Category: Multiliteracies

Preparing for Writing Methods, K-8

The month of August has brought a number of transitions, not the least of which is that I begin teaching at CMU next week. There are two courses that I will be doing this fall; one is a writing methods course for K-8 pre-service teachers and the other an intermediate composition course. More on composition next week, but for now I thought that I would post some of my thinking about writing methods as I created my syllabus.

I must say that sections of this intro to the course are taken from my department chair, Marcy Taylor’s syllabus, but I have added a few things. I forgot how much a syllabus can, in a sense, be a teaching philosophy of sorts, and I really enjoyed crafting this introductory part of the document. In my next post (and once I have the assignment refined a little more), I will post what I plan to call the “Educational Contexts Multigenre Research Project.” For now, here are some of my thoughts on writing and teaching writing, as represented in my syllabus  for this fall’s class.

Course Overview
In “The Neglected ‘R’: The Need for a Writing Revolution,” the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges begin their report by claiming that

Writing is how students connect the dots in their knowledge. Although many models of effective ways to teach writing exist, both the teaching and practice of writing are increasingly shortchanged throughout the school and college years. (2003, p. 6)

Given this national context, we will explore models of teaching writing while attempting to understand why and how writing is being “shortchanged” in our schools. A complex task, teaching writing requires that we understand why and how people choose to write, what methods are appropriate in certain situations, how social-cultural and cognitive factors play into individual writing processes, and the effects of newer technologies and multiple literacies on what constitutes “good” writing instruction.

Good writing instruction requires more than following a textbook. A trusted scholar and practitioner, Lucy Calkins offers a vision for what it means to be a teacher of writing:

If our teaching is to be an art, we must draw from all we know, feel and believe in order to create something beautiful.  To teach well, we do not need more techniques and strategies as much as we need a vision of what is essential.  It is not the number of good ideas that turns our work into art but the selection, balance and design of those ideas. (1994, p. 3)

Thus, this course is designed to help you make wise decisions about the “selection, balance and design” of writing in your elementary-level classrooms. Think of it as a workshop; the emphasis will be on creating and critiquing ideas about writing pedagogy through a hands-on approach. It is designed to focus on five basic areas of preparation:  your own writing; reading and discussion; working with children in the classroom; creating teaching materials; and written reflection on the first four.

Methods courses can never be only about “methods” or lesson planning alone. Many students expect to get a “bag of tricks” or “set of strategies” from the class that they can simply take and use directly as lessons in their classrooms. This is reasonable. Because you are anxious to get out and have your own classroom, I can understand why you may be impatient with what you see as theory or “busy work.” My goal is that you come to realize is that “theory” is all you have with which to filter the events of the classroom; you won’t know what to do completely until you get there. Think of this class as offering a theory, an approach, to writing instruction, one that will define writing and literacy in a broad manner.

For that definition, we turn to Anstey and Bull who offer us a vision of what literacy pedagogy, when deeply and critically theorized, can look like:

[L]iteracy pedagogy must teach students to be flexible, tolerant of different viewpoints, and able to problem solve, analyse situations, and work strategically. They must be able to identify the knowledge and resources they have and combine and recombine them to suit the particular purpose and context. Consequently, school classrooms and teachers’ pedagogy must encourage, model, and reflect these sorts of behaviours. The content and pedagogy of literacy programs must reflect the literate practices of local to global communities and equip students for change. Educators cannot hope to teach students all they need to know, as this will change constantly. But teachers can equip their students with the knowledge, skills, strategies, and attitudes that will enable them to meet new situations and cope with them. (2006, p. 18)

No small task, indeed. Learning how to teach writing may involve unlearning how you were taught writing. It may challenge your conceptions of what a “good” writer is and should be able to do. Thus, the focus of this course will be on practicing the strategies of a writing workshop approach as filtered through the multiple lenses of curriculum and pedagogy, practice and theory. This applies to both traditional written texts (e.g., stories, essays, and poems) and those composed with newer technologies and in multiple media (e.g., hypertexts, audio, video, and other multimedia).

