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!'
There is so much value in having students explore different genres so that they can experience a plethora of different literacies. One of our jobs as teachers is to expose children to the world around them, and this project does just that.
ReplyDeleteThe key for me in this reading and in your post is the "internal dialogue." We always say that we want our kids to learn out to think for themselves, and self-monitoring is our goal; but how do we do that? How do we make sure there's a light on up there after we leave? How can we make them have genuine self-inquiry?
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