the word "expletive" for the characters' swearing as they read passages aloud, and riffing on the term "weasel face" for about 5 minutues straight. At one point, the girl in the group, whom I'll call Hope, disgustedly asked, "You didn't read anything, did you?"
And that's what Rebecca and I initially thought as well, especially when we looked at the dragon drawing one of the particularly rambunctious boys had seen fit to draw on the back of the group's book club discussion record (kids summarize the group's discussion on these things). But then we took a closer look, and actually, once you got over the fact that he'd depicted all the main characters as sword-wielding dragons (he wanted to read a book with a sword, he told us the day they chose books), it was pretty darn right on. It recorded one of the most significant scenes that had occurred in the book at that point and did so in some detail, all of it accurate. What were we to make of this?
Later during our Wednesday conversation, Rebecca said she had a hunch that all the kids in the Feed group probably had read, at least based on their past track records with other books and assignments. So our next question became, then why were the boys working so hard to look as if they haven't? I'll cut to the chase here, but the conclusion we eventually arrived at is that while we have been attentive to social interactions within book clubs ever since we started studying them, we've only recently (okay, as recently as Wednesday) begun to articulate the unspoken question that we think is pretty present in adolescent readers' minds in a book club setting:
"How do I want others to read me?"
In some ways, this is an old-ish question. Peg Finders has been thinking about it for quite some time in regard to gender roles middle-school girls display through their literacy practices, and http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Practices-Social-Acts-Classroom/dp/0805836780/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-8360087-2614562?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177094783&sr=1-2 has long had some provocative things to say about intermediate elementary students' social roles in the context of literature circles. However, I don't know of anyone who's currently considering this question in regard to adolescents (dis)engaged in the more free-flowing conversation of book clubs. So that's good news for us. At least in terms of research.
In terms of actually working with kids this coming Monday? Well, that's a different story. So the experiment we'll try then is based on our hunch that kids are reacting privately to books in ways their more public social roles might prohibit them from sharing during book club. At the same time, their social interactions during book club are likely to shape their private readings in turn.
For instance, if you as a private reader noted on a sticky note that a topic was controversial, yet you got to book club and found that no one else felt similarly, would you say something and risk your response as being marked as alien to that of your peers? If your 15-year-old self was having a particularly high self-esteem day, maybe so. But a lot of other times, we're guessing maybe not.
Here's our pedagogical experiment, then, which hopefully won't be too simplistic. Immediately prior to book clubs on Monday, we're going to ask students to do a quickwrite to identify any challenges, controversies, or difficulties they encountered in this section of the book (incidentally, we're also interested in how they're defining these terms). Then we'll observe their book club interactions and ask them to do another quickwrite post-book club to describe what they think now in regard to these challenges. Did their reactions change, stay the same, or something else, and why?
It's sure to be interesting. We'll keep you posted on what we're finding out.
We didn't necessarily feel that way on Monday post-book club, though. In fact, when we thought about how it went that day, both of us wound up fixating on the loud, at-first-glance off-task group in the corner who're reading a great YA sci-fi book called Feed. This group is comprised of 4 boys and 1 girl, who I'm pretty sure was ruing her book choice by the end of the period. When Rebecca and I thought about how different this group's reaction to the book was from the group's last semester, we were baffled. I mean, this is a great book, one of the best choices of those we're making available in terms of its tailoring to an adolescent audience. It should've been right up this group's alley.
Yet by the end of the book club, my fieldnotes show that these guys (and yes, it was the guys) were throwing pencils around, laughing raucously about their own clever substitution of the word "expletive" for the characters' swearing as they read passages aloud, and riffing on the term "weasel face" for about 5 minutues straight. At one point, the girl in the group, whom I'll call Hope, disgustedly asked, "You didn't read anything, did you?"
And that's what Rebecca and I initially thought as well, especially when we looked at the dragon drawing one of the particularly rambunctious boys had seen fit to draw on the back of the group's book club discussion record (kids summarize the group's discussion on these things). But then we took a closer look, and actually, once you got over the fact that he'd depicted all the main characters as sword-wielding dragons (he wanted to read a book with a sword, he told us the day they chose books), it was pretty darn right on. It recorded one of the most significant scenes that had occurred in the book at that point and did so in some detail, all of it accurate. What were we to make of this?
Later during our Wednesday conversation, Rebecca said she had a hunch that all the kids in the Feed group probably had read, at least based on their past track records with other books and assignments. So our next question became, then why were the boys working so hard to look as if they haven't? I'll cut to the chase here, but the conclusion we eventually arrived at is that while we have been attentive to social interactions within book clubs ever since we started studying them, we've only recently (okay, as recently as Wednesday) begun to articulate the unspoken question that we think is pretty present in adolescent readers' minds in a book club setting:
"How do I want others to read me?"
In some ways, this is an old-ish question. Peg Finders has been thinking about it for quite some time in regard to gender roles middle-school girls display through their literacy practices, and http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Practices-Social-Acts-Classroom/dp/0805836780/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-8360087-2614562?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177094783&sr=1-2 has long had some provocative things to say about intermediate elementary students' social roles in the context of literature circles. However, I don't know of anyone who's currently considering this question in regard to adolescents (dis)engaged in the more free-flowing conversation of book clubs. So that's good news for us. At least in terms of research.
In terms of actually working with kids this coming Monday? Well, that's a different story. So the experiment we'll try then is based on our hunch that kids are reacting privately to books in ways their more public social roles might prohibit them from sharing during book club. At the same time, their social interactions during book club are likely to shape their private readings in turn.
For instance, if you as a private reader noted on a sticky note that a topic was controversial, yet you got to book club and found that no one else felt similarly, would you say something and risk your response as being marked as alien to that of your peers? If your 15-year-old self was having a particularly high self-esteem day, maybe so. But a lot of other times, we're guessing maybe not.
Here's our pedagogical experiment, then, which hopefully won't be too simplistic. Immediately prior to book clubs on Monday, we're going to ask students to do a quickwrite to identify any challenges, controversies, or difficulties they encountered in this section of the book (incidentally, we're also interested in how they're defining these terms). Then we'll observe their book club interactions and ask them to do another quickwrite post-book club to describe what they think now in regard to these challenges. Did their reactions change, stay the same, or something else, and why?
It's sure to be interesting. We'll keep you posted on what we're finding out.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
check out the new links
To the right, I've added lots of new links to blogs and sites by lots of cool people. One is to the "mother blog" of the new CSU Writing Project Advanced Institute. Starting in a couple of weeks, we'll be conducting an online book club on various articles in Working toward Equity, a recent and terrific new publication by the Teacher Research Collaborative. In fact, the entire book is available for FREE download at this same location on the NWP website. If you can't take part in the Advanced Institute this summer, this would be a good way to participate vicariously and via comments if you're interested.
