Haenyyoon's Blog

Digitial Media

haenyyoon — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:26:31 +0000

This week’s reading reminded me of a recent New Yorker cover that came out back in September. It’s a picture of a little boy standing on top of some books. He’s teaching a classroom full of old adults who are trying to learn “new literacies”. They are attempting to use “text talk”, but it’s noticeable that some of them look worried, some of them have very outdated equipment, some of them are sleeping – all in all, it’s an awkward site as these adults are trying to use things like “OMG” or “G2G” and “WTF”, as taught through a child (http://www.sparehed.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/brunetti.jpg). I think this is such a funny picture of our changing world yet an accurate picture of the digital divide between “young” people and “old” people – perhaps extending to new literacies versus old literacies.

I agree with Moje that multimodality has been around forever. Vygotsky (1978) highlighted the fact that communication encompasses multiple forms and repertories from oral, visual, written, etc., however, with the different ways that we are communicating with one another in this digital age, I think multiple literacies is now at the forefront of conversations because of the changing nature of literacy and communication. To be literate means a totally different thing than it did before – even five years ago. Now, we are blogging about our ideas, updating our status, chatting instead of calling, texting instead of leaving a message, and anticipating downloading the latest “app”. If literate practices are socially situated and means to make meaning, children today are growing up in the age of digital texts within the constructs of school that value the very opposite. Walk into most classrooms and it is obvious that multimodal texts are not part of the classroom curricula – it is still heavily print-based in nature.

I go back to the New Yorker cover because one thing that is always unnerving for anyone is to be in the midst of something that we don’t understand. As adults, the technological savvy needed to operate in a digital world is a daunting task – there are cognitive shifts to be made, terminology to learn, functions to memorize, and designing and creating that needs to happen, causing a little bit of discomfort along the way. In the article by McVee et. al. and the digital poetry interpretations, it was interesting to see that teachers started to understand what it felt like to feel cognitive dissonance and frustration in learning something new. They quote the New London Group’s idea of transformative practice as “juxtaposition, integration, and living with tension”, which I think is never an easy thing for teachers who are expected to know all the answers, but a necessary process for growth. The incorporation of purposeful new literacy integration as a mediational tool for communication would help elevate schools from being a prehistoric place to one that is relevant and changing with the times. I thought the poetry projects were very neat and showed how clearly the use of digital media helped students with making meaning and understanding poems with greater depth and connection.

However, there is also a danger in incorporating technology just for the sake of doing so, detracting from meaning rather than making it (as they mentioned in the “powerpoint” example). Again, such a tricky dilemma – teaching is such a hard profession, filled with nuances and intricacies and no “one right answer”. Are you making your students more literate just because you had them make a powerpoint? Are your students less literate because you introduced them to an important piece of printed text? No and No – the key point addressed in these articles is to keep in mind the cultural tools that students come in the classroom with, which will always be ever-changing. It is urging teachers to make literacy accessible and connected to how students make meaning in their particular time and space.

On a side note, I watched the YouTube clip of “Shift Happens” and although it made a lot of important points, I found the ominous, foreboding music to be overly dramatic and very annoying! Sorry folks to end on a negative note, but I just had to get that out.