One of the most fundamental tenets that scholars in our field argue is that teachers of writing need also to be writers. It is my goal as your teacher to help you become both a better writer and teacher of writing in different genres, for different purposes, and across various audiences. By the end of the course, you will believe the mantra, “I am a writer.”
References

  • Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.
  • Calkins, Lucy. The Art of Teaching Writing. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.
  • National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges. (2003). The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution. Available: www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/neglectedr.pdf

Thoughts on Technology and Literacy Professional Development

Last week, a number of RCWP teachers met to plan professional development for the 2007-08 school year. The meetings went well, as we discussed a number of issues about how and why we should be doing technology/writing PD and we all agreed that we needed to make the sessions compelling to teachers in terms of meeting real needs and stay focused on literacy practices, too.

To that end, the group came up with five topics that we will present over the course of the year, one each month from October through March. Here is a list of topics and the technologies that we will explore in each.

  • Why Technology? Exploring New Literacies (RSS and Overview of Read/Write Web)
  • Reading, Writing, and Researching Online (Searching, Evaluating, and Documenting with Social Bookmarking, Google Notebook, and Zotero)
  • Creating a Community of Writers Using Technology (Blogs, Wikis, Google Docs, EZines)
  • Free, Easy, and Legal Resources for Creating Content (Copyright, Fair Use, Creative Commons, Open Source)
  • Communicating Beyond the Classroom (Public and private spaces, Email rhetoric and groups, Flickr)

We are starting to post agendas on our wiki and look forward to hearing what you all think. In particular, do you think that:

  • We give a good survey of available technologies?
  • We move through the ideas in each workshop and over the series in a coherent manner?
  • Teachers would be willing to pay to come to these sessions (once a month on Thursdays, from 6:00 – 8:30 PM)?

Any feedback that you have would be great. I am in the midst of transitioning from MSU to CMU this week, so I apologize about the lack of posts, but I hope to get back in the swing of posting soon.

Musings on Multiliteracies

Since it has been a few weeks since my last blog post, I have been engaged in the first and second week of RCWP’s summer institute, the online discussion for Tech Matters 2007, and a few days offline when we took a long holiday weekend up north. So, there are many, many ideas floating in my head right now — perhaps disconnected — that I want to capture before they slip away.

First, we had a great talk today at RCWP about Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies as well as the new Michigan Educational Technology Standards. You can see some of our ideas captured in our wiki page on the book. This was done to both spur on our colleagues as they write their multiliteracies learning plan and to foreground many of the issues that we want to talk about on Thursday when the state director of technology from MDE visits our site. So, more on that soon.

Second, there are some cool things developing from a social network that Kevin started, Tech Friends. Whether you are an NWP TL or not, this seems to be a great network that is focusing their discussions on issues of teaching with technology, all the while considering critical aspects of infrastructure and classroom practice. Join in!

Third, Tech Matters is next week. Paul Allison has done a great job organizing us into a DrupalEd site and the conversations there are rich, too. I am still not quite sure what is public there and what will be soon, but that is where I will be next week and much of my writing attention will be in that site.

Fourth, I am scheduled to do our sacred writing time tomorrow morning and I want to do something with syncronous collaborative writing. I am just at a loss right now for what to have them do. I might have them begin writing a story, although that could quickly get out of hand. I might try to make it more focused and have them discuss their favorite writing spaces.

Finally, I can safely say that I am feeling overwhelmed with maintaining my online identity right now. I tried Twitter for awhile, but I couldn’t keep up with it. My Flickr feed is all but dead. This blog has been neglected for many weeks. And now I have the TM07 and Tech Friends networks that I am joining in, too. I have been woefully remiss in posting to the Tech Stories blog, and I see that they are going to present at K12 Online Conference — congrats to Bonnie and Kevin — another community that I want to get involved in, too.

At what point can/shoudl we expect our colleagues to engage in learning about and learning to write with newer technologies when even the techies are overwhelmed?

Whew. That was random. But, I wanted to share some of my thinking and see if anyone can help me think about how to collect my online self. I tried Netvibes a year ago, but fell out of that habit, too.

Any ways that you can think of to organize all these ideas, activities, spaces, people, etc?

