27 posts tagged “digital writing”

After reading the Foreward, Introduction, and the first couple chapters of Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher's new book Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century, I had to put it down. It was too much too fast.  Since the book itself is an application of the gaming-influenced instructional design principals published in James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, I decided to go back and read his work instead.  Apparently, this 2003 book's publication was a watershed event for education, and I missed it.

Fortunately, I couldn't find a library copy of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Instead, I read a 2005 article of Gee's from E-learning, "Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines."  Reading the article instead of the book gave me what Gee says the best video games give gamers:  a fish tank, or sandbox experience.  I was able to explore new material without risk or rules in a smaller, controlled environment.  Where I was flailing through Selfe and Hawisher's book with no shore/buoy/raft in site, in Gee's article I was relaxing in a wading pool. Gee explains, "Fish tanks are stripped-down versions of the game...When confronted with complex systems, letting the learner see some of the basic variables and how they interact can be a good way into confronting more complex versions of the system later on" (12).  And about sandboxes he writes, "...if learners are put into a situation that feels like the real thing, but with risks and dangers greatly mitigated, they can learn well and still feel a sense of authenticity and accomplishment;"  further, "You can't expect newcomers to learn if they feel too much pressure, understand too little, and feel like failures" (12).

A "serial" summary of some of Gee's principles (and what I now sort of understand from Cynthia Selfe):

Empowered Learners: 

"Good learning requires that learners feel like active agents (producers) not just passive reciepients (consumers)...In a video game, players make things happen...learners must come to understand the design of the domain they are learning, so that they can make good choices about how to affect that design...The whole curriculum should be shaped by the learner's actions and react back on the learner in meaningful ways" (7).

Are students allowed to "discover their favored learning styles without fear...Do they get to reflect on the nature of their own learning and learning in general?  Are students encouraged to try out different learning styles and problem solutions without risking a bad grade?" (7).

Learner identities...does my curriculum and practice allow/encourage students to see themselves as "the kind of person" who thinks like a practitioner of my discipline?  "...academic areas are not first and foremost bodies of facts, they are, rather, first and foremost, the activities and ways of knowing through which such facts are generated, defended, and modified.  Such activities and ways of knowing are carried out by people who adopt certain sorts of identities, that is, adopt certain ways with words, actions, and interactions, as well as certain values, attitudes, and beliefs" (8).

Smart tools...skills have meaning and are learned with they become strategies, when they are "situated" in an authentic context.  "...humans feel expanded and empowered whent hey can manipulate powerful tools in intricate ways that extend their area of effectiveness" (8).  Smart tools are "tools and technologies that allow the learner to manipulate [their] world in a fine-grained way" (9).  What are the smart tools of language arts?  Language conventions, modes of discourse? 

Distributed knowledge...in some video games, character/gamers have to collaborate because each gamer has some specific knowledge or skill to contribute to a team working toward a goal. Does collaboration in my classroom incorporate authentic distributed knowledge and therefore opportunities for integration?

Problem Solving:

"Given human creativity, if learners face problems early on that are too free-form or too complex, they often form creative hypotheses about how to solve these problems, but hypotheses that don't work well for later problems" (example:  generation 1.5 writers learning syntax from spoken language and applying those rules to written language?)..."The problems learners face early on are crucial and should be well designed to lead them to hypotheses that work well, not just on these problems, but as aspect of the solutions of later, harder problems..." (9).

"...the order in which learners confront problems in a problem space is important..." (9) "The fruitful patterns or generalizations in any domain are the ones that are best recognized by those who already know how to look at the domain, how the complex variables at play in the domain related and interrelate to each other...Problem spaces can be designed to enhance the trajectory through which the learner traverses them.  This does not mean leading the learner by the hand in a linear way.  It means designing a problem space well" (10).  What's a "problem space" in language arts?

Pleasant frustration..."Motivation for humans lies in challenges that feel challenging, but doable and in gaining continual feedback that lets them know what progress they are making" (10).

Cycles of expertise..."Expertise is formed in any area by repeated cycles of learners practicing skills until they are nearly automatic, then having those skills fail in ways that cause the learners to have to think again and learn anew" (10).  Sort of like learning the 5 paragraph essay in junior high and having to unlearn it in high school?