Critical Literacy

haenyyoon — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:52:58 +0000

Critical literacy is a term that I think a lot of people use and view as important, but I think people definitely define it in different ways. Is it really about exploring social issues and getting kids to participate in a democratic society? Or, is it teaching kids how to analyze and critique texts to examine what voices are being heard and what steroetypes are being perpetuated? Is it empowering students to understand the access literacy gives to the world? I think it’s probably all of these, and I think the common theme that arises from all three of these articles is summarized in the notion that critical literacy has an element of leading kids to use reading and writing to interpret their everday experiences and make sense of their social world. I, wholeheartedly, agree with Green’s assertion that the most effective way to develop critical readers is through writing. She goes on to talk about how writing helps them see how language works and how language is used. I, also, think that writing gives kids space to find a voice whereas the reading of difficult texts may exclude them from the conversation. I was, especially, struck by the idea that social narratives (Lewison & Heffernen) give students a safe space to voice their ideas and give their perspectives on the world, especially the culture of their local context. These kids wrote about bullying, name-calling, competition, and spoke to issues that were real and everyday to their own situations. The fact that they could entwine their own experiences with a fiction piece gave the kids a safe space to “vent” without fully exposing themselves like a personal narrative would. I think this is very true and should be a point of contention for many educators. Some students do not feel comfortable or interested in personal narratives which does not give them access to language experiences, especially if they are going to reluctantly write. I’ve been in a lot of schools where the “plague of the personal narratives” is quite rampant. I’ve heard lots of stories about bike rides, going to the park, sleepovers, birthday parties, and at times, it does seem like an uninteresting string of the same stories with no point. However, I’d like to challenge the critical literacy writing workshop a bit (even though I think it is a great idea). Heffernen and Lewis situate their study through the lens of allowing childrens’ cultural resources to find a place in our classrooms, allowing children to voice and re-voice their ideas and appropriate writing to suit their experience with the world. I would argue that some children like personal narratives. Some children do not want to always write stories that have a point or speak to some larger critical issue. Some children want to write about their birthday parties everyday. Some children want to write about aliens in Mars. As teachers, I think it’s important to think about how open our classrooms are to allowing different sorts of access to be possible. Is there room for writing about racism as well as writing about Captain Underpants? Do children feel safe using their voice to speak to larger issues as well as using their voice to just “speak”.

Literacy Brokering

haenyyoon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:58:42 +0000

“Literacy brokering as a process of seeking and/or providing informal assistance about some aspect of a given text or literacy practice. Brokers bridge linguistic, cultural, and textual divides for others” (Perry, p. 256). This notion of brokering really connected with me, especially being a child of immigrant parents. I think all immigrant children engage in some form of brokering since they act as the liason of culture and language for parents. The Perry article had a lot of implications for teachers as the wide cultural gaps between school and home became so apparent. Immigrant families not only have to deal with a language issue, but the cultural and social contexts of a new country prove to marginalize some of these families from full participation in school and community. I appreciated the fact that this article focused on young children’s brokering activities because I think the emergence of literacy practices in young children as well as the need to broker these practices for their parents is a unique predicament. It is not just about language acquisition for many of these children, but it is about cultural brokering as well as genre brokering. The things that we take for granted are foreign material to many of these families. For example, most of us can easily identify junk mail when we see it, but most immigrant families cannot (especially if they do not understand the idea of soliciting). Furthermore, young children need a very sophisticated grasp of cultural norms to really understand what those things are, as well. I remember growing up speaking English very well and not really understanding how someone can tell you that you are “guaranteed to win a $1,000,000″ and not actually win it. In the classroom, the same applies. Field trip forms, homework sheets, reading logs, fundraisers, conference forms, etc. The depth of cultural understanding needed to decipher the meaning behind these things is something that we often take for granted. It does go back to Halliday’s idea that we “learn about language and we learn through language”. In a sense, to fully acquire meaning, we turn to not only syntactic structures of language, but its function and use. This idea of literacy brokering is intergenerational learning, but almost the opposite idea presented in Fisher’s piece of spoken word events and Black bookstores. The intergenerational learning that occurs in her piece is the passing on of tradition, language, history, and culture from old to young. In literacy brokering, the intergenerational learning comes from the passing on of literacy practices and culture from young to old. Both of which I think are interesting and exciting!

