A New Vision

  I feel that primarily my conception of teaching ELA has become more specific in the past 3 months. At the beginning of this course I had a basic vision of how I would like to approach teaching ELA but I had a hard time imagining exactly how these ideas would concretely manifest themselves within the classroom. 


   Thanks to the experiences our class has had since September, I feel that I now have many tools with which I can concretize my initial vision. Such tools include: kwl charts, literacy centers, blogging, voice threads, lesson planning skills, writing activities using prompts, composition strategies for writing and representing, podcasting, talking circles, revision strategies, assessment rubrics and theory, prewriting strategies, approaches to unit planning and lastly but not leastly, having a greater familiarity with the IRP for ELA. 


   Interestingly, while these tools have a direct application in the teaching of ELA, we may also notice the many ways in which such skills and strategies will also prove useful in the teaching of other subjects. As such, I feel fortunate to now have this knowledge which I will be able to use in both my future ELA classroom and within my teaching in general.  I would also like to thank everyone for contributing so much to our class experience. 


Merry Christmas season to all, and to all a good night.     -Dawson  

Surpassing Mere “Exercises in Technique”:  The Meaningful Teaching of Writing and          Representing  

“It would be comic to suppose that all that is required to make music and drawing a part of the course study is to have the school board legislate that a certain amount of time of the pupil, covering a certain prescribed ground, shall be given to work with pencil and paper and musical exercises. There is no magic by which these things can pass over from the printed page of the school manual to the child’s consciousness. If the teacher has no standard of value in relation to them, no intimate personal response of feeling to them, no conceptions of the methods of art which alone bring the child to a corresponding intellectual and emotional attitude, these studies will remain precisely what they so often are- passing recreations, modes of showing off or exercises in technique”

-John Dewey from The Education Situation as it Concerns Elementary School

            

    When John Dewey sat down to write this passage, he did so in a year which saw the first movie theater open in the U.S, the downfall of Butch Cassidy’s posse of western outlaws and birth of John Steinbeck- it was nineteen hundred and two. Yet despite the vast expanse of time that has passed between this historic year and that of the present, Dewey’s message could not be more relevant to the contemporary education community. When a teacher enters a classroom they do with the class of students in front of them and a “certain prescribed ground” (i.e PLO’s) in the back of their mind. As Dewey implies, true teaching can only take place when an educator considers not only what to teach but also how to meaningfully convey the subject that is being taught. Just as this principle applies to music and drawing so to does it apply to other arts such as writing and representing. According to researchers like Pat D’Arcy, the art of writing and representing can be considered to comprise four key elements: process (thinking and planning), products (the pieces of formatted writing), codes (aspects like spelling and grammar) and media (hand writing, word processing, drawing etc) (Constructing Meaning, 262). Due to the global perspective that D’Arcy’s model presents, we will be able to use it as a guide in our consideration of the important teachable aspects of writing and representing at the grade three level. However in doing so, we will also attempt to qualify these considerations with a contemplative look at the methods an educator can use in order to breathe life into these learning outcomes and goals, and thereby transcend the realm of teaching mere “passing recreations, modes of showing off or exercises in technique”.                                                   

                                                
Process     

“With an understanding of the process associated with writing, teachers begin to teach about what writers do” -Teaching Writing in a Time of Reform, Strickland et al.

Within the PLO’s of British Colombia’s IRP for ELA, of integral importance of prewriting strategies do not go unnoticed. During grade three it is expected that students will be able to generate, develop and organize their ideas (PLO C4). In considering the methods by which a student may reach this goal it is interesting to note the high degree of agreement that exists within educational literature. For example group discussion, brain-storming and the use of graphic organizers appear nearly ubiquitously within educational texts as integral strategies for students to use during the prewriting stage (Launching the Writing Workshop, 3, Constructing Meaning 251, IRP, 223). While group discussion and personal brainstorming may often be used interchangeably in order to generate ideas, the use of graphic tools like story frames and webs offer an arguably irreplaceable method by which students may organize their writing. As graphic organizers provide a built in degree of structure and organization (Constructing meaning 251), they allow students to plan out a composition from its beginning to its end- an ability which greatly facilitates the overall coherency and flow of a piece.