Cycle = extended practice, tests of mastery of that practice, a new challenge, then a new extended practice..."This is what constitutes good pacing in a game" (11).

Information on demand/ just in time...learners can't internalize verbal information unless they can use or apply it.  Gee's example is a game manual.  "The first few levels of Goblin Commander: Unleash the Hord allows the player to enact the information that would be in the manual, step by step, and then the game seamlessly moves into more challenging game play" (11).  I can do this now with writing instruction, in writing conferences, but how could a new teacher be trained to do this without more significant classroom practice?

These principles, as I understand them as a novice, reinforce the workshop models of language arts instruction and really contextualize the success I've had using visual art and a sort of "artists' workshop" model in my class.

My husband wanted to buy some kind of gaming system for our son this Christmas.  His sister talked him out of it (he never believes me:).  They got one for their five year-old son along with the Lego Star Wars game, and it's like heroin.  Little Ryan can't turn it off. He didn't even want to open presents on his birthday because he was too busy playing. I'm just not up for that battle.  I already have it with TV time and pokemonaholic.com.

Then in last Sunday's USA Weekend, I read an article about how childhood play has changed.  Jane Healey, author of Failure to Connect:  How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--and What We Can Do About It claims:

...many of the most popular and exciting video games engage and build the basic 'fight or flee' part of the brain rather than the centers of higher reasoning.  Some games...are more reflective, and...[may require] intelligent reasoning.  In many cases, children 'look like they're solving problems on a video game, but they're really just responding on a sensory level...If you watch kids on a computer, most of them, they're just hitting keys or moving the mouse as fast as they can.  It really reminds me of rats running in a maze.'

So I feel good about holding off for another year.  At home and in my classroom, I need to learn how to integrate gaming, or gaming principles in a way that isn't a collision with what I'm doing already.

As I have mentioned in a post or two, until very recently, my son refused to hold a pencil or use a crayon.  Suddenly, after preschool last year, he could write his name.  But the J is always backwards.  It's been like an unreachable itch for me, but somehow I've stopped myself from correcting him.  Finally, this fall we had our first parent conference with his kindergarten teacher.  I was able to ask, "How do I fix this?"  She told me not to.  In kindergarten, teachers ask questions like, "Well, does that J look like the one on our alphabet chart?"  And if he's ready, he'll notice it's backwards.  Brilliance.  That's how, after years in the classroom, I finally decided to teach writing--and how to facilitate useful peer response and portfolio assessment.

Over time, I began to realize that student writers didn't get much out of comments offered by their peers in feedback sessions.  The best practice I started using was a "read around."  Everybody simply read everybody else's essay and naturally asked themselves, "Is mine like this one? Why isn't mine like this one?  Is that good or bad?"  Just like the backwards J.  I would add in "professional" models of the different techniques I was trying to teach so that they had another point of reference.  I would also hold conferences with them individually and ask reader response questions.

The issue for me tonight is how I might replicate my best practice online.  One of the articles we read for this week cautioned against trying to replicate analog successes in cyberspace.  We need to approach the digital environment as its own habitat with unique potential. So in the past, I've asked students to keep "writing folders" containing every draft of any piece of writing they felt was worth my assessment.  My goal was to represent a variety of modes/audiences/purposes and teach students how to mine my 6 Traits Rubric scores to gain a sense of their most successful genres.  A student may have scored an overall 3.8 (on a 4 point scale) for personal narrative, but  only a 2.3 on  an expository or analytical essay.  This is a conversation starter.  We might note together that the highest score  on the personal narrative was for voice, while that was the lowest for the analytical writing.  That difference is a learning opportunity.  What should we practice?  What should we read?  What approach would be better for the MCA?  But if I don't want to replicate this exactly online because I need to be mindful of the new opportunities of cyberspace, what do I do?

Another of the articles we read (that came to me as a pdf so I can't offer it here--sorry), cautioned about the use of partner feedback online.  While all students in the reported study made gains in their reflection skills over a semester as they kept a blogfolio, those who participated in peer feedback made less progress.  The authors of the study sited the possibility that students may have felt constrained by the audience of their peers, were less willing to let themselves "babble," or freely reflect.  Clearly, there's an issue about trust and community building underlying any attempt at peer feedback.  But even in my tightly knit classes who have been trained, the comments from peers haven't been as worthwhile as I would want them to be.  There's the issue of "zone of proximal development"--that student writers will only really benefit from comments from peers who are at or above their skill and knowledge level.  They perform better, make more progress from my reader response.  Just a fact.  What I want to preserve in an online reflection system is exposure to peers' writing and published models, and of course externalized thinking about those texts.  So here are some possibilities.