I'd also like to call your attention to my new baby--my little podcasting show called "This Project's Life," where I'm posting brief interviews with CSUWP members every other week or so. You'll also want to take a look at the rest of the our new website, including the new (and brief) videos of CSUWP members because they're a lot of fun.
I'd also like to call your attention to my new baby--my little podcasting show called "This Project's Life," where I'm posting brief interviews with CSUWP members every other week or so. You'll also want to take a look at the rest of the our new website, including the new (and brief) videos of CSUWP members because they're a lot of fun.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
i'm baa-ack...
Even though I haven't been blogging in a while (geez...2-month hiatus), I've been reading a lot of other people's blogs. Does that count for something? If not, I'm a virtual slacker. I'm okay with that.
In reading those other blogs, though, one thing I've discovered is that confessionals are pretty dang common. A lot of people apologize because life gets in the way. I could do that, too, and it might actually be relatively interesting, but I'm going to resist.
Instead, I'm writing from the very first meeting of the very first CSU Writing Project (CSUWP) Advanced Institute. So while I may be a slacker, I also belong to a group of groundbreakers. Balance is the key to life.
As I write, everyone's setting up individual blogs. I'll add them to my links soon so you can check them out, too. In the meantime, let me tell you a little bit more about this really cool group of people and what we're doing in the basement of Mugs Coffee on a snowy Saturday morning. Ever since 2003, CSUWP folks have been wanting to have a summer institute part two. This year, though, we got a grant from those nice people at National Writing Project so we could actually do it. So eleven of us are going to spend a lot of time together (both virtually and F2F) over the next year exploring our own teacher research questions, reading other teacher research, and yes, consuming enormous quantities of food as always (betcha wanna see a group picture now, huh? Trust me, it's a writing project thing).
You can read about their teacher research as well as take a look at our "mother blog," as Bud's calling it. Everyone should be posting an entry today. Since I know this group, I know they'll be asking good questions and answering them in entertaining and insightful ways.
And because the AI co-director Jason Malone and I are asking all of them to post at least once a week for the next several months, I gotta--oops! I get to--do it, too. So if you're interested in my professional life, come back fairly often. I'll be here.
In reading those other blogs, though, one thing I've discovered is that confessionals are pretty dang common. A lot of people apologize because life gets in the way. I could do that, too, and it might actually be relatively interesting, but I'm going to resist.
Instead, I'm writing from the very first meeting of the very first CSU Writing Project (CSUWP) Advanced Institute. So while I may be a slacker, I also belong to a group of groundbreakers. Balance is the key to life.
As I write, everyone's setting up individual blogs. I'll add them to my links soon so you can check them out, too. In the meantime, let me tell you a little bit more about this really cool group of people and what we're doing in the basement of Mugs Coffee on a snowy Saturday morning. Ever since 2003, CSUWP folks have been wanting to have a summer institute part two. This year, though, we got a grant from those nice people at National Writing Project so we could actually do it. So eleven of us are going to spend a lot of time together (both virtually and F2F) over the next year exploring our own teacher research questions, reading other teacher research, and yes, consuming enormous quantities of food as always (betcha wanna see a group picture now, huh? Trust me, it's a writing project thing).
You can read about their teacher research as well as take a look at our "mother blog," as Bud's calling it. Everyone should be posting an entry today. Since I know this group, I know they'll be asking good questions and answering them in entertaining and insightful ways.
And because the AI co-director Jason Malone and I are asking all of them to post at least once a week for the next several months, I gotta--oops! I get to--do it, too. So if you're interested in my professional life, come back fairly often. I'll be here.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
there's a brave new blogiverse out there: scrapartists
In a recent post on her blog, Louann Reid posed the question, "Why not blog?" You can visit Louann's blog by clicking on the Multiliteracies button at the bottom of my blogroll to the left (sorry, can't make links today because I'm posting from Safari).
As I commented there, blogging makes a lot of sense to me from a professional standpoint, but I've also been intrigued about why so many people choose to blog *apart* from a sense of professional duty. Probably there are some closet columnists out there like me, but I stumbled on a whole new discourse community by accident this weekend. As a result, I spent an embarrassing amount of time lurking this weekend. In fact, my daughter claims I'm officially obsessed, but I prefer to think of it as fascination.
It's all her fault anyway. She's a senior, so I'm making her a scrapbook for graduation. I know next to nothing about how to do this. As always when I have a little question, I turn to research. I flipped through a scrapbooking magazine at the grocery store and discovered they have a website. And let me tell you, not only is the blogiverse full of scrapbookers, but out-of-school literacies are alive and well out there. I mean, these people are SERIOUS. They host conventions. They scrapbook digitally (wow, do these women know their way around in Photoshop). Some call themselves "Life Artists" or "scrapartists," and they have created their own language complete with abbreviations sure to confuse the uninitiated. Here are a few examples:
LO=layout
scraplift=copying a LO design from another Life Artist
journal=to write often lengthy captions near pictures on your LO
rubon=a decal of lettering or design that you "rub on" to a LO<--It took me several hours to figure that last one out.
They pose creative challenges, suggest pre-writing procedures to help with journaling, and host contests like MM Idol (Memory Makers Idol). They scan and post their work and comment on one another's. There are rules and tools. They emboss and chalk and sandpaper. They buy expensive Nikons and talk about what makes the best light. They blog and journal and participate in online forums with a vengeance. And all of them appear to be female.
I was so impressed that in the supposed service of collecting ideas for my daughter's project, I just couldn't stop myself, Gee's voice whispering in my ear all the while: "What do you make of this? Is scrapbooking a literacy practice? And if so, what makes it so compelling that entire discourse community has formed around it? Why do only women get to be members? Why the abundance of apparently affluent SOHs (another common abbreviation for "stay-at-home-mom"), and why do so many of them live in Provo (a.k.a. the "scrapbooking capitol of the world")? What are scrapbookers' norms and values?"
At the very least, I find scrapbooking to be a peculiar (as in "noteworthy") instance of a feminized discourse community that has, in the service of preserving family heritage and creating art that deliberately reflects the artist's individuality,
* appropriated many practices often associated with a masculinized domain, such as tool use--online technologies, drills, heat guns, etc. (many scrapbookers recommend buying supplies at Home Depot and Lowe's; I followed one thread that described how a salesman looked at a scrapbooker as if she had a "third eye" when she asked for a screw post)
AND
* combined them with many practices typically associated with a domestic domain, such as sewing, scrapbooking itself, and community formation (many scrapbookers host local LO parties that sound reminiscent of quilting bees).
