Design

I like Smagorinsky, and liked his piece with Michelle Zoss and Patty M. Reed about vocational classes such as interior design or shop and the status they're given in schools, compared with more legit and brainy activities like reading and doing math. They spend some time discussing motive--a topic tragically overlooked in many classrooms. It was the same way when I was in high school--vocational ed kids were the ones who weren't good at doing school, and were unfairly considered academic losers. In reality, they were probably learning a lot more useful stuff and having a lot more fun than us nerds stuck in Calculus (which I have NEVER used and suffered considerable agony to half-learn), and most likely making a lot more money than I will be. Clearly schools need to get their priorities crooked and look at, as the authors say, the value of cultural and psychological tools as well as traditional literacies. Plus it was great to listen to students excitedly problem-solve and think through their projects, rather than the resistant attitude we often see from students.

Hmm, I wonder where these negative connotations come from:

I will be honest--I did not enjoy the Burn and Parker article, although the decisions, process, and editing of film is interesting to me, especially after working with the Alamo for several years and being part of the conversation on new and innovative flicks. An article dissecting the grammar of film seems unnecessary for some reason--maybe because the kids I work with have nothing resembling access to a production like this. Grammar of regular old print text is boring in of itself, especially when teased apart from language as a sentence-diagramming worksheet chore. I can't quite put myself in the right frame of mind to evaluate methods of studying "digital moving image texts." I don't know if it's because the authors are Londoners (seems like context is an important enough idea to be wary of research done outside America) but that was one of many terms and phrases used in Digital Inscription and Animation that sounded weird in my head. Thus, I couldn't really get it. Maybe it was because I read this article last or maybe I am just out of patience after working in a BD unit for the last week and broke for the last two, but phrases like synchronic syntagm, diachronic syntagm, spatiotemporal grammatical system, interpersonal metafunctionand spectatorial grammar just get on my nerves. I know that's not a very academic attitude, but it's my blog and that's my opinion. However: my interest was piqued by Eisenstein's theory of montage I think the idea of the montage is a more useful framework in approaching many aspects of life and education: a collection, the impact of connected images, peoples' thoughts and stories--a montage does more to capture the complex context of a seemingly-simple theme or idea.

Like the Brits' article, Jody Shipka's piece was...nice...no really, it was good. But again--for the vast majority of schools I've visited in this urban, diverse city are so far out from what she was able to do with her students: "I have been inviting students to chose [sic] (that's right, there's a typo) their mix of materials, methodologies, technologies and rhetorical strategies for the past nine years." That's great if you don't have to deal with TAKS testing and were allowed to do what you want as a teacher. It's a great article--I particularly liked the American Museum of Greed project, but I wanted to put it in Mr. Pat Forgione's hands.

Bezemer and Kess focus on the effects of text and image in curriculum from the 30's, 80's, and our current digital age. By starting out with a clarification of important concepts (mode, medium, site of display, frame), this piece becomes a good foundation for Shipka's and the Brits' type of work. The appealing and artistic vibe of this line of study is the emphasis on transformation--the changing and rearranging process, the unfixed-ness of the final product, the flux and flow of building and rebuilding one's world. The real education of adjustment, the shades of meaning, rather than a fixation on an absolute answer. Although this sounds like absolute hippie talk, the kind of nonsense coming out of a New Age Music teacher's mouth, these analyses of transduction/transformation and social repositioning were done on math and science textbooks, as well as writing.

Inquiring Minds Want To Know!

That is my idea for a district slogan--Inquiring Minds Want To Know. It's funny and it means something. We should be cultivating inquiring minds that want to know, not apathetic, disillusioned ones that don't really care about their future or other people. I think it's a lot better than AISD's "Every Child Can Learn," or another district's (can't remember which one) "Whatever It Takes." Those are stupid, pedantic, desperate-sounding slogans that I just can't stand behind.

