A 10-panel comic explores a subtle kind of racism many people of color experience.

Alisha Huber curated a page on everyday racisms for the page Upworthy on Dec 18th, 2015.  Here's what she had to say:

"If we're being honest, we all make assumptions about other people, right?

We look at their skin, their clothes, and their car, and we make guesses about them that we don't even realize we're making. Everyone does it.

You ask a pregnant female coworker if she'll keep working after the baby is born — but you wouldn't think to ask that question of a guy who was about to become a dad.

You ask that nice girl behind the counter at the bagel shop whether she'll ever go to college so she can get a better job — only to learn that she's an underemployed Ph.D.

You ask a hipster-looking guy on the subway whether he's into artisanal pickles — but he just happens to be a bad dresser who has no idea what you're talking about.

The fact is, though, that people of color deal with other people's assumptions constantly.

Research shows that other people's expectations can have a profound effect on us. They can determine our success or failure. And black women deal with this nonsense more than others. In a recent study, nearly half of the female black and Latina scientists polled reported being mistaken for janitors or administrative staff."

Ottawa Citizen Review: A powerful memorial to missing and murdered aboriginal women

Yesterday, I visited Carleton University to see the Exhibit Walking with Our Sisters and it was a powerful experience.  I went with some students from the Urban Cohort and University of Ottawa and we passed through the space, viewing the vamps, pieces of unfinished mocassins.

The exhibit brought back for me the words of poet Chrystos, who said, "my purpose [in writing] is to make it as clear & as inescapably as possible, what the conditions of our lives are" (Not Vanishing, 1988).  The Ottawa Citizen featured a wonderful review of the exhibit including the pictures I've posted here.  

Margaret Atwood

I was invited to see Margaret Atwood at the Elmwood School's Centennial Celebration.  As always, she had some fabulous one-liners, one my favorite being "my dystopian novels are hideously teachable."

Traversing and inhabiting the boundaries of Urban Imaginaries

A working infographic for thinking about Urban Communities in Ottawa

Not far from Dismaland: The Later Lives of Disney Princesses Show That "Happily Ever After" Is a Lie

Dina Goldstein created a series of photographs imagining what happened to Disney princesses after their fairy tales ended. The futures she imagines for the women are grim.  To see her other work, click here.

Welcome to Dismaland!

How might we think through this anti-establishment dystopian theme park "not suitable for adults"? The 2.5 acre show features installations by 58 artists, including 10 works from Banksy himself who described the production as “a festival of art, amusements and entry-level anarchism.”  
The Economist and the amazing art and design website Colossal have pictures and articles about this installation.

What does a theme park like this do to your childhood memories about Disney?  What does it do to the corporatized ideal that has become Disney?

Thinking about religion from the perspective of Indian youth

"Whatever your religion, if you have one or not, we cannot deny that it is omnipresent. It’s hard to imagine a life without it, especially in parts of the world that are divided by beliefs and cultural systems. They shape our world views which relate humanity to an order of existence. Whether the world would be a better or worse place without it that’s up to you. A group of Indian children were asked this very question as part of a “Kids Speak Out” video series on YouTube. We all know that children aren’t afraid to say how they really feel, this is what they had to say:"

"Man" - Animation and/as an affective register in visual literacies

What multiple statements about our ethics as a species, about colonialism (those in power affect the most devastating change?), about gender (the video is called "Man"), and about environmentalism does this video make?  How can we read it many ways, taking account of the affective register this video compels without a single verbal or written utterance?

The visual and literacies

How do we interpret world overpopulation?  One way to consider learning about the earth and about overpopulation and the demands we place on our planet is through powerful images.  How do these pictures write across the curriculum?
Click here for an article on The Guardian about overpopulation and overconsumption in pictures.  What do images provoke that merely talking about these problems in the abstract doesn't?

Trash waveIndonesian surfer Dede Surinaya catches a wave in a remote but garbage-covered bay on Java, Indonesia, the world’s most populated island

‘Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.’Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Photograph: Zak Noyle

Waves of humanitySprawling Mexico City rolls across the landscape, displacing every scrap of natural habitat

‘If our species had started with just two people at the time of the earliest agricultural practices some 10,000 years ago, and increased by one percent per year, today humanity would be a solid ball of flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would be many times faster than the speed of light.’Gabor Zovanyi

Photograph: Pablo Lopez Luz

The return of the ancient mariner?