1. A class blog that asks students to mimic some aspect of a model text in each posting.  I could select the post texts based on what I perceive that my students need to practice or on standards I need to cover. Alternately, students could collect their own exerpts to practice from.
   
2. A class wiki with pages for each writing assignment that include links to sample student essays or, if applicable, published examples.  Students could participate in discussion of "best" and "worst" features of the example writing and post their own drafts for consideration.
3. Students could keep individual blogs, either with teacher directed prompts for metacognition, or self-motivated reflection.  Blogs might also be really useful for one minute essays at the end of lessons.  I'm not a fan of posting drafts or finished works in a blog format.  I just don't think the comment templates available are adequate for useful feedback, unless the students have been trained in reader response and are capable of engaging in useful questioning.  If the eportfolio were to represent best work rather than process, I think I would use a wiki to catalogue the finished drafts, maybe with reflective introductions to each file.

My own blog for this course has pushed a few issues to the surface.  I'm not writing just for reflection, but for my colleagues and my future classrooms.  My entries have been a bit more informative and a little less reflective than those I would want to see from my students.  I'm cataloging my thinking, sure, but mostly my resources for future reference.  There's a public-private schmear on a blog.  When I'm writing for a specified audience--my colleagues or my future self--I do feel constrained in terms of what's appropriate or useful to include. I believe my blog would be entirely different in tone and somewhat different in content if I were writing only for my teacher or classmates, and remarkably different if I were writing it only for myself.  My challenge as a teacher will be to clarify the purpose of the eportfolio if I choose to use it:  reflecting, publishing, practicing--or all of these. (I do have to admit that I feel more motivated to "publish" on my blog than I do to write in my private journal.  What's that all about?)

So my 6 year-old kindergartener son is obsessed with Pokemon.  I remember reading articles and hearing news reports while I was in teacher school 15 years ago that Pokemon mania was melting kids' brains or something (translation: annoying the heck out of recess supervisors).  Turns out my son is learning to read because of Pokemon.

To be clear, we are a reading family.  A minute after he was born, I tried to nurse him.  Two minutes after, I read a book to him.  Still, he hasn't shown much interest in reading by himself.  Reading has always been a bonding thing.  By age 4, he did learn how to sight read "loading," "yes," "no," "play," and "back" so that he could play Sesame Street online. But then last year, older cousin Gunnar introduced him to Pokemon.  Suddenly we were emptying his piggy bank so that we could go to the book store to buy a Pokemon handbook.  He will sit alone in his room for long stretches of time studying, reading to himself from his handbook, his Pokemon cards, and a Pokemon magazine that I bought for him.  Last week, he surprised himself by reading a level one reader about a snowman to me.  He didn't know he could do it.

He's converted me, too.  Initially, I was suspicious, but Pokemon is fabulous!  Josh has learned to count by tens and do double digit addition and subtraction through calculating battle damage.  He can't yet do the multiplication, but he understands what it is.  He knows how to think strategically in terms of selecting his bench and prize cards.  He taught himself how to use context clues to read the cards themselves and understand each Pokemon's attack, weakness, resistance, and retreat cost.  Also, he's discovered pokemonaholic.com.  He can read and navigate the entire site.  The boy I couldn't convince to hold a crayon until last year now selects, prints, colors (or sometimes directs me to color) Pokemon and then creates puppets about which he has changed what he doesn't like--colors and attacks mostly--and classified each in a sort of family group that he has created and named.  He can name the type, element, attacks, and evolution of at least 50 Pokemon. He whines and fusses about doing his homework worksheets, but will spend a focused half hour practicing writing the names of pokemon, then renaming them and categorizing them again.  The thinking this kid is doing is spectacular, but he maybe appreciates more his newfound confidence and competence, being able to hold a conversation with the third grader at his bus stop.