Whoever said being multiliterate would be easy though, right?

Opening Thoughts, Day 2

Opening Thoughts – Day 2

  • Dixie Goswami – Bread Loaf
    • Think about a follow up conference in 2009 that would invite the young people with whom we are working to attend as well. The literacy that our young people are learning is collaborative; every talk that I have heard shows that the students are the primary source about technology tools and making meaning with one another.
    • We need to figure out how we, as professionals, can invite our young people into this work so we can learn from them. Shirley Heath used to remind us that students are resources to be developed, not problems to be solved. The conversation is shifting, and we will move that shift and critique the technology tools that we use.
    • The next time we convene, we will have young people who will be able to be “advocates and activists.” We need to think about students as co-researchers by reinventing the mission of teacher research so we work closely with students to find out from them and with them the meaning of what they are doing with technology.
    • Years ago, we brought boxes and boxes of student work that took us the whole summer to go through. yesterday, in Renee’s sessions, she went through interviews, transcripts, videos, and other materials that made it instantly possible to see what was happening.
    • Also, we don’t have to find publishers that demand certain formats for scholarly work. The only limit for sharing your work and calling it scholarly research is your own time, creativity, and ability to get it on the internet.
    • There could not be a more exciting time than now. The presentations that we have watched in the past two days represent the tip of the iceberg. The school, community, colleagues, and other factors makes the ecology of technology is something that we need to look at more as well. There is a huge base of research that must be done to show how classroom practice happens, how it is formed, and what allows it to happen.
    • Five, ten years ago, we would have been talking about technology tools. We don’t define the digital divide in terms of who has access to tools. Now, we are looking at which kids have the kinds of opportunities to network in school and how we are intervening in those process. The infrastructure is important, but you are asking the hard questions that culminate in the hard questions. It is not a question of whether we teach, but how we do it well.
    • The big digital divide is not looked at as equipment, but opportunities for students to participate in a participatory culture. What does this mean? The challenges, risks, ethical perspectives that need to be brought to all of this mean that we can not afford to have increasing numbers of young people to be media makers only through popular culture outside of schools. Thinking about this is an incredibly complex task.
    • What do classrooms look like? How do we intervene in policy?
  • Karen McComas – Marshall University WP
    • Starting with Renee’s first graders yesterday reminded me of what is important about what I do. I teach far more than content and I try to create an environment in which change can happen.
    • Yesterday, Jackie’s list of truisms reminded me of another set of truisms that I found a few years ago from a 1998 keynote from Neil Postman. Five things:
      • All technological change is a trade-off. As I bring in something new, I leave something out.
      • The advantages and disadvantages of technology are never distributed evenly across the population. However, if we wait until everyone has it, we will stand still for an eternity.
      • In every technology, there are two or three powerful ideas. My task, as a teacher, is to identify an utilize them.
      • Technology change is additive. All things change, not just the technology
      • Media tend to become mythic. We need to research it.
    • Katie Wood Ray tells us that writing workshop is not easy, and not everyone can do it. I feel the same about technology and teaching with technology.
    • I left my SI people with a prompt on Friday, and I wanted it to affront them. “Given the demands of the modern age, and the demands on our children’s future, is it really OK to as whether or not they can use technology in their teaching?”
  • Liz Davis – DC Area WP
    • I completed the institute in 1995 and was worried about technology in the classroom. In 1999, I attended a conference on the digital divide that focused on race, gender, and power. I learned a few things at this conference as I prepared to present at it.