What surprised me most, though, was how central literacy is to all of this. My visits to websites and blogs like those I've listed below dissuaded me of my notion of scrapbooking as a quaint little domestic art. It's anything but quaint, and its practitioners are highly motivated to use literacy in robust and authentic ways I'm pretty sure they didn't pick up in school. Or maybe they did. Heather Burch, the owner of Poppy Ink (it's the last scrapbooking website I've listed below), posts a pretty surprising bio.:
"I graduated with a double-major in English lit. and print journalism. The written word is serious business. Some of the best prose ever written is: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolfe. THAT is what this hobby has given me—metaphorically. It’s given me a part of my life that is mine. In between vacuuming, diaper-changing, peek-a-boo, tantrums, bills— I have a place I can escape to create. And at the same time, I preserve my family’s story. A big job. A job I’m grateful for."
Now I'm wondering what we as English teachers/educators can learn from scrapbooking and its practitioners? I encourage you to think about that and check out this vast online community for yourself. Here are a few of the most interesting sites I found this weekend:
http://twopeasinabucket.kaboose.com/cg.asp (website where scrapbookers can post their work, shop, connect, etc.)
http://abiteast.typepad.com/abiteast/ (blog of a scrapartist living in Beijing)
http://aliedwards.typepad.com/ (blog of the woman who coined the term "Life Artist" and is using scrapbooking as a way to promote autism awareness)
http://www.poppyink.com/ (website for a scrapbooking company deliberately influenced by pop art)
As I commented there, blogging makes a lot of sense to me from a professional standpoint, but I've also been intrigued about why so many people choose to blog *apart* from a sense of professional duty. Probably there are some closet columnists out there like me, but I stumbled on a whole new discourse community by accident this weekend. As a result, I spent an embarrassing amount of time lurking this weekend. In fact, my daughter claims I'm officially obsessed, but I prefer to think of it as fascination.
It's all her fault anyway. She's a senior, so I'm making her a scrapbook for graduation. I know next to nothing about how to do this. As always when I have a little question, I turn to research. I flipped through a scrapbooking magazine at the grocery store and discovered they have a website. And let me tell you, not only is the blogiverse full of scrapbookers, but out-of-school literacies are alive and well out there. I mean, these people are SERIOUS. They host conventions. They scrapbook digitally (wow, do these women know their way around in Photoshop). Some call themselves "Life Artists" or "scrapartists," and they have created their own language complete with abbreviations sure to confuse the uninitiated. Here are a few examples:
LO=layout
scraplift=copying a LO design from another Life Artist
journal=to write often lengthy captions near pictures on your LO
rubon=a decal of lettering or design that you "rub on" to a LO<--It took me several hours to figure that last one out.
They pose creative challenges, suggest pre-writing procedures to help with journaling, and host contests like MM Idol (Memory Makers Idol). They scan and post their work and comment on one another's. There are rules and tools. They emboss and chalk and sandpaper. They buy expensive Nikons and talk about what makes the best light. They blog and journal and participate in online forums with a vengeance. And all of them appear to be female.
I was so impressed that in the supposed service of collecting ideas for my daughter's project, I just couldn't stop myself, Gee's voice whispering in my ear all the while: "What do you make of this? Is scrapbooking a literacy practice? And if so, what makes it so compelling that entire discourse community has formed around it? Why do only women get to be members? Why the abundance of apparently affluent SOHs (another common abbreviation for "stay-at-home-mom"), and why do so many of them live in Provo (a.k.a. the "scrapbooking capitol of the world")? What are scrapbookers' norms and values?"
At the very least, I find scrapbooking to be a peculiar (as in "noteworthy") instance of a feminized discourse community that has, in the service of preserving family heritage and creating art that deliberately reflects the artist's individuality,
* appropriated many practices often associated with a masculinized domain, such as tool use--online technologies, drills, heat guns, etc. (many scrapbookers recommend buying supplies at Home Depot and Lowe's; I followed one thread that described how a salesman looked at a scrapbooker as if she had a "third eye" when she asked for a screw post)
AND
* combined them with many practices typically associated with a domestic domain, such as sewing, scrapbooking itself, and community formation (many scrapbookers host local LO parties that sound reminiscent of quilting bees).
What surprised me most, though, was how central literacy is to all of this. My visits to websites and blogs like those I've listed below dissuaded me of my notion of scrapbooking as a quaint little domestic art. It's anything but quaint, and its practitioners are highly motivated to use literacy in robust and authentic ways I'm pretty sure they didn't pick up in school. Or maybe they did. Heather Burch, the owner of Poppy Ink (it's the last scrapbooking website I've listed below), posts a pretty surprising bio.:
"I graduated with a double-major in English lit. and print journalism. The written word is serious business. Some of the best prose ever written is: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolfe. THAT is what this hobby has given me—metaphorically. It’s given me a part of my life that is mine. In between vacuuming, diaper-changing, peek-a-boo, tantrums, bills— I have a place I can escape to create. And at the same time, I preserve my family’s story. A big job. A job I’m grateful for."
Now I'm wondering what we as English teachers/educators can learn from scrapbooking and its practitioners? I encourage you to think about that and check out this vast online community for yourself. Here are a few of the most interesting sites I found this weekend:
http://twopeasinabucket.kaboose.com/cg.asp (website where scrapbookers can post their work, shop, connect, etc.)
http://abiteast.typepad.com/abiteast/ (blog of a scrapartist living in Beijing)
http://aliedwards.typepad.com/ (blog of the woman who coined the term "Life Artist" and is using scrapbooking as a way to promote autism awareness)
http://www.poppyink.com/ (website for a scrapbooking company deliberately influenced by pop art)
thinking about silence
Perhaps because we've been talking about class discussion in my Methods class, perhaps because I'm thinking about classroom discourse as always, perhaps because I had a really peculiar dream on Saturday night in which my house was so noisy, I couldn't hear the strangers who had appeared to reveal to me the secret of my life, I've been thinking about silence. Here's what came out in my journal today:
Reverence
What could we learn
from the space between our words
when we bare the flats of wrists
the backs of knees,
make vulnerability visible
beneath linked cuffs and nylons?
Silence threatens to embrace us
and so we drop our eyes
lick a finger pray for wind
for any subject that will neutralize
our trembling at its mercies.
But if I were to trace
your snaky temples
and you my furrowed brow
(these little deaths),
we could revere them.
Nothing more
would need be said
be done
but bowing.
