“Not without merit, Shann,” he said one day as he handed back a piece of writing I’d done on one of Milton’s poems. That’s all. No explanation of what was good about it, no indication about how it might have received higher praise.

He must have said other things on other occasions, but they’re the only four words I remember.

They made an impact, though, those four words. I remember feeling I’d made a step through what had up until then been an impenetrable barrier. Dinger might not have said much to me directly, but he had written pithy reports that made me wonder if I’d ever succeed as an English student. “He has much to learn about keeping ‘on the beam’ and making effective use of his points,” he’d written in the first one. “He is not in danger of over-confidence,” he said in another. And then, half way through my second year with him: “Carrying on steadily from last year, without showing yet the rigour born of confidence.”

So, ‘not without merit’ sounded promising, especially given the hint of surprise in his voice, as if I’d unsettled a few of his doubts. I looked forward to what he might write in the end-of-year report.

This is what he wrote at the end of my two years in his class:

His sincerity and good sense are more than adequate compensation for any lack of facility. He does not have easy successes; but application, honesty and good taste are a very effective combination.

Digger’s words were uncomfortable. They had a penetrating quality. I thought about them a lot.

Dinger was in his sixties when he taught me, and died in 1988 aged 81.

***

Last week my cousin sent me a copy of a new book about Dinger Bell. (Remembering C.A.Bell, by Michael Dan, Ian Rutherford and David Castle). As I’ve been reading it I’ve been asking myself a number of related questions:

Why did Dinger’s words penetrate? Was it because he was good with words? Was it because they came out of a penetrating gaze?
How did someone so immersed in the world of literature, who seemed only aware of my presence on the periphery of his awareness, come to perceive certain things about my ability and my character?
Dinger was an authentic personality; we all knew this. I’m at present discussing ‘the ethics of authenticity’ with Michael Umphrey and others in an online discussion. What was it about Dinger that was patently authentic?

***

It turns out (I’ve discovered, from reading this book) that Dinger thought a lot about education, and in particular about the importance of English Literature. I don’t remember him talking about this; in fact, he said very little in class. He would make a few comments about our work, he would ask some questions after we’d read something and make terse and mildly discouraging comments about the superficiality or slickness of our responses, and he would read out loud poems and passages and grunt and chuckle and leave significant pauses at various places, as if to ask, “Well, what do you say to that? Is that not wonderful! Does that not make you stop and examine the nature of things! No? Nothing? All the worse for you then!”

He didn’t talk much about these things, but it turns out he wrote about them. Reading literature had, for him, a moral purpose. The books we read in our final year were chosen to

add to their (the students’) experience some knowledge of an Englishman of the sixteenth century who was forced to choose between principle and expediency (Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons); an Englishman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who had to try to reconcile the two sides of his own nature (David Cecil Lord M); a black man of our own century who failed to understand the ‘civilization’ of white men (Joyce Cary Mr Johnson); a group of French Algerians exhibiting th tension between religious faith and materialism or skepticism (Camus The Plague). We are human beings first, revealing, some believe, a touch of the divine; after that we are permitted to be scientists or humanists. (quoted p202)

The English course needed to be a course of substance:

English has the right and the obligation to draw for its content upon the best writing in the history of man and in the history of science. In exercising this right and duty, it at the same time offers, like the classics of old, a context, a synthesizing, and a background, which, however blurred or inadequate, is better than vacuity. Some progressives, the fun-and-games school, will deplore this obsession with the past, even though the past may include the recent past … Our experts in English have been extraordinarily fearful of putting too great a strain on reading from the past with children whose minds are dominated by the present and the immediate future, obsessed by the apparently useful and profitable. Some experts seem to have been afraid that the children would take it as an affront to be asked to read anything better than ephemeral and tabloid stuff. In the natural reaction from the dreariness of imposing classics on the unwilling, the unready and the unable, we are apt to lose sight of the fact that intelligent and interested senior students can have their development starved by lack of nutriment as surely as their less literary fellows can be sickened by surfeit. (quoted p204)

The study of literature was, for Dinger, a way to understand better “human nature, human aspirations, and human achievements in contexts richer and more ennobling than those of party politics and of ‘business’” (quoted p201), and he valued above all things honesty and a seeking after the truth, both in what we read and in what we wrote. In some notes distributed to us boys he wrote:

Try to tell what seems to you to be the truth. (There is truth even in fiction.) Do not pretend to know: you are not likely to be convincing. Say what you have to say as clearly, economically, and effectively as you can. Spare occasional thoughts fo the person to whom or for whom you are writing. Look for the word which may penetrate to him. Let ‘style’ look after itself.

This attitude towards literature determined his views about essay writing. He detested the formulaic or the flash.

The word ‘essay’ was appropriately applied in the first place to literary exercises written in meditative or philosophical moods by people who chose topics on which they felt impelled or qualified to write. Many of the essays written in schools and examinations on casually set topics are word-spinning without motive. (quoted p202)

In children’s eyes, it is sensible to explain why they are being called upon to write on a topic; and it is sometimes politic to suggest ways – not the way – in which a topic may be handled. I am glad to state again my prejudice against the accidental essay. If the writers know that they are working in an actual field of experience and that they are practising a particular kind of writing for a particular kind of public, they are less likely to disintegrate as writers into aimless nonentities. If also they are told that there is not set formula requiring an ‘introductory’ paragraph and a ‘concluding’ paragraph, that there are several points at which the may break into the topic, that it is their privilege to choose their own point of penetration, then they may writing as self-respecting people who assume responsibility for their thoughts. (quoted p206)

It is important for the teacher to realize that the use of the sentence as a unit of expression is conditioned to no small degree by intelligence and maturity. Sentence patterns represent ways of thinking, not merely ways of writing and speaking. (quoted p212)

Dinger’s commitment to the moral purpose of the English discipline shaped his views on the teaching of vocabulary, grammar and assessment:

… the young writer should fairly soon become aware that the meanings of a surprising number of works are tinged with emotional colours and that these colours are often fast colours which defy the efforts to remove them of bleaching ‘clear thinkers’. There is rich wisdom in that knowledge. (quoted p207)

Grammar should not be taught merely as a pedantic exercise or as an end in itself. We should be trying to induce, for example, a respect for the really effective adjective or adverb, a consistency in construction and in the use of tense, an awareness that phrases and clauses can be moved about inside a sentence with varying results; and, above all, we should be trying to kill invertebrate jumbles of words. (quoted p216)

If short-answer ticking and crossing becomes the dominant practice in English examinations, then short-answer ticking and crossing will also become the standard practice in English teaching … The supreme form of creation will be the making of convulsive jabs at little squares with ball-point pens….
There is no need for defeatism. Even modern children do not resent writing if they are allowed to preserve their integrity and are not called upon to perform tricks (quoted p209)

I suppose what I loved about reading this book on Dinger Bell was the revelation that what we experienced as authentic, impressive, slightly fearsome and full of authority came from a deeply held philosophy about the nature of the subject. He thought deeply and had deep convictions. He had no need to talk about these convictions in the classroom: they seeped out of him in his grunts and silences and questions and asides. He was a senior teacher at our school not because he knew how to play the political game, but because he was a master teacher who knew his discipline.

I have this sense, looking back, that there is a connection between his deep knowledge of the discipline and his penetrating comments about his students. He saw us as apprentices, struggling with what many of us yearned to, but did not yet, understand. He knew us not because he took time out from his disciplinary business to ‘get to know us’: he knew something significant about us because he watched as we struggled to become more adept in his discipline.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged C.A. ('Dinger') Bell, classroom, English, Melbourne Grammar School | 3 Comments

Thanks to some folk I’ve never met

Posted on November 12, 2009 by steveshann

I’ve just this minute finished marking the 90 submissions written by my postgraduate students in the Literacy Across the Curriculum unit. This is the final task in what has been an intense little unit.

There is so much that I want to write about this experience. I’ve set aside time in December to do this writing.

Before then, though, I wanted to say a public thankyou to those people who helped me put it together.

Of course the main ones are my colleague, Kaye Lowe, and the students who gave such useful feedback as the course unfolded and who (whether they know it or not) influenced its shape and direction as we got under way.

But this thankyou is for a number of people I’ve never met in the flesh: Karen La Bonte, Teresa Bunner, Elfarran, Susan Carter, J. D. Wilson, Dan Sharkovitz.

During the middle months of this year, and then again in September, I mulled in my blog about where I was going with this unit. The people above encouraged, nudged and challenged that thinking. In particular Karen underlined the importance of challenging the students, Teresa helped me find a fertile question that worked (and it did work – more on that in December), and Elfarran gave me some ideas about thinking about our core discipline which I used in the course and which many of the students found took them right into the heart of things.

Thank you all. One of the joys of the internet is the way it helps break down the feeling of isolation in the classroom.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged literacy, university | 2 Comments

How to improve literacy rates: a simple plan

Posted on November 7, 2009 by steveshann

The government is considering a simple plan. To improve literacy you mandate regular high-stakes multiple-choice national testing in our schools. This keeps teachers on their toes and students focused on what matters most.

I’ve just come out of a classroom where literacy rates seemed to have improved quite unexpectedly and dramatically. For eight weeks, a group of 90 postgraduate students, all of them training to be teachers in secondary classrooms, have been doing a course called ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’. At the end of the course, the students were asked to respond to the statement ‘My own literacy skills have improved.’ 18% strongly agreed, 39% agreed, 28% were neutral, 13% disagreed and 3% strongly disagreed.

It’s hardly hard-data research, but something of significance appears to have happened. Here are 90 students who have each had at least 15 years of institutional learning, and nearly 60% of them think their literacy skills have improved over eight weeks.

What did we do?

Did we make sure the students focussed on their reading and writing by giving them a test? No.

Did the university tell me that my job was dependent on whether or not literacy rates amongst the students improved? No.

Instead we did what I think much good education has done in the past: we wrestled with an unsettling series of questions, and we tried to get our heads around a challenging body of knowledge. We read a great deal (a textbook and, between us, over 300 shorter texts); we wrote a great deal (each student reported on two significant pieces of original research and most made substantial written contributions to over a dozen online discussions); and we talked a lot in our weekly tutorials. Because the content was, for most of the students, relevant and disturbing, it stimulating a great deal of thinking. A number of the students found themselves mulling over issues as they cooked their dinner or walked the dog or stood in the shower.

The government has a simple plan. Unfortunately it is missing the point about how people learn to read and write.

If we want our young to become better readers and writers, we need to make sure that they do lots of reading and writing. The government’s plan will reinforce current pressures to narrow the curriculum. There won’t be time for wide reading and creative writing. Worse, there will be less and less time for talk, which is where so much fruitful engagement starts, and less time for meandering and mulling. Test scores might go up, but real literacy will be a casualty.

***

In a future blog post I’ll write more about our ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’ course. It’s been highly stimulating and intense.

Posted in literacy | Tagged assessment, literacy, reading, standards, university, writing | 5 Comments

ELPC 4: And finally, a rubric

Posted on September 9, 2009 by steveshann

This morning I’ve been working on a rubric for the journals referred to in the earlier posts in this series. I don’t like marking with rubrics (but then I don’t like marks much!), but I do find rubrics useful as a way of exposing my values and criteria to my students. It’s good to talk about draft rubrics.

So here’s the one I’ve come up with this morning.

This is going to be of more interest to my students than to other readers, though Karen, Dan and Elfarran will notice their fingerprints on this one.

Sorry about the size of the print.

And here are the notes I want to attach to this rubric, for us to talk about in our first tutorial.

Notes:

1. The final journal submission has a word limit of 2000 words. This is twice the word limit of the last journal assessment submission.2. Your 2000 words can be in the form of extracts culled from your ongoing journal, or in the form of a 2000 word paper, drawing ideas and material from your journals, tutorials, reading, interactions with students and teaching practice.

3. I will be asking myself a series of specific questions when I read these 2000 words. These are:

Has this student made it clear what he/she sees as his/her ‘core disciplinary business’? Does he/she see this in terms of (i) the traditional historically approved version? (ii) his/her personal heart-of-heart version? (iii) the radically transformed literacy landscape we now live in version?

Has the student made it clear that he/she has become informed about the current debate about literacy in general and writing in particular?

Has this student thought through any implications a redefining of writing would have on his/her philosophy and pedagogy?

4. You’ll notice that this time I’ve put ‘contact with staff’ in with ‘reading’. Last time ‘contact with staff’ was in with ‘interactions with students’. It didn’t sit well there, as many of you wanted to talk about Tovani and Prof Lowe together.

5. It is my hypothesis (obviously shared by many of you) that feeling a sense of belonging to a vibrant and stimulating community is a key in the development of successful literacy skills. Criteria 3 is there to give you an opportunity to reflect on this aspect. If the ELPC G2 community has been stimulating, here is an opportunity to discuss this. If, on the other hand, you disagree with my hypothesis, here is an opportunity to challenge it.
6. Criteria 4 & 5 are not compulsory. You do not have to address these in your 2000 words. But they have been included in the rubric because, for some of you, the teaching practice and/or the Writing Skill Task will have made a significant contribution to your thinking about literacy.

