CBC Article on Hawthorne school

Read this article about our school for this course: Hawthorne School to help Families in Need.
The article features one of our urban education students, Karen Rayburn!

Slammin' Across the Curriculum

What important implications slam poetry has for youth writing in the “there and now” is one of the questions Bronwen Low opens up to us in “Slammin’ School Performance Poetry and the Urban School”? In this article, which was one of our readings for this week, Low reads the rhetoric of the literacy crisis against what the new literacies movement has revealed about adolescent literacies: that youth feel compelled to speak through a range of related mediums such as slam poetry, hip hop and social media.  Turning the idea of literacy being some sort of singular "entity" on its head, involves not only working with different literacy modalities (reading and writing, texting, oral traditions, video, for example), but also working to redefine what constitutes literacies not as outputs (final products) but as practices.  

Low, quoting Frith (1983, p. 17) explains that “Black music is immediate and democratic – a performance is unique and the listeners of that performance become part of it” (p. 78)  From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Slam Poetry, we learn that “Slam poetry is the brainchild of Marc Smith (So What!) and the blue collar intellectual eccentrics who crammed into the Get Me High Lounge on Monday nights from November 1984 to September 1986 for a wide-open poetry experience. Finger-poppin’ hipster Butchie (James Dukaris) owned the place and allowed anything to happen, and it usually did. The experimenters in this new style of poetry presentation gyrated, rotated, spewed, and stepped their words along the bar top, dancing between the bottles, bellowing out the backdoor, standing on the street or on their stools, turning the west side of Chicago into a rainforest of dripping whispers or a blast furnace of fiery elongated syllables, phrases, snatches of scripts, and verse that electrified the night.”

A few questions and thoughts to consider about teaching and slam poetry:

·       When we talk about digital storytelling or other tools to communicate, the concept of audience is important. 

·         Interesting how slam poetry uses alternative literacy as a comment about the failings of ‘in-school’ traditional literacies.

“Trouble around the text”: Fears that emerged in our discussion

·         Trouble around assessment – how does assessing slam poetry different than assessing a poem a student writes on the page.  What is inherent in performance that adds to the writing?

·         Location : does it work in a rural setting? 

·         How do you evaluate a genre that is new to you as a teacher or that you might not understand?

Slam Poetry in our class!

  How does poetry about curriculum become globalized? In this case, we are reminded that the media is as much the message as the words being spoken.  Low notes that “slam is the creation of its technologized context” (p. 78).   Slam poetry reaches around the world via the internet.

Slip of the tongue

Here's a slam poetry example that students might identify with -- not just students in urban schools but everywhere.  It could be a mentor text to speak to students about the concepts of colonialism, commodification, marketing, and relationships, as told by youth.

Slam poetry about education

Post by Elihudi Justin Urassa.

Mentor texts: Our collage of texts in different areas

Mentor texts and the art and science of lighting fires through writing

This week in our class we are engaging with the topic of mentor texts and are taking up the questions of what are they, when would we use them, and why do they matter?  Reading along with this topic Shelly Peterson’s (2008) chapter on Writing Non-Narrative in Content Areas in Writing Across the Curriculum, she explains that she uses the term “non-narrative instead of nonfiction” to focus “on form rather than on whether or not the content is factual or imagined” (p. 21).  In this chapter, she provides a range of examples of non-narrative forms and ideas for writing and provides some useful mini-lessons on identifying features of genres that are meant to inform, persuade or to instruct or direct.

In our class today, we sorted through the mentor texts you chose and we thought about the usefulness of such classifications, as well as where some texts defied easy categorization. After brainstorming, our class came up with key ways to use the mentor texts to help students learn about different genres. Notable moments were finding websites that allow you to adjust reading levels for informational articles, videos that exemplify different approaches to introducing a concept, and the unique ways people put their mentor texts on their blogs.

While the mentor texts you chose are for your students, the mentor text I chose for you is about teaching.  Roy F. Fox’s (1997) “Spiders, Fireflies and the Glow of Popular Science” from Stephen Tchudi’s The Astonishing Curriculum: Integrating Science and the Humanities Through Language is be a piece of non-narrative writing that is meant to inform. I chose it because it is about a teacher who teaches writing through what I would say is the most engaging way possible: by asking students to write on a topic that fascinates them.

Fox begins his chapter with a little story about the power of using sound to interact with mystery. He shares how he begins with a poem about a firefly at a book club talk to discuss a collection of poetry about nature. Asking his audience to choose their favorite poem from the collection that all touched on some mystery, as he had done when he selected the story about the firefly, the participants were fully engaged and moved from reading their chosen poem to sharing what fascinated them and what they remained curious about. Fox asserts, “teachers of many disciplines and levels, from biology to art, from junior highs school to college, should ask their students to select a mystery (which is somehow relevant to the course) and write a descriptive popular science article about it” (p. 127).  Taking up the topic of demystifying science writing with integrating study of science, humanities and society, Fox encourages us to develop teaching that immerses students in what is best about science: “commitment, curiosity, discovery, focus, precision, knowledge and facts” (p. 128). “At the same time,” Fox writes, “students are absorbed in what is best about the humanities: commitment, exploration, creativity, and clear communication motivated only for purposes of sharing information” (p. 128). Arguing that creating an assignment like “Writing a Popular Science Article” bridges the two cultures, Fox underlines that the most significant element of the assignment is personal, passionate curiosity. He notes that while experienced writers already know what their passions are, students may not know, and, thus, they are the ones who most need experience in the nurture between authentic involvement and effective expression. Therefore, in his article, Fox shares his own process of nurturing this dynamic by sharing his practice of having students get started on their Make a Mystery Make Sense project and then engaging them in a range of writing and oral response activities. 

