Two years ago, when I was on sabbatical (and this blog was dedicated to my learning and research), I read a lot about "agency." How can we make students the agents of their learning? How does our curriculum promote agency? Much of the research I read centered on video and online gaming as exemplars for agency.
I had a great moment in my second block, ninth grade class last week. I had just worked my way through a sentence variety lesson I've used for years (I think I got it from a Diana Hacker writing handbook). Afterward, while students were revising a piece of writing for sentence variety, one student said, "Doing this makes me feel like a professional writer." He became an agent of his own learning, rather than a student just answering a teacher's questions in writing to get the points. I love it when students remember that writing is an art, not just a chore.
Here are a couple of examples of great revisions for sentence variety from class that day. Students were responding to a portrait by Xavier Tavera.
Original Sentences
Their body stance is indicating that they won't back down from a fight.
The artist is showing how buff and big they look.
It is indicating that they are criminals.
Revised Sentences
Shoulders up, arms tight with tension, their body stance indicates that they won't back down from a fight.
Artist Xavier Tavera show how buff and big they look.
Dark and mysterious, ski masks hide something they want no one to know about.
Particularly Effective Use of a Short, Simple Sentence in Revision
In the picture to the right, it shows a white guy standing very tense and uneasy with eyes filled with anger wearing a sleeveless shirt, ski mask, and casual pants. In the next picture, a black man stands behind the same brick wall as the white guy wearing the same ski mask as the white guy with a hand extended out wanting something. the man wears a white shirt and black pants. Both are dangerous. [my italics]
A wise woman I know, a social worker of long experience, asked me once why I required my students to write about anything but themselves. The best stories, the ones with the most life and detail she believed, come out when teenagers write from personal experience. Perhaps her preference comes after years of listening to young people tell her their compelling stories. Her point of view is untempered by the reality that developing writers need what many researchers and practitioners call "mental models" for structured, academic writing. They need to know that a topic sentence is followed by supporting ideas, which in turn are proven with examples and other evidence. Like I tell my students, you need to learn how to play the scales before you can make music. That said, I'm a sucker for a detail-rich story!
I've been thinking about the difference between formalized, highly structured academic writing and storytelling lately because my students turned in their first drafted paragraph just this week. I was impressed by their understanding of formal organization, and was pleased to find a few storytellers in my pile of essays as well. The stories were lovely to read, but more difficult to grade because their structure is far more subtle, the student's thinking more tricky to assess. So, I put it to the students: Which style is better writing? It's a false dichotomy, I know, but it led to lively conversation about "good writing." What we discovered small group after small group is that what makes writing good results from strengths that a particular writer brings to the page. And that a blend of clear structure and vivid voice is like chocolate and peanut butter--they go best together.
Here are the two exceptional 7th grade pieces we used for our debate:
The Kingdom
by Fuad Rifka
His kingdom is a n ancient lamp,
a walking stick,
a water bag.
At the door of his dwelling
the sun slants
and the stars are resting.
by Ruben Dario
The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.
To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,
and the dread of having been, and future terrors...
And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,
and to suffer through all life and through the darkness,
and through what we do not know and hardly suspect...
And the flesh that tempts us with bunches of cool
grapes,
and the tomb that awaits us with funeral sprays,
and not to know where we go,
nor whence we came!...
Echo
by Henriquieta Lisboa
Green parrot
let out a shrill scream.
Rock in sudden
anger, replied.
A great uproar
invaded the forest.
Thousands of parrots
screamed together
and rock echoed.
From all sides
strafing space
steely screams rained
and rained down.
Very piercing screams!
But no one died.
Politics
by Alkaios
He wants power
He has power
He wants more
And his country will break in his hands,
Is breaking now.
See more at our Picassa slideshow. (I'm blogging during class so I don't have time to learn how to embed it!)
So last week, I launched our world poetry unit by inviting my arts partner Judi Petkau from the Weisman Art Museum to my classroom. Over two days, she reviewed gesture and contour drawing, asking students to draw leaves, tools, stones, and other elemental objects. Then, they created observed self-portraits.
My examples (culled from The New African Poetry, ed. Ojaide, Sallah):
Winter Spring
January is like a stone Joy surprises me.
that sits at the tip of my tongue, A little birdsong threatens
bitterness for the absence of sap. to burst out of my heart.
Selfishly, I lock in my heart All dreams are possible.
the memory of grass and warm rain. I offer my pollen to the wind.
Student examples (see resource list at the end for book information):
you live only for me and in me you are
reborn and in this way I live for you. You
changed my whole life. I need you so much
love, in these gray hours. Leave behind all life
that was life. A sensation of tranquility that
seems never ending love was the flower carried
in their mouths, and love blue like their fear.