    • As I read Damico’s article, I thought more about new literacies and the way that we are moving from an ideological model to a multilitercies model. For my students, seeing the differences from home to school were not always seen as assets, but as deficits.
    • Our classrooms and the ways in which we see students have been a hindrance in my ability to teach at the highest level of expectations. I teach the poorest students in Washington DC. Asking them to bring their lives into the classrooms has been something new for me.
    • Yet, from bringing their lives out of the margins of my lessons has made a difference in the way I teach. When we talk about multimodal meaning making, we have to think about all the risks in doing that. Whose language has the most power? Whose literacy is valued the most, defined as standard?
    • This brings into your classroom and teaching many questions that are difficult and you may not be ready to deal with.
    • Damico’s article brings many questions about the technology and the ways the students learn. Yesterday, as I listened to Renee’s students, I recall the conversation that happened at my table. We automatically began thinking about why students were worried about the story’s plot, and we began looking at issues of race, class, and power. At some point, the students may have derailed the lesson, but maybe questioning what we teach is a good thing as they critically analyze what they are learning in school.
    • Learning is about liberation (Friere). If students are able to take what they learn in the classroom, in the long run they should take what they have from their home, community, and streets, and then move it to a level of application that is real and applicable to them, then do we need to teach other R’s? Resistance? Revolution? Rising Up?
    • I am quite excited about the direction the local and national writing project that are going. We need to take control of how we design the language of what they learn, then corporations will make it happen for us.
  • Janet Swenson – Red Cedar WP
    • An Old, Slightly Sea-Sick Messenger Looks at a New Media, New Literacies World
    • Clifford Geertz — Tacking near, tacking far
      • We need to look very closely at the phenomenon, yet then move back and look at the larger social, economic, political systems in which they are embedded.
      • When the problems are very complex, we should do this often, hence the “sea sickness” of tacking in and out so quickly
    • Now that we have a shared understanding of the case studies, we need to look at the common and uncommon aspects of the work.
      • New tools: MP3 recorders
      • New sites: social networks
      • New compositions: Google Docs
    • I think that now we need to tack even further away from the shore and think about the larger implications of schooling.
    • Derek Bock, Our Underachieving Colleges
      • As a result of participating in college, are we giving them an opportunity to acquire a meaningful vision of life, develop their character, improve their minds, address important questions about who we are and what we should become, become more critical and reflective individuals, lead full lives and complete human beings?
    • How do we contextualize what we are seeing in this broad landscape?
    • Some things that technology offers is a rebottling (digital scrapbooking) but Potin of MIT is worried about whether our students are only skimming the surface and not doing the deep diving that transforms lives and communities?
    • Share a video: Hero in the Hallway
  • Will Banks – Tar River WP
    • Freewrite from a few nights ago about how what we have been thinking has challenged us. Courtney has asked us to be careful with our language.
    • Paul used the term “blog” and Cessi used “electronic exchange” and there are social networks. Is what we are exploring hte confulence of things?
    • Literacies are becoming relational in that things are hypertextual, and not always evident. They are much more complex and chaotic than even HTML of just a few years ago.
    • This emerging set of literacies has to do with engaging chaos.
    • Can these textual events be taught? What do we learn from them? Can the texts give answers to the questions we have?
    • These literacy events and our occasioning these events seem to emerge rather than exist? How do you teach this?

