Digital Is...

One thing that came to mind when I was browsing this site in a coffee shop on my phone, and then later on my laptop at home: I have a smart phone and a laptop. I also have a library card that affords me access to hundreds of computers in various locations around the city. At any one time there are 3 laptops, two iPhones and a tablet or two in my apartment: we are connected. We are connected because we can afford it between our two full time jobs. Digitial literacy is something that is still highly selective. I have many students that would not be able to take part in many of the 'connected learning' ideas that I looked at on the Digital Is website. Even if they had the technology, they also need a full time consistent internet connection, something we've all been astounded by at various points opening Verizon bills.

Moving past this realization of all the ways many students suffer in the 21st-century-technology-run-times, I found some of the resources on the website fascinating. The summer institute the organization offers would be an amazing place for students to begin their journeys to become digitally literate past the point of texting and Instagramming. I loved the idea of keeping digital blog posts and collections in one place as well. It's a great go to for finding like minded individuals with their fingers on the pulse of tech in education.

Kittle: Finding Form for Ideas

"I make decisions about teaching and then wonder if it is the best thing just about every week in my class." Kittle struggles in a very real way with being able to step back and watch her students apply the skills she's taught them over time. Naturally this is always a conflict for me: as much as I want to gradually release responsibility to my students so that they can perform highly on their own, I find that they have a hard time with being able to remember and apply the skills we've learned as we've learned them. This of course leads to sweeping mistakes and either low grades which affects their confidence and morale, or general frustration on my part: cue unreasonable "haven't they learned anything??" rants on my part.

Kittle's description of students struggling with creation, as she did over the emotional multigenre scrapbook piece she wrote in memory of a friend killed in a car accident, is especially poignant when we consider how to push our students to that point that they independently apply their skills to really become writers. They need to have the motivation and the inspiration to write something, of course, and this is one aspect she touches on in the article. She mentions that, "this is the process that leads to confidence as a writer" and it's something our students rarely get the chance to attempt, between common core standards and Regents exams. As she says, this is foggy territory. Easing into this creation process with quick writes makes a lot of sense, and using topics that will spark the collective class interest is key (finding that is trickier!)

Importantly, on page 167, Kittle mentions some 'WhateverYouDoDon't' pointers, such as avoiding trying to inauthentically cram content into the multigenre project. I can completely understand that this should be a writing exercise and a development of creating, not exam prep in a snazzy new format. One of the reasons for this project being daunting to me is that I don't necessarily know what it will look like: choosing a topic, choosing my formats and making it materialize from some thoughts floating around in my head is confusing and challenging but completely worthwhile. She mentions this as one of the criteria for setting the project up: don't have too narrow an topic area, and "don't narrowly define the product".

Reading about how Kittle ensures her students pick something worthwhile was one of the most intriguing parts of this chapter: she tells them to pick something that's been circling at the back of their minds, that requires emotional investment. This gem definitely pushed me in the right direction for my project so it's easy to imagine how well it would go over in my classroom.

Bailey and Carroll on the Multimodal, Multigenre Research Project

This article is somewhat similar to the Vaughan and Fleischer piece in the way that it describes and explains how to put this project into practice in a classroom, including many details as well as previous failings. The overall goal seems to be making students able to "turn information into real knowledge that is meaningful to them" (78). Like the authors, I have found that the research I have conducted in my classroom has been forced and sometimes uninteresting to my students, which is why this project appeals especially to me. She explains that the research is grounded in topics that interest the students from the beginning with "real inquiry [by] students" driving the learning.

As open minded as I am about literacy in unexpected places, the author lost me a bit when she went into the idea that when we get information from a music video it's still "reading". Yes I agree when she says that "we make all kinds of connections all the time between what we are seeing and hearing and the events in our lives" but I would challenge this idea of making the term 'reading' universal to everything we do that includes making a connection. I think this objective should stand on it's own, which is something I've been exploring in my grade team this past year. I felt she undermined the actual reading and research process somewhat by grouping it with the reading of literature and information they would be doing in the project later. The skill set she describe while students "acquire a new multimodal way of thinking" and become more fluent in the "metalanguage of multimodality" is definitely explored through these alternative intellectual pursuits such as analyzing music videos, but I think this deserves it's own recognition, especially in conversation with the students themselves.

The later discussion of higher order thinking skill development made me write a huge "YES!" in the margin of my print out: I was along 100% with this train of thought: "because the students have to analyse all the information that they write on their note sheets, they practice and develop important critical thinking skills." This for me is a reason alone to do this project in my 5th Grade writing classroom next year as I have found this to be absolutely the biggest gap in my high schooler's skill sets.

Hughes on Multigenre Research Projects

I appreciated this further explanation on the research project as with each article I've read I've gotten a better understanding of what this project might look like in class. The article opening up with an inspiring anecdote of the culminating presentation of a project like this helped me to better see how this part of the project would play out.

Hughes goes through a list of objectives that the students will master, one of them being that they will, "Learn the skills needed to successfully collaborate with interviewees, peers, teachers, community members, and family members who contribute to their research". Having just done this in a project I just completed, this was truly like pulling teeth at the same time as bashing my head into a brick wall. Yes that bad. The logistics around this were so complex and frustratingly out of my control that much of the project was spent holding students' hands to help them plan an interview (metaphorically: if only it was that easy.) I think this is a great objective that Hughes includes for this reason precisely: this MUST be practiced from young years of school, not only in high school.

One question that I still have is how all of these teachers helped their students pick a certain research area, if they helped at all that is. I fear that my students would have a difficult time with this. One of the other articles mentioned a theme of overcoming adversity, but I wonder if this makes it too narrow of a lens for an upper school grade or whether this is exactly what they need. I predict this needs to be figured out through trial and error with each class taught.