McCarthey & Zheng

haenyyoon — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:55:10 +0000

I just had a very interesting discussion with a friend of mine who is also getting her PHD. She works with ESL students at the secondary level (9-12), and I was talking to her about the hybridity in written texts – combining first language and second language. The first thing that she said was, “I totally disagree with that – We do not let our students write in their second language, only English.” She went on to talk about how her students get confused when they code-switch from their first language to their second language. One of the questions that she asked was, “How could a teacher respond to a students’ writing if she does not speak the native language of the child?” So, I was left to think about how I would respond. I think it is important to give teachers access to the language of power (Delpit), so I’m not advocating for kids to be denied academic language and access to English, but I do agree with McCarthey and Zheng that using their native language provides a scaffold for children as they write. I, also, believe that the structures used to speak in your native language provide the base to transition into written language as well as communication in a second language. However, beyond the superficial layers of writing production, there is also an element of identity that comes with valuing children’s native language. In all the articles we’ve read so far, there is clearly a connection between identity and language, and written language is closely associated with how we see ourselves as producers of texts and users of language. Forcing children to use just English holds the danger of devaluing their first language, which may lead to a resistance to write (which I really think is a major roadblock to improving writing). Everyday, we see children “code-switch” very flexibly, but this may not show in the kinds of standardized writing assessments that we give students. At the same time, I can understand my friend’s concerns about the use of the native language: How do children reconcile confusions in using both at the same time? How can children be ensured that they are learning “adequate” English? How do we get these kids to “catch up”? So, I turn it back to you all – what do you think and how would you respond?

“We Real Cool”

haenyyoon — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:13:14 +0000

I had the opportunity to hear David Kirkland speak when he came to the Chancellor’s Academy one summer a few years back. He addressed this notion of black masculine literacies by sharing narratives of black adolescent males. I remember being struck by the complexities of being black and being literate, and I believe the description of black masculine literacies as “complex, messy, and ongoing” is an accurate portrayal of explaining this phenomenon. Kirkland reiterates the sociocultural nature of literacy, infused with multiple meanings, contributing to identity formation and participation in culture. These boys saw value in language because of identity more than utility. They saw language as a means of enacting their “coolness” (identity) that transcended semantics and word formation. Language was not just a means of writing down ideas on a page, but it was an expression of who they were. Therefore, their literate practices were multilayered and multimodal, involving print in texts, styles of dress, songs and rap, objects, and dialects.
I think the boys’ use of language in the formation of social groups as well as participation in popular culture gives tremendous insight into what these boys value and how they situate themselves in their social worlds. The boys were clearly aware of the language of “wider communication” (p.290) or how to speak properly, but they also saw “Ebonics” as a way of forming group identity, leading to the emergence of their own individual selves. Kirkland and Jackson discuss how the boys “carved out lives out of letters, stained skin with social meanings, and embraced multiple symbol systems to manufacture meaningful existences” (p.293). Thinking about these complicated enactments of literacy, teachers should probably consider how a rejection of students’ ways of speaking is a rejection of not only spoken word but a rejection of who they are. The kind of talk that students engage in, the sorts of writing they choose to participate in, the kinds of clothes that students wear, the music they listen to, the symbols they identify with are full of political and social implications that teachers should not easily dismiss or try to correct without understanding.

Professional Development

haenyyoon — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:38:54 +0000

I may be using this space to vent, but I will do my best to tie it into the readings . Chapter 4 in Because Writing Matters really resonates with me because it directly ties in with the work that I do in schools everyday. We’ve been talking about genuine professional development through the last few weeks and how complicated the path is to true and lasting transformations, but one thing I would like to bring up is all the external factors to change that affect a teacher’s professional development. One of those outside influences is the administrator. One of the key ingredients to change that Nagan underscores is a “committed administrator. Jim Gray says, “school reform can’t happen just by passing laws and publishing mandates” (p.66). However, the more and more schools I visit, the more I realize that teachers are handed mandates and very few means to support its implementation. One of the frustrating things that I see happening in schools is that administrators uphold high standards and want teachers to learn the curriculum and be competent, but they would like to accomplish this without putting the time, money, and energy. Sometimes, I can’t help but feel like I am supposed to be the solution to the “problem” instead of a co-laboror in the change process – thus the title “collaborator”. Many administrators do not provide the time during the day for teachers to come together, very few are willing to spend the money to get substitutes so that teachers can work together and watch each other, many pine for staff developers but know so little of what is actually happening in the school around the staff development. I still feel like administrators want to “fix” the teachers instead of grow them, and until they see the teachers not as a “source of the problem but as a principal resource for the solution” (Sheridan Blau, p. 67), will we make significant steps in meaningful professional development.