I have never seen any student in my class, even the most dedicated poet/reader/suck up/professor's kid, attack my content with such fervor.  Why haven't I noticed what's been lacking?  Because I've never observed a gamer so closely before.  When I was 10, I watched my sister kick butt on Ms. Pacman at the Woodshed pizza parlor, but games have changed since Santa brought us Atari.

I've started doing a little reading about gaming and literacy, which I will discuss in more depth in later postings.  But here are a few principles I've culled that are applicable to instructional design.

1. Point of view:  is the gamer/learner immersed in the game/curriculum world as a first person participant? Or does he have a "God's-eye" view?
2. Narrative:  is the storyline/curricular sequence compelling?  Is it linear, multilinear?  Can it be manipulated?  Do the gamer/learner's choices affect outcomes or have observable consequences for self and others?
   
3. Goals, challenges, obstacles:  is the goal of the game/curriculum clear and compelling? Are challenges exciting?  Do they demarcate status and achievement?
4. Cut scenes and backstory:  does the game/curriculum offer imaginative spaces?  exposition? nonplaying characters/ peers who contribute information and collaborate with the gamer/learner?

Resources

Dickey, Michele D. "Engaging by Design:  How Engagement Strategies in Popular Computer and Video Games Can Inform Instructional Design." Educational Technology Research & Development 53:2 2005, pp.67-83.

Norton-Meier, Lori. "Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club:  a Reluctant Mother Tries to Join the 'Flow'." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 48:5 February 2005.

This week,  I decided to sign up for an online feedback session with a writing consultant at the U of M's Center for Writing.  I didn't have a draft lying around, so I sent her one of my blog postings about writing centers. I came away with a powerful impression of just how much can be accomplished online--and with a transcript of our session so that I won't forget or misinterpret my reader's comments.

So in my reading this week, I found this disheartening:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/teenagers.html

A few years ago, I was supposed to disregard Internet use as reading time and emphasize literature based reading with my students.  Then recently, even IMing became a rhetorical act and someone said that surfing the net counts as reading.  This little chart tells me that no one really likes to read online.  What's an English teacher to believe?

In any case, I learned a few things about how design can enhance readability and therefore usability.  Let's take my alternative school's website as an example--and put it next to Northwest Passage High School, also an ALC.

OCP

 

NPHS

For the past several years, I've been infusing my writing and reading curriculum with visual art.  This choice was a natural progression from my decision to treat my student writers as artists and view every piece of writing as a collection of artistic choices.  

I am a poet and a teacher, and the way I had been teaching literacy had nothing to do with my lived experience as a writer.  In my class these days, we don't "finish" a lot of pieces.  But we share and develop, revise recursively and stretch for that one great image/idea/line/moment.  We may not remember all 17 rules of comma usage, but we know how to control the pace of a piece and how we want it to be read.  We are working toward what Geoffrey Sirc calls an everyday aesthetic, "bringing art consciousness to everyday life" (117), stumbling upon "interesting, quirky, small-t truths" (118)--also, box logic, learning as invention not verification (attributed to Greg Ulmer), and the pedagogy of the curio cabinet.

In his Writing New Media chapter "Box-Logic," Sirc applies this aesthetic in his composition classroom.  Following primarily the art of Joseph Cornell (although also citing Walter Benjamin and George Maciunas), Sirc suggests using digital spaces as Cornell used "boxes" to collect found objects that resonate with strong associations (both his and his audiences'):  meaning making in the third space.  In other words, the meaning of a work is derived from the associations arising from its organization or ordering of found objects, neither in the mind of the artist nor the viewer, but in a combination of both--the third space, or third mind. (Although I haven't read it, I'm told that  Inquiry Based English Instruction also describes this kind of approach to teaching literacy.)

In Sirc's composition classroom, students start collaborative collections on high interest topics--or as Sirc puts it those topics that are "suffused with fascination" (116)--particularly rap and hip hop in his most popular project.  They then work in research teams to collect images, audio files, and text-based artifacts related to their issue and annotate those artifacts, a process of "composition as craving" (117). Once the collection is compiled in a digital space (website/wiki/blog), patterns and supportable generalizations emerge.  Students can be assigned individual writing tasks that address more traditional analytical, narrative, or descriptive modes of writing. Along the way, Sirc embeds best practices in research. Writing traditional 'citational prose', he argues, is a natural progression from this research process.