Closing Thoughts on Day 1

Closing Thoughts on Day 1

Six friends of the NWP will offer closing comments on day one!

  • Jackie Royster – Truisms
    1. Literacy is not benign – it has social and policitcal power wiht predictable and unpredictable conseuences.
    2. Digital technologies make it easier to see Truism 1.
    3. We have teachers who want to do right by their students.
    4. Cases that were presented today show us the possibilities for dynamic action.
    5. Thoughtful and meaningful uses of technology are meaningful for teachers and students.
    6. As a field, we need to engage those outside of our field in meaningful, multimedia dialogue with the intention of affecting beliefs and share this knowledge about learning. So, truism #6 is that there are some things that we already know and we are coming to know and act on them better with each new wave of technology.
    • We need to be realistic about infrastructure and we need to work on critiquing the systems of power and control. We are inviting students to question things that those who control our society may not want us to question, thus there are risks involved.
      • There are multiple opportunities for research.
        • How do you bring the canons of our work into this medium?
        • What happens when we push this into schools with infrastructure problems?
        • What about the conditions that enable change?
        • What is whetting the appetite for students and teachers to do digital work?
        • How do we disrupt these habits while accomplishing our goals?
        • What does writing and digital literacy mean?
        • What about assessment of writing?
        • What do policy makers and other stake holders need to know in order to have progress?
        • How do we speak in specfics and not generalities?
        • How do we keep things simple and connect to our values of teaching?
        • What are the appropriate roles for students?
        • What are the relationships between technologies and teaching?
        • How do we interogate cultural practices as they migrate across media?
        • How can we keep pedagogies dynamic?
        • How do we garner resources withour institutionalization?
  • Danielle DeVoss – Composing with/in/through infrastructures
    • When the task of composing — or even the tasks of thinking, of inmagining, of creating — are not supported in the spaces in which we work, typically invisible support mechanisms break down, revealing themselves as needing to be address to meet the different demands of new writing practices.
      • So often we are not even aware of the infrastructure until we hit something that breaks. Hitting firewalls. Can’t install open source tools. Can’t get into computer labs.
    • The Goals:
      • To encourage students to be thoughtful, critical, and reflective useres of digital technologies.
      • To encourage students to explore, analyze, and critique different digital technologies so that they may choose the best tehcnology to facilitate their writing and the rhetorical situation to which they are responding.
      • To promote the undesrstanding of both writing and technology as complex, socially situated, and political tools through which humans act, make, and share information.
    • So, although our demands and needs may be different, and the technologies we engage in the classroom may be different, good teaching and good practice transcend tools.
  • Mark Schlager
    • The core business of the NWP – teaching writing and the professional development of teachers or writing
    • When I hear “improvement” and “innovation” I begin to think about organizational aspects. As organizations react to globalization,  they need to get streamlined and collaborative.
    • Should the NWP organize itself differently to look at how to support writing and technology as well as the professional development thereof?
    • As a minimum, you have to have the people responsible for identifying and implementing changes to the core business. But, this is not adequate anymore.
    • We need to assimilate dramatic improvements and shifting them into shifting targets.
    • We need to invest in a specific activity that supports those who are doing the PD.
    • How do you share good practices? How do you demonstrate that technology will do something better than something else?
  • Gail Hawisher
    • What does it mean to be literate today?
      • I think that our discussions confirm that literate activity can not be described without talking about new technologies. It can’t mean that we can’t be litreate without the technologies, but they have to be folded in to the definition.
      • In our example this morning, the technology was integral to the learning and writing that took place for both students and teachers.
    • As teachers use technology for teaching and students use it for learning, new challegnes are presented.
      • It is both teachers and students who are using technology for teaching and learning. Teachers are learners in progress.
      • How do we make learning and teaching count for all of us?
      • How do we align what we do in class with what we expect from students and how we assess them?
    • Value added to technology
      • New technology provides students with an audience. Moves away from “teacher as examiner”
      • What is the distinctive power that the use of technology brings to our teaching?
  • Courtney Cazden
    • The (re)definition of literacy
      • I have stressed the importance of speaking specifically about the uses of software rather than just “technology” in general. I don’t think that we should just pluaralize “literacy” – it is a cop out.
      • There are some general aspects of the whole digital world that are pervasive. What was true before about teaching writing is true in form in the digital world, but still different.
        • NWP and Bread Loaf teachers all have the same desire of wanting their students to be more fluent and effective writers for larger audiences. What has changed is that the audience is so much more unknown and unknowable when you put something out on the internet.
        • Another goal is critical literacy. Teachers, particularly ones who have had social justice philosophy, who have been analytical as well as evaluative, have been doing this for a long time. The internet now has nothing that is pre-selected by teachers, textbook editors, librarians, or anyone. Need to be able to analyze sources more and more.
        • When you are not just retrieving but contributing things to the internet, there are exaggerated forms of the things that we have been talking about for a long time. What we have talked about for the long time, the presentation of self and how you choose to talk about and respond to others, now involves a heightened awareness of the ethics for civil resposne.
  • Glynda Hull – something old, something new
    • Something old — we are meaning making beings, and that is a truism and something to keep in mind at a conference on technology. How can technology extend or expand the meaning making that we do?
    • Something new — Modernity at Large by Arjun Appadurai. The characteristic of a global world is that you have moving people and moving text that float around everywhere.
      • How do we understand the inequity in the digital divide?
      • How do we understand being critical when living in a global world?
      • How do we understand what counts as a good text/picture/video in different contexts and with different ideologies?
    • We have been asked to think about whether technology is making literacy different, and I am on the end of the continuum that suggest that it really is. We may want to think about different metaphors for understanding literacy, such as aesthtics and art.
      • The primary object of literacy education is not to give learners a finite set of capacititis, but to give them the ability to construct meaning from the artifacts of their lives.