Just as the means of effective prewriting are generally agreed upon, so too is one method by which students may produce compositions which transcend being mere “exercises in technique” and instead may become relevant and meaningful. This method is namely the use of personal experiences and ideas in one’s writing or representing. While this idea is a central tenant of the PLO C1, it is also endorsed by educators like Calkins and Mermelstein- “our goal is to offer children the opportunity to bring their lives to school and put their lives on the page” as well as by writers like Robin Stevenson who believe that children should learn to value their own experience as source material for writing (Launching the Writing Workshop, 1 and Robin Stevenson from a talk given at UVIC, October 2011). This principle also forms the basis of the book Love That Dog, in which a child begins to view his own experiential writing as authentic poetry (Love That Dog, Sharon Creech). However, despite the apparent utility of drawing upon one’s personal experience, it is interesting to note how this approach goes unemphasized within the IRP’s focus on imaginative writing in the PLO C3. While this PLO recognizes the importance of teaching students to use sensory detail and mood in their imaginative writing, it seems to fail to recognize that one’s personal experience provides a ready source of sensory and emotional experiences which can be drawn upon when writing fiction.

  

An additional advantage to using personal experience when writing is that it allows students to share specialized knowledge. For example, just as a student who knows a lot about buses could write a book about them, a class that has been researching the water quality in their community could write a report (EDCI 302, class discussion). By engaging in projects like these, students learn that their writing and representing can be relevant not only to themselves but also to the larger community. Additionally as Casey and Hemenway note, writing for authentic audiences allows students to consider themselves as equally authentic writers (Structure and Freedom, 69).

Just as writing and representing can be a means of expressing our experience and identity, it can also be a means of extending our thinking and learning about ourselves (PLO C8). One way to achieve this is through what James Moffet termed “the revision of inner speech” (Constructing Meaning, 264). Primarily, this concept refers to the idea that the act of writing or representing helps one’s thinking to become both more elaborate and precise. An interesting point raised by Moffat was that if we have students write too much for the purpose of exhibition, we may discount or deny this exploratory component of the process (Constructing Meaning, 265). Another means by which writing may extend our thinking is through the use of journals. As Bainbridge, Heydon and Malicky note, using journals “provides a record of where we have journeyed in our thinking and points to where we might travel next” (Constructing Meaning,  241). As such, journals (as well as other methods like KWHL charts), allow students to identify both strengths in their knowledge of a topic as well as areas that would be benefitted by further research.

                                                     

Codes

The ability of a student to effectively employ codes like grammar and spelling remains one of the central instructional functions of the elementary ELA program. Although the explicit instruction of such codes has become unpopular in modern language arts pedagogy (Constructing Meaning 334), an integrated approach to disseminating this knowledge remains the focal point of PLO’s like C10. While the value of teaching these codes is generally agreed upon, opinions as to how they should be taught vary widely. For example Bainbridge, Heydon and Malicky conceive of spelling as a task which is learned solely through visual memory (Constructing Meaning, 333). While this conception ignores that certain children may have different learning styles (like auditory, for example), it also fails to recognize the utility of other spelling strategies. For example rhythm can used as a mnemonic as in the spelling of ‘Mississippi’ (miss-iss-ipp-i). Another debatable subject is the extent to which students should rely on phonetic spelling techniques. Although this method is now strongly emphasized from kindergarten to grade three (Constructing Meaning, 322), it is not without certain drawbacks. While some languages like Spanish use a spelling system which is highly phonetic, most phonemes in English can be spelled in more than one way. For example the /k/ sound may be achieved by a ‘k’ in the word ‘kitten’ or by a ‘c’ in the word ‘cat’. Due to such ambiguities, the utility of explicitly teaching phonetic spelling remains a topic of debate within the education community. In considering the benefits and drawbacks of using different methods to teach linguistic codes, it perhaps seems most important that students are taught a variety of techniques, allowing them to select those that are most useful to their own writing and representing.