Sirc adopts a critical stance in promoting this pedagogy:  "There's something increasingly untenable about the integrated coherence of college essayist prose, in which the easy falseness of a unified resolution gets prized over the richer, more difficult, de facto text the world presents itself as" (123).  In fact, Sirc argues that English teachers are like museum curators:  do the kinds of writing we include in our classrooms enshrine traditionally great works, or represent "a range of culturally valid forms" (126)?  This is of course, binary thinking--a false dichotomy.  We can do both, which Sirc almost acknowledges:  "...my challenge...is to have these young people burnish not anthologized writers' essays but their own forms of powerful pensee, while, certainly, at the same time learning some kind of basic prose styling to help them avoid verbal pitfalls in formal settings" (128).  I would argue that if Sirc really wants to raise his students' cultural and aesthetic capital, as he at one point contends, we may need to relax just a bit in our resistance to traditional forms.

In any case, here is a link to my example of a digital box collection as the beginning of a composition process. I intended to prove that the Disney Princesses were ruining my daughter's life, but I ended up reflecting on parenting.  The collecting process changed my direction.  Rick Beach has a clearer example of surveying how teachers are portrayed in Hollywood. His analysis is clearly more considered than mine and would better model possible analytical writing assignments for students.

I'm going to admit that I have no expertise whatsoever on this topic, but I have been thinking about it for a couple of days.  Tuesday night, we had a guest speaker who suggested that this area--new media thinking/new century thinking/ 21st century thinking--is so new that there isn't consensus on how to assess it.  I searched around the internet a bit and really couldn't find much.  I'm writing this post as much to ask for information as to share my thoughts on this topic.  I'm certain that someone has written about this and even created a handy rubric, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the correct places to look.

If I'm going to be incorporating new media writing and reading into my curriculum usefully, I have to honor its convergence of old and new practices.  My 6 traits rubric, which has served me heroically for years, will no longer do the job, but neither do I want to abandon its principle of assessing thinking in combination with mechanical skill.  In other words, I don't want to "grade" new media works based on how cool I think they are.  I need to be able to recognize with a reasonable degree of accuracy what kind of thinking a student used to create the project.

I skimmed a lengthy report on newmediathinking.org, and brainstormed a list of possible assessment questions.  I can't even attribute these thoughts to the report because I was voraciously multitasking while skimming.   I guess you could  call this post "placeholder thinking."  I'll get back to it--or you will explain it to me, Gentle Reader.

1.  Sequencing:  has the student ordered the information in a way that's appropriate to the form?  (This question gets a little trickier with new media, in my opinion.  We can't just look for block or alternating style in a comparison/contrast essay.)  Should images, text, audio, video be hyperlinked? embedded in a narrative structure? Do links or the visual design show the reader/viewer how to navigate this order, or has the creator constructed a single path?

2.  Clickability:  is the content adequately grounded in/ linked to its larger context? Are the links relevant and useful to the purpose of the communication?  If not hyperlinked, is the project sufficiently interactive in some other way?

3.  Debugging:  is there evidence of recursive thinking?  Has the student anticipated or solved for obstacles of his or her chosen medium?  How have the parameters of the medium shaped and reshaped the project?

4.  Reflection: is there evidence of metacognition?  Is the student able to explain creative choices? defend points of view included or excluded? prioritized content over technique, or clearly supported content with technique?

5.  Cybercitizenship:  has the student showed evidence of respect for intellectual property? attempted to build or enter into an online community around his or her chosen media?  found ways to collaborate? engaged in appropriate code switching? 

Surely, there's more.  But I'm starting to swim around trying to figure out a way to articulate what I have left in my notes, and I can't.  I'd like to see a strand on listening.  Something better on design/ visual thinking.  Articulation and self-expression.  Meaning making.  Convergence.  Numbers 1-5 above are becoming clear to me, but these others I don't grasp yet, especially in a new media context.

In order to create the 4 minute podcast that I made about little Sophia, I would need a month of class days to search for or create clips, seek permission if necessary, teach how to use Garage Band, draft and revise a script, record and edit the podcasts.  This doesn't even include initial thinking and discussion among the students about the purpose and mood of the podcast as Farkas suggests. 