Posted in literacy, Pedagogy, University classes | Tagged assessment, community, literacy, Ning, teacher training, thinking, university, writing | 1 Comment

ELPC Part 3: Redefining writing? What next!

Posted on September 8, 2009 by steveshann

I used to think that I worked best on my own, down at the coast with my own emerging thoughts and the world shut out. It was never true, I now realize. Even when I was writing my PhD thesis down here, I was reading books and articles and drawing on long conversations with my supervisors. I was also sharing chapter drafts with them. That’s the way it’s been over the past couple of days, too, but now I’ve got a PLN for the sharing of ideas. As I walk along the beach or jot ideas down, I have Teresa’s voice quietly urging me to be more controversial, Elfarran reminding me that my own preoccupations are not necessarily the same as my students, Susan and J.D. letting me know that they’re enjoying reading my stuttering thoughts, Dan taking me back to the connection between love and literacy, and Karen (as always) making the view of the territory clearer. You’ve all helped me sharpen my focus question and also given me ideas for the structure of the course.

I’ve settled on the following as the focus question:

Redefining writing? What next! Is this just a distraction from my core disciplinary purpose?

In our first lecture or tutorial, I’ll mull aloud about the various parts of this. How is writing being redefined? The history of passing fads in education. Elfarran’s breakdown of the question ‘What’s my core disciplinary purpose?’ into three parts:

in its traditional historically approved version,
in my personal heart of hearts version and
in the radically transforming literacy landscape we now live in version.

So I’ll say a bit to begin with. But the main business of the four weeks (it’s a ridiculously short time!) will be the students themselves exploring the question, in a number of related ways:

A literature search, based on Michael Wesch’s How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class. One of the comments on Michael Wesch’s post has described how Moodle might be used for this project, and later today or tomorrow I’m going to post a couple of examples to guide the students. In Week 1 of our month the students will find, read and create an abstract of (say) 3 articles, in Week 2 they will read the extracts created by their colleagues, and in the Week 3 tutorial we’ll have a discussion centred around our focus question and drawing on the ideas generated by all this research. I think this will be manageable, stimulating and (most importantly in a teacher-education course) repeatable in the students’ own classrooms.
Again later on tonight I’m going to create a Ning for us to use to share ideas. We’ve been using Moodle, but there are three reasons why I want to add a Ning to our box of tricks. Firstly, I want to explore with the students the idea that we stimulate writing by belonging to a stimulating community (thanks, Dan, for your comments on this aspect), and Nings work particularly well in creating an online community. Secondly, the Moodle blog feature doesn’t allow students to read others blog. And thirdly not all schools have Moodle, and Nings are free and easy to set up, and so again will add to each student’s repertoire.
All of the formal assessment for this part of the course will come from the students’ blogs. This is what we decided at the beginning of the course, and though I’m not sure I’d do it this way if I had my time over, the students have understandably resisted the idea of changing what we originally agreed on. I’m going to construct a rubric for this. I’m not a big fan of rubrics as marking devices (that’s a whole other story), but I do like the kinds of conversations that occur when a rubric is produced. Rubrics help clarify expectations and surface values, even if they don’t help assign marks in any objective way. The focus in the rubric is going to be on how deeply the student has researched and thought through the issues raised by the focus question. Karen la Bonte’s response to my last blog post is going to be especially useful here, and I’ll be pinching some of her words for inclusion in the rubric (which won’t please Karen, given her own distaste for rubrics!).
Each student will be required to work on one writing-related (defined broadly) skill, a skill that is going to be useful for them as a teacher. I’m going to do one too. I’m going to create my first digital narrative. (Karen has recommended Voicethreads as a good digital narrative tool, so I’ll be investigating this.) The subject of my digital narrative is going to be connected to this part of the course. In Week 4, those students who would like to share their little projects will do so in the tutorial. All students will write about their developing skill in their blogs.
In Week 2, my colleague Assoc Prof Kaye Lowe will run the tutorial on ‘Writing and Spelling’. This will give us more food for thought as we think about the relevance of rethinking our attitudes towards the teaching of writing.

So, five interconnected elements, all revolving around the question ‘Redefining writing? What next! Is this just a distraction from my core disciplinary purpose?’

Posted in literacy, Pedagogy, University classes | Tagged assessment, community, education, literacy, MichaelWesch, Ning, questions, teacher training, thinking, university, Web 2.0, writing | 3 Comments

ELPC Part 2: Inching towards a more charged focus question

Posted on September 7, 2009 by steveshann

So. Here I am, at the coast on my own for three days. Time to think and read and write. Bliss. It’s 7.30 at night and I’ve finished dinner (but still got my apron on); a salmon and bean frittata with an avocado, pea and olive salad. A glass and a half of cheap but pleasant red wine. I’ve been for a walk on the beach during a break in the wet weather, there’s a fire on, and I’m like a pig in poo.

I’m planning to write a short blog post each day. I’m here to sort out the focus and structure of the second half of our ‘literacy across the curriculum’ unit which I wrote about in my last post. The focus for our final four weeks is writing.

I’ve just re-read the post, and Teresa’s comment. She wondered about my proposed research questions, and very politely suggested that they didn’t quite hit the mark. She’s right. They lack punch. They have no real charge, they don’t challenge pre-conceived assumptions. I need to work on them.

My students come from all the secondary disciplines, and they’re in the middle of a five week block in schools, where I’m guessing some of the bigger educational questions will be subsumed by concerns about classroom management and finding the time and energy to prepare properly. Some of the students may well be wondering about the relevance of four weeks back at university thinking about writing.

And while they’ve been out in schools, I’ve done my own wondering. I’ve been thinking and writing about the many different tacks that we might take when we’re looking at writing. What is the function of writing? Does writing imply an exclusive focus on the written word? What about multiple modalities? 21^st century literacies? Literacies in the digital age? There are so many potential tacks that it’s easy to get lost.

So today I’ve been trying to find a charged and challenging question that cuts through some of this. Something that takes us into the heart of all this complexity and tension.

How about something like this:

Writing-as-composing, Multiple-modalities-in-writing, writing-for-web-2.0. What Now? What Next? Is all this distracting me from my core disciplinary business?

I like that this one acknowledges the skepticism, then asks us to examine it. I also like the way it invites us to think carefully about what our core business is, and to see if re-thinking aspects of writing fit into this core.

And it doesn’t have a simple answer, like my earlier version. There’s a strong debate going on in educational circles about this very question.

How does it sound to you Teresa? Others? Better?

****

Finding the right words for our focus question is just one part of the planning. There’s also the students’ reading (I’m going to adapt Michael Wesch’s idea on ‘how to get my students finding and reading 94 articles before the next class‘); the development of a composing skill (I wrote about this in my last blog post); the way we might use the University Moodle and a Ning; the content of the tutorials; and so on. In some ways, the precise wording seems such a small part of what needs to be done. But (because I’m going through a bit of a Dickens-phase in my reading at the moment), I’m reminded of the way Dickens used to spend weeks playing with titles for his books before he could begin the real creating. The title often held some kind of essence for him. That’s how I feel about the focus question.

Posted in literacy, Pedagogy, University classes | Tagged literacy, MichaelWesch, teacher training, technology, university, Web 2.0, writing | 4 Comments

ELPC Part 1: A fertile research question

Posted on September 5, 2009 by steveshann

When it comes to learning something new, just listening to an expert is usually not enough. Nor is passively reading. Usually we need to do something, to actively construct the knowledge ourselves, from a number of different sources and for a particular purpose (often to teach or explain it to someone else).

This seems to be the principle driving the inspirational Michael Wesch and his university class. It’s the principle behind the structure of our postgraduate course called ‘literacy across the curriculum’ in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. (The course acronym is ELPC, hence my title.)

learning_pyramid

For the first four weeks of this literacy course, the students each had to do their own piece of research. In our last four weeks (in October, after the students have spent time in schools), I’m wanting to again have them actively constructing knowledge from a variety of sources and for a particular purpose.

I’m writing this blog post to help me find the words to describe this proposed project.

****

I’ve already discovered that these are quite remarkable students. Ranging in age from early 20s to mid 50s, from all kinds of disciplines and walks of life, many with their own families and the perspectives that come from being a parent, they’ve begun to challenge or extend accepted definitions of literacy.

Michele and Renee were struck by the usefulness of reflective writing and blogging, and wondered how this might become a part of their teaching in the humanities and the arts;
Niomi, Matthew, Adam, Pip and Rob wanted us to include aspects of ‘mathematical literacy’;
Jane, Leigh and Alison urged us to include the ability to read images;
Terry described the experiences of a friend of his who struggled with reading but came to know the world profoundly through talking, acting, role-playing and discussing, or what Terry called his friend’s advanced “vocal, aural, relational and dramatic literacy”;
Sarah wrote, “Literacy is about using our hands, our voices, our expressions, pictures, words and emotions.”
Brett wrote a wonderful blog post about ‘reading the environment’, in which he told the story of a group of scouts going out into the bush.

Rachel eloquently summed up this desire to think more extensively and inclusively as follows:

everything can be read: … the world is made up of signs. Thus, in order to be truly literate, we need to be able to actively participate in multiple mediums. Yes, we need to have an deep and intimate understanding of written text and to be able to produce text in a way that precisely communicates our intentions. I don’t believe that imperative will ever go away. However, it is increasingly clear that, in order to survive and to make survival meaningful, our children need to be able to “read” technology, visual media, numerous intellectual disciplines, the non-human environment and one another. It’s knee-knockingly intimidating but as I write this, I’m also excited by the possibilities. Imagine being able to train our brains to easily roam over so many dimensions of existence, and to competently convey our insight to so many diverse beings. Truly mind-blowing.

****

I want to try to build on this kind of thinking in our last four weeks together. This time though, instead of having each of them do his or her own research project (as in the first four weeks), I’d like us all to be working together on a single project.

The focus, this time, is writing or composing (thanks Karen!).

So right now I’m trying to find the words for a fertile research question that would help us explore writing in a way that had the students constructing meaning for a particular purpose.

My friend Karen La Bonte has already suggested a couple of questions around which we might focus our work.

Do we express ourselves only to reflect what is already known (which we have recently digested), or are we creating new knowledge in and via our composition?

Does the act of composing have to be language-oriented to be valid?

These two questions connect very nicely with the kinds of questions the students have been raising.

But there’s more I’d like this research question to encompass. When the postgraduate students recently reported on their own research, many made the point (explicitly or implicitly) that literacy and love are connected, that literacy development is excited by exciting relationships, that a person is motivated to become literate through a desire to belong.

Reuben described the secure and stimulating emotional climate in which he gained his insatiable love of reading; I’ve quoted his words in an earlier blog post. Coming at it from the opposite direction, Geoffrey wrote about the effect his father’s sudden death had on his literacy learning as a 5 year old.

Geoffrey’s father died suddenly when Geoffrey was 5, and this had a profound effect.

What my own experience as a child of 5 and 6yrs old highlights for me is what a huge impact one’s emotional state has on one’s ability to read and comprehend and find joy and pleasure in literacy. Powerful emotions such as trauma, grief, anxiety and inadequacy may make it impossible for a student to learn anything, let alone enter into a text and gain some pleasure from it. I was unable to learn some of the basic building blocks of literacy because my consciousness was flooded and overloaded by some very powerful emotions. I think there are many young people in a similar situation as I was but for other reasons no doubt. Martial breakdown, domestic violence, homelessness and sexual abuse, would I believe all have a similar debilitating impact on a student trying to comprehend a text. For them as well as for me, it would not be before these intense emotions have dissipated that I or they could begin to enter into the other world that unfolds in literature. I was never [at school] able to go back and relearn or learn for the first time the things that I had been too engulfed in pain to absorb.

As Jane put it:

If the context we live within is fractured or unsupported, absent or indifferent, volatile or dormant, then the chances are that we will struggle to make any connections that are meaningful and⁄or insightful.

Literacy develops within a context, within an emotional climate. My own hypothesis (obviously shared by many of the students) is that we’re barking up the wrong tree if our literacy strategies continually focus on the individual, and in particular on what skills he or she lacks. We need to be thinking more about creating the environment, the culture, the community, the relationships, in which a desire to become literate can and will grow.

I want our final four weeks together to explore and reflect this. I want our research work to be vibrantly collaborative, conducted partly online and partly face-to-face in our four tutorials (three of them taken by me, one by Kaye Lowe).

So what’s the research question that captures all of this?

I feel blocked.

****

I’ve just been for a walk. Walking usually helps. On the way home I had a thought. I think the research question might come in two forms.