“Language Learning and Peer Response Online in a High School ELL Classroom” by Joe Bellino and Ailish Zompa

Here are notes from Joe and Ailish’s presentation on “Language Learning and Peer Response Online in a High School ELL Classroom.” They both teach at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland.

“Language Learning and Peer Response Online in a High School ELL Classroom”
by Joe Bellino and Ailish Zompa

  • Overview of Project
    • What we wanted students to get from our Google Docs project
      • We wanted students to have the opportunity to easily read the writing of their classmates
      • We wanted students to practice using language that would help their classmates improve ideas and development
      • We wanted to encourage students to improve their own ideas and development
    • In 1988, Joe did a teacher research project looking at peer conferencing in his ESOL students. He found that students felt:
      • The papers were hard to read
      • Students didn’t trust feedback (“How can someone else learning English help me?”)
      • Students were sometimes reluctant to participate
      • But, it still helped their writing.
    • Then, computers came along and it simplified mechanical aspects of writing and allowed them to read more. We used Nicenet to get and give feedback, but the threaded discussion would put comments way down the page.
    • Look of peer conferencing with Google Docs:
      • More time on task
      • More reading
      • More feedback
  • Looking at the writing of one student
    • Jealousy writing prompt based on a Brief Constructed Response model
    • Students would read the prompt, write a response, and post it on their Google Doc account. After they finished their post, they had to visit five other students and comment on their writing.
    • Looking at one particular student’s work.
      • Tech Note: Joe and Ailish have students only create ONE Google Doc for the entire year and the student erases the first assignment when they prepare to write the second one.
    • Looking closely at the ten steps in the revision process where other students commented on his work and then he made revision:
      • What do you see in the student’s work?
      • Questions and comments
      • What questions do you have for this student?

My reflections on the presentation

As I listened to Joe and Ailish describe their work, I am amazed and the beautiful simplicity that Google Docs has allowed them in framing a writing workshop in their classroom. Gone are the days of multiple overheads, copying students’ work, finding many colored pens, disks that were lost or broken, compatibility issues with word processors/hardware, and waiting (and waiting and waiting) for feedback. Instead, as they noted above, the students are spending more time on task, really reading (and learning from) one another’s writing, and offering more feedback over time, even if it isn’t as substantive feedback as we would like to see to begin with. I feel that you are only as good a writer as the feedback that you give others, so looking at how Joe and Ailish have used Google Docs to streamline the feedback process makes me think that it is a useful pedagogical tool.

Using the conference questions to analyze the case study

  • What is the distinctive power that technology brings to learning to write and literacy? How does it enhance and change the way students learn to write? how does it enhance and chance the teachers teach writing and literacy?
    • Efficiency and organization of paperwork
    • Student motivation, for whatever reason, there is some excitement on the part of kids as they are using tech
    • It is the use of the technology, not the technology itself
    • Peer response works in this kind of situation
  • As teachers use technology in teaching, and students use it for learning in the classroom, new challenges and vulnerabilities have become evident. What are the concerns, pitfalls, risks, and vulnerabilities that accompany literacy, and teaching literacy in the digital age? What lessons have we learned about these challenges and problems?
    • What happens when things change (from Writely to Google Docs, when the server is down, etc)?
    • The sparse community of like-minded people — how are we going to spread this out and share it.
  • The definition of what it means to be literate keeps evolving. Through the ages it has referred to written communication and expression using pen and paper. The audience has been those who have had access to the hard copy product. In the digital age, these as well as other aspects of literacy have changed. Now, when you think about being a writer or being literate in the digital age, what is the same and what is different?
    • Multiliteracies – linguistic/rhetorical diversity from student
    • Is being able to collaborate a “literacy” that we must be fluent in as well?
    • Why would we try something else when we are comfortable? Some people try technology just to try it, where as we need to think about how he technology is more effective for getting students to learn what we want them to learn? There is an education part related to these new literacies that has to happen?