So I've made the point several times that anyone who thinks they have all the answers and knows everything is probably someone you don't want to listen to, and how I sort of like ambiguity and the unknown at times, so hopefully I'm not contradicting myself with this post. What I'm really trying to do is create a framework for holding all the information I've gathered. Brian and I were talking about how we've read so much by so many people about so many things that it's hard to remember who's who and what's what, so I've started a list of applications--things we know about how people are and how they learn. I like school, but I sometimes feel lame sitting around talking about all the various theories I know about--I wanna see them in action, doing something. I'm going to come back and fill in the blanks later, I'll even hypertext relevant links, but here's what I've got so far, in no particular order:

1. curriculum should be structured around authentic questions and conversations, with the aim of helping students enter into these conversations, rather than just trying to figure out what the teacher is after.
2. smaller classes and smaller schools. This lessens the culture of school violence and allows teachers to develop more personal relationships with kiddos, so they will trust them more.
3. real teacher development--not powerpoint slides and boredom. Stuff about motivation, mentoring new teachers, some yoga exercises, something other than what I've had to sit through and never use.
4. community support--we should be bringing in community leaders and
old people. In ancient times, those were the people who did the teaching. Today we leave them in nursing homes and government offices. Also, by using the community as a classroom, we're getting kids to see what they learn in action, in the real world.
5. arts integration. Studies show that kids involved in any kind of arts--music, drama, painting, sculpture, dance, whatever--do better on their college entrance exams. Plus it gives them a place to experience and show passion. But even more than taking an art class, we should integrate the arts into other subjects as often as possible--we all know about Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.
6. PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENTS. I won't even launch into my diatribe about standardized testing, you've all heard it. Portfolio assessments give kiddos a chance to have a voice in how they're assessed, show works in progress as well as finished products, and give a much better picture of what they've learned than does a multiple choice and culturally biased test administered on one day in complete silence.
7. apprenticeship/mentoring. Kids know when they're forced to learn something they'll never use in real life, and they have every right to demand why. Let's let them try on different vocations, learn from people who are doing it so they can see how that life might be.
8. statesmanship--I don't know who said this, but if we really want to safeguard our future and the future of democracy (and here I'm trying not to roll my eyes), we should be educating kids to be statesman, to participate in their society and government. As is, politics are set up as a discourse the normal dude can't enter into, so no one votes because no one thinks it will matter. By and large, that might be true unless we start teaching responsibility. This goes beyond your average civics course.
9. draw on "funds of knowledge" and students' cultural backgrounds. There are still some members of the Old Guard who buy into that tabula rasa, empty vessel bullshit. No. Kids know lots of things. They don't come to school to be filled up with knowledge by middle-class white folk. When we impose a school culture (which to some is rather foreign and silly) and ignore the culture they come from and their home knowledge, we do them a disservice. Read some Moll.
10. improve teacher education programs. Pre-service teachers need to be aware of the hefty import their words and attitudes have on students, and need a better understanding of the cultural discourses and diversity that they will face in their rooms. They need to safeguard against becoming jaded and cynical, especially in low-performing schools--the average shelf life of a new teachers is 3-5 years.
11. define literacy and intelligence. It's not doing well on a test. It's not getting an A. Actually let me rephrase that, it's not just doing well and getting A's. We all know people who are brilliant that didn't really do well in school, and we know plenty of people who are not so bright and also didn't do well. If you determine literacy is reading and writing well, you'll dismiss those who are poor spellers but write beautiful songs. If intelligence is knowing how to use cultural, social, and professional tools, that opens up the pool of who we accept as valuable to society. I totally believe there should be standards and accountability, I'm just saying we could reevaluate how we judge.
12. higher pay and more incentives for teachers. Enough said.
13. technology training and integration. Teachers and students need to be aware of the implications and possibilities of all technological artifacts available. Equity needs to be given to students in terms of using said artifacts. 45 minutes every two weeks in the lab to type a paper or make a powerpoint presentation is not enough when we could be learning about so much more, if we just weren't so scared they'd watch music videos and download porn.

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.