First there is the research question which we as a group would be working on. It might be worded as follows:

Do current theories and practices take too narrow a view of what constitutes ‘writing’?

This would involve some review of the literature, lots of discussion, some tutorials and some composing by each of the students.

What kind of composing?

Well, perhaps a second research question might guide the students’ work. Something like the following:

Given that writing (composing) (1) functions both to express and to discover and (2) has many forms (not just word-focussed), what writing skill (traditionally associated with my discipline or inspired by a different discipline) might I develop over the next four weeks which will improve my teaching and⁄or my students’ learning?

I like the direction that this question would take us (though it feels too wordy). The students would each find a skill that they wanted to develop, and over the four weeks would work to develop it; lots of scope for variety and creativity, but lots of cross-fertilisation as well. I’ve already begun to think about what skill I might work on in the next couple of weeks, to model the kind of approach I’m thinking about. The student journal (blog) would become the place both where the student experimented and developed the skill, and where he or she reflected on the progress being made. The progress would be shared informally in the tutorials and online. Each student would leave with a useful skill honed, and Kaye Lowe and I would be left with lots of raw material for some useful reflection and writing of our own.

****

I have a test that I like to use for research questions. It’s based on the work of the Israeli educationists Yoram Harpaz and Adem Lepstein, who suggest that a good research question must meet the following six criteria:

OPEN: The question had no simple single answer, but probably several, different from and even contradictory to each other.
UNDERMINING: The question undermines or challenges the basic assumptions and fixed beliefs of the student; cast doubts on the ‘self-evident’, on ‘common sense; uncovers basic conflicts lacking a simple solution; and required thinking about the roots of things.
RICH: The question requires grappling with rich content indispensable to understanding humanity and the world, that is impossible to understand without careful and lengthy reflection and/or research.
CONNECTED: The question is relevant to the life of the student, and to the society in which he lives.
CHARGED: The question has an ethical dimension, a strong emotional and ethical charge which motivates further inquiry, reflection, discussion and/or research.
PRACTICAL: It is a question that lends itself to further to exploration, about which information is available to the student.

I’ve managed to negotiate (with work and family) three days at the beginning of next week when I’m going down to the coast (this time with broadband USB stick!) to think some more about these questions and to begin to put a firmer structure to these final fours weeks in October.

So I’d be interested in your thoughts. Do the questions meet the criteria? Does the approach make sense?

Posted in literacy, Pedagogy, University classes | Tagged community, culture, curriculum, literacy, MichaelWesch, teaching, thinking, university, writing | 4 Comments

Some thoughts on the fly

Posted on August 26, 2009 by steveshann

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. A lot has happened, is happening, and I keep trying to find time to write about it. There’s no substantial time right now, with journals to read, schools to visit and lessons to plan and follow up. But I don’t want too much to slip by without at least a mention. So here are some thoughts on the fly.

Heloise and Abelard

My Year 11 Extension class are studying the connections between text, culture and value and are currently working on a text of their own choosing. I especially enjoy this part of the course, especially when a student discovers a text that opens up worlds. For Will, strange and compelling worlds have been opened up in his reading of the letters of Heloise and Abelard, and his study of two appropriations, Pope’s poem and the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

If you’re interested in what a 21st century 16-year-old might see and feel as a result of reading this story, I warmly recommend taking the time to browse through some of Will’s blogs on our class Ning. His writing describes his struggles to understand how such a tragedy could take place. Will is drawn deeply into the story of the two lovers, he’s appalled by the punishment dealt out to Abelard and the tragedy of their enforced separation, and he is profoundly curious and puzzled by the question of whether a commitment to the church and God can ever wipe clean the memory of a passionate love.

In the last week or so, Will has written a series of letters, in the form of poems, between Heloise and Abelard. All of them are published on the Ning. Here is the second one:

To Abelard, my lord,

My love I write to you at last,
Although I thought these passions passed.
Like a phoenix from the cinder,
Love returns again to hinder
This process of forgetfulness,
And draws me from my dark recess.

This letter comes from painful tears,
Forgotten in these silent years.
Unsettled by your words and woes,
That stirred me from my sweet repose.
Sadness flows and blots the page
As I write from holy cage.

I cannot rest within these walls,
These rugged rocks and hallowed halls.
Pensive in my own bastille,
Locked away with holy seal.
My mind does stray to thoughts of old
As passions come and then unfold.

They told us love should come through trust,
But what is love if without lust?
Infatuation takes command,
With trepidation hand in hand.
Look past these consecrated vows
And find the place where passion grows.

You have proven me your affection,
And love has seen its resurrection.
Now memory takes authority,
When emotions claim priority.
We can hope to fight desire,
But we will never quench Love’s fire.

Involving university students in research

For the past fortnight I’ve been mulling over a dilemma.

My university students are currently out on a five week stint in schools, so our ‘Literacy across the curriculum‘ unit is on hold. We’ve had what I think is a highly stimulating first month, looking in particular at the question ‘I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?‘.

But what do do when the students return for our last four weeks together?

I’ve suggested to my students that we vary the original plan and have them doing some research on a literacy-related topic of interest to each of them; but they have let me know that they’re worried about workloads and they’d prefer it if we stuck with the original plan which had me sharing with them some of my ideas about writing. I’m worried that the final four weeks will be too passive (teacher presenting, students absorbing); they’re worried that the final four weeks (if we follow my later suggestion) will be too over-loaded given the workload they’re expecting.

So what to do? How to find a way through this dilemma?

A discussion with my colleague Anita Collins and some mulling over the example set by the wonderful Michael Wesch has given me the beginnings of a glimpse of a way through the fog.

Michael Wesch organises his Digital Ethnography course so that he and his students are involved together in some authentic research. As he writes on his wiki:.

Our goal in this course is to work together to complete the best research project possible. Therefore, given the dynamic nature of ethnographic research, there is no fixed schedule. Even the points below are not fixed. We can redistribute point values at any time. We are simply using points to motivate us all to stay on track and work as well together as we can. Ultimately, our success will not be measured in A’s and B’s but the quality of our work and its impact on the world.

Could I set things up for the final four weeks so that the students and I are involved in a piece of authentic research together, with me as the co-ordinating spirit (setting the question, suggesting resources, setting up the structure for student inputs), but with the students exploring the question in diverse yet connected ways? I would draw things together, write up our final report, broadcast it to relevant places in the world; the students would contribute their own thinking coming from their diverse disciplines and perspectives. This would give a focus to their journal writing and so wouldn’t vary expectations or add to the volume of their workload (and so would meet some of their concerns about my most recent suggestion); yet it would inject into our final four weeks the necessary element of students actively using what they coming to understand (and so would meet the concerns that I had about the possible passive nature of our original plan).

I think this could work. I’ll mull some more.

I’ll need to think, for example, about what our central research question might be. In a sense, I think that’s the easy part. We’re studying literacy across the curriculum, we looked at reading (defined broadly) in the first four weeks, and we’re planning to look at writing (again defined broadly) in our final month. So our research question would be something like this:

How does each of the disciplines write? That is, how do the disciplines communicate their knowledge, within the discipline and to outsiders? And can the disciplines learn from the writing modes of each other?

This probably needs work (thoughts or suggestions anyone?), but it’s a start.

Why Shakespeare? A student perspective

Recently folk at the English Companion Ning discussed the question ‘Why teach Shakespeare?’ from the teachers’ perspective. A week or so ago, my two Year 10 classes (in Canberra) joined with Jenny Luca‘s Year 9 class (in Melbourne) to discuss the same question from a the students’ point-of-view.

The full discussion can be found on our Ning. Here is a summary.

… because of its relevance to modern life (Charlotte)

I can’t think of any good reason (quite a few students!)

… because the English Department is either lazy or unimaginative (Adrian, being provocative but stimulating too)

… to develop and broaden our interest in literature (Angus)

… because I love Shakespeare (Linda)

… to further consolidate themes and ideas taught in English classes (Josh)

… because it speaks to our age group [we’re currently studying Romeo and Juliet] (Christian)

… to learn about love (Mayank)

… to find out where our language came from (James)

… to prepare us for Years 11 & 12 (Max, Kurt)

… to separate the students planning to do Advanced and Standard English in Year 11 (Angus)

… because it has a timeless quality (Nick, Christian)

… because it is magic, it makes me smile and it captivates my mind (Sam)

… to understand and appreciate why there’s so much respect for Shakespeare (Amber)

… to understand the links between our culture and the play (Amber)

… so you can get better at analysing symbolism and studying techniques (Jack)

… because you can learn about life from studying classics like this (Laura)

… to become competent at extracting meaning from texts (Gurtej)

… because we are now old enough to be able to handle a challenging text (Eliot)

… because it is so famous, and there are so many references to it in modern culture (Rachael)

… to broaden our knowledge of the English language (Alex, Nick)

… to learn about other times and other lives (Taylia)

… because the twists and turns fo events that lead to pure tragedy is great (Elsa)

… because it’s a challenge (Will)

… because the play has everything: drama, comedy, action, suspense (Jo)

Soon after these thoughts were posted on our Ning, I made cards out of the summaries, and in one of my Year 10 classes I got each of the students to ‘adopt a card’, which they then used as a starting point to explain their point of view. We had a terrific discussion, with those saying that studying Shakespeare was a waste of our precious time more prominent than the above summaries would suggest. Then, after I’d listened to all the very eloquent arguments on both sides, I announced to the class:

Well, I’ve listened carefully to what you’ve all been saying, and frankly those arguing that there are better ways we should be spending our time have been surprisingly convincing. Therefore, starting from next lesson, we’re going to abandon Romeo and Juliet and do other types of English work. That’s it. That’s the end of our time with Shakespeare.

There was a shocked silence in the room. Some of the boys looked genuinely upset, others disbelieving. Of course I then told them that I’d been joking and that they might each reflect on their gut reaction when they heard the ‘news’.

Posted in literacy, My English classroom, Pedagogy, University classes | Tagged EnglishCompanion, Heloise and Abelard, literacy, MichaelWesch, Ning, questions, Shakespeare, teacher training, text culture value[s], thinking, university | 8 Comments

Discussing classic texts with Year 11 students

Posted on August 9, 2009 by steveshann

My year 11 Extension class is doing a course called ‘Text-Value-Culture’, and last term we read ‘The Odyssey’ and talked about the way this story has been appropriated by different writers for different purposes. This term each of the students has chosen a pre-WW2 text and a couple of appropriations to study.

You can read about what the students are doing on our Class Ning.

Some of the students have expressed an interest in finding people from outside our classroom who share their interest in a particular text. Shannon is exploring Poe’s ‘The Raven’. Tom is looking at how the story of Tarzan has been adapted by different cultures. Will started with the story of Heloise and Abelard, and that has taken him to a poem by Alexander Pope and the film ‘The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. And Michael is reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

If you are interested in reading what these students have written about their texts, then feel free join our Ning and to join the conversations.

Posted in My English classroom | 2 Comments

The mystery of learning to read

Posted on August 9, 2009 by steveshann

dialogue My colleague at the university and in our course on ‘Literacy across the curriculum, Associate Professor Kaye Lowe, has talked with our students about the essential mystery of how we learn to read. It’s often impossible to pinpoint what it was (if it was any single thing) that led to us ‘getting it’.

It seems to me that this applies to all kinds of learning, that the successful classroom is essentially a mysterious place, though I’ve tried to put my finger on some of the essential elements in a series of earlier posts, culminating in On the nature of literacy (with a nod to Spinoza).

It’s a mystery that many of my postgraduate students are wrestling with at the moment. They’re wondering both how they themselves learned to read, and how they can set up a classroom environment of deep learning when they graduate.

One student, Reuben, has done a particularly fine job at capturing the learning environment in which he learned to read. He has given me permission to quote from his online journal:

I have always had an insatiable appetite for books and reading and I have been attempting to recall or understand my motivation as a young reader. What was the cause of this appetite, where did it come from? There are a few elements that I believe contributed; I was often read to by my parents, and the material that they read to me was often above the expected level of comprehension so that I had to struggle to understand it. It is my hypothesis that the link was formed in my mind between information and books – and I have always desired information. I think, developmentally speaking, this is true of most children (as anyone who has had a chain of endless “why’s” from a toddler can testify). However I was indulged in the aspect by my parents and in particular by my father on the topic of ecology, which is a large part of his work. He would never shy away from complex, involved answers which I found fascinating.

Once I was able to read reasonably well, my parents also made a point of frequently taking me to the public library or secondhand book stores, and allowing me to make my own choices. I can still recall the first secondhand book that I chose for myself, and took immense pleasure in reading.

The title of the book was “How Things Work” and featured diagrams and explanations of the scientific workings behind a range of otherwise mysterious devices and phenomena such as telephones, radio-broadcasts, weather patterns and geological formations. Obviously, it was adapted for a child’s level of literacy, but I believe the title is a very telling statement on my personal motivation as an early reader. I was driven by a desire to learn ‘How Things Worked’.