Let's assume I could use 4 weeks of my 9 week term to produce podcasts.  Here's how I would do it:

• Create a course wiki full of audio clips for which I have already gained permission--images and videos for other tech projects, too.  If students made all the contacts during the quarter, the course would be over before we gained permission.
• Train students to use Garage Band by putting them in groups, giving each group the same 5 audio clips, allowing them to choose their own music and voice overs, and after creating a podcast, comparing theirs with the rest of the class.  Reflect on purpose and mood, creative choices.
• Assign individual Garage Band exercises in which students identify a podcast they admire and then try to replicate part of it. Discuss obstacles and resources, how the medium shaped their experience of expression.
• Teach or revisit research practices.  By this time, we will not have been able to cover any course content, so students will have to generate their own ideas for the podcasts.
• Spend a few days on research.
• Spend a few days writing scripts.
• Spend a week creating the podcasts.
• Spend a week listening to and discussing the podcasts.
• Maybe apply what we learned to a more traditional research task, translating the podcasts into an essay or something to explore the relationship between form and purpose.

In other words, I probably won't be using podcasts well until the magical time when all students are trained in the technology before eighth grade. 

Still in 2007, some of my students don't have computers at home.  While my district is making a commendable effort to get laptops into the hands of 4th graders, the secondary alternative population of students is a high mobility crowd and likely won't have benefited from that early exposure.  And, well, I don't have enough computers to undertake podcasting in the first place.

Gripes aside, I can't wait to try this with my students!  I took on too much with my Sophia podcast. I had so many clips I couldn't even find them all once I dropped them into Garage Band tracks.  Finding the clips really consumed most of the time I had to work on it--and I didn't even seek permission to use the music (for which I will surely go to artists' hell).  At least, the speech clips are public domain, but I had to spend time searching sites to verify that fact, too.  I could have centralized my search around creative commons, but wading through that morass of media seemed like it would take even more time.  My point is, if I want to use podcasts as performances of understanding in my regular curriculum, I believe I'll have to do a lot of this footwork for the students well in advance of the project, leaving for them only enough research to maintain some autonomy and practice the process of verifying/gaining permission.

Resources

Click here to explore a podcasting resource suggested by my Digital Writing professor.  The site has a lot of downloads, but seems pretty comprehensive.

Podomatic

Pod Safe Music Network

Sonic Literacy and Composition Studies

Podcasting and the Classroom Audience

Podcast Creation Guide

My daughter has decided to idolize Sleeping Beauty.  The Disney Corporation has launched far too much propaganda in the form of Halloween costumes, fruit snacks, and lame picture books--and it's eating my daughter's brain!  Who has more influence:  me or Walt D?  I don't wear make-up, rarely style or even comb my hair.  I wear jeans and a long sleeved T-shirt with comfortable shoes almost every day.  Where did my daughter get the idea that she needs a ball gown and flowing hair?

I started my podcast project for Digital Writing intending to record my husband creating a sports talk show (his secret fantasy job).  We didn't have enough time to pull together research for that one, so I decided to record my family talking on Sunday afternoon and see what I could make of it.  Of course, Sophie wanted to talk about the Disney Princesses while coloring a picture of them.

I'm going to discuss my process and teaching applications in another post.  For this one, just enjoy Sophia's little outlook on life as a new follower of the very old Cult of Domesticity (and pray with me that it doesn't last).

Sleeping_Beauty

Jennifer Budenski

Credits

The following audio files (in order of their use) were included in this podcast for educational purposes:
 
"Someday My Prince Will Come." (sample) Carlos Franzetti Trio. Retrieved from <<http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/1607215>> 11 Nov 2007.

"Someday My Prince Will Come." (midi) Retrieved from <<http://www.freewebtown.com/bce30082/CW_Post.mp3>> 11 Nov 2007.

Jordan, Barbara. "1976 Keynote Address to the Democratic National Convention." (excerpt)  Retrieved from <<http://www.americanrhetoric.com/mp3clips/politicalspeeches/barbarajordan1976dnc1997.mp3>> 11 Nov 2007.

Clinton, Hillary.  "Commencement Address at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University." Retrieved from <<http://www.freewebtown.com/bce30082/CW_Post.mp3>> 11 Nov 2007.

Hill, Anita.  "Opening Statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Clarence Thomas."  (excerpt) Retrieved from <<http://www.americanrhetoric.com/mp3clips/speeches/anitahill.mp3>> 11 Nov 2007.