Teaching Writing in the 21st Century

Group PicTonight, I am blogging from Baltimore, where I am attending an NWP working meeting, “Teaching Writing in the 21st Century.” I feel very fortunate to be here with about 60 colleagues and friends of the National Writing Project and the Bread Loaf School of English. There are many, many wonderful people here — too many to name — and the next 48 hours we will spend together promises to be professionally rewarding in many ways.

One of the major goals for the work will be to think about how and why teachers are using technology in service of literacy learning and, in turn, thinking about implications for the National Writing Project’s future work. Given RCWP’s work in the Lead Technology Site work over the past few years, I am looking forward to sharing some of our ideas. In particular, I am looking forward to hearing about one of our co-directors, Renee Webster, as she does a presentation on integrating digital voice recorders into her elementary classrooms.

I say “hear about” her presentation instead of “see” because I have been assigned to be in a group focusing on online language learning and peer response for ELL students, a session by Joe Bellino (who took the photograph above) and Ailish Zompa that I have been looking forward to attending, too.

So, tonight it has been nice to be among friends and colleagues, and I am sure that there will be more posts tomorrow!

Book Review: Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies

Yet another busy week has passed by with too much to blog, and too little time. Our summer institute is coming soon, and I have had lots of reading to do, so the good news is that I now have an excuse to get blogging again — book reviews.

So, here is my first one, written about a text we are using in RCWP this summer and, perhaps, in Tech Matters, too. What follows below is the rough draft of my critical response to the book, to be revised and refined throughout the summer.

Multiliteracies BookTeaching and Learning Multiliteracies: Changing Times, Changing Literacies

Michèle Anstey and Geoff Bull

Published by IRA, 2006

Echoing the countless calls for 21st century literacy or new technology standards, Anstey and Bull suggest that “[L]iteracy pedagogy must teach students to be flexible, tolerant of different viewpoints, and able to problem solve, analyse situations, and work strategically. They must be able to identify the knowledge and resources they have and combine and recombine them to suit the particular purpose and context” (p. 18). In saying this, it seems as though they add nothing new to the conversation about why and how to teach students about various discourses and technology. These demands are commonplace now, in business coalition reports, professional journals, and even in state curriculum documents (usually the last place we see such progressive calls to action).
Yet, this is only the beginning of their argument. And, as a literacy educator, I find the fact that they begin with a claim that most others end upon a refreshing change. In a preview of the text to come, Anstey and Bull immediately add the following to the quote begun above [emphasis mine]:

Consequently, school classrooms and teaches’ pedagogy must encourage, model, and reflect these sorts of behaviours. The content and pedagogy of literacy programs must reflect the literate practices of local to global communities and equip students for change. Educators cannot hope to teach student all they need to know, as this will change constantly. But teachers can equip their students with the knowledge, skills, strategies, and attitudes that will enable them to meet new situations and cope with them. (p. 18)

It is with these closing remarks in their introductory chapter that Anstey and Bull lay the groundwork for their timely and practical text, Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies: Changing Times, Changing Literacies. Rather than focus on a particular technology (or limited set of technologies) or the aspects of a certain discourse, the authors offer teachers a series of chapters that builds theoretical and practical knowledge through careful explanation and thoughtful reflection techniques.

Anstey and Bull create a vivid picture of globalization in the first chapter, suggesting that the reasons to be multiliterate are about more than just economic competitiveness and, indeed, center more on concerns about power, identity, and ethical behavior in a new digitized, globalized era. In the second chapter, they continue this line of thinking and layer in the New London Group’s Pedagogy of Multiliteracies heuristic for helping teachers think about our understanings of text, semiotic systems, meaning making, intertextuality, and critical literacy. They suggest a “Four Resource Model” of the multiliterate person (p. 41), a model that is flexible enough to give teachers and students language to talk about multiliterate perspectives on texts.