This desire was very much a natural phenomenon – how then to capture some practical application of the same enthusiasm. Can it be engineered in students? Cris Tovani discusses this, with the anecdote regarding the teaching of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although I remain a little apprehensive about my own skills in the area, I am convinced of the importance of modeling as described therein. There is no more powerful motivator than a confident display of skill, as long as it is tempered with the information that it is entirely achievable.

Another vivid memory that I recall when considering my personal history as a reader is an incident involving my Grandmother’s second husband Trevor, who I quite admired because of his own proficiency with language. As a child and a young teenager I would often visit them for holidays, and reading would be a primary entertainment. At this particular stage, I was obsessed with the technical skill of reading, and the speed at which I could accomplish it. I would work my way through a huge stack of library books, proclaiming to anyone within audible distance when I had finished a book. Trevor must have been watching this behavior, because he began to quiz me on details from the books whenever I finished one. Without explicitly stating it, I was made aware of a large deficiency in my understanding of the books. Though I am sure it was not his intention, I can recall feeling ashamed to discover that I had not really been reading the books at all, but just mechanically processing the text with my eyes.

The exercise that we completed in the tutorial this week made me recall this memory and I am sure there in a profound lesson there, though I am still not certain how to explain the sensation of sudden realization, the radical change in thinking and perspective that I experienced.

*****

Kaye Lowe has been reminding us that where we once tried to understand the reading process by seeing what struggling readers had difficulty with, we now understand more about how to encourage literacy by observing how good readers came to read. It seems to me that Reuben has described some of what’s essential.

Posted in literacy, University classes | Tagged classroom, community, Cris Tovani, education, literacy, reading, teacher training, university | 3 Comments

Thoughts on ‘literacy across the curriculum’ from my students

Posted on July 31, 2009 by steveshann

The university course is now almost a fortnight old, and the 90 postgraduate students have all begun their blogs. The course is called “Literacy across the curriculum”, and the students have been writing about their current understanding of the term ‘literacy’, their response to the question But I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?, our textbook, and the various discussions and sessions we’ve had together.

We’re trying to find some way of making these blogs available for all the students to read. Some have public blogs, such as Charmaine’s The Write Words , Amy’s Inky Ponderances, Michelle’s Readin’ and Writin’, Mat’s Stuff that happened and Brad’s 21st Century Education.

But there’s lots of other stimulating writing from other students too. Until we’ve found a way of making more of these blogs accessible, here is a selection from a few of them:

Andrew

What is literacy? To many the term refers exclusively to reading and writing. I have a very different view. “Literacy is the ability to authentically participate in a given context.” By this definition possibly the most literate folk to have ever existed were the Japanese Ninja. Their job description not only included killing people without leaving marks, but such diverse activities as ettiquete, diplomacy, languages, singing, dancing, and many more, such that they could participate authentically in any context; they could blend in. To be illiterate is to feel uncomfortable, unable, out of place.

Thomas

I struggle with the simplicity of the definition that describes ‘literacy’ as ‘being able to read and write, or to understand something.’ By this definition I consider myself to be highly literate in some languages, fields, and discourses but completely and utterly illiterate in others. If I was to compile a list of those texts and discourses that I am able to deeply understand (such as academic papers in archaeology, textbooks on educational theory, letters from my grandparents, Hollywood blockbusters, etc) and those that I can’t (Indigenous Australian Art, spoken or written Mandarin, academic papers in particle physics, etc.) the balance is well in favour of those forms of knowledge of which I have no hope of understanding at my current level of education. I am, by these criteria, illiterate in most areas of human experience. But within my social and cultural context I am literate, and have managed to get through 12 years of schooling, about 6 years of university (and counting), many jobs, and have not been a complete social misfit. Clearly, the social and cultural context of literacy cannot be taken for granted.

So where does this leave me, a SOSE teacher in training, pondering the question of what role I have in teaching ‘literacy’? Where do I begin? Before students even enter my class they have to demonstrate literacy in any number of intertwining and colliding worlds. Bus timetables, street signs, roll call, uniforms, codes of behaviour, bells, sirens, lining up, how to speak to peers, how to speak to teachers, class schedules, room numbers…literacy is a big deal in real life! Then there are the academic requirements of my class. Students, despite their protestations that essays are what they do in English, are graded on their ability to communicate in written and spoken English, and to conform to particular generic characteristics depending on whether they are producing a report, a persuasive essay, a poem, a role-play as a medieval serf or as an academic historian. The nuts and bolts of the English language are integral to their being able to succeed in this. Finally, we pile on discipline-specific literacy. Students need to be able to read a History textbook (or Geography, Legal Studies, etc.), a map, a primary document (whatever form it might take), photographs, paintings…etc. and understand mathematical ideas such as trigonometry, area, and probability. Come to think of it – I would struggle to think of ANYTHING that could possibly be taught that is not ‘literacy’ – understanding and being understood, and interpreting and making meanings from symbols within a specific context.

Reuben

I am radically opposed to the idea that the purpose of education is the creation of a future workforce. To prepare my students for the world that they will find outside of school, I would attempt to teach critical reasoning and compassion, to create an ethically and intellectually developing individual.

Rachel

I asked my research subject if she remembered first becoming interested in reading. She said that she hadn’t really seen the point for quite a while and that what she remembered liking as a young kid was going outside and getting lost in her own world that way. It took a while before she realised that she could do that through books as well.
She told me that she remembered being small and looking up at her parents’ bookcases towering above her! …. She said that it had made her curious to know about the ‘worlds’ inside them …

I am, by my own admission, woefully financially illiterate. When I have to think about superannuation, childcare benefit rebates or tax returns, my mind goes cloudy; I try to avoid the subject; I think of all kinds of good reasons why I don’t need to focus on these details. I imagine that most people must experience some kind of comparable mental ‘fog’ when confronted with their illiteracy/cies.

I am finding it a relief to finally be in a classroom such as this. Studying and teaching literacy feels central to what I find important; it’s central to who I am.

Jane

So the long and the short of it is that now I’m getting excited. Thoughts are skipping through my fuddled brain and I’m thinking of all the connections we make that aren’t formally considered literacy yet are a way of understanding that denotes we have to have drawn upon a prior knowledge to make those connections. Is that a form of literacy? Are we talking of literacy as a way of making things understood. A form of expression and understanding that is successful in itself by being understood.

Katherine

Some thought on my own reading, based on discussion with Steve during tute. I’m a lazy reader when I’m reading for a purpose other than entertainment. I tend to skim read, skip to summaries or just read the start and end of paragraphs. I picked up this habit as a PhD student and never really broke it – there was always so much to read, and more papers coming out all the time. Also, much of what’s written in a paper isn’t really important except for the abstract unless it is immediately relevant to your own research. As an academic I have generally taught large classes and frequently had hundreds of lab reports, essays, exams to mark. So again, it is partly to preserve sanity that skim reading becomes a habit. I’ve also noticed that the more closely I read a student’s work the fewer marks I give because the more I pick up small errors, evidence of not really understanding, etc. Other reading for preparing classes etc has generally been the same – searching for the right equation, a good diagram, a nice example or some specific data. In contrast, when I read for pleasure I read every word, and often read a sentence or paragraph a few times when I come across an interesting idea or a clever analogy, etc. I enjoy words and read a bit of a poetry, a couple of novels a week typically including at least one science fiction. I enjoy well written books with no plot (but not Samuel Beckett, ever, at all) as well as good stories. Some books I return to every few years, and read again. It took me a couple of years after finishing my PhD to be able to read fiction again without automatically skipping around looking for the key ideas, I still find myself doing it now and then.

Terence

It began with learning the alphabet and, before that was even mastered, asking questions constantly of any sign, anywhere, anytime, “what is that letter? What about the last one? The one that looks like a circle?” Shapes and numbers were also a part of the questioning, and a lot of repetition, but not as a punishment for getting it wrong, rather as an encouraging opportunity to show the new knowledge was remembered, to feel accomplishment.

This moved onto words on cereal boxes, ads on the television or in the newspaper, short books with lots of pictures, the numbers of the fuel prices at the petrol station, the cost of cured meats or chicken at the delhi in the supermarket (even ordering from the deli – “Excuse me, I would like 400grams of devon, please.” All be it on tiptoe.) Also, with numeracy, not only was there counting and recognising numbers, but also counting in patterns, by 10’s 5’s, 2’s. Addition and “lots of” (multiplication) were all also a part of my pre-schooling education, and looking back personally and having conversed with my parents about it, the reason was not to give an inflated sense of self-importance or accomplishment, but rather the prepare my mind with the tools necessary for learning, to awaken a love of learning and a desire to seek out opportunities to do so. Car trips and visiting relatives or friends were also the most sought after times to play these games, which often then began including our cousins or friends. Even as a small child, I remember the smiles of joy and happiness (sounds a little corny, but kids really do have an ability that we dull as we grow to find satisfaction and joy far more easily in far more places) when my friends and cousins were asked the questions, got them right, or we had to help and give hints. Inclusion, belonging, encouragement and joy are all important parts of the learning process, and something I have resolved that I don’t want to remove from the process, especially with regard to literacy and numeracy skills.
I believe that the inherent joy I have of learning and the ease at which it often occurs is due to the way I was introduced to it all – a safe, fun, encouraging and interesting environment that was about inclusion rather than competition. Competitive aspirations are great, but never when they discourage or dishearten children.

Matthew

So how do I approach reading to learn? My own strategies often involve knowing what I want to learn – and chasing down the particular piece of information. Unlike English Literature, one does not read a book starting at the beginning and proceeding as the author constructed the book. Often many sections of technical literature are redundant for you as an individual, as you already have learned the concepts. There are many different ways of quickly locating the relevant information: abstracts, contents,introductions, indexes, appendices, and skimming within a selected chapter. But this is when you actually use books and printed journals – which for me has been less and less frequently. Most of my reading has been conducted online for years. I use favourite web resources (slashdot; the register; etc.) but more often use google or other search engines to find my desired content. Then the regular strategies come into play. To retain content, I rewrite and summarise what I have read, or attempt to put a technique into immediate operation, and hopefully document my technique and resource for the technique appropriately – so others can learn and understand the reason for the chosen technique. I have never been strong on underlining, highlighting, writing in margins, etc. – and I guess this is a personal preference. Do I carry questions in my head during my reading? I tend not to write questions down before reading, but I allow my mental questions to shape and guide my reading as stated above. Sometimes I have not even articulated the questions to myself: but if asked for the question, I could answer without hesitation.

Posted in literacy, University classes | Tagged classroom, community, education, learning, literacy, reading, teaching, thinking, university, writing | 3 Comments

Cris Tovani’s ‘Do I really have to teach reading?

Posted on July 4, 2009 by steveshann

This blog post is a bit different from all the others. The subject is Cris Tovani’s book Do I really have to teach reading?, the set text book for the postgraduate students doing my unit ‘Literacy across the curriculum’. The course begins in a couple of weeks.

For the past three days I’ve set aside the mornings to read the book, armed with my sticky labels and highlighter pens. After reading each chapter, I’ve been writing up some thoughts. I’ve decided to publish these in this blog partly as a guide for any of my students not sure how to approach reflective journal writing, and partly in the hope that this post might help make some connections with teachers who have also used some of Tovani’s ideas.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Half an hour ago I picked up our textbook for the first time. Tovani’s Do I really have to teach reading? I’d heard good things about it, but still had a lingering worries.

Is this going to be one of those trite books on ‘How-to-achieve-instant-success-in-10-easy-steps’?
What kind of classroom experience has this author had? Or does she sit in some ivory tower?
Is her focus going to be exclusively on reading, on the act of decoding words on a page, or is she interested in the broader (and more important) question of how we learn, through various disciplines, about the world?
How might what she says align with what I’ve discovered about Josh?
How might what she says align with the seven propositions that I’ve come up with? Will I end up amending my list?

The first chapter (‘I’m the stupid lady from Denver’) answered some of these questions. She seemed both down-to-earth and thoughtful at the same time. Experienced but open to new thoughts in the light of further (sometime uncomfortable) experience.

Two things stood out for me.

The first was her insistence that good questions were the key to reading success. We need to begin to read with questions in our mind which we hope the text will answer, and I noticed how true this was of the way I was reading her book. I had questions which I wanted answered. And not just any question. As Tovani says (p3), ‘the questions have to be questions that I really care about. I can’t ask any old question – it has to be one that I truly am curious about’.

I wondered, as I read this, how many of the postgraduate students would be coming to this course on literacy across the curriculum with a sense that it was going to answer questions that they really cared about. I wondered what I might do, in the first week, to help them discover some of these questions.

I also liked her focus on the broader issues of learning. We want our students to learn what our subject has to teach them, and reading is a means to that end, not the end in itself.