National Writing Project

haenyyoon — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:28:16 +0000

I have always found the National Writing Project to be an interesting and worthwhile phenomenon. Before reading the article by Anne Whitney, I heard those same sentiments from teachers saying that being part of the project “changed their lives.” So, the article was an interesting one because it attempted to break down what “life-changing” actually means. Based on the idea that transformation is a change in meaning perspectives, attitudes, and stances, the writing project aims to provide a forum for changes in ways of thinking more than specific writing programs or strategies. Whitney identifies two areas that were part of transformation for these teachers: confidence and competence. I think these two things reveal a very important aspect of writing that goes beyond just skills and strategies – that writing is an enactment of identities and a construction of self just as much as it is words on paper. She underscores the importance of teacher attitudes and beliefs in the affecting of actual practice. One of those poignant comments from the teachers comes from the following statement: “I experienced community, acceptance, renewal, and challenge. I continue to feel a part of that learning community, and continue to be challenged to think about literacy in new and different ways because of it” (p.174). As I was reading through the comments of teachers and their transformation through the summer, I began to think that teacher change came from the structure of the National Writing Project – the forum to share ideas, the community built upon shared beliefs and struggles, and the encouragement and support of colleagues. I think this is a rarity for teachers through an academic year where school culture emphasizes results more than reflection. The National Writing Project seemed to be a place where teachers were able to reflect on their practice with other colleagues who experienced the same dilemmas. Given the liberty to try new things, the teachers responded with new energy and new thinking. I wonder if the schools can start to catch on to this sort of professional development – not just creating a PLC in namesake, but creating a culture that promotes a community of learners who reflect, revise, and “reframe” their teaching and perspectives.

Beth Maloch: Moments by which change is made…

haenyyoon — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:53:41 +0000

Beth Maloch takes on a socioconstructivist perspective on identity for her study, asserting that identity is not static, but dynamic and fluid. The idea that identity can be constructed and reconstructed depending on social interactions resonates with me because it is such an important perspective to hold when teaching students in the classroom. Antwan and Chris’ participation in literacy events across the day changed depending on their positioning in such events. Did they feel confident in the event? Did they feel supported? Did they have choice? There were numerous factors that contributed to their active participation, but what is more revealing is that their identity shifted at different points throughout the day. They did not just assume one position in the classroom, but moved between several constructed ideas, including marginalized and dominant positions. I like the fact that Maloch did not portray literature circle groups as the “cure-all” for struggling students, instead she managed to shed light on the fact that “struggling” students do not always have to be positioned as such, and their participation in the classroom does not always have to be a fixed one. The basic fact that many children enter into our classrooms with cultural capital that is not deemed “acceptable” is undeniable. When children lack the cultural capital to be successful at school, the interactions they have with their teacher and peers can further marginalize them as valuable members of the classroom community. I think it’s important for teachers to capitalize on the capital that all children bring into our classroom spaces. I, also, think it’s important to ask ourselves why school seems to work for certain types of students but fail consistently for others. Is it the structure of school that needs to change? Is it the perspective of teachers that need to shift? I, often, wrestle with these ideas as I think about what the goal of school is – is it to shape students into what adults want them to be or is it to discover and develop the possibilities of self? In answering these important questions, teachers have the power to act as mediators as Ms. P did for Chris and Antwan. In “living out particular identities and positional identities in the figured world of Ms. P’s classroom, every interaction affords new possibilities for reshaping and reforming themselves as beings in this classroom world” (p. 103). I love this – every student then has a new opportunity to take on another aspect of their identity, instead of being labeled as the “bad reader” or the “troublemaker”.