It Flies High by Tyrone
It flies high
above the miniature beacon of light
the Lu bird flies with no set course
with inflexible heavens
never losing his way
while encountering the cold, solitude
rain. Even though the sky is like a
bedsheet and below a delicious hell where
furious birds dwell, spring is here.
Winter winds have blown out of the sky
the dark Earth drapes herself green
sailors are out on the broad sea,
Zephyrs duffing out their sails.
Nightingale deep in the woods
where bees make honey
and poets daydream silently seeing
beautiful birds sing.
Never Alone by Amy
the pine cones rustled
and I ached to be alone with the wind
an epic of flowers told as drops of dew
nights I dreamed in a fever
about houses wet with love
stories I tell from to the finger prints
left to mark a dream of loneliness
imagine how unfair that the dust
was my only companion
you will remember for we in our youth did these things by Marcy
I heat up the coffee, light my morning
cigarette & grab breakfast to go
but I'm distracted, so fully I feel
his flesh in me, that I don't feel
him on me
then I remember what he's done,
I treat him too well for how he's harmed me
frustrated I inhale the tobacco
until my lungs are heavily loaded
I look forward to tonight when
I can sit on my porch alone
with the moon & a jar of wine
Solemn Fool by Scott
I have only one question
for the solemn fool
Although I'm dead
I'm waiting for you
Do you miss me
like I miss you
Please, please tell me,
solemn fool.
As students finished a self-portrait, I directed them to find a line of poetry to be its caption. They were to write not a description of themselves, but of their portraits. For example, while I was feeling birdsong in my heart, by portrait turned out looking haggard and bitter (see below). Students helped me to choose "Life is made of thistles and black thorns. I would have liked it sweeter and less bitter."
Student examples:
Several students are complaining both about having to draw and having to read poetry. Such creative exercises are outside of their comfort zones. There are no blanks to fill in here, no correct answers. Only individual interpretations supported by evidentiary reasoning.
In the next week, we're going to translate a poem to canvas. That should be fun to document and post.
As Judi and I proceed, I need to articulate our goals and outcomes.
Knowing: Students will know about the role of poetry in other cultures. They will be able to identify language techniques used in poetry.
Comprehending: Students will understand that poetry can be read as an aesthetic experience similar to viewing visual art. They will understand how to support their interpretations with textual evidence.
Doing: Students will read self-selected works of world poetry. From this textual basis, they will create found poems, original poems, drawings, and a painting.
Resources (the books students referred to most in the first week of the unit)
20th Century Latin American Poetry
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
International Poetry on the Web
The Space Between Our Footsteps
Windcatcher: New and Selected Poems by Breyten Breytenbach
Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
The New African Poetry
Contemporary Russian Poetry
:
For about the past half hour, I've listened to Victoria Wilson, our high school Library Media Specialist highlight fun Web 2.0 tools. Some of her usable ideas:
just hear !t: use this real time player for class room music...A few years ago a Minnesota Writing Project fellow suggesting using the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction" in as many versions as can be found as a lesson in voice and style. Here's an easy way to make that happen without having to compile the songs or pay for them, or to ask students to create their own playlists of other cover songs.
Wordle: create visual representations of word lists or other texts. For example...
This is a really simple example, but more complex texts are available in the Wordle gallery--like Wordle interpretations of presidential speeches. I'm definitely going to use it as a poetry interpretation tool.
Finally, I would add two sites to my graphic storytelling toolbox-- SUMO Paint and Animoto. Beyond storytelling, too, Victoria suggested photographing students at work during a particular unit and dropping those photos into Animoto to reflect their process back to them. Years ago, I had a TV student follow us around to make a documentary--a long, intense and worthwhile process. Now with a few clicks I could be making minidocumentaries myself through the year.
OCP Home Page Evolution
I started second quarter with a test prep unit, assigning students to prepare for either the MCA/ GRAD in Reading or Composition, the GED, or the SAT. We studied a lot of usage and syntax, took practice tests, and almost killed each other. I hate teaching to these tests because the curriculum tends to be inauthentic and boring. I did the best I could embedding choice and high interest reading, but really. This is a curriculum even an English teacher can't love. Ideally, we shouldn't need to "prepare" for these tests. If my student population weren't transient, truant, and chemically addicted, I could teach a scope and sequence that would end organically with success on the tests.
After this grammar tortore, we were burned out, so I punted. How could I make writing functional and engaging again. I asked my students, "Hey, what if we could create a website for our school?" We didn't have one, and other Minnesota alternative programs do. The idea of creating a website seemed like the perfect formula for success with nontraditional students. It offered daily computer access, relevant composition tasks, and a highly visual, published product. And truly, most students who chose to work on the website project were engaged as soon as they found their niches. Some wanted to work primarily on visual design, some researching, interviewing and gathering images. Others who never really discovered the content they could confidently contribute, or those who struggled with the technology, quit early.