We are simply trying to help kids get the skills they need to understand and learn about the content we as teachers care passionately about…” (p7)

Meaning doesn’t arrive because we have highlighted text or used sticky notes or written the right words on a comprehension worksheet. Meaning arrives because we are purposefully engaged in thinking while we read. (p9)

“Purposefully engaging in thinking…” Isn’t this education in a nutshell? Isn’t this the sole aim of this university unit? Of every classroom? To the extent that our students are ‘purposefully engaged in thinking’ (instead of ‘skillfully engaged in avoiding’, or ‘skillfully engaged in ticking the right boxes’), our job as teachers is pretty much done. How we get to them to that state, or how we organize our classroom so that this kind of purposeful thinking flourishes, is a very complex matter. But that’s the goal.

Chapter 2 The ‘So What?’ of reading instruction

Again, a great little chapter which again keeps the focus on the ultimate purpose of what we do. Hence the question: ‘So what?’ As I was reading it, I kept thinking about stimulus questions for my postgraduate students, or ways I might help them reflect on Tovani’s ideas. But then I read this:

Good readers don’t need end-of-the-chapter questions or isolated skill sheets. They ask their own questions, based upon their need for a deeper understanding of specific aspects of the text. (p20)

So maybe the only question I need to ask my students from this chapter is: So what?

***

I’ve just got back from a walk on the beach (it’s school holiday time), and when I walked back in the front door I saw Tovani’s book sitting on the dining room table where I’d left it after reading the first couple of chapters this morning. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to pick it up and read Chapter 3. Yet the book has been sitting on my desk at home for the best part of a month, untouched. Up until today, I haven’t been motivated to read it.

What’s changed?

Is it just that I’ve forced myself to read the first chapter and have found that I’ve enjoyed it? I don’t think so. I think it’s more than that. And I think the ‘more’ is relevant to this whole topic of literacy across the curriculum.

Over the past couple of months I’ve given myself time to prepare myself for the content of this course. I’ve wondered about the question of relevance: is the teaching of literacy really the business of all secondary teachers, regardless of their discipline? I’ve written down some initial thoughts in my blog, and had a go at formulating some maxims or propositions. I’ve argued over the content of the course and I’ve written a unit plan. I’ve spent some time talking to Josh, a secondary student at the school where I teach, and I’ve mulled over what he’s told me. With a group of other teachers I’ve read a book (Readicide, by Kelly Gallagher) on how schools are systematically killing off students’ motivation to read.

So I’ve come to the reading of Tovani’s book in a very active and purposeful frame of mind. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the issues before I’ve opened a page.

How differently we often approach things at school. I visited a class the other day where, as an introductory exercise to the study of a Shakespeare play, the class was asked to read a number of articles about Elizabethan England and Shakespearean theatre. No warm up. No preparation. No pre-thinking. No eliciting of questions. Just straight into the reading, cold. Result? Little engagement, little interest and no useful learning.

My postgraduate students won’t have had the time to prepare for this course in the same way I have. But nor will they then come to it cold, like the students in the Shakespeare class. Their desire to become good teachers will most likely mean that they’ll read the Tovani book in the spirit she advocates: ‘purposefully engaged in thinking while we read’?

Tovani Chapter 3: Parallel experiences

If you were going to plonk every teacher on a spectrum with those who see the big picture (the thinkers) at one end and those who see the detail (the doers) at the other, then I’m with the thinkers. I’m stronger, therefore, with ends than I am with means.

Tovani seems to have a nice balance, and I’m guessing what I’ve got to learn from her is more to do with means than ends. Someone at the other end of the spectrum, the doer, is perhaps more likely to learn from what she says about the big picture.

In this chapter she makes the following point (p35):

If you’re able to slow your thinking down a little and notice things that you do when you read content material, you can teach the strategies you use to students.

Here’s a challenge for me! Next term I’m teaching Romeo and Juliet to my Year 10 classes. I tend to focus on the big picture: on what the play says about love and hate, for example. We spend a little bit of time getting the basic plot and the main characters clear, and then we make connections between the drama in Verona and what’s happening in the students’ own lives. We revel in the Baz Luhrmann film (or at least I do!). I also focus on the sound of the language and the drama of the scenes, so we get out of our seats a lot and act out parts.

But do I do enough to help the students read the play? I don’t mean that I should be encouraging them all to sit down and read Romeo and Juliet from cover to cover. I’ve never done that, and I’m sure it would kill the thing stone cold dead if I did. I’m thinking more about how they might make sense of a difficult passage. How they might work out what it’s about, and how it’s saying what it’s saying? (And, by extension, how might they make sense of any difficult passage, not just in Shakespeare but in any challenging text they come across in their English studies.)

I’m thinking of Josh here. He was in my class last year when we studied Macbeth. I suspect that much of it went over his head, or that he relied on SparkNotes. Could I do it differently this year?

Here’s an experiment.

I’ve just found a passage in Romeo and Juliet that I don’t remember reading before. (I probably have, but I’m 62 and I forget things!) Here it is:

Indeed I never shall be satisfied
With Romeo till I behold him – dead –
Is my poor heart so for a kinsman vexed.
Madam, if you could find out but a man
To bear a poison, I would temper it
That Romeo should upon receipt thereof
Soon sleep in quiet.

I then went into my 15 year old son’s room and asked him to read it. He saw the film some years ago and knows the basic plot, but he doesn’t like reading Shakespeare.

When he’d finished reading this short passage, he said “Well, at least I get this bit. This guy wants Romeo dead.”

“Who does?” I asked.

Oliver looked down at the text and this time noticed something he hadn’t taken in first time.

“What? Juliet? Why would she want Romeo dead? Or maybe I didn’t get it? Maybe Juliet can’t stand being in love with him and wants him dead?”

I could have said, “You’re not sure you got it right?”, as Ol was now doing what Cris Tovani advocates, letting his questions guide his reading. But because I wanted instead to do my own slow reading of this passage, and to notice how I went about making sense of it, I left it there.

How did I make sense of it?

I didn’t understand what ‘tempering’ the poison meant, but (like Oliver) I got the gist of what she was saying. The line

Is my poor heart so for a kinsman vexed

didn’t seem to make grammatical sense until I reminded myself that Shakespeare (and poets) often muck around with the order of words, and that the line might have been easier to read had it been:

my poor heart is so vexed for a kinsman

Same words, different order. Now it made perfect sense, though this time we’d lost the steady beat of the iambic pentameter.

Like Oliver, I was initially surprised to hear Juliet wishing Romeo dead, and offering to administer the poison herself. Why was she saying these things? It didn’t seem to make sense.

I looked to see who Juliet was talking to. It was her mother, and I knew that Lady Capulet knew nothing of Juliet’s marriage to Romeo. Was Juliet dissembling? I flicked back a couple of pages to find out when this conversation took place. Romeo has killed Tybalt (her kinsman), Juliet knows what has happened and has just said goodbye to Romeo after a secret overnight visit to her bedroom, and Lady Capulet has found Juliet with tears on her face. Juliet has to explain her tears, so she pretends to be weeping for Tybalt, and Lady Capulet puts into Juliet’s mind the idea of revenge through poisoning. She says to Juliet:

I’ll send for one in Mantua,
Where that same banished runagate doth live,
Shall give him such an unaccustomed dram
That he shall soon keep Tybalt company;
And then I hope thou wilt be satisfied.

Yes, it all made sense now. Juliet was dissembling.

Tovani says that if we can uncover our own strategies and teach these to our students, they too will read better. How did I make sense of this passage? By reading it slowly and using my knowledge of the way poets play around with word order for the sake of rhythm. And by letting my questions guide my further inquiry. (Why is Juliet saying these things? Who is she talking to? What’s just happened? Is she dissembling?)

I’m guessing that if I were to show Oliver how I went about doing this, he might have another string to his interpretive bow when he next encounters a confusing passage in Shakespeare.

Did I do enough of this kind of thing with Josh last year? Do I do enough of this kind of thing in all of my English classes? I doubt it.

Ch 4 Real Rigor

On page 40 Tovani says:

I also need to remember what it feels like to read something for the first time. I can’t expect my students to be able to read and understand for the first time text that I work at over a period of time to understand.

I remember some years ago being asked, at short notice, to teach a Year 10 class for a term. They had just started to study Macbeth, a play that I hadn’t read. Each night I would anxiously and inefficiently read the scenes we were to read together the following day, trying to commit the notes in the margin to memory, trying to work out who was who and what had already happened, picking my way painfully through all the key passages. I was teaching other classes at the time, so I didn’t have the luxury of doing what I’d normally do when preparing to teach a major text: reading around it, watching a video or two, reading about it, thinking about how I might best approach the teaching of it. The train had left the station and I just had to sprint to get on board. At the end of the unit I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and said to myself that I’d be a happy man if I never saw a copy of Macbeth again. (In fact I ended up teaching it for several years after that, and came to love it, but only because I then had the time to get into it properly.)

This is how many students experience the play, I’m sure. They’re not given the time or the means to find their way through the challenges and into an experience of the drama and richness.

I worry that we’re repeating this mistake in this postgraduate course. The students are going to have 4 weeks (before they go out on a teaching round) to

get their heads around the basic concepts of the unit,
write an ongoing journal,
select a student to interview,
prepare a presentation and
read Tovani’s book.

Of course all of these tasks are designed to help the students immerse themselves in the concepts, to raise questions and reflect on their experiences and assumptions … just as I’ve been doing in this journal. But I’ve been preparing myself for the past couple of months; they’re being expected to squeeze it all into four short weeks.

It isn’t fairfor me to spend days or even years planning instruction around a text, and then expect my students to read and understand concepts the first time through – especially knowing that reading comprehension drops when readers are reading unfamiliar information. (Tovani pp40-41)

The course won’t work if there’s no time for the students to think, to wonder, to explore side-tracks, to relate the course material to their own experiences, and so on.

Tovani Ch 5 ‘Why am I reading this?’

A chapter about purpose. A strong affirmation of what I was trying to say in an earlier blog post about ends and means: literacy is a means to another end, not an end in itself. We don’t read in order to read better or faster; we read in order to understand something better.

I must have a reason for reading the piece. There must be something in it that will make my life as a teacher or a person better. If the piece isn’t going to entertain, teach, or improve my life in some way, I throw it out. (p61)

It’s the job of the teacher, says Tovani, to make the purpose clear.

So why are we asking our postgraduate students to read Tovani’s book? I think there are three main reasons:

To help them think about the unit’s central question: But I’m not an English teacher; is literacy really my business?
To give preservice teachers practical suggestions from a practising classroom teacher on how to teach their subjects more successfully.
To inform their thinking while they are doing the research project on an adolescent student’s reading.

I have to admit that I’m a tad uncomfortable with this. I’m a teacher who, at least most of the time, thinks “that setting the purpose limits the scope of the students’ reading’ (p60). I’m hoping that the students will have their own questions which they bring to their reading of Tovani’s book. I want to use our first tutorial together to surface some of these questions.

Ch 6 Holding thinking to remember and reuse

Lots of practical stuff in this chapter, different strategies for getting inside a challenging texts. It’s made me think about the strategies I use, and the ones I used to use. Tovani stresses active strategies; for her, underlining or highlighting is not enough. And, if I look back through what I’ve done with her book, there are quite a few scribbles in the margins when I’ve had questions or made connections.

But most of what I’ve done is to highlight, and then to write these little reflections. I think that’s always been the way I’ve ‘held my thinking’, or made it visible. By writing emails, or joining online discussions, or having conversations, or writing blog like reflections. I’ve always needed to feel that I’m communicating my questions and thoughts and summaries to someone else.

There’s another method I’ve used which I suspect Tovani might think was too passive (and too time-consuming). When I’ve been studying difficult texts, from the time I did my undergraduate degree all the way through to doing a PhD about eight years ago, I’ve copied out quotes. I like to hear, over and over, the voices of the authors I read, and somewhere on old outdated floppy disks I’ve got files full of quotes from Freud, Jung, Hillman, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Taylor, Bion, Campbell, Klein, Milner and others whose work I read for my PhD. And in a dusty plastic bucket in my store room, there are stacks of folders full of quotes (typed with an old ribbon typewriter, or handwritten) from the books I read as a young teacher, by John Holt, Dennison, Kohl, A.S. Neill, R.F. Mackenzie, and others. I love getting these out every now and then and hearing the voices of the authors who meant so much to me then.

But the world has speeded up and maybe today’s students don’t have time for that kind of slow absorbing.

I have a strategy I’ve come to rely (over-rely?) on in my classroom. I often ask my student to respond to two questions when they’re trying to get into a difficult text.

What do you notice?
What do you wonder?

These two questions seem to provide lots of opportunities for students to find ways into texts. I think they mirror the questions that good readers use naturally.