In chapter 3, Anstey and Bull go on to offer specific advice for how to integrate a pedagogy of multiliteracies model into classroom teaching and learning, focusing specifically on classroom talk, lesson structure, and materials used. They explain how “[a] dynamic multiliteracies pedagogy is concerned with making decisions about learning that are based on the relationships between the desired learning outcomes, what teachers know about their students, and what teachers know about the way in which successful pedagogy is conducted” (p. 81). I find this approach particularly refreshing as it acknowledges the expertise of teachers and the local contexts in which they find themselves. Even though this quote is (perhaps intentionally) vague, there are concrete suggestions in the chapter that will help a discerning reader make choices about how to integrate such pedagogy in his or her classroom.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on multiliteracies and children’s literature as well as producing and consuming texts, respectively. Both of these chapters offer specific examples about how and why to use particular children’s texts and lists of questions and terminology that will help teachers find resources and adopt the language of a multiliteracies perspective into their pedagogy. The final chapter moves back to the Four Resource model as a way to begin integrated curriculum planning and, in turn, a focus on whole-school plans for literacy that include students, teachers, and the entire school.

Overall, I find Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies: Changing Times, Changing Literacies a compelling text, and one that I know we will be using this summer in RCWP (and, possibly, in Tech Matters) as well as in my fall pre-service writing methods class. One concern that I have, however, relates to the Four Resource Model. Like all models, students could become scripted — like Harvey Daniels has noted about literature circles — into certain roles and become complacent in them. If the “code breaker,” “meaning maker,” text user,” and “text analyst” take their roles too literally, then a number of problems could occur, the worst of which is that they don’t become multiliterate since they are engaging in primarily one way of reading the text.

That said, I think that the benefits of this book outweigh that concern. Anstey and Bull offer series upon series of useful questions and annotated lists of terms. The also offer periodic reflection questions that could easily be turned into classroom prompts for journal writing and/or discussion. Despite my concerns about the Four Square model, the authors conclude that “[t]o rely on just one approach [to teaching], or on one favoured pedagogy, is to pretend that all students of teachers or schools can benefit from the same treatment” (p. 135). I believe that this is just as much a jab at the standards-based reformists as it is aimed towards themselves and the ways in which the pedagogy of multiliteracis might be enacted, too.

And, because the authors remain critical of themselves right up to the very end, I respect them — and the pedagogy outlined in this book — that much more for it.

Teachers’ Online Personas (Discussion from My Dissertation Defense)

Today was my dissertation defense, and I am happy to say that I passed with no major revisions. Hooray! There are still some minor things that I need to touch up, but that is to be expected. So, my hope is that I will have this all wrapped up and turned in to the grad school in the next two weeks.

(Sigh of relief) 🙂

Now, on to the more interesting aspects of my defense. What I found very compelling was the discussion that ensued with the audience and my committee once I got done talking. I would say that the topic of the half-hour discussion centered very closely around issues of teachers’ online personas, expectations that schools/colleagues/administrators have of those teachers to develop online personas, and the power relationships embedded in those identities.

We talked about issues of read/write web technology, access to student work vs. privacy concerns, infrastructure and access in schools, the role of technology in one’s day-to-day teaching, and a number of other issues that make it difficult, if not impossible, for some teachers to develop or maintain an online persona.This was a far-ranging discussion, with implications for K-12 teachers hoping to help students develop digital writing and think about how to distribute it, both technically and ethically, as well as teacher educators thinking about how best to inform their own teaching practices.

We also talked about the ways in which newer technologies could/should allow teachers to become more political about the infrastructure and access issues that they face in their schools. For instance, is it a good idea for a teacher to blog about how bad the technology is in her school? Who is the intended audience for a blog like this and what would its purpose be?So, there are many ideas that came from this discussion, and I thank my writing group colleague, Jim, for capturing many of them in his notes. I think that all of these issues are ones that I can pursue in future work — some of which will be happening tomorrow, when I finish up interviews for the podcasting project.

And, more importantly, I am almost done! Thanks to all my friends, family, and colleagues who attended today, both in person and in spirit. I appreciate your support.