As teacher Jennifer Savage notes, another teachable aspect of spelling and grammar involves conferring upon students the ability to be able to work with these codes in a self reliant way. As Savage points out, the use of think pads, word walls and student dictionaries are all effective ways of helping primary students sustain and enhance their own learning (How Can I Effectively Use the First Steps Writing Program in My Classroom? 41).

                                      
Media

In this month’s edition of the journal Language Arts, researcher Carol Bedard remarks that within the spectrum of ELA “we have seen the emergence of a multimodal perspective- an eclectic approach which acknowledges the role of multiple modes (talk, gesture, image, sound, movement) in making meaning” (Writing for the Big Screen, 113). Due to the nearly paradigmatic shift in the way in which media is now being experienced (ex. Youtube, video games etc), it may be argued that “visual literacy plays a more critical role in literacy education than ever before” (Constructing Meaning, 263). Therefore, if educators are going to approach writing and representing in a truly constructivist sense, they need to begin by acknowledging the advanced literacies that many students may have with respect to means of representing like video and animation. In doing so, we can teach our students that writing and representing are multifaceted means of communicating. For example in working within the media of Podcasts, students may apply writing and representing skills in creating: music programs, radio plays, news reports, soundscapes, talk radio programs, video webisodes etc. (EDCI 302 class discussion). In doing so,  students are given the opportunity to communicate via culturally relevant forms of media while also gaining skills in communications technology which are becoming increasingly important in our society (IRP, 13). As speech pathologist Kathleen Bulloch points out, utilizing diverse forms of representational media can also be an excellent way to involve special needs students who aren’t as interested in conventional methods of representing (Adopting Materials and Strategies for Special Needs Students). Through media like 3D showcase exhibits and photo essays, these students may be given an alternative way to describe and communicate their thoughts, feelings and life experience. 

                                                      
Products

Although the outcome of one’s work may be viewed as finished product,  students often stand to learn the most from their compositions when they view them critically. Within this metacognitive process, students may set goals for improvement on future pieces or identify strategies they could use to better the piece they are presently working on (PLO’s C9 and C6 respectively). However as writers like Stevenson have addressed, it is not enough to tell students to revise their work, we also must help them understand what to look for during the revision process (Robin Stevenson, Talk Given at UVIC, October 2011). While topics suggested by the IRP like sentence fluency, word choice and organization may indeed be necessary for effective communication, other topics of revision, like those suggested by Nancie Atwell  in her article “In the Middle” may be considered to be somewhat more controversial. For example, in revising imaginative writing Atwell treats features like sudden endings and the use of sparse dialogue within a narrative as weaknesses to be addressed (Atwell, 226). One problem with focusing on such features is that it inhibits children’s ability to have fun with language. For example,  “obscure cliff hanger endings” and other abnormal narrative features may often provide students with an important sense of enjoyment and inspiration (EDCI 302 class discussion). Additionally, having students follow prescriptive narrative patterns which allocate set amounts of narration and dialogue may further limit students’ creativity. It is also important to consider that many professional writers do not abide by such conventions anyways, for example, consider the near absence of dialogue in the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nonetheless, despite the fact that individual educators may have varying conceptions of what to revise, the revision process remains an integral component of writing and representing. By engaging in this process students rethink, revise and re-imagine their work in ever evolving ways.  As the IRP notes, the creation and revision of original texts “helps us appreciate the artistry of language” (IRP, 214).