Tovani Ch 7 Group work that grows understanding

For lots of reasons, Tovani says, group work is an essential part of growing literacy. It’s a challenge establishing groups that discuss content well, but she’s sure it’s worth the effort.

I have such mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I hate being put into a group myself to discuss some issue that we’re not all properly prepared for and interested in; important issues get trivialized and nothing is achieved. On the other hand, I’ll willingly force myself through the challenges of a tough text if I know there’s a discussion looming with some respected colleagues. One of my greatest professional pleasures at my present school was a Professional Reading Group, where we’d all read the same book and then meet for dinner, wine and rollicking discussion.

Tovani herself talks about her struggles with group work. She was better at controlling and stimulating a whole class discussion than at facilitating productive group work. I’m the same. I love the cut-and-thrust of a good whole class discussion well managed, and at times feel a little rudderless when the groups are each going in their own unpredictable directions.

All of this Tovani acknowledges, and yet insists that it’s worth the effort. Norms need to be established, models and scaffolds provided and problems tackled. When it’s working well, it provides extra stimulation and motivation: reading is more purposeful.

Mmmmm.

Next term, as we act out various scenes in Romeo and Juliet, the boys will work in groups to read and make sense of quite difficult passages. Maybe I’ll use some of Tovani’s strategies.

Ch 8 Assessment that drives instruction

Tovani says to her students, “It will be hard for you to fail if you are willing to share your thinking.” (p102) She notes that “Meaning does not arrive. It is constructed over a period of time. (p104)”.

It’s so much easier if we can get students to share their thinking. That happens when we tie their grades to the effort they put into getting that thinking … into written form, and into class discussions. (p115)

That’s what I’ve tried to do with this postgraduate Literacy Across the Curriculum course. The emphasis is on the students making their thinking visible, in sharing it and allowing it to deepen and evolve as the course progresses. Their grades are tied into ‘the effort they put into getting that thinking into written form’. They do not have to arrive at a particular conclusion or a pre-determined insight.

The focus question is: “But I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?”, and any number of perspectives on this is possible. At one end of the spectrum will be those who want to define ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ in a particular way and assign the job to English teachers, or to primary teachers, or to homes. At the other end will those who think about literacy more broadly and see it as a part of their job as a teacher, no matter what their discipline. And there will be many other positions between.

The important thing is that the students reflect on their own experience, on the student they research, on the reading they do and the discussions (and lectures) they attend. So their journals are worth 70% and their research presentation 30%. These aren’t the only places where students will be sharing their thinking. We’ll be having tutorial and online discussions as well. I’m hoping that the students will draw on these in their journals and presentations … but the Tovani chapter does makes me think about whether we are assessing what we value in the best possible way.

Tovani Ch 9 Last thoughts

This is a great little book. I’ve loved reading it.

Each chapter begins with a story and the story that kicks off this chapter is a particularly moving (and encouraging one).

And it begins with a quote that I’d be pleased to have at the front of our postgraduate unit:

If teachers become distant from their own learning, they will most certainly become distant from the learning of their students. (Alisa Wills-Keely quoted on p117)

Posted in literacy, University classes | Tagged assessment, classroom, Cris Tovani, education, Josh, literacy, questions, teacher training, texts, thinking, university, writing | 8 Comments

On the nature of literacy (with a nod to Spinoza)

Posted on June 29, 2009 by steveshann

spinoza

In my last post, I suggested (following a lead inspired by Neil Postman) that we’re waging war on illiteracy. But this is wrong. We’re battling ignorance. Our enemy (at whatever level we teach and in whatever discipline we teach it) is lack of knowledge: knowledge of subject matter, knowledge of perspectives and knowledge of skills. At the end of a school year, we want each one of our students to know more: to know more about the world and to know more about how to operate effectively and ethically in it. It sounds uncomfortable to put it this way, perhaps, but we want our students to be less ignorant.

This distinction – enemy as illiteracy, enemy as ignorance – is not a trivial one, given the context in which I’m trying to think clearly about all of this. Next month I’m teaching a course called ‘Literacy across the curriculum’ to 90 postgraduate preservice teachers. They come from all disciplines. If I try to tell the Maths teacher that the enemy is illiteracy, she will tell me that’s the English teacher’s war. If, instead, I tell her our enemy is ignorance, then that’s a battle we can fight together. She will want her students to become more knowledgeable about mathematics. She’ll want them to understand the nature of the discipline, to come to know its ways of knowing the world, to become adept at its methods and ways of communicating its knowledge. All of this will involve reading and writing (both terms defined broadly). All of this will involve taking stuff in (reading) and putting stuff out (writing).

****

It’s interesting, in retrospect, to see the way my thinking about this was fuzzied by the tendency to confuse ends and means. The end is to reduce ignorance; one important part of that is make our students more literate. The assumption that our primary aim is to teach literacy kept seeping through in my seven maxims. To be literate is to have the key to the door; it’s not the room we seek to enter.

So, in this post, I want to refine my seven maxims. I want my maxims to achieve two things: firstly, to more accurately reflect the true purpose of our teaching (viz to reduce ignorance), and secondly, to indicate the action that follows (for, as my colleague J. D. Wilson Jnr wrote in response to the last post, ” true belief is never passive, it provokes an action”).

I also want to ditch the military analogy (The teacher as Napoleon Bonaparte). It has served its purpose; it’s steered me away from motherhood statements and nudged me towards effective action.

And finally I want to play with the approach adopted by Spinoza in his Ethics, where instead of maxims he wrote definitions, proofs, propositions and notes. I want to do this primarily because I find it fun to appropriate others’ methods, and in the past I’ve found that Spinoza’s particular approach encourages a kind of discipline that’s especially useful to a meandering thinker like me . It has the added advantage of inviting challenges; a maxim implies a truism or a precept, whereas a proposition sounds more like an idea inviting a conversation.

****

On the nature of literacy

DEFINITIONS

Ignorance: the state of unknowing, where not everything that can be known is known. All people are ignorant, but there are degrees. The amount of ignorance can be reduced.
Knowledge: our possession of adequate and useful ideas about the true, the beautiful, the good, and the just. Knowledge reduces ignorance. All knowledge becomes the foundation of greater knowledge.
Learning: the natural process whereby, through interactions with others, our ideas of the world become more aligned with the true, the beautiful, the good, and the just. Learning produces knowledge.
Natural: I am not using the world natural to mean either ‘easy’ or ‘happens by itself without the interference or involvement of others’. Instead I’m using the word in a more biological or environmental sense, to mean ‘being a part of the natural world’. Learning is the result of an inbuilt natural tendency or urge in the organism to attempt to increase its own being or essence or power. Learning, then, is natural for a student in the same way that growing is natural for a plant. Given favourable conditions (which are always a highly complex web of different factors), learning takes place naturally; given unfavourable conditions, learning (like growing) struggles (and becomes learning of a different type) or stops (the organism dies).
Literacy: the means by which we come to learn about the world, and with which we express our understanding. We learn by becoming more literate. Ignorance is blackness; literacy is the torch and knowledge is what the torch illuminates.
Reading: that part of literacy which is to do with taking in knowledge of the true, the beautiful, the good, and the just. To ‘read’ the world includes not just the taking in of meaning by decoding symbols on a page, but also viewing and listening.
Writing: that part of literacy which is to do with expressing our current understanding of the true, the beautiful, the good, and the just. To ‘write’ about the world includes not just the making of words on a page, but also speaking and representing.

PROPOSITIONS

PROP 1. All students by nature desire to know (Aristotle).

Proof: This is self-evident from definition 4.

Action: All teachers need to teach their students to become more literate.

PROP 2. All students by nature desire to belong.

Proof: If it is true that all students desire to know (Prop 1) and that learning necessarily involves interactions with others (Def 3), then it follows that all students by nature desire to belong.

Action: A primary goal for all teachers is to create a sense of community. A sense of belonging is a spur to becoming more literate.

PROP 3. The more my students know about the subject, the more they will want to read, and the more they will understand from their reading. Literacy and knowledge have an iterative rather than a causal relationship.

Proof: This is self-evident from definition 2 (and numerous studies on the effect of prior knowledge on reading comprehension!).

Action: When introducing new material, teachers need to make sure their students have the necessary background knowledge to make sense of it.

PROP 4. The more the class inquiry is centred around clearly identified fertile questions, the more purposeful and effective the gaining of knowledge will be.

Proof: All students desire to know (Prop 1) and desire naturally produces questions.

Action: If a teacher can keep fertile questions at the centre of classroom inquiry, she will be helping her students to read effectively.

PROP 5. The more each student feels he can make a meaningful contribution to the learning of the class as a whole, the more keenly he or she will seek to know.

Proof: Learning is the result of an inbuilt natural tendency or urge in the organism to attempt to increase its own being or essence or power. (Def 4). Being effective in a class is therefore a stimulant to learning.

Action: Teachers need to establish their classrooms as communities of collaborative scholars searching for the true, the beautiful, the good and the just; where opinions are freely expressed and tested, dialogue is privileged and careful listening to each other is mandated.

PROP 6. Learning involves courage, confusion and difficulty.

Proof: To learn is to move from the known of relative ignorance to the unknown of greater knowledge (Def 1 & 3). It is a move from the familiar and secure into the unknown and unpredictable.

Action: A teacher must make the journey easier by tolerating mistakes, encouraging risk-taking and providing necessary directions, structures and scaffolds.

PROP 7. Literacy is about our ability to read and write all kinds of texts, not just written ones.

Proof: This is self-evident from Def 6 & 7.

Action: Particularly (but not only) because people learn in different ways, our pursuit of knowledge should involve not just written texts but a rich variety of other kinds as well.

****

I said above that I hoped propositions invited conversation, so I look forward to any responses you might have.

Posted in literacy, University classes | Tagged Aristotle, Beauty, classroom, community, education, literacy, questions, reading, Spinoza, teacher training, teaching, thinking, Truth, university, writing | 3 Comments

The teacher as Napoleon Bonaparte!

Posted on June 24, 2009 by steveshann

napoleon_bonaparte-225-cg-dec15-86

I’ve been reading an entertaining essay by Neil Postman called ‘The educationist as painkiller’. He writes:

… there is nothing worse than ignorance on the subject of education. This is so because the subject of education claims dominion over the widest possible territory. It purports to tell us not only what intelligence is but how it may be nurtured; not only what is worthwhile knowledge but how it may be gained; not only what is the good life but how one may prepare for it. There is no other subject – not even philosophy itself – that casts so wide a net, and therefore no other subject that requires of its professors so much genius and wisdom.

(p85 of Postman Conscientious Objections)

It’s not just the professors who feel the pressure of this burden; it’s us classroom teachers as well. We’re meant to be experts in subject matter that is beyond the expertise of any human mind. We can try to understand intelligence, worthwhile knowledge and the necessary preparation for the good life; indeed, we can spend most of our careers attempting to match our classroom practices with our fuzzy and evolving answers to these big questions. But we always end up feeling that there’s a gap between what we ought to know and our current understanding. If we try to be experts (or even knowledgeable) about these things, we end up feeling inadequate or even impotent.

Postman suggests, both playfully and seriously, that there’s a solution to this problem:

Neil Postman

The solution is to diminish the extent of our limitations by diminishing the scope of the subject. In so doing, we may increase not only our stature but also our competence and potency…

This, then, is the strategy I propose for educationists – that we abandon our vague, seemingly arrogant, and ultimately futile attempts to make children intelligent, and concentrate our attention on helping them avoid being stupid … By changing the way we talk about our role as teachers, we provide ourselves with necessary constraints and realizable objectives … The educationist should become an expert in stupidity and be able to prescribe specific procedures for avoiding it. (pp6-87)

A sense of humility, a sense of potency, a specific subject matter. This is precisely what doctors and lawyers have, and this is what is to be gained if educationists adopt the metaphor of educationist as painkiller. (p89)

*****

Like so much of Postman’s writing, the essay is funny and wise at the same time. It’s well worth a read to enjoy what he has to say about how teachers might go about reducing stupidity.

But here I don’t want to go down that track. Instead I want to try a Postman-inspired experiment as part of the little research project I’m working on. Over my previous half dozen or so posts, I’ve been reporting on conversations with 16 years old Josh, and have been trying to come up with maxims or principles that might guide literacy teaching.

But I’ve been feeling that there’s something not-quite-right about these maxims. They feel sound but not all that useful; interesting but of limited value as a guide to action. A bit vague.

A bit impotent.

What would happen, I wondered, if (following Postman) I were to turn these maxims on their heads? Instead of focusing on promoting literacy, focus on fighting illiteracy? Waging war rather than establishing peace? (I’m noticing how I’m drawn to a military analogy rather than a medical one. Interesting. I don’t see myself as the fighting type!)

This experiment might be a dead-end. But that’s the nature of research, isn’t it: trying different things in order to see what works? There are many failed experiments in good science. So here goes.