Students sorted themselves into categories of those confident with technology (even overly so) and those skittish about delving too deeply beyond checking email. Initially, I asked them to work cooperatively across three class periods to contribute research information to a matrix comparing and contrasting free webhosting and authoring service.
Subpages on the site grew naturally according to student interest. For example, Demetrius really wanted to post an image of Barack Obama, but after a unanimous reaction by his classmates that Mr. Obama was not an appropriate graphic illustration for our OCP Rules and Expectations subpage, Demetrius decided to compose an OCP Heroes and Role Models page. Demetrius' process in composing his chosen page was beautifully organic and honest, punctuated by many breaks for You Tube, Firefox crashes, and leaving the classroom to get a drink of water (check his phone messages). First, he interviewed fellow OCPers about their personal heroes. Next, he searched for images, asking along the way who some of them were, occassionally diverting to google them. Finally, he attempted to post them on his subpage. For a reason he and I never discovered, posting an image to Google Sites during his class period involved an incredibly frustrating process of watching Firefox crash each time he clicked the browse and upload buttons, then restarting Firefox an unpredictable number of times until an image would appear in the selection box to be added to the page.
My perception of Demetruis' process is that he surrendered most days to his frustration believing he could never finish. When I asked that he add captions to the images so that site visitors could recognize the heroes and role models, he seemed to think it was an impossible task. Moving images in Google Sites is something neither of us mastered, so finding space for typing names in a consistent way to maintain page design proved impossible. But if I could just find him a tool, like clicking paragraph text in the format menu just to place the cursor for typing, he could persevere. On the last day of the project, Demetrius opened his subpage to discover that another student had attempted to write a brief introduction naming what the chosen heroes and role models shared in common. Finding this small contribution on his page seemed to motivate him for a final effort. Also on this day, another student and I discovered through trial and error over a few days how to insert a Picasa slide show on a subpage. Demetrius discovered his solution. Rather than struggling to manipulate the images on his page, we placed them in a slide show. Although we still didn't have role models' names listed, we did have the introduction and the slide show frame to give shape to the content.
I loved the experimentation and frustration of the recursive thinking and composing, and the clarifying effect both of collaborative writing and translation of information from verbal to visual text. We didn't know what our composition would look like or read like until it was finished. We couldn't just fill in the blanks.
Another student, Devin, volunteered to explain the hard to understand calculation of credits earned in alternative school. He wrote and revised a written explanation, but couldn't clearly communicate how attendance, participation and quality of work could result in a passing letter grade but not an entire credit. When our program assistant produced a fictitious grade report for "Jane Alternative," two other boys were able to use the visual to generate three clear statements summarizing how credit is earned at OCP. I'm going to admit that I sat beside them to facilitate the translation of verbal to visual to verbal again, but they were authorities on the accuracy of the information and the precision of language for each statement. All students learned how a multimodal composition could communicate more clearly than verbal text in this situation.
I feel as though I could type these stories over and over. Adam made the OCP tour movie and posted it on You Tube. Reed created the curriculum subpage, Ana the staff. Jesse struggled mightily with the image uploading issue to create the student work subpage. Sheldon took over the community subpage when others had to walk away from the frustration of the technology. Keyla, Alonte, and Brittany became fully invested in finding and posting OCP's favorite media. Chet didn't want the responsibility of his own page, but assisted many others and allowed me to use the subpages to help him practice identifying main ideas.
Students didn't articulate these outcomes on their unit reflections, but here's the kind of literacy skills I believe we practiced:
- task and risk management, resilience
- recursive revision
- information gathering and evaluation
- comparison and contrast
- translation between verbal and visual modes
- criticizing, using criticism
- collaboration
- editing and proofreading
The outcome that students nearly unanimously appreciated was collaboration. While they had plenty of criticism for other aspects of the unit (one student called it "chaos"), all but three students said they felt like they were all working together on this project. Jeff said, "Yes, we all played our parts and helped others who asked for it." John pointed out, "You had to get help to finish." Nikki said that she "saw people getting other people to finish." Adam noticed that "we all had different jobs to finish the project."
Over the 20 days of our unit, assessment became a matter of triage. What problem can we solve today, and who's going to be in charge of working on it? Who can help? If we all worked toward making progress on the site, we all earned our participation credit for the day. We also stopped at the midpoint and at the end to view the site as a whole to evaluate it, reassessing our to do lists. In the end, students received academic points for completing their individual projects (subpages) and writing feedback at the midpoint and end of the project. They will share an academic grade for the site as a whole.
And here's our page. I enabled the comment function, so please sign into your Google account and freely comment to validate and extend our learning.
After spending the opening few weeks on writing true, personal stories and the next few studying visual literacy, it seemed logically to put several graphic novels in front of my students to see what they could make of them. Their three favorite texts were clearly Fax from Sarajevo by Joe Kubert, Silverfish by David Lapham, and the graphic novel version of the 9/11 report.