                                            

Final Thoughts

In reflecting on his work, the Dutch kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen states that “the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Jansen    -also check out this link for a breathtaking look at Jansen’s work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcR7U2tuNoY). Regardless of the perspective that we take, in the teaching of writing and representing we will inevitably transmit both useful information as well as information which may build “walls” within our students’ minds and thereby limit what they think is possible. As such, our job as educators is to constantly be balancing these two products of our teaching. Only in doing so can we hope to instill the mastery of craft and imaginative freedom that will open the door to a world alive with possibility. 

Works Cited:

Adapting Materials and Strategies for Special Needs Students. Kathleen Bulloch. www.educationoasis.com/resources/Articles/adapting_materials.htm

Constructing Meaning. Bainbridge, Heydon and Malicky. Nelson Education, 2009.

English Language Arts K-7, Integrated Resource Package, British Columbia Ministry of Education

How Can I Effectively Use the First Steps Writing Program in My Classroom? Jennifer Savage. http://schools.gedsb.net/ar/passion/piv/Literacy/Savage.pdf

In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading and Learning. Nancie Atwell.

Launching the Writing Workshop. Calkins and Mermelstein.

Love That Dog. Sharon Creech. HarperCollins, 2001.

Robin Stevenson, writer.  Talk Given at UVIC, October 2011

Structure and Freedom: Achieving a Balanced Writing Curriculum. Mara Casey and Stephan Hemenway. English Journal, July 2001.

Teaching Writing in a Time of Reform. Strickland et al. The Elementary School Journal. March, 2001.

The Educational Situation as it Concerns Elementary School. John Dewey. Reprinted in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, July 2001.

Writing for the Big Screen: Literary Experiences in a Movie Making Project. Carol Bedard and Charles Fuhrken. Language Arts, November 2011.

   

               

Getting Down with Podcasting

Due to advances in media technology, elementary students are now able to engage in artistic mediums such as film and radio production. As these forms of media are highly produced and consumed within much of north American culture, they have arguably become more culturally relevant than traditional means of artistic and communicative self expression such as writing and drawing. Amidst such artistic genres and means of communicating is the podcast: a series of audio or video files which are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast).  Although webcasting is often differentiated from podcasting by its use of streaming as opposed to downloaded content, for the ease of our discussion here both forms of content acquisition will be considered under the umbrella of podcasting. For the elementary school classroom podcasting  provides students with an extremely diverse means of creative expression through genres like news reports, sitcoms, radio dramas, documentary productions, music shows and more. To view some interesting ways that both children and adults are using this medium check out the links below.

Kids:

http://kootenaycoopradio.com/index.php?/radio-show/show/radio_camp/                                                                                            

this link comes from KCR, a community owned radio station in Nelson B.C

http://www.adrianbruce.com/acekids/                                                                                                                                                          

this page features podcasts made by a grade 5/6 class

http://www.kid-cast.com/                                                                                                                                                                                           

this is a site designed to make it easier for children to create and publish their own podcasts

Grown Ups:

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/how-to-think-about-science-part-1---24-listen/                                                              

this is an extremely interesting series on the history and philosophy of science

http://kootenaycoopradio.com/index.php?/radio-show/show/break_the_stereo/                                                        

To really get down with podcasting, join host Cass Tutsch for a weekly installment of funk, soul and rare grooves!

The Tale of the Pupil and the IRP: Who Are Our Students and What Are We Teaching Them?

Who are Today’s ELA Students?

“You can not teach a crab to walk straight” –Aristophenes

            