Reverence
What could we learn
from the space between our words
when we bare the flats of wrists
the backs of knees,
make vulnerability visible
beneath linked cuffs and nylons?
Silence threatens to embrace us
and so we drop our eyes
lick a finger pray for wind
for any subject that will neutralize
our trembling at its mercies.
But if I were to trace
your snaky temples
and you my furrowed brow
(these little deaths),
we could revere them.
Nothing more
would need be said
be done
but bowing.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
personal pep talk
“In knowing who you are and writing from it, you will help the world by giving it understanding.” – Natalie Goldberg, Writing down the Bones, p. 241
I’m still convinced that my new book is important to write (despite the fact that my editor didn’t even nibble on the unrequested progress-report bone I threw him in my recent e-mail). And I’m trying hard not to listen to my annoyingly persistent self-editing voice that wants to know if his lack of response is some sort of “sign.”
All I know is that something deep within in me keeps insisting that it’s important to write about why and how to teach literature that deals with difficult—some would say dangerous—issues and questions. So far in my rationale, I’ve been pointing out the difficulty that people everywhere—most visibly, politicians, reality TV contestants, warring spouses, angry adolescents—seem to have with doing this very thing, or at least doing so in a civil fashion.
But on further reflection, as I heed Natalie Goldberg’s advice about knowing who I am, I realize that right now, I’m a 41-year-old woman with an injured back who struggles daily with my own big questions, as I’m guessing we all do, whether we want to admit it or not. Conflict and big questions are an unavoidable part of existence, and at least part of the reason why I read is to confront them vicariously through literary lives. And talking through them with the help of a text, what Parker Palmer refers to as a “third thing,” gives me the distance I temporarily need to sort through conflicts of my own as well as questions posed by living in the larger world.
Why does it matter that we talk these texts through with other people rather than pondering them individually then sliding the book back on the shelf? Listen to what Palmer says in A Hidden Wholeness:
“Whether we know it or not, like it or not, acknowledge it or not, our lives are interconnected in a complex web of causation. My understanding of truth impinges on your life, and yours impinges in mine, so the differences between us matter to both of us.”
Now Palmer’s not writing about literary discussions per se, but I think his claim holds true for them as well. As teachers, we can distance our students and ourselves by underlining the similes and highlighting the metaphors so that it actually becomes a “fourth thing,” but is that really why we read? Aren’t we more interested in the truths those linguistic parallels eventually lead us to? Shouldn’t we be teaching our kids to do all that annotation in the service of asking Why?
Well, I think so. Of course I’m not the only one to argue that we enter literary worlds to exit into our own more clearly or that talking through texts can help us do so. I know I’m evoking those buzz words “relevance” and “authenticity” here. (And I also know the book feels so important because it’s probably tapping my own need to confront conflict and speak my own truth, too.) But I don’t think it’s always (or ever) easy to teach the texts that really matter. (Witness the difference between some of my Methods students’ recent list of texts they’re dying to teach and the ones they actually suggested for their working unit. Let’s just say the second list is mostly canonical.)
So summoning the courage to teach the text in the first place seems an important first step. And dealing with the “hot potato” once you’ve done so seems an important second. And yes, I think this could make a difference in helping our kids learn how to deal productively with difficult issues beyond the classroom. So while I’m not entirely sure why it seems so important to me personally to write this book, I think I have to try.
I’m still convinced that my new book is important to write (despite the fact that my editor didn’t even nibble on the unrequested progress-report bone I threw him in my recent e-mail). And I’m trying hard not to listen to my annoyingly persistent self-editing voice that wants to know if his lack of response is some sort of “sign.”
All I know is that something deep within in me keeps insisting that it’s important to write about why and how to teach literature that deals with difficult—some would say dangerous—issues and questions. So far in my rationale, I’ve been pointing out the difficulty that people everywhere—most visibly, politicians, reality TV contestants, warring spouses, angry adolescents—seem to have with doing this very thing, or at least doing so in a civil fashion.
But on further reflection, as I heed Natalie Goldberg’s advice about knowing who I am, I realize that right now, I’m a 41-year-old woman with an injured back who struggles daily with my own big questions, as I’m guessing we all do, whether we want to admit it or not. Conflict and big questions are an unavoidable part of existence, and at least part of the reason why I read is to confront them vicariously through literary lives. And talking through them with the help of a text, what Parker Palmer refers to as a “third thing,” gives me the distance I temporarily need to sort through conflicts of my own as well as questions posed by living in the larger world.
Why does it matter that we talk these texts through with other people rather than pondering them individually then sliding the book back on the shelf? Listen to what Palmer says in A Hidden Wholeness:
“Whether we know it or not, like it or not, acknowledge it or not, our lives are interconnected in a complex web of causation. My understanding of truth impinges on your life, and yours impinges in mine, so the differences between us matter to both of us.”
Now Palmer’s not writing about literary discussions per se, but I think his claim holds true for them as well. As teachers, we can distance our students and ourselves by underlining the similes and highlighting the metaphors so that it actually becomes a “fourth thing,” but is that really why we read? Aren’t we more interested in the truths those linguistic parallels eventually lead us to? Shouldn’t we be teaching our kids to do all that annotation in the service of asking Why?
Well, I think so. Of course I’m not the only one to argue that we enter literary worlds to exit into our own more clearly or that talking through texts can help us do so. I know I’m evoking those buzz words “relevance” and “authenticity” here. (And I also know the book feels so important because it’s probably tapping my own need to confront conflict and speak my own truth, too.) But I don’t think it’s always (or ever) easy to teach the texts that really matter. (Witness the difference between some of my Methods students’ recent list of texts they’re dying to teach and the ones they actually suggested for their working unit. Let’s just say the second list is mostly canonical.)
So summoning the courage to teach the text in the first place seems an important first step. And dealing with the “hot potato” once you’ve done so seems an important second. And yes, I think this could make a difference in helping our kids learn how to deal productively with difficult issues beyond the classroom. So while I’m not entirely sure why it seems so important to me personally to write this book, I think I have to try.
Friday, January 26, 2007
I'm back
Okay, so I've been away for so long, I forgot my username AND my password. Is that a bad sign? Could be.
But I've decided that what counts is that I'm back at all. Even after a non-restful Christmas "break," an 80+ page grant proposal, and being rear-ended by a drunk driver. (Stories lurk behind every item on that list, I assure you.)
I'm patting myself lightly on the back (see aforementioned incident with drunk driver) that I remembered enough about blogging to retrieve my password. It took me so long, however, that I have exactly 2 minutes before I must leave again for a meeting. So right now, if anyone's still out there reading, all you're getting is a promise of what's to come:
1. some guest posts from my students last semester
2. ongoing thoughts on the new book
3. some musings on human plasticity
Farewell until then.