*****

First of all, here are the six maxims for literacy teaching I’ve come up with so far:

1. The more I can infect my class with my love for the subject, the more individuals in the class will want to read. Maxim 1: Reading is fertilised by a teacher’s love for the subject matter.

2. The more my students know about the subject, the more they will want to read, and the more they will understand from their reading. Maxim 2: Prior knowledge is a gateway to reading proficiency.

3. The more the class inquiry is centred around clearly identified fertile questions, the more purposeful and effective the reading will be. Maxim 3: An inquiring mind directs a reading that is purposeful.

4. The more each student feels he can make a meaningful contribution to the learning of the class as a whole, the better he’ll read. Maxim 4: We read better when we sense we are agents in the learning of others.

5. The atmosphere in the class – the sense in which it is experienced as a community of scholars – will impact on the amount of good reading done. Maxim 5: Belonging, community and literacy are linked.

6. Teacher enthusiasm, fertile questions, prior knowledge, active learning and an animated community aren’t always enough. Maxim 6: Some academic texts need close and disciplined guidance.

Given what emerged from the last conversation I had with Josh when he talked so well about film and the part it has played in stimulating his thinking about Othello, evil and human nature, I would now want to add a seventh:

7. Literacy is about our ability to use texts (all kinds of texts, not just written ones) to increase our understanding. Maxim 7: Our work with written texts should not be isolated from our work with other kinds of texts.

They do have something of the ring of Create a wholesome literary classroom rather than Attack ignorance and lethargy. The first sounds bland; the second rather exciting.

****

So I want to have a crack at re-thinking these maxims as if they were battle guidelines for a military leader rather than part of a training manual for doctors or teachers.

Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Let your love of the cause invigorate your army. (Replacing: Reading is fertilised by a teacher’s love for the subject matter.)
Wage war against ignorance. (Prior knowledge is a gateway to reading proficiency.)
Give the troops an objective; let them invent ways of achieving it. (An inquiring mind directs a reading that is purposeful.)
Order the troops to work as a unit. (We read better when we sense we are agents in the learning of others.)
Instill pride in belonging to the regiment. (Belonging, community and literacy are linked.)
Make sure the troops know their weapons. (Some academic texts need close and disciplined guidance.)
In battle, every object is a potential weapon. (Our work with written texts should not be isolated from our work with other kinds of texts.)

****

So where has this got me?

Certainly since writing this I keep remembering times when, with an enemy in my sights and a battleplan in my hand, I’ve felt more animated and potent. I wrote about one of these occasions in Play the game!

But does the narrative and metaphor we inhabit, and the language that we consequently use – have any effect on our effectiveness? Am I getting closer to some useful guidelines about how to approach the teaching of reading across the curriculum? Or am I being distracted by Postman’s clever essay and heading down a blind alley?

I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Art of War

Posted in Pedagogy, Research, University classes | Tagged education, literacy, Neil Postman, reading, teacher training, teaching, thinking, university | 4 Comments

Walking through the barrier: Josh Part 3

Posted on June 20, 2009 by steveshann

Preface

In a month I’ll be teaching a postgraduate education unit called ‘Literacy across the curriculum’, and I’ll be asking each of the 90 students to report on a high school student’s reading. The project is described in more detail in my post: Headlights in the fog. I have decided to do the project myself, and have been talking to Josh, a fifteen year old ex-student of mine. This post is Part 3 of a series describing my progress. The two earlier posts on Josh were The walled city: Josh Part 1 and Doubts and loves: Josh Part 2

My final meeting with Josh

“So how’s Othello going?” I asked. I knew that we were getting into the assessment and grading season at school, and that maybe the pressure might lead to a kind of anxious narrowing of focus in Josh, a resurfacing of his earlier worry that he just couldn’t relate to Shakespeare, that he couldn’t really see the point. So I was surprised by his response.

“Othello‘s going really well,” he said. “It’s like a warning …

“Like a warning? What do you mean?”

“It’s like a warning to me. It’s like one of those fables that gives a lesson. It’s like it’s saying: Look beneath the surface, don’t be fooled by what appears to be the truth, there’s a kind of dark human nature down there that we want to bury beneath the carpet, but don’t be fooled.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, thinking back to what I’d written in earlier posts about interpretative communities and how I’d assumed Josh’s experience of English would be shaped and limited by utilitarian notions of the purpose of education. But here was Josh talking about his English as if it involved some kind of search for understanding about the world, as if it provided insights into human nature. I was reminded of the comment my friend Karen LaBonte made at the end of my last post: “Actually, I think I see that Josh probably has lots of interpretive communities, and that he makes himself new for each community he is in.”

“Yes, we’re coming to the end of our study of Othello, and it feels like everything is fitting together now.”

“It’s all making sense.”

“Yes, things seem to be working in harmony.”

“I’m wondering whether this feeling of it all coming together has built up over time, or whether there was a moment when everything seemed to slot into place?”

“I think there was an actual moment … or at least an actual event … It was when we watched the movie.”

“You’ve just been watching the movie of Othello?”

“Yes, we’ve just finished it. Watching the movie allowed me to see past the language. The play became more of a story than a sort of textual analysis. Without the movie, I’d still be behind the barrier of the language. The movie helped me to walk through the barrier and into a simple story, it flowed really well…”

Josh paused, but it didn’t feel as though he’s run out of things to say. He was flowing himself by now!

“… yeah, the movie flowed really well, it was really well acted. But it wasn’t just the movie that got me more into it. It was also reading what one of the critics had said about the play. Our teacher was telling us about a critic who was saying that Iago was pure evil. I didn’t agree with this, I didn’t think he was completely evil, he knew what was right and what was wrong … But I couldn’t find the words the express what I thought, or I didn’t have the evidence on the spot, so this gave me a reason to go back to the text. Well, not so much the text of the written play, more the movie. I kept thinking of the actor who was playing Iago, and you could tell that he was feeling awkward about what was happening, you could tell from his body language that he was asking himself, Should I be doing this?’ … And that got me thinking about the actor. It was like he was a critic as well.”

“The actor was a critic? Say some more.”

“Well, the actor had to come up with an interpretation of Iago. Shakespeare didn’t say on the page: ‘Iago is feeling awkward at this point … or … Iago frowns as if uncertain about what to do’. The actor has to decide what’s going on inside Iago, and his body language is going to reflect what he has decided. It’s like body language is a critical reading. The actor is a critic.”

I was finding all of this mighty interesting and mighty impressive. This insight was, Josh assured me, his own, though the class had been talking in general terms about critics and critical readings. But he’d come up with the idea about the actor being a critic. And the impetus to all of this thinking had been his desire to justify his disagreement with the critic who said that Iago was ‘pure evil’.

Many years ago I wrote a book called ‘Their other lives‘, about 12 college students and the lives they lived (inner and outer lives) which were never revealed in the classroom. I was reminded of this as I listened to Josh. He had been one of just under 30 students in my English class last year, and I had always seen him as keen and workmanlike plodder, unlikely to be able to think as deeply or to express himself as well as he was doing right now. I had been wrong, I’d seen only a part of Josh, and not the deepest part. This was my own experience as a school student, too; of feeling that the inner and outer lives which I knew to be a part of me were never allowed to surface in the classroom, and that my learning suffered as a result. My schooling was thin affair. It had no depth. Now, as a teacher, I try to find ways of allowing connections to be made between the syllabus and the students’ other lives, but this conversation was reminding me how significant the gap still was. Perhaps the deschoolers would say that it will always be thus.

This conversation with Josh was also reminding me of the danger of holding too narrow a definition of ‘literacy’ and ‘reading’. How ought we to ‘read ‘Shakespeare (or any topic of substance, in any discipline)? Not (As my American colleague J. D. Wilson Jnr reminded me in a response to my last blog) just by sitting down with a book and, either alone or with the help of a teacher, deciphering the text. We play with it, watch it, act it, think about it, discuss it, argue about it, read around it; these are all parts of literacy.

Josh and I went on to talk of other things. He didn’t do much reading for any of his subjects, he said, just the textbooks and occasional articles he was given. Occasionally he found these things interesting and informative, but usually only when he could relate them to his everyday life or to his aspirations. He was thinking of being an engineer, or maybe something to do with physical education as he’d recently developed a strong interest in his PE subject at school. Business studies had always been an good subject for him, more though because his parents were both in business and he loved the family discussions about the issues that came up in their work. “I enjoy all of that much more than the textbook,” he said. “I learn a lot more from it too.”

We talked, too, about his experience in my class, where we’d read Animal Farm, Macbeth and Of Mice and Men. He himself lives on a small farm outside Canberra, so he could relate to Of Mice and Men and found the world it described an interesting one. He enjoyed the work we did on Animal Farm, too, but for a different reason:

“It was good when we did those projects, when we had to choose from a list of possible research projects after we’d read the book. I chose to compare Animal Farm with The Giver, because both books were about trying to set up a perfect community but it goes wrong. I didn’t particular enjoy The Giver when we read it in Year 7. It was just a book that I had to study. But because this time it was my choice to study it, and I could see a reason for it, I really got into it this time. I found it really interesting to compare what happens in Animal Farm with what happened in the Giver community. It was so much better reading it this time, when I wasn’t being told to read it, it was my choice. Choice is really important.”

Josh described his pattern of reading from about Year 5 (when he was 9) to now in Year 11. “I wasn’t a confident reader in Year 5,” he said. “I could read, but there was no real flow to it, I couldn’t read out loud with any confidence, and I wasn’t in the top reading group. I discovered books I really liked when I was in about Year 7, and I discovered Matthew Reilley in Year 10, so I did more reading then. But not much otherwise. Of any kind, fiction or non-fiction.

And finally we talked about English the subject. I’d asked him what he thought the purpose of English was.

“I wish English was more practical,” Josh said, in a tone of voice quite different from the one he’d been using earlier. “With some it, yeah, I think to myself: Why am I being asked to do this? . English needs to be about getting the skills you’re going to need in the workplace. Basic skills. The ones you’re going to need throughout life. Like when we were in primary school, that’s the kind of work we did in English. Stuff that would give you a headstart. Stuff that would be useful.”

This last response came from a different Josh to the one who had been talking about Othello being like a fable giving him a warning about human nature. This was much more the down-to-earth Josh, the farm boy, the student who related best to a syllabus which had practical uses. Two different Joshes, each with his own perspective, each looking for something different from an English course.

I was reminded again of Karen LaBonte’s words:

Josh probably has lots of interpretive communities, and that he makes himself new for each community he is in.

Posted in literacy, My English classroom | Tagged classics, classroom, education, English, Josh, Karen LaBonte, learning, literacy, reading, school students, teacher training, thinking | 5 Comments

Doubts and loves: Josh Part 2

Posted on June 10, 2009 by steveshann

The Place Where We Are Right

by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

I. Josh

I’ve been writing about Josh, a sixteen year old student at the school where I teach. I’ve chosen him to be a part of a little research project. I want to find out what and how he reads, and to think about what might be done in schools to get students like Josh reading more. And reading better.

To begin with, as I reported earlier, Josh seemed to me to be a student for whom reading was rarely a pleasure. Since I’ve got to know him better, I have discovered that this isn’t entirely accurate. Nevertheless, when I first talked with him a couple of weeks ago, he was finding the required reading in his English class – Othello – heavy going. It wasn’t like poetry, he told me at that first meeting, where everyone can have their own interpretation, where you can find connections to your own experiences. It was more of an elusive puzzle. It didn’t mean much. It was hard to make sense of it.

After that first meeting, I had a go at imagining what might go through Josh’s mind when confronted with a Shakespeare play. This is what I wrote:

I’m about to start another Shakespeare play. Full of unfamiliar words and strange sentences. I need to understand this, I need to know what’s happening here … because that’s what English is all about, isn’t it, finding the meaning, analysing a text so that you get what the author is saying. And I’m doing this because there’ll be questions somewhere down the track about Othello. They’ll want to know if I know what it’s all about. They’ll want to know if I understand it, if I can analyse a passage and show that I’ve got it. And why is that important? Because if I can do this I’ll get a good mark, I’ll have a sense of achievement, and it will probably make my subsequent studies easier too if I can understand this play now. So I need to understand this beginning, to get off to a good start, and those definitions and explanations down the side of my text are going to be very helpful … though I’ve tried that in the past and I still don’t really get it.