Dead birdOn Midway Atoll, far from the centres of world commerce, an albatross, dead from ingesting too much plastic, decays on the beach – it is a common sight on the remote island

‘Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals – the same fate awaits them both; as one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath.’ Ecclesiastes 3:19

Photograph: Chris Jordan

British Columbia clear-cutSometimes called the Brazil of the North, Canada has not been kind to its native forests as seen by clear-cut logging on Vancouver Island

‘Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species. It is an illusion that has cost us much, ensnared us in our own designs, given us a few boasts to make about our courage and genius, but all the same it is an illusion.’ Donald Worster

Photograph: Garth Lentz

Writing journey: As mentors of/as students at Hawthorne Public School

Today we completed our journey as writing mentors for Mr. Harder’s grade 8 students at Hawthorne Public School, a well as three students from Ms. Simser’s class. It seems just like yesterday that we were ushered into to meet the students and provided a sermon of sorts that for me touched on the importance of inquiry based learning and why part of what Mr. Harder calls ‘A Harder Learning Plan’ involves his students in cross curricular explorations of writing across history and geography.  While the students had a range of options in terms of the type of writing students could do to fulfill the expectations of the students’ complex task, one thing was of great significance – identity.  Mr. Harder noted that whether the students were writing a creative piece or a critical essay, he wanted them to try and understand the identities of the individuals and places they were studying. The general topic of inquiry for all students was immigration in Canada between 1891 and 1914.  For instance, Mr. Harder suggested that if students were taking up the theme of loyalty, how does this have to do with the land and people’s relationship to it, and how do such themes of identity and courage make the historical moment of the Red River Rebellion, come alive. Additionally, and importantly, Mr. Harder asked his students to consider how what they were writing about interconnected with their own identities and to consider how the Canadian story is one of dislocation. Turning back to the work of inquiry, Mr. Harder noted that what makes the work of history is if we find the self in everything we do. On that final note, Mr. Harder reviewed that the goal for the young writers in the class was for them to learn new strategies to improve their own writing and for the mentors to support this work through whatever ways they thought may be useful. 

While our four Mondays at Hawthorne flew by, I think we were able to build relationships through reading our way into our mentees ideas and lives. Working with a student from Ms. Simser’s class on a creative writing project, I was privileged to be part of his process of gathering ideas for his story and working through how  his Jumanji-like story with a twist of Goosebumps would unfold. As I read through the blog entries of the other University of Ottawa writing mentors, I see posts of resources and stories of learning that are deep and important. 

One theme that emerges in our blog posts is the privilege of having been able to listen Mr. Harder speak about entering the world of teaching as a profession.  He reminded teacher candidates that each of you has a place in the machine which is getting a job, learning to work with other seasoned teachers, and to develop courses and lessons.  He reminded us that taking each day, each lesson at a time is important, and to hold onto your core values in teaching despite all odds is important – without trying to change the world all at once.  

Helen Humphreys

In the Ottawa Citizen on February 28th, there was an excellent article on Helen Humphrey's new book entitled The Evening Chorus.  Commenting about nature, she explains, "I am in favour of returning Nature to being a proper noun, and of poets writing about the natural world, and having their contributions valued as scientific study.  I believe that humans are very much part of the natural world and that our connection to it is a vital one and needs to be protected and nurtured, just as we need to protect and nurture the natural world around us".

For Helen Humphreys' website, click here.

Link to Deanna Young's Website

The affective force of poetry: A session with poet Deanna Young

This past week, we had the great fortune of having the award winning poet Deanna Young come to visit our class and speak to us about poetry across the curriculum. Leading up to her visit, I mentioned a few times that Deanna was one guest speaker not to be missed; she did not disappoint.   Beginning with taking up Peterson’s chapter on poetry in Writing Across the Curriculum, Deanna noted that in reading it she jotted down many ideas that came to mind, but the one things she felt that was missing was the significance of affect when it comes to the reading of poetry.