But I've decided that what counts is that I'm back at all. Even after a non-restful Christmas "break," an 80+ page grant proposal, and being rear-ended by a drunk driver. (Stories lurk behind every item on that list, I assure you.)
I'm patting myself lightly on the back (see aforementioned incident with drunk driver) that I remembered enough about blogging to retrieve my password. It took me so long, however, that I have exactly 2 minutes before I must leave again for a meeting. So right now, if anyone's still out there reading, all you're getting is a promise of what's to come:
1. some guest posts from my students last semester
2. ongoing thoughts on the new book
3. some musings on human plasticity
Farewell until then.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
what does it mean to say something works?
A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with one of my students who is currently student teaching. She was sharing teaching materials she'd developed this semester. She was clearly excited because, as she put it, "What I love about these techniques is that they really work!"
The materials she described made my heart hurt: choral responses to vocab. words ("I can really see who knows the definitions and who doesn't!" she explained, her eyes bright), pre-tests and post-tests containing multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions ("They do so much better on the post-tests!"), lesson plans based on the school's template, which mandated that most of the class be devoted to direct instruction.
And I began thinking, what does it mean to say that something works? Did these things "work" because kids were compliant when she asked them to participate? Did they work because the majority of the class scored well on the unit test, even though it assessed only low-level understanding--the kinds of knowledge you can bubble in or fill in the blank?
I've been contemplating the same question the past couple of days in the book club classroom where I'm working. Yesterday, the kids were making mandalas to communicate their understanding of the spirit of the book. I've written about this exercise previously in an English Journal article, but I'm really excited about the changes Rebecca and I made for this go-round because, well, at least intitially, it appeared that...it worked! What do I mean by that?
Well, yesterday, it "worked" in terms of eliciting student engagement. In fact, as Rebecca and I discussed later, for the entirety of the class period, only a small handful of kids got off-task, and even they didn't stay there. Kids who rarely participate in whole-class discussion had already talked more in the book club setting. But during mandala construction, some of them actually even took the lead! Overall, the groups worked *willingly* until the bell rang, and then they scrambled to put away their supplies, gather up their books, and rush off to the next class.
Today, as students began presenting their mandalas to the class, however, I thought of the question again. In the past when I've used visual interpretation activities with my classes (again, Peter Smagorinsky and I have written about Body Biographies extensively, so you should check those pubs out if you want to know more), such activities have generally encouraged students to move beyond the literal in their interpretations. The very nature of asking them to create representative symbols usually encourages that. This time, though, I was surprised to find that some of the groups didn't move much beyond the concrete events that occurred in their books. For instance, the "symbols" created by the book club who'd read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime included smiley faces ("Christopher uses these to show his emotions because he's autistic"), envelopes ("Christopher's mom sends him letters in the book"), and math equations ("Christopher really likes math"). Yesterday, though, mandalas really seemed to be "working" for this group. One of the girls had even remarked, "Our mandala is basically cool."
So did mandalas really "work" for them? Well, sort of. I think the kids would say they enjoyed the activity and felt they'd provided an overview of the book for the rest of the class. Yet, as we debriefed afterwards, Rebecca was clearly disappointed. I think she'd say mandalas didn't work at all for this group. But was this a symptom of the activity itself or something else like the fact that Rebecca suspects these kids are dutiful assignment readers but non-readers beyond that? In other words, is this a sign of the consequences of aliteracy?
Or maybe it's something else. Like the Curious Incident book club, other book clubs mentioned in their presentation that they weren't able to relate to their books because they hadn't met similar characters or had similar experiences. Maybe that's why they didn't move beyond the literal. But as Rebecca and I discussed later, isn't that why we read in the first place? To get to live other lives? So is their literalism, even in the face of a prompt like the mandala that begs for symbolic representation, a product of the standardized testing era where you get to be successful as a student if you understand the plot and can label the simile? Where in schools are kids taught to see reading, and literacy in general, as a means of cultivating the imagination?
My point is that the notion of "what works" is far more complex than we generally imply by the phrase. The good news is that I think the new book is NOT a big mistake because Rebecca and are learning that we need to provide far more scaffolding to help kids discuss difficult books in complex ways. That's what I was hoping to accomplish anyway; getting there is just going to be more involved than I anticipated.
If anybody's out there, oh, dear reader, please tell me what you think.
The materials she described made my heart hurt: choral responses to vocab. words ("I can really see who knows the definitions and who doesn't!" she explained, her eyes bright), pre-tests and post-tests containing multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions ("They do so much better on the post-tests!"), lesson plans based on the school's template, which mandated that most of the class be devoted to direct instruction.
And I began thinking, what does it mean to say that something works? Did these things "work" because kids were compliant when she asked them to participate? Did they work because the majority of the class scored well on the unit test, even though it assessed only low-level understanding--the kinds of knowledge you can bubble in or fill in the blank?
I've been contemplating the same question the past couple of days in the book club classroom where I'm working. Yesterday, the kids were making mandalas to communicate their understanding of the spirit of the book. I've written about this exercise previously in an English Journal article, but I'm really excited about the changes Rebecca and I made for this go-round because, well, at least intitially, it appeared that...it worked! What do I mean by that?
Well, yesterday, it "worked" in terms of eliciting student engagement. In fact, as Rebecca and I discussed later, for the entirety of the class period, only a small handful of kids got off-task, and even they didn't stay there. Kids who rarely participate in whole-class discussion had already talked more in the book club setting. But during mandala construction, some of them actually even took the lead! Overall, the groups worked *willingly* until the bell rang, and then they scrambled to put away their supplies, gather up their books, and rush off to the next class.
Today, as students began presenting their mandalas to the class, however, I thought of the question again. In the past when I've used visual interpretation activities with my classes (again, Peter Smagorinsky and I have written about Body Biographies extensively, so you should check those pubs out if you want to know more), such activities have generally encouraged students to move beyond the literal in their interpretations. The very nature of asking them to create representative symbols usually encourages that. This time, though, I was surprised to find that some of the groups didn't move much beyond the concrete events that occurred in their books. For instance, the "symbols" created by the book club who'd read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime included smiley faces ("Christopher uses these to show his emotions because he's autistic"), envelopes ("Christopher's mom sends him letters in the book"), and math equations ("Christopher really likes math"). Yesterday, though, mandalas really seemed to be "working" for this group. One of the girls had even remarked, "Our mandala is basically cool."