T/F Comics can be reliable sources of true information.
T/F Only certain kinds of stories can be told in comic form.
T/F Comics follow the same structures/patterns as other stories.
T/F Comics are easier to read than word-based texts.
T/F Comics are for kids.
My plan was to have students take notes under each statement as we continued to explore graphic storytelling resources like this NYT slide show about graphic novelists and Joe Sacco's comic journalism (Look for his Iraq war comic "Complacency Kills" or his Pulitzer winning "Palestine.") However, it became clear that they didn't have the research and note taking skills to manage this kind of unit structure, and I didn't have the time to teach it to them if I wanted to get to the fun part of creating their own comics within our 20 day marking period (attention span). I should have simply used the statements as an anticipation guide and review tool. Next time...
Anyway, I also found an excellent Will Eisner intructional book, and used it to create a slide show that would
As a composition teacher, I found that reading and studying graphic stories and comics, we were able to isolate the impact of form and genre on story. Given literally rigid boundaries, how would plot and character ideas change?
We had only five days for composition, using tools like Comic Life, toondoo.com, and bitstrips.com. I encouraged students first to attempt their own drawing and photography before turning to online character and comic creators, then scanning their work to place into a Comic Life file.
Someone at my MWP presentation last week asked me to post this slide:
After my own presentation, I listened to Julie Landsman remind me about the racism inherent in low expectations and the need for white teachers to reclaim their authority in their classrooms to maintain high expectations. I wondered about this slide of mine. Is my decision to step outside of mainstream curriculum and pedagogy an excuse? Does it allow students to avoid the cultural capital of traditional curriculum? Do I use all the circumstances in the top half of the slide to apologize for students' poor performance?
I tend to see the glass half full--the unfinished draft is two more pages than he had ever written before, she can't spell but what insight!, he has attended every day for 10 days in a row. These are real successes. Yet, I can call them successful because my expectations for my students are just one step more than they've walked before. For some students, "low" can't even describe how simple success can be. He decided to show up today. And the accumulation of weeks of walking students toward progress so slowly and carefully overwhelms and drains, disheartens and disillusions. Until some of them gain enough confidence to make a leap. Some of them do.
Alternative school teaching presents an exhausting daily dichotomy: would it be better to start with high expectations (that send a large group back out the door to learn by suffering the consequences of dropping out), or to attempt to repair the damage of years of school failure and apathy with careful, measured steps toward accomplishment (that may grant motivating credit for substandard work)?
And the truth is, I feed them as often as I can. Though it is against district policy, I have on rare occasions transported them. I present myself as their role model and talk about my own healthy and unhealthy families. I talk about drugs, drinking and smoking more openly than I should. I try to teach them to analyze the media critically. I challenge their personal fables as often as I can in ways they understand, telling about my student who died, the ones I taught in jail. I don't take them into my home, tell their parents what I really think about them, call the police when I suspect I know of some dangerous choice they are considering. These boundaries shift because every kid is different, because I believe like Atticus Finch that knowing you can't win doesn't mean you shouldn't fight.
The top half of the slide doesn't offer excuses. It lobs in variables for good teachers to consider as, during one of the 4,000 decisions they make in a day, they calculate a fair, useful expectation for a child.
I told my students in the middle of last week that we would be learning to "read" and "write" images, that written composition and image composition have more in common than they might think. It was a brash claim, and they wanted to argue. We'll see if they're too worn down to pick a fight by our last day of the unit just before MEA break.
On day one, we "read" this Target ad using Critical Response Protocol:
First hour was sluggish as usual, but by second hour, several students had begun to notice mixed and agitating elements without yet being able to identify the choices that led to the ad's composition. Afterwards, they went hunting for similarly ambiguous advertising in a pile of magazines I keep in the classroom and were generaly shocked how easy they were to find.
Each day of the unit, we'll be studying one element of visual composition: schema, gaze, composition, and color theory. I modeled each in a PowerPoint and after taking notes and listening to me ramble at the beginning of each class, students go looking for the element we've learned. For schema, they scanned magazine ads for circular, square and triangular underlying organizational patterns. (We made old school collages of the images they found.) For gaze today, they used our MacBook iSight cameras to create self-portraits from a variety of angles. I think tomorrow, for composition, we'll look at some art or news photography. In the end, students will design their own avatars and write an in-class essay analyzing an image.
Written Analysis of an advertisement:
Student Self-Portraits/ Avatars:
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
Recent Comments
-
Judi said:
Looking good! The canvases are a bit small, but that's ok! good thoughtful ground colors coming. Mixing the drawing with... read more
on OCP Artists at Work -
Judi said:
The OCP website is great! I really like the opening video and the indepth links to what its like to... read more
on Using Google Sites for Literacy Practice -
-
on Whiteboard