While at this point you may be thinking ‘okay, there are some students who would run with this project but there are others who are impossible to engage’, Fox shares that the hardest part of this assignment is to help students discover the mystery that ignites them and “some students never catch fire.” This is a tough situation, but Fox asks us to take heart in at least helping students to understand that “personal fires feed real inquiry” (p. 134).  And, at least, this is a beginning.  As we continue to think through teaching writing cross the curriculum, maybe holding onto this is also a  good beginning even while we strive to create classrooms where writing to learn and learning to write will foster passion and personal interest in the process of learning, which Fox exemplifies through encouraging his students to interact with science in a humanizing way. 

Sorting it out: Writing to Learn and Learning to Write

Week 2: Blog Response and Summary to Atwell

“I want to go deep inside language together and use it to know, shape and play with our worlds – but my practices evolve as my students and I go deeper.” Nancie Atwell, In the Middle

In "Learning to Teach Writing," Atwell takes us on a journey of how she began teaching as a creationist who focused on creating curriculum to becoming an evolutionist who instead allows the curriculum to unfold.  She and her students learn together and she teaches students what she sees they need to learn.

While this first course reading for PED 3148 is specifically about teaching writing in the English Classroom versus Writing Across the Curriculum, I chose it because it is above all else a powerful story of learning. Beginning her story when she tells us “the gap was at its widest with an eight grader who taught me that I didn’t know enough” (p. 4).   Atwell describes how she moves from using a highly prescribed, systematic ELA program that was accompanied by specific behaviours she expected around learning and used “to manipulate students into bearing the sole responsibility for narrowing the gap” (p. 4) of what they didn’t know and what she expected them to learn. Sharing a story with us from when she says the gap was at its greatest, we meet Jeff and eight grade student who struggles with writing.

Instead of following the process of the prewriting procedures, Jeff drew pictures and his sister helped him scribe his story at home. Despite what Atwell explains as her continual “strong disapproval” of Jeff’s approach, he persevered and was able to pass the course and move on to high school. While it wasn’t only until years later that Atwell realized she had to change her pedagogy to accommodate the behaviors of beginning writers and not expect them to all find ways “to make sense of, or peace with the language arts curriculum or ….to fail the course” (p. 4), it was the experience of not being able to reach Jeff that became for her what Shoshana Felman calls “trouble around the text.” In later reading what she revisited to learn when Jeff was in her class, that sitting behind the big desk in the front of the classroom and following a curriculum structure that prescribed topics and insisted on a specific process, she held fast to the belief that her “ideas were more credible and important than her students might possibility explain” (p. 7).

Poignantly Atwell confesses what many teachers may at some level know but defend against admitting: “I had missed the chance to understand what I was doing to talk to him and learn from him how to help him” (p. 9). Here the teacher becomes an interventionist (Taylor, 2000, p. 48) where turning away from a prescribed curriculum she moves to a writing workshop model that allowed students choice in what they would write and how they would write to later refining her pedagogy further “reintegrating the teacher to central in the writing classroom” (Taylor p. 48).  Using a backwards design strategy of sorts, Atwell is direct in her approach of being very clear in her expectations and what students are responsible to achieve. To support her students, Atwell uses an apprenticeship model and uses what Jerome Bruner called the “handover” method, also known as gradual release, as the teacher intervenes and gradually provides less support for the learner to help students learn skills and synthesize knowledge, as they become confident writers.

It is here that I see what we can learn from Atwell’s story of learning and the sort of pedagogies we may want to adapt when thinking about teaching writing across the curriculum. In building our own knowledge based and use of instructional strategies that Peterson (2008) offers in her text for teachers, we can begin to imagine what are the possibilities for the diversity of writers in our classrooms.

How to Create a Blog: Help Video

Rubric for your Professional Learning Blog

Spotlight on Writing: Mini-Unit Check Brick

Template: Spotlight on Writing - Collaborative Mini-Unit Plan

Recap from the first class!

Thank you all for a great first class!
We gathered thoughts together about what comes to mind when you hear the word "writing."  Your responses were interesting and varied.  I have your ideas that we wrote on the board captured in the photos below.  Thank you for sharing your free writing!  I have shared my free-write below.

In-class free write - Linda Radford
What comes to mind when I hear the word writing?  Sheer fear of whether not I can get what is in my head onto the page in a way that is coherent, readable, proactive, interesting, and important.  Thus, in terms of putting words on the page, writing to me is a tall order that is accompanied by the anxiety of the work along with the delight of accomplishing what I set out to say.  The other thought that comes to mind about writing is about reading. The joy and benefit I receive from reading the word, or as Freire contends, the world. Through reading what is represented, I can read myself with and against different texts and gain a deeper knowledge of who I am and my work in education.

Course Syllabus PED 3148