So did mandalas really "work" for them? Well, sort of. I think the kids would say they enjoyed the activity and felt they'd provided an overview of the book for the rest of the class. Yet, as we debriefed afterwards, Rebecca was clearly disappointed. I think she'd say mandalas didn't work at all for this group. But was this a symptom of the activity itself or something else like the fact that Rebecca suspects these kids are dutiful assignment readers but non-readers beyond that? In other words, is this a sign of the consequences of aliteracy?
Or maybe it's something else. Like the Curious Incident book club, other book clubs mentioned in their presentation that they weren't able to relate to their books because they hadn't met similar characters or had similar experiences. Maybe that's why they didn't move beyond the literal. But as Rebecca and I discussed later, isn't that why we read in the first place? To get to live other lives? So is their literalism, even in the face of a prompt like the mandala that begs for symbolic representation, a product of the standardized testing era where you get to be successful as a student if you understand the plot and can label the simile? Where in schools are kids taught to see reading, and literacy in general, as a means of cultivating the imagination?
My point is that the notion of "what works" is far more complex than we generally imply by the phrase. The good news is that I think the new book is NOT a big mistake because Rebecca and are learning that we need to provide far more scaffolding to help kids discuss difficult books in complex ways. That's what I was hoping to accomplish anyway; getting there is just going to be more involved than I anticipated.
If anybody's out there, oh, dear reader, please tell me what you think.
Monday, November 27, 2006
What if my new book concept is a big mistake?
I'm writing today with disappointment...or at least so I thought as I was rehearsing this entry in my head after working in Rebecca's class this morning. A bit of background info. to contextualize this post:
I'm working on a new book on book clubs, the premise of which is that book clubs might provide a context for students to do 2 things:
1) explore challenging topics and/or controversial issues in difficult texts
2) learn how to talk about the above in productive ways
Well, today, as I watched Rebecca's students in their book clubs, I felt like my whole book might be in jeopardy because neither of the above things seemed to be happening. And I thus faced a terrifying prospect: What if this whole book concept that I've already devoted considerable time and energy to is a big mistake? What if I don't learn anything at all?
Fortunately, my teacher researcher voice is telling me to back off a little from my grand expectations and see what I actually have to learn. In fact, if all your initial predictions prove true, do you really learn anything in the end?
So at the moment, I think Rebecca and I may be learning that we need to prepare kids more if we want to help kids accomplish these objectives. Because let's face it, they probably haven't been cued to do so already in schools. What have kids been cued to do? Well, it's hard to know for sure without direct interviews, but it's likely that they've been taught to read for structural features like similes, metaphors, plot development, theme, and so on. For instance, if they read Romeo and Juliet last year, maybe they did so with a focus on decoding the language, comprehending the plot, and defining tragedy rather than understanding sexual puns, thinking about class and gender expectations, or exploring the phenomenon of adolescent suicide. Like I said, it's hard to know for sure without talking to them personally, so I'll probably need to do that at some point--maybe in a group interview at the end of the book club sequence where I'd ask them to comment on how this approach compares to prior classroom experiences they've had with literary texts.
But my hunch is that we can't expect that kids will suddenly be able to talk about difficult issues like racial conflict in Cry, the Beloved Country or the existence of God in The Life of Pi or sexual identity in Postcards from No Man's Land simply because we've bought some really cool books and asked them to use sticky notes to respond to them.
Of course, we've done more than that, too, but the students appear to be either unaware of or unable to address the issues I'd predicted they'd discuss in their book clubs, even when the issues are central to the texts and we'd indirectly prompted them to do so with the response tools we've provided. As a result, I'm asking new questions. Here are a few from today's fieldnotes:
I'm working on a new book on book clubs, the premise of which is that book clubs might provide a context for students to do 2 things:
1) explore challenging topics and/or controversial issues in difficult texts
2) learn how to talk about the above in productive ways
Well, today, as I watched Rebecca's students in their book clubs, I felt like my whole book might be in jeopardy because neither of the above things seemed to be happening. And I thus faced a terrifying prospect: What if this whole book concept that I've already devoted considerable time and energy to is a big mistake? What if I don't learn anything at all?
Fortunately, my teacher researcher voice is telling me to back off a little from my grand expectations and see what I actually have to learn. In fact, if all your initial predictions prove true, do you really learn anything in the end?
So at the moment, I think Rebecca and I may be learning that we need to prepare kids more if we want to help kids accomplish these objectives. Because let's face it, they probably haven't been cued to do so already in schools. What have kids been cued to do? Well, it's hard to know for sure without direct interviews, but it's likely that they've been taught to read for structural features like similes, metaphors, plot development, theme, and so on. For instance, if they read Romeo and Juliet last year, maybe they did so with a focus on decoding the language, comprehending the plot, and defining tragedy rather than understanding sexual puns, thinking about class and gender expectations, or exploring the phenomenon of adolescent suicide. Like I said, it's hard to know for sure without talking to them personally, so I'll probably need to do that at some point--maybe in a group interview at the end of the book club sequence where I'd ask them to comment on how this approach compares to prior classroom experiences they've had with literary texts.
But my hunch is that we can't expect that kids will suddenly be able to talk about difficult issues like racial conflict in Cry, the Beloved Country or the existence of God in The Life of Pi or sexual identity in Postcards from No Man's Land simply because we've bought some really cool books and asked them to use sticky notes to respond to them.
Of course, we've done more than that, too, but the students appear to be either unaware of or unable to address the issues I'd predicted they'd discuss in their book clubs, even when the issues are central to the texts and we'd indirectly prompted them to do so with the response tools we've provided. As a result, I'm asking new questions. Here are a few from today's fieldnotes:
- In their independent responses to texts, do kids know how to acknowledge and respond to difficult issues and conflicts?
- Do they know how to have discussions on such topics in schools? Or do they need more explicit models for doing so? If the latter is the case, how do we reconcile the notion of models with the benefits of the free-flowing nature of book club conversation?
At the very least, Rebecca and I are already thinking carefully about what we want to do next semester with book clubs in another class. At the moment, I think we need to be more explicit about why we've chosen this particular set of texts and about the teacher research questions we're attempting to answer by observing their book club interactions. We also need to more deliberately scaffold the processes of identifying difficult issues in texts and dealing with them productively in the public setting of book clubs.
So maybe the book concept isn't a big mistake after all. At least I'm learning something....
Friday, November 17, 2006
more from NWP
Howdy, ya'll,
Those of at CSUWP are once again prepared to take over the world. It's amazing how inspired I've managed to get in a little over 48 hours, even in my post-sinus infection haze. The magic of hundreds of fired-up writing teachers under the same roof never fails to take me by surprise. At my very first session, the NWP presenter said, "We are the answer." And as bold as that may sound, you just gotta believe it.