Anthony, Susan B. "Speech on Women's Right to Vote." (excerpt) Retrieved from <<http://www.learnoutloud.com/
Free-Audio-Video/Social-Sciences/Gender-Studies/Speech-on-Womens-Right-to-Vote/22919#>> 11 Nov 2007.

Canterbury, Sue.  "Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction." (excerpt) Retrieved from <<http://www.artsmia.org/circling-around-abstraction/>> 11 Nov 2007.

Dickinson, Emily.  "Hope Is a Thing with Feathers." (excerpt)  Becky Miller, rdr. Retrieved from <<http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22444>> 11 Nov 2007.

"Someday My Prince Will Come." (sample) Stay Awake: Various Interpretations Of Music From Vintage Disney Films Sinead O'Connor.  Retrieved from <<http://www.artsmia.org/circling-around-abstraction/>> 11 Nov 2007.

Transcript (created in Celtx)

Disney Princess or Cult Leader?

SOUND: "someday my prince will come" (jazz version)

VOICE: (Mom)  Sophie, when you grow up do you want to be a princess?

VOICE: VOICE: (SOPHIE) I WANT TO BE SLEEPING BEAUTY.

VOICE:  (mom) Why do you want to be sleeping beauty?

VOICE: (sophie) cause she's my favorite!

VOICE: (mom)When I was little, I wanted to be encyclopedia brown or maybe jane pauley.

VOICE: (mom) Why is she your favorite?

VOICE: (sophie)She has all the things I want to be.

SOUND: change to midi version of "someday my prince will come"

VOICE: (MOM) WHY IS SHE YOUR FAVORITE?

VOICE: (sophie) she has all the things I want to be.

VOICE: (mom) like what?

VOICE: (sophie)like her dress, her necklace, her hair, her crown...

MUSIC: transition

VOICE: (MOM)  I grew up in the 1970's i guess i just had different role models.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (barbara jordan) What is different, what is special? I, barbara jordan, am a keynote speaker.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (MOM) what does cinderella do after she has babies?

VOICE: (SOPHIE) have babies.

VOICE: (MOM we haven't done that ending in a while, have we?  Remeber how I used to say she goes to college and gets a job?

VOICE: (SOPHIE) uh-huh.

VOICE: (MOM)  do you like that when I say that?

VOICE: Voice:  (sophie) no.  she doesn't go to college when she gets old.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE:(hillary clinton) my mother had never gone to college and she very much wanted me to do that.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (mom)do you think sleeping beauty is smart, sophie?

VOICE: (sophie)  she says...she's not smart.  because she thought the owl was her handsome prince but it's not.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (anita hill) what happened next, and telling the world about it are the two most difficult things, uh, experiences of my life.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (MOM) do you think sleeping beauty has a job?

VOICE: (sophie) she has a job to work.

VOICE: (MOM)work where? doing what?

VOICE: (sophie) work at her house.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (actor/ susan b. anthony) not we the white male citizens or we the male citizens, but we the whole people...

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (MOM) would you like to be an astronaut?

VOICE: (sophie) no.

VOICE: (mom) would you like to be a teacher like mommy?

VOICE: (sophie) uh-uh.

VOICE: (MOM) would you like to be a singer?

VOICE: (sophie) uh-uh. uh-uh.

VOICE: (MOM) would you like to be a princess?

VOICE: (sophie) uh-huh.

VOICE: (MOM) would you like to be someone's mommy?

VOICE: (sophie)I wanna be sleeping beauty!

VOICE: (mom) do you want to marry a handsome prince?

VOICE: (sophie)yeah, sleeping beauty's handsome prince!

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (curator) o'keeffe was always an abstractionist.  the difference though from any of her contemporaries though is she always kept her subject matter grounded.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (MOM) what else do you want to be besides sleeping beauty?

VOICE: (sophie) that's all I wanna be.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (reader/Emily dickinson) hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

MUSIC: TRANSITION

VOICE: (mom) maybe it's not about role models. maybe it's not about a generational divide.  maybe it's about how i wasn't stalked when I was a child by media giants leveraging their licensed characters across everything i see, hear, and touch.

MUSIC: "Someday My prince will come" sinead o'connor