Raphael and Daniels

haenyyoon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:59:12 +0000

“More than any other stakeholders in education, teachers know that no one answer, no single approach, no simple solution will lead all students to success as readers and writers” (Raphael). I liked how Raphael’s article was about providing a framework and not a prescription. These days, even the most well-intentioned framework has transformed into a single approach solution. Eventually, all curriculum needs to be re-conceptualized by the teacher in order to be successful in a classroom of unique individuals. I think book club plus is an interesting idea. My only concern would be the possibility of educators looking to it as a program rather than a philosophy. Harvey Daniels, in his article, mentions the ways that philosophies become distorted. His literature circles concept definitely became one such distortion. I was excited to read about his new stance on literature circles. In my last three years in the classroom, I had changed my idea of book clubs since I encountered the same problems that he mentioned. I implemented the literature circles with the role sheets, and some common issues that would come up were: “What if I don’t have a connection?” and “Can I be the illustrator?” I, also, noticed that many students were using the sheets to create contrived discussions where one person reads their sheet, then the next, and so forth. What started as well-intentioned became manufactured and disingenuous. In my last three years, I moved towards the “post-it” note model because the students were accustomed to doing this in their independent reading. They used the post-it notes to guide their discussions, and the result was better discussions and more independence. It was refreshing to see someone rethink where his ideas have gone (Daniels), acknowledge the wrong turns it has taken, and offer new ideas and insights. I do think the idea of book clubs is a good one, but more than the structure, I think the opportunity that kids have to exchange ideas and talk in a classroom is an important one.

Newkirk, Chapters 1 &2

haenyyoon — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:47:52 +0000

I’ve always admired the way that Starbucks talks about their employees, referring to them as “partners”. After frequenting many Starbucks locales, I noticed that the baristas showed knowledge, efficiency, and excellent customer service. What is the philosophy of Starbucks? A happy employee yields happy customers. Walking into schools breeds a different feeling. Lately, schools are plagued with unhappy teachers, trying to survive the demands of federal and local mandates while attempting to maintain a sense of fulfillment from their professions. At the same time, lawmakers are asking the perpetual question: Why are children not learning? Why are classrooms not knowledgeable, efficient, excellent, and happy places? I’d like to apply the Starbucks principle here. Newkirk talks about the mechanization of literacy in schools, where schools are likened to factories, producing children valued for their uniformity rather than individuality. An equal concern is the mechanization of teaching where scripted curriculum, “research-based” textbooks, and scientific methods of teaching, undermining the idiosyncrasies of each teacher. Newkirk poignantly states, “Schools are not factories; students are not products” (p.10) – I expand that statement to include teachers. Teaching is a situated practice, and the research used to standardize the profession does not account for the intricacies of each classroom, the context of the communities, the available resources, the culture and climate of a particular local environment. Futhermore, so many of these research reports exclude teachers from the conversations, producing one-sided conclusions rather than a dialogic. I’m convinced that the best teaching comes from the knowledge and everyday practice of educators in the classroom. Good teachers are individuals that have high expectations for their students, who refuse to succumb to deficit thinking, and use intuition to bring out the best in each child. I wonder why we don’t apply that same thinking to the teaching profession? Do lawmakers have high expectations for teachers or hand them scripted curriculum because of the lack of trust in their wisdom? Do they believe that teachers are experts or do they believe they are deficient and unable to respond to the students they see daily? Many times, I think teachers feel defeated, tired from resisting – even more troubling is that some teachers have lost confidence in themselves. I agree with Newkirk that standards are necessary, but there is a big difference between “standards” and “standardization” – hopefully in this new era, we move towards the former and away from the later.