Halfway through our trip, here's what we've already done:
1. Written a plan for an Advanced Institute that will integrate teacher research and technology and will be open to any CSUWP teacher THIS SUMMER (if you're interested, you need to ask me about this), identified a potential grant to fund it, and begun to think about staffing
2. Started thinking seriously about a one-day administrator's conference
3. Become convinced that professional development support for early career teachers is a necessity, not an option (this morning we heard that nearly half of all new teachers leave the profession within 5 years, yet the median # of years for a NWP teacher is 25! Coincidence? We think not.)
4. Gotten me to post to post to two blogs in one day, including my own (click on the blogessor post to the right to see the other post)
5. Figured out that my sleep number is 45 and discovered that all Nashville roads are under construction (see Cam's previous post)
Tomorrow Rebecca Fox, Tiffany Hunt, Emily Richards Moyer, and I will make a strong CSUWP showing at our NCTE presentation. I'm pretty sure Bud will be posting some pictures and a truly heartwarming story about the impact of your podcasts soon.
Stay tuned,
Cindy
Those of at CSUWP are once again prepared to take over the world. It's amazing how inspired I've managed to get in a little over 48 hours, even in my post-sinus infection haze. The magic of hundreds of fired-up writing teachers under the same roof never fails to take me by surprise. At my very first session, the NWP presenter said, "We are the answer." And as bold as that may sound, you just gotta believe it.
Halfway through our trip, here's what we've already done:
1. Written a plan for an Advanced Institute that will integrate teacher research and technology and will be open to any CSUWP teacher THIS SUMMER (if you're interested, you need to ask me about this), identified a potential grant to fund it, and begun to think about staffing
2. Started thinking seriously about a one-day administrator's conference
3. Become convinced that professional development support for early career teachers is a necessity, not an option (this morning we heard that nearly half of all new teachers leave the profession within 5 years, yet the median # of years for a NWP teacher is 25! Coincidence? We think not.)
4. Gotten me to post to post to two blogs in one day, including my own (click on the blogessor post to the right to see the other post)
5. Figured out that my sleep number is 45 and discovered that all Nashville roads are under construction (see Cam's previous post)
Tomorrow Rebecca Fox, Tiffany Hunt, Emily Richards Moyer, and I will make a strong CSUWP showing at our NCTE presentation. I'm pretty sure Bud will be posting some pictures and a truly heartwarming story about the impact of your podcasts soon.
Stay tuned,
Cindy
why blogging could make me a better person
I'm back after a little hiatus. I could make some excuses for why I haven't been writing much lately, but we've all been busy, haven't we? In fact, some of the busiest people I know are making time for blogging on a regular basis, so that excuse...well, it really doesn't work.
Really, it doesn't.
So I've been reflecting on what this has been a hard habit for me to embrace. I journal faithfully. Virtually, all of my scholarly work is grounded in exploratory composing (talk, writing, visualizing). I write for external audiences. So why hasn't blogging become a part of my life?
I'm writing from the National Writing Project conference (http://www.writingproject.org --sorry, though I feel ever so cool for knowing how to hyperlink, I haven't figured out how to make it work in safari yet, and I'm blogging this on my mac). Yesterday, I presented with Bud Hunt (see budtheteacher link in my blogroll to the left). Bud and I have been working together for about 8 years now, and we're still trying to save the world. I believe teacher research is the answer, he believes technology is the answer, we both *know* that the writing project is the answer, and yesterday, we talked about the intersection among all of those things. At the moment, we're also planning a CSU Writing Project event (http://www.csuwp.blogspot.com) that will explore them in more detail. In the process of this, our conversations have been pushing me toward the above questions about blogging as did a conversation Bud and I had yesterday with one of our roundtable participants who blogs religiously.
In fact, there was a really odd moment during our session when Bud was preaching it, and he looked to his right and realized (out loud), "Hey, how are ya, Paul?," like he was talking to an old friend that he'd somehow never met. Bud went on to explain that he "knew" Paul Allison from the New York City Writing Project, but only cybernetically. Then, he talked in detail about how Paul's online work with his students had influenced his (Bud's) thinking. In other words, though he and Paul had never met, they clearly knew one another in a way that is pretty substantive, yet very rare, in education. Bud had been "inside" Paul's head *and* his classroom, and now, it seemed only incidentally handy that they were meeting face-to-face.
Well, the three of us stayed after the session and talked about, among other things, the impulse toward blogging that heretofore has struck me rather like the motivation for flossing. You know, one of those habits you know you'd pick up if you were a better person, especially because someone really smart like your dentist says you ought to. And so you floss for a couple of weeks after your check-up until the little plastic box conveniently gets shoved to the back of the drawer so you don't have to think about it any more.
But there's been a confluence of events now, so I don't know that I can so easily forget about blogging. First, Bud said that he wants more people to blog not so much because of what it can do for the blogger but what it can do for the "blogee." He said something along the lines of this: "I want you to blog because I'm selfish. I want to know what you're thinking, and I don't want to wait until the next time I see you or the next time you publish to do so." He assures me that other people feel the same, not about my thinking in particular, but about thinking, period.
Secondly, Bud's clearly on to something when it comes to networking. Do you know how many people have come up to him in the course of two days and said, "Hey, you're Bud the teacher, aren't you? I really like your blog." Now, I admit--at first I thought that was a tad bit creepy, but then, some pretty interesting conversation typically and immediately ensued. So maybe blogging, like journaling, is a kind of knowledge-in-progress, except with a potential audience who could shape your thinking attached.
And the coup d'etat was NWP Director Richard Sterling's comment this morning that "new media is the new democracy and therefore an instrument of change."
Knowledge-in-progress, networking, and democracy as an instrument of change. Now that's something that will get me blogging...and maybe, just maybe, make me a better person all at the same time.
Really, it doesn't.
So I've been reflecting on what this has been a hard habit for me to embrace. I journal faithfully. Virtually, all of my scholarly work is grounded in exploratory composing (talk, writing, visualizing). I write for external audiences. So why hasn't blogging become a part of my life?
I'm writing from the National Writing Project conference (http://www.writingproject.org --sorry, though I feel ever so cool for knowing how to hyperlink, I haven't figured out how to make it work in safari yet, and I'm blogging this on my mac). Yesterday, I presented with Bud Hunt (see budtheteacher link in my blogroll to the left). Bud and I have been working together for about 8 years now, and we're still trying to save the world. I believe teacher research is the answer, he believes technology is the answer, we both *know* that the writing project is the answer, and yesterday, we talked about the intersection among all of those things. At the moment, we're also planning a CSU Writing Project event (http://www.csuwp.blogspot.com) that will explore them in more detail. In the process of this, our conversations have been pushing me toward the above questions about blogging as did a conversation Bud and I had yesterday with one of our roundtable participants who blogs religiously.
