8 Interesting Ideas in Myers

I've been grappling with the task of writing another post about Myers since his book is so jam-packed, so I decided to shift modes and write a decontextualized and succinct (sort of) rehashing of top points, based on my notes rather than the text. This is almost more for my purposes, as each time I rewrite notes I learn and remember it a little more.

1. the effects of tools/technology -- tools expand cognition, "every student must have a full range of tools in order to have the opportunity to be able to generate a full range of thoughts and to have a complete opportunity to show what he or she can do...." (161)

2. Sign shifting leads to new ways of knowing. Every sign system has levels of understanding. See also Bruner's new interpretation of Vgyotsky, Piaget's decalage, and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.

3. Types of speech events (Hymes) -- notational (memory retrieval, avoids personal agency), academic/ritual (distancing, nominalization, 3rd person), conversational/social (linked to local identity, vernacular, colloquialisms), presentational, multivocal. What are we teaching in schools?

4. National Assessment of Education Progress recognizes 3 types of writing -- informational, persuasion, narrative (where Kinneavy's subcategories of expressive, referential, literary, and persuasive could fall). In Translation/Critical, there are 5 modes -- expressive, narrative, descriptive, expositive, argumentative.

5. The Enlightenment precipitated a shift of methods of knowing from time and space (narrative/descriptive) to parts or fragmentation (exposition/argumentative). Here I see an overlap to the first chapter of Schon's The Reflective Practitioner where he discusses the crisis of confidence in professional knowledge structures as one organization after another falls or fails. Translation/Critical literacy sees a balance, a shift from types of texts to types of readings -- here Harding and Rosenblatt collaborated, in 1938, the same year as John Dewey's Education and Experience came out.

6. The importance of play--"Pretend disarms and enchants; it suggests heroic possibilities for making changes." See Dibs: In Search of Self by Virginia Axline

7. Trans/crit lit. "keeps traditional literacy and pairs with previously marginalized voices, adding other forms, helping students to express themselves, comprehend/appreciate/critize literary texts within the context of other cultural artifacts, encourage a diversity of response." This definition of literacy is organized around apprenticeships and situated in communicative events.

8. There will be and is a struggle of local forms of literacy with the dominant form--parents with analyzing/decoding jobs vs parents whose jobs feature problem-solving and translation/critical type tasks. There will be those who fear a loss of nationhood in this view of literacy, those who fear exclusion in the melting pot.

Piagetian exceptions and inner monologues

One of the many things from Myers that caught my attention is his explanation of the Piagetian letdown. Piaget's theory of development (something we all probably learned in high school psych or at least undergrad ed) has these stages that all kids supposedly go through in the same order, but not at the same rate. It does make sense. This idea was the basis of my training when I worked for the IRD, something I had to constantly repeat during parents' meetings and conferences with not-doing-well students, and it's something I believed, but anytime you say something like "all kids," you're setting yourself up. Piaget described the exceptions as "decalage"--every concept can have several layers or levels of meaning, and this is not the exception, but the rule. Just like AISD's slogan "every child can learn" (duh), these pat ideas and boxes don't contain or explain how children learn, what they learn, and what they learn to do with it. I was really impressed when my kids figured out how to get around the myspace firewall, for appearing to have little technological skill. Unfortunately this kind of problem solving isn't tested on TAKS. As described in Ch. 10, negotiating sign systems, problem solving, and communication is what we should be focusing on in our curriculum. Given the scope of the Internet's effect on how we communicate, learn, think, etc, it's ridiculous that kids are given so little time in the computer lab and are so restricted in their search parameters.

More interestingly, Myers goes on to suggest that we not only condone internal talk (deemed to be sign of craziness by mainstream society), but make it explicit, to use "the power of internalized discourse as a tool for self-regulation, problem analysis, and self-discovery." We all do it. I was thinking a good blog would be one where all one's inner monologue was written down, but I don't think it works that way--some things, once uttered or written, lose the function of its structure. To say your inner thoughts aloud would place them outside the context of your own brain, out there in the world to clash and interact with other stuff. It's not meant to be shared, it's how you work through things on your own, and it's pretty important unless we want classrooms of helpless kids who rely on us for everything.

Chapter 8 is titled "Embodied Knowledge: Self-fashioning and Agency." The idea is that a form of literacy is always a form of self-fashioning. Clearly our self-talk also influences and forms our identity, and it worries me, given the state of things, what kids may be saying to themselves and making of themselves.

More to come.