    Within Aristophenes’ ancient proverb is a message which also happens to coincide with contemporary Social Constructivist views on linguistic development. This message is namely the idea that in order to effectively teach one’s student, a teacher must have a meaningful understanding of who that student is. Although trends in globalization and immigration have made diversity in the classroom an increasingly recognized reality, it is not enough to simply state that our learners are ‘diverse’. In order to truly understand our students we must try to understand how diversity manifests itself within the classroom. For example, one such manifestation is the idea that many students have not only unique ethnic or cultural heritages but also unique patterns of discourse (Constructing Meaning, 43). Within the context of an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, a recognition of such variance can allow a teacher to understand that a student who uses speech in a slower than normal way may not be disengaged but instead be exercising a set of linguistic pragmatics unique to his or her culture. Another form of student diversity, which may be completely related or completely unrelated to ethnic and cultural diversity, is the idea that “children display different modes of learning and different ways of representing what they know” (IRP, 26). Acknowledging this form of diversity is to recognize that each learner may utilize an array of learning styles and registers of self expression –all of which are equally valid. One final classroom diversity worth recognizing is one which is marked not by a difference between classmates but instead by the difference between students and their teachers. This intergenerational diversity is defined largely by differential usage patterns in information and communication technology. For example, although today’s learners are spending increasing amounts of time engaged with Internet technology, 76 percent of teachers have never used wikis, blogs or podcasts (A Vision of K-12 Students Today). Thus, in addition to being defined by diverse patterns of discourse, learning and self expression, today’s ELA students are also deeply immersed in emerging forms of media technology.

How Do Today’s ELA Students Learn?

   Just as today’s ELA students are diverse, so too are the ways in which they learn.  However according to researchers like Cambourne, the acquisition of literacy is nonetheless dependant upon certain key conditions. Primarily, these conditions are: ‘engagement’, ‘immersion’, ‘demonstration’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘use’. With respect to the element of ‘engagement’, it is increasingly being recognized that true engagement entails having children participate in authentic language experiences which are relevant to their daily lives (Constructing Meaning, 52). As educators like Robert Probst are quick to point out, this requires students to make personal connections with the texts they read, just as it requires teachers to promote different types of classroom discourse other than traditional forms like  ‘recitation’ (Tom Sawyer, Teaching and Talking). Interestingly, the way in which Cambourne’s criteria of ‘immersion’ is understood is also changing. For example just as the efficacy of integrated immersion experiences is being increasingly recognized (like multimodal activities such as Tea Party Lessons or Literacy Centers), so too is the role that parents have in promoting literacy during the school years (Literacy and Diversity, 53). Recently, Cambournes notion of ‘responsibility’ has also been of pedagogical interest, primarily with respect to the development of students’ metacognitive abilities. For example B.C’s Integrated Resource Package (IRP) for ELA states, “students who can monitor their learning, assess their strengths and weaknesses and set goals for improvement become independent lifelong learners” (IRP, 17). Similarly, the concept of language ‘use’ is also being renovated as increasing attention is being paid to the way in which different facets of language relate to each other. While this paradigmatic shift has caused educators to pay increased attention to the links between oracy and writing, researchers are also examining how writing can be bolstered the through the skilled use of visual representation (Constructing Meaning, 36, What should I Draw Today, 8).

How the IRP Helps and Hinders Beginning Teachers

   In addressing the learning needs and requirements of students, B.C’s IRP for the teaching of ELA is a document of considerable utility to the beginning teacher. For instance in addressing the learning needs of children, the document raises a host of pedagogical concerns which may not be immediately apparent to the inexperienced teacher. Such concerns include: learning to teach within the zone of proximal development, learning to differentiate between semantic, syntactic and graphophonic cueing systems and understanding how to disseminate and support learning strategies (IRP, 18 and 21). Similarly, the Prescribed Learning Outcomes (PLO’s) contained within the IRP also contain several elements which are of great assistance to new teachers. For example, the PLO’s can serve to guide a teacher’s understanding of what developmental levels their students are moving through. Within the PLO’s for grade one, competencies like “being able to recognize high frequency words” (B12), “being able to write simple sentences” (C10) and “being able to recognize and create rhyming words” (A12) can help a teacher identify what knowledge their students may already have and what goals the students should be working towards. Additionally other competencies such as “using prereading strategies like asking questions and making predictions” (B5) and “responding to read text by making text to text, text to self or text to world connections” (B8) provide beginning teachers with suggestions of what interactive and multimodal learning might look like. 