In fact, there was a really odd moment during our session when Bud was preaching it, and he looked to his right and realized (out loud), "Hey, how are ya, Paul?," like he was talking to an old friend that he'd somehow never met. Bud went on to explain that he "knew" Paul Allison from the New York City Writing Project, but only cybernetically. Then, he talked in detail about how Paul's online work with his students had influenced his (Bud's) thinking. In other words, though he and Paul had never met, they clearly knew one another in a way that is pretty substantive, yet very rare, in education. Bud had been "inside" Paul's head *and* his classroom, and now, it seemed only incidentally handy that they were meeting face-to-face.
Well, the three of us stayed after the session and talked about, among other things, the impulse toward blogging that heretofore has struck me rather like the motivation for flossing. You know, one of those habits you know you'd pick up if you were a better person, especially because someone really smart like your dentist says you ought to. And so you floss for a couple of weeks after your check-up until the little plastic box conveniently gets shoved to the back of the drawer so you don't have to think about it any more.
But there's been a confluence of events now, so I don't know that I can so easily forget about blogging. First, Bud said that he wants more people to blog not so much because of what it can do for the blogger but what it can do for the "blogee." He said something along the lines of this: "I want you to blog because I'm selfish. I want to know what you're thinking, and I don't want to wait until the next time I see you or the next time you publish to do so." He assures me that other people feel the same, not about my thinking in particular, but about thinking, period.
Secondly, Bud's clearly on to something when it comes to networking. Do you know how many people have come up to him in the course of two days and said, "Hey, you're Bud the teacher, aren't you? I really like your blog." Now, I admit--at first I thought that was a tad bit creepy, but then, some pretty interesting conversation typically and immediately ensued. So maybe blogging, like journaling, is a kind of knowledge-in-progress, except with a potential audience who could shape your thinking attached.
And the coup d'etat was NWP Director Richard Sterling's comment this morning that "new media is the new democracy and therefore an instrument of change."
Knowledge-in-progress, networking, and democracy as an instrument of change. Now that's something that will get me blogging...and maybe, just maybe, make me a better person all at the same time.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Check out the CO301D blogs and the K-12 online technology conference
Thanks to the patience and persistence of Bud Hunt, I was able to bumble my way through enough HTML code to add an aggregator to my right sidebar. If you're kind enough to visit, you should take a look at these blogs written by my students in the CO301D class I've been writing about here.
They've posted some interesting entries already, and I'm sure they'll make more. Check them out.
And while you're online, you should also consider checking in to the first annual K-12 online technology conference to be held over the next couple of weeks. Looks like Week 1 will focus on descriptions of how teachers are using technology in their classes as well as how-to's for using technology, period. Week 2 will cover how to use technology for your own professional development as well as tips for overcoming common obstacles to using technology in your classroom (e.g., computer access, filtering, district/parent concerns, etc.).
Bud will be "delivering" his keynote on Monday, and he always has interesting things to say. So check him out, too.
They've posted some interesting entries already, and I'm sure they'll make more. Check them out.
And while you're online, you should also consider checking in to the first annual K-12 online technology conference to be held over the next couple of weeks. Looks like Week 1 will focus on descriptions of how teachers are using technology in their classes as well as how-to's for using technology, period. Week 2 will cover how to use technology for your own professional development as well as tips for overcoming common obstacles to using technology in your classroom (e.g., computer access, filtering, district/parent concerns, etc.).
Bud will be "delivering" his keynote on Monday, and he always has interesting things to say. So check him out, too.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Evolving Questions
Today in my CO301D class, we're going to work on discovering questions that will motivate case studies for the rest of the semester, so I want to use my questions about school violence as a case in point. Don't get me wrong, my questions are by no means set in stone. In fact, I expect them to develop, become more complex, perhaps even change entirely as I try to arrive at some provisional answers. But for now, I just want to talk about how they're coming along and why.
What did I do to find them? (NOTE: A numbered list follows, but I don't mean for it to be chronological. Many of these processes are occurring simultaneously.)
1. First of all, I became "inquisitorial." As you gathered if you read my last post, I essentially identified an area that was perplexing to me--you know, one of those areas that your mind just won't let go of.
2. I blogged about it to explore and organize my own thinking.
3. I talked to people about it, both verbally and on-line.
4. I read about it (in the newspaper, on other blogs, in responses to my blog, and in English Journal and the National Writing Project Quarterly).
When I first started this process, I didn't really have a question in mind beyond the ever-present "why," but as a result of all the above processes, here's what I currently want to know:
1) How can we be proactive in preventing violence *and* promoting peace? How do we go to the source of violence before it happens, as many experts/lay people/law enforcement officers/the president recommend?
2) How should we react when violence does occur both far away and close to home (articles written by a couple of CSU Writing Project teachers--Hilary Hughes and Emily Richards Moyer--have gotten me thinking in this direction)?
3) What have kids, teachers, and schools done in response to recent school violence? What have they learned? What will they do if it happens again?
As you can see, I really have SETS of related questions now rather than a single one. Answering one set of questions might provide some insight into the others, but any one of the sets would provide enough direction to get me started.
What did I do to find them? (NOTE: A numbered list follows, but I don't mean for it to be chronological. Many of these processes are occurring simultaneously.)
1. First of all, I became "inquisitorial." As you gathered if you read my last post, I essentially identified an area that was perplexing to me--you know, one of those areas that your mind just won't let go of.
2. I blogged about it to explore and organize my own thinking.
3. I talked to people about it, both verbally and on-line.
4. I read about it (in the newspaper, on other blogs, in responses to my blog, and in English Journal and the National Writing Project Quarterly).
When I first started this process, I didn't really have a question in mind beyond the ever-present "why," but as a result of all the above processes, here's what I currently want to know:
1) How can we be proactive in preventing violence *and* promoting peace? How do we go to the source of violence before it happens, as many experts/lay people/law enforcement officers/the president recommend?
2) How should we react when violence does occur both far away and close to home (articles written by a couple of CSU Writing Project teachers--Hilary Hughes and Emily Richards Moyer--have gotten me thinking in this direction)?
3) What have kids, teachers, and schools done in response to recent school violence? What have they learned? What will they do if it happens again?
As you can see, I really have SETS of related questions now rather than a single one. Answering one set of questions might provide some insight into the others, but any one of the sets would provide enough direction to get me started.
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