Beginning with the provocative question: “Is poetry just about another new tool, to use the cliché in your toolbox, to teach content or is there another reason?”, Deanna addresses what poetry across the curriculum means to her:

            I think if you are a are a teacher if you going to use poetry across the curriculum, the only way you can use it effectively and get the most out of it is if you are seeing it for what it is. To me the article doesn't get at that essence. It talks more about thinking and precision and those kinds of things but it doesn't talk about the heart and the transformative power of poetry. Peterson’s reading does address how to make poetry accessible to students, but it skips over why students will care or bother to use it. My question is how do you turn kids onto poetry and use it so it is something they will actually embrace and are drawn to and are not just dismissing in your classroom as another little gimmick that the teacher is using and she or he wants me to write an acrostic poem and come up with a poem through the letters of my name: “D is for dynamic.” Is that something that really meant a lot to you and turned you into a poetry reader and writer? Does that turn kids onto poetry? I don’t believe it ever has.   Keep that in mind whether you are using poetry in English, Math or Geography – remind yourself of poetry’s essence and what it can do for us as human beings. That is really what poetry should be about.

To help us experience what she was speaking about, Deanna them took us on a little adventure of writing poetry. Writing two titles on the board -  The Beauty of Math or The Trouble with Math - Deanna gave us the rules that you could not use the word “math” in the body of our poems, and you cannot use word numbers or digits 1, 2 or 3 ad infinitum. The poem must be 9 lines of any length. 

As intended, this little exercise did the trick, as we all furiously wrote, challenging ourselves to convey our ideas about math without breaking any of the rules, which of course pushed us to new plateaus of engaging with our connections to math. Not surprising, considering my own math anxiety, I worked with the title The Trouble with Math and here is my little attempt:

            The marks on the chalkboard stare at me

            With symbols and signs I can’t discern

            Oh how I wish I could remember those formulas

            And could magically sweep through each equation

            The grand finale would stand before me like a final bow

            I would feel the exhilaration of a good performance

            I would hear the applause of all those towering teachers in my past

            I would then be ready to take on another challenge

            And feel like Harry Potter all over again.

Even though, unlike the other brave souls in the class, I did not offer to share my own little comic twist on my own feelings of loss and desire around math, our classroom became alive with reading performances that shared a range of perspectives on math that got underneath how, for some, poetry was a means of communicating logic to the hot topic of math anxiety.

Experiencing poetry’s ability to surprise and bring to the surface our emotional experiences around a subject which has a bad rap of being cold and calculating, Deanna then set the stage to share some poems that she had thought could be used across the curriculum.  Bringing us into the wonderful world of ‘what if’, Deanna asked us to consider whether Dylan Thomas’s The force that through the green fuse drives the flower was used in Biology would shake students awake. In Basho’s The petals tremble, students could experience the contrast of the delicate petals on a mountain rose in juxtaposition to the overpowering rapids below.  Asking how we could perhaps see Mary Oliver’s Alligator Poem fitting into the curriculum, ideas of how it could be used in Art because of its imagery, Geography to talk about the ecosystem and the everglades, or a way to talk about Darwinism in Biology all emerged as possibilities. Theodore Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz also applies to a ream of subject area uses such as the Arts or Family Studies where it may be a venue for high school students to loosen their own memories of childhood.

Moving from discussing My Papa’s Waltz’s strict rhyme scheme, we moved to considering another master of rhyme and one of my favorite poets, Dr. Seuss. Reading From One Fish, Two Fish, we talked about an array of uses for the lines of this prolific poet’s work, including The Lorax which many would say has done more to bring ideas of the environmentalism to both short and tall people then any other piece of literature. Turning to another serious subject, we were introduced to Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, which could be a significant catalyst to talk about mental health if we read the iris as human. Last but not least, Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool was put on the table as a means to inspire students to write about an issue that is important to them in an eight-line poem using rhyme and contemporary vocabulary.

In closing, Deanna implored us to liberally use poems as models for student writing, as we all start writing by mimicking. While she only had about two hours of time to share with us before running off to work her magic as a web editor at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we won’t soon forget that we need to keep asking the question of what poetry can bring into our lives and what it can do for us as human beings.  

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