NTCE's Take on Multimodality

I will not lie: before reading the NTCE's mission, I thought the writing would be excruciatingly dull. Joyfully, I was proven wrong! Furthermore I was not let down by this piece on multi-modality and was, in the first place, pleased to see that they had an opinion at all on the subject. I found their views incredibly up to date, noting that our society is now driven largely by technology and this become a way of acquiring information for students of all ages. They explain the impact this has on teaching by stating that, "The techniques of acquiring, organizing, evaluating, and creatively using multimodal information should become an increasingly important component of the English/Language Arts classroom."This is a subject I have become increasingly interested in: how can students filter through the vast amounts of information that is now readily at hand to them, to be able to become discerning readers, finding credible information while still reading a wide range of types and genres of writing? This is one of the key draws the multimodal approach to learning has for me and my key takeaway from this article.

I also noted that the statement puts a large onus on the English part of education to do a lot of the teaching around ensuring students become multimodal learners, 'Certain conventions of design are more effective than others for visual, aural, or multimodal texts. English/Language Arts teachers will need to become more informed about these conventions because they will influence the rhetorical and aesthetic impact of all multimodal texts." This seems to warn that teachers will need to become familiar and skilled with many genres and modes of information and teaching rather than just bound anthologies of literature, or else they may well be left behind.

Lastly I enjoyed the nod to the issue that any student now has the opportunity to publish any of their work on the internet (like we are doing now) and that this comes with some caveats including: 

• With more opportunities and greater ease in sending their work out into the world, the quality of the ideas and the effectiveness of the communication media will become more important and more relevant to students.
   

The Unfamiliar Genre Project: Fleischer and Andrew- Vaughan

This article was so clear and concise that I found myself planning this project as a unit to teach next year when I will teach 5th Grade Writing. The instructions down to the script were accessible and feasible as well as genuinely exciting to think about introducing as a topic to my future students.

I really enjoyed the details with which this project is explained, including rubrics and lists of possible topics to use, as well as many responses from the authors' own students which help give the project a lot of authenticity. (If her students liked it maybe mine will too!)

Other than simply exploring genres students had not yet discovered, which is a great intellectually challenging pursuit, the part I thought particularly salient was the research around metacognition. One of my good friends has been doing a research project on just this for Oxford for a number of years now, and this idea of thinking about thinking is something I have found fascinating in conversations with him. Vaughan seems to agree as she stated "how important it is to be conscious of and evaluate the internal dialogue we engage in as we think, read, write and learn" (p.40). This project allows students to consider their process, just as we have been asked to, while pushing themselves to learn in a new way and very auto-didactically. She requires "the research journal to help students make this subtle venture more pronounced,"and indeed I have found that the reflection on our work has done just this in my embarkation on the project.

While reading the instructions (almost a manual really!) I was wondering how I could pick something unfamiliar but yet with enough substance to be of interest in the research stage and also be engaging to apply to a work of my own. In skimming the lists, things like a user's manual or a lab report seemed the most dull of the bunch, things I would never voluntarily choose to research, while I could see genres like scrapbooks being great fun but not particularly meaty on the intellect front. I would predict this choice aspect to be especially tricky to my students. Furthermore, the list included many genres I had studied in high school, almost 10 years ago now for some of them, but I have barely given a moment's consideration since then. I analyzed epic poems and studied the rhetorical devices used in sales brochures when I was 15 but does that mean I should strike them from my 'unfamiliar' pile, so to speak? This minor details was not addressed, though I can imagine Fleischer and Andrew- Vaughan's responses: 'challenge yourself with something completely new!'

Flower and Hayes on the Cognitive Writing Process

My understanding of the first goal that Flowers and Hayes bring up is somewhat skeptical. They raise the argument that for the most part, writers cannot necessarily separate the stages of writing as simply as pre-writing, drafting, revising etc. because writers constantly go through the process of prewriting and revising as they plan their work. I feel it's important to define the kind of writing we embark on before positing such ideals. Sadly, most of the time students in high school are not writing creatively, but rather writing research projects, exploratory essays or argumentative essays. In these cases, the planning happens in a rather linear process at a low level. Once students reach university level and they begin exploring different theses instead of simply practicing how to write in a formula (intro, body paragraph one and so on) I completely agree that it's difficult to tie down each stage of writing in such a rigid format and in turn very tricky to model such writing. As they say, "The problem with stage descriptions of writing is that they model the growth of the written product, not the inner process of the person producing it." Again in terms of creative writing, I agree with this argument: skilled writers must aim for a high level of revising and editing as a constant throughout the process rather than a cursory glance at the end of a first draft to make sure every sentence is correct and well placed. In the case of working with my 10th Grade students, however, I find the writing process incredibly helpful when they are trying to pin down their ideas and then spit them out onto a page. One major difference that this article didn't go into is the brainstorming stage that often precedes the pre-writing: this is the section I often see students come up with their most interesting and succinct ideas. I feel this is definitely a crucial addition.

One of the last ideas the authors argue comes back to this idea: they claim "the act of developing and refining one's own goals is not limited to a "pre-writing stage" in the composing process, but is intimately bound up with the on- going, moment-to-moment process of composing." This I can definitely relate to: to use Flower and Hayes' terminology, the 'writing goals' I would come up with for my students or in my own work (that should flourish throughout the process rather than be the start point that never shifts) would be to continuously consider the writing as it is put into the work. This is not yet natural to my students as they often become to tied to their initial ideas that they become like some venerable text, but I agree that a developing writer should absolutely allow their goals to develop and grow as they see their work progress.

Response to:
Flower, L. & Hayes, J. R. (1981).  A cognitive process theory of writing.  College Composition and Communication, 32 (4).  pp. 365-387.