   Nonetheless, some of the benefits that the IRP has to offer can also in themselves function as hinderances. For example, while it is useful to have an idea of what skills you can reasonably expect your students to acquire over the course of a year, it is likely that these expectations will set a standard of performance which may be slightly or largely inappropriate for many students. As all individual learners have unique strengths, it seems inevitable that for any given learner some PLO’s will be too easily attained while others may remain temporarily out of reach. Another problematic aspect of the IRP is the way in which it categorizes certain learning outcomes. For example, in drawing distinctions between personal, informational and imaginative writing (PLO’s C1, C2 and C3 for grade 1) the IRP may cause a teacher to ignore the personal implications of imaginative writing (which are poignantly displayed in Ruth Shagory’s “The Need to Write, The Need to Listen”) or the informational possibilities of personal writing (such as writing to a pen pal). Finally it is important to note how the IRP may prejudice teachers regarding the potential of their students. In claiming that students from low income families may have increased difficulty in learning to read and write (IRP, 19), the IRP risks instilling biases within a teacher which may cause them to underestimate the knowledge and potential of such students. Furthermore, we also must note how claims such as these are in contradiction to research such as Wells’ Bristol Study which demonstrated that children from low income families do not exhibit impoverished language use (text 52). Thus, just as teachers would expect their students to approach a text critically, teachers themselves may benefit most by approaching the IRP in a similar manner.

Works Cited

A Vision of K-12 Students Today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8   

Constructing Meaning, Bainbridge, Heydon and Malicky.

English Language Arts K-7, Integrated Resource Package, British Columbia Ministry of Education

Literacy and Diversity: Working with the Grain, Marlene Asselin. (http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9460794&site=ehost-live&scope=site)

The Need to Write the Need to Listen, Ruth Shagoury

Tom Sawyer, Teaching and Talking, Robert Probst.

What Should I Draw Today? Sketchbooks in Early Childhood, Christine Marme Thompson. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193527)

Howdy

One of my earliest memories is of my brother Ben flying backwards off the horse we were riding while my father leapt into the air-  catching Ben just before he hit the ground. When I imagine how my father would have felt on that day if Ben had been injured,  I think, its a good thing Pappy made that catch. When that vivid memory in turn provokes me to recall  the gaggle of horse-related mishaps that would later come to befall my father, brother and myself, I also think that its a good thing we all gave up trying to become cowboys a long time ago. So,  I thought I would become a teacher instead. That latter journey is one that would come to gallop me across whole countries and continents, fortunes would be made and lost, hats would be tipped and tail feathers would be ruffled, existential truths would become briefly visible only to disappear behind sagebrush horizons just as lustrous moustaches would be grown only to be solemnly shaved off again. On several occasions during this endeavor someone riding their chuck wagon beside mine would holler: 


"So if you're thinkin' to make yourself one of those Elementary School Teachers, don't that imply that one must teach everything?"   


"Sure as a good wrangler loves beans" I would reply.


And within that teachin' of everything, that explorin' of worlds as vast as the clear night sky, I knew from the top of my ten gallon hat to the tip if my spurs that such an undertaking would by golly necessitate the teaching of English Language Arts. As I envision that undertaking in my minds eye, I picture children writing poems about the first snowfall of the year that blankets white those hills in the distance, I hear students singing sad twangy ballads about the last of the dinosaurs and I sense the illumination that resides in a child when they read their first sentence, paragraph or story. I hope to see children teach each other concepts in math and history through poems and stories they have written,  just as I hope that P.E and Drama games can allow children to further explore the stories and poems we have read in class. I picture pen pals and partner reading, listening games and representations proudly displayed within picture frames, and the delight of children learning to spell their own names. Above all, I suppose that it is my modest hope that those young stablehands will come to see language as none other than a trusty maguey lasso with which they can ride towards truth and perhaps better yet- fiction, scoop up friendships and downright hogtie those feelings of inadequacy that so often are the thorn in the boot of our young folk. Finally, lest I should forget, I also hope the process will be a hootenanny!