I was reading Stanley Fish’s Is there a text in the classroom? at the time, and Fish would say that these thoughts that I’ve imagined as Josh’s would come not from Josh himself but from the community (Fish calls it ‘the interpretive community’) to which he belongs:

the mental operations we can perform are limited by the institutions in which we are already embedded. These institutions precede us, and it is only by inhabiting them, or being inhabited by them, that we have access to the public and conventional senses they make. (pp331-332)

I found myself speculating about Josh’s ‘interpretive community’. No doubt it was made up partly of his family, partly his fellow students, and partly the majority of the teachers he has experienced, most of whom (at a school like ours) would transmit norms and expectations shaped by the traditions of the past. He would have heard many of his English teachers talk about ‘analysing a text’, of ‘quoting particular passages as evidence’, of ‘Shakespeare’s purpose’ or ‘Shakespeare’s themes’ or ‘Shakespeare’s characters’, all of which assume a stable text with meanings implanted by the author to be dug out by the reader. Rubrics would have echoed these assumptions: ‘identifies themes’ … ‘understands author’s purpose’ … ‘provides examples from the text to support your analysis’ … and so on. He would know that his community values ‘good grades’, and that his school markets itself on the fact that its students do well in public examinations. He would have seen parades of English prize winners each year, those students who have done best at ‘accurately getting the meaning out of the texts’. He would have been in classes where those who missed ‘the central message’ of a text or passage were corrected or even subtly mocked. In all of these ways, Josh’s experience of Shakespeare would have been shaped.

***

But if notions of a text with a stable but elusive meaning confused Josh to begin with, he didn’t stay stuck for long. Othello, The Globe Theatre 2007

“Othello’s going much better now,” he told me when we caught up for a chat.

“What’s changed?” I asked.

“Well, first of all, we’ve been doing lots of different interpretations in class, and that’s been really interesting. Like there are some who think that Iago is pure evil, and others who think that there’s a point where he realizes that this has gone too far and yet he can’t step out of it, he has to keep going otherwise he would end up being destroyed himself. So that’s been good. I really like being able to see how different students interpret things in different ways, how we’ve all got different readings. It’s like poetry, where you can all have your different interpretations.

“The other thing is that I went to SparkNotes and found out what was actually happening, why everyone was doing what they were doing, who was who, how this bit of the story related to that bit. Up until then, we’d been going through the play bit by bit, looking at the monologues, talking about what was happening in this particular bit, but I didn’t have any framework to attach it all to and I wasn’t really getting it. I kept missing bits, and they were like important parts of the puzzle. It wasn’t until I read the Sparknotes that I found that I could understand the whole story, where it was going, what it was about, who everyone was. That really mattered, it really made a difference.

“I think having that framework is really important to me. I think that if I’d had it at the beginning, it would have made a big big difference. But now I’m enjoying it. I’m getting into it, I find it interesting.”

Josh then talked to me about his reading in general.

“It’s not that I’m a reluctant reader, or even not a really good reader. When I find a book that I like, I’ll really look forward to reading it, I’ll go off on my own and spend a lot of time. Like I read the whole of the ‘Tomorrow’ series, and recently during a time at school when there wasn’t much on, I got back into it, reading ‘The Elle Chronicles’ and then the other books that came after that. But I don’t like books where I have to keep going back to the beginning to remind myself who was who, or what the background events were. The ‘Tomorrow’ series is so good because each episode has got little reminders about people’s backgrounds, or things about what the characters are like, so the story carries you along. I like reading books like that. But I’ll go for long periods when I don’t find anything that I really want to read, as long as a year maybe.”

II. Readicide

At the wonderful The English Companion Ning, there’s a discussion going on at the moment about Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide: how schools are killing reading and what you can do about it. Like Maja Wilson in the previous book club discussion, Kelly is on the side of those teachers whose focus is on producing literate citizens with a love of learning rather than on preparing students to pass the next educational hurdle.

Kelly argues that classrooms are full of reluctant or under-performing readers because teachers (sometimes because they are forced to) are committing a number of cardinal sins:

1. They’re testing too much, forcing students to concentrate on the trivial.

2. They’re focusing too much on reading skills and reading programs instead of teaching a the wide general knowledge – fostered through subjects like the sciences, the social sciences and the arts – which give students the necessary prior knowledge to make sense of the texts they encounter.

3. They’re over-teaching certain texts, preventing students from enjoying the flow of truly pleasurable reading.

4. They’re trying to teach to too many standards, leading to a rushed and narrow experience for students.

5. They’re teaching the classics without remembering why we want our students to read them.

6. They’re not allowing time in school for reading, and they’re not insisting that students are reading at least two books at any one time.

7. They’re under-teaching difficult texts. Students struggle with these if not given adequate support.

8. They’re not passing on their knowledge of what distinguishes a successful reader from one who flounders.

Over the past week I’ve been following the discussion, and have just finished reading the book itself.

Because Kelly’s central thesis and the questions it raises are relevant to my research with Josh, I’ve tried a little thought experiment. What if Kelly, having heard Josh’s responses so far, were to interview Josh? What questions would he ask? And how might Josh answer?

Here’s the little scene that played itself out in my imagination.

Kelly: Josh I’m interested that you often have big gaps between reading a book that you really like?

Josh: Yes. I like reading. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been a pretty good reader.

Kelly: But you used to read more than you do now.

Josh: More fiction, yes. I have to read a lot for school, textbooks and books for English and research on the internet, stuff like that, but I read less fiction than I used to when I was in primary school.

Kelly: Do you miss it?

Josh: Do I miss it? [pause] I’m not sure. I like it when I find a good book. I like getting lost in it, being carried away by the story. It’s sort of relaxing, a way of chilling out I suppose. Of not feeling the pressure so much.

Kelly: The pressure?

Josh: The pressure of stuff at school really. There’s lots to do. I do maths and sciences, that’s where I do best, but you have to work hard to keep up. I want to get a good score at the end of Year 12, to keep my options open.

Kelly: And reading a good book helps you to forget all of that for a while.

Josh: I suppose it does, yes. But there’s not a lot of time for that now. And it doesn’t feel as important as studying for my exams, or doing my assignments.

Kelly: It’s dropped off the priority list.

Josh: Well it’s dropped down it a fair bit, I suppose you could say.

Kelly: And the reading you do at school, you don’t find that relaxing in the same kind of way?

Josh: Some of it’s interesting. And I’m getting into Shakespeare a bit more now, like I was telling Dr Shann. But when I relax now it’s with TV or the net, or with my friends. I’m interested in things, don’t get me wrong. But I’m more likely to find a film documentary or even magazine articles interesting, more so than a book most of the time.

Kelly: So that’s how you find out about the things you find interesting. Through the net, or your friends, or through magazines or the TV.

Josh: Pretty much, yeah.

Kelly: And are those things – the net, your friends, magazines, film documentaries – are those things a big part of your school syllabus?

Josh: Not really. We watch documentaries sometimes in science, and we use the net for our research. But it’s mainly what the teachers teach us, and our textbooks and preparing for the next assessment task. The pressure gets more intense in Year 11 I’ve found.

Kelly: It was better in Year 10.

Josh: [pause] I suppose there was less pressure. It wasn’t as rushed. But we still did the same kinds of things in class: stuff to read, assignments to do, tests to prepare for. Some of it was interesting, some of it was just work. It had to be done.

Kelly: The way you talk, Josh, it sounds like the pleasure you get from reading is more something you have to find time for yourself, rather than something that is a part of your school life.

Josh: That’s pretty much it I guess.

Kelly: But with the ‘Othello’, you’re starting to get some pleasure from that?

Josh: I’m doing much better, if that’s what you mean, and that makes me feel good. My teacher was giving some assessments back the other day and she was saying that she’s pleased with my progress. I feel I’m making progress.

Kelly: And having those lessons where you all started to discuss your different interpretations helped.

Josh: That was interesting. To see the different things different kids saw in the text. It was like poems, where it’s interesting to see all the different things that kids see, all the different interpretations. Like some of the students thought that Iago was pure evil, but I didn’t think so. I think there was a point when he realized that what he was doing was wrong, but he’d got too far in, he couldn’t get out without causing himself real grief. He had a sense of right and wrong.

Kelly: But he wasn’t able to do what he thought was the right thing to do.

Josh: He couldn’t. He was trapped.

Kelly: Like sometimes happens in the real world.

Josh: [pause] In the real world? I don’t get you.

Kelly: People sometimes know what they’re doing is wrong, but feel they’re too involved, they can’t get off the path they’re on.

Josh: I guess that’s right. I suppose so. I hadn’t really thought about it like that, but I guess that’s right.

Kelly: Maybe ‘Othello’ has something to say about how we should live our lives.

Josh: What do you mean? It’s more about Othello and Iago and the others, isn’t it, about understanding why they do what they do.

Kelly: Why do you think we want our kids to study the play?

Josh: So we get better at analyzing the play. It’s by Shakespeare. He’s a great writer.

Kelly: A great writer?

Josh: He wrote all those famous plays that have lasted all that time. He must be a great writer.

Kelly: I wonder what it is that makes him so great.

Josh: His language?

Kelly: You find his language to be outstanding?

Josh: I find his language to be pretty difficult to understand. But SparkNotes helped. Once I’d got the framework, things started to make sense.

Kelly: You talk about it as if we set plays like Othello because they’re like difficult puzzles which you need to work hard to solve.

Josh: Well, you do need to work hard!

Kelly: Yes, you do. But maybe that’s not why we set them. Maybe we set them because they say something to us about the important issues in life.

Josh: The important issues in life? Isn’t that what we learn maybe in science when we’re studying things like the stem cell issue or cloning or the environment? Or in Religion and Values Education classes? Isn’t English more about analysing language and communicating and getting better at reading and writing?

Kelly: Well maybe we read Othello partly because it says something about what happens to your life if you give in to evil? That seems at least to be the aspect of Othello that you’ve found yourself most interested in. Maybe if you discovered that the great texts taught us something about how to live our lives, you’d read more?

Josh: I read books as a bit of an escape, not to learn more!

Kelly: I’m all for reading lots for the sheer pleasure of being carried along by a good story. Those ‘Tomorrow’ books sound great. But there’s another kind of fiction, too, more demanding but ultimately just as important. Plays like ‘Macbeth’, or novels like ‘Animal Farm’, or ‘Of Mice and Men’.

Josh: I had to read those last year, when I was in Dr Shann’s class!

Kelly: And …?

Josh: And … I read them.

Kelly: And …

Josh: Well I did all right in the assessments. Not great. But all right.

Kelly: And ….?

Josh: I don’t get you.

Kelly: Did you just read them so you’d do all right in the assessments?

Josh: Well they weren’t like the ‘Tomorrow’ series. I didn’t get carried away by them, if that’s what you mean.

Kelly: But what did you learn from them? What did they mean to you?

Josh: Not a lot, to tell you the truth. I read them. I did the assessments. I did all right. I tried my hardest. I was pleased with my achievement.

III My maxims revisited

Can an imagined conversation like the one above reveal anything new to me? After all, it’s the product of my own mind, fed by my own experiences and shaped by my own assumptions. Is it possible that it might also challenge some of these assumptions, that it might extend my thinking in some way?

The bit in the conversation that made me hold my breath a bit was towards the end when Josh talked about being in my class and reading Animal Farm, Macbeth, and Of Mice and Men. According to my imagined Josh, these great texts left no lasting impression, they were means to an end (good grades).

I can imagine Josh feeling exactly this! And I can imagine what Kelly Gallagher might be thinking. “How did you teach these big books Steve? What kind of a framework did you give the students? Did you give them the Guided Tour (the teacher helping the student to see the important features) and end with the Budget Tour (letting the informed students discover more for themselves)? To what extent did you insist on a close study of important parts of these texts? Did you allow Josh to discover the greatness in these books? Did Josh take away something valuable after wrestling with these books?”

These are uncomfortable questions. I could hide behind a Fish-like defence that Josh was constrained not by my teaching but by the assumptions he brought to the task. I could point to the various attempts at framing or close reading I did. Or the links I tried to make with the world the students themselves experienced.

But the fact remains that a good student like Josh, someone who can read for pleasure, and who is motivated to do well, left my class reading less than he read when he was in primary school and having never discovered the greatness of these classic texts.

Is it time to re-think and to adjust?

In an earlier post I came up with five maxims which I thought should guide our literacy teaching:

1. The more I can infect my class with my love for the subject, the more individuals in the class will want to read. Maxim 1: Reading is fertilised by a teacher’s love for the subject matter.

2. The more my students know about the subject, the more they will want to read, and the more they will understand from their reading. Maxim 2: Prior knowledge is a gateway to reading proficiency.

3. The more the class inquiry is centred around clearly identified fertile questions, the more purposeful and effective the reading will be. Maxim 3: An inquiring mind directs a reading that is purposeful.

4. The more each student feels he can make a meaningful contribution to the learning of the class as a whole, the better he’ll read. Maxim 4: We read better when we sense we are agents in the learning of others.

5. The atmosphere in the class – the sense in which it is experienced as a community of scholars – will impact on the amount of good reading done. Maxim 5: Belonging, community and literacy are linked.

I feel I can stand confidently behind all five, and I think they were a part of my teaching of Josh last year. But something is clearly missing. I need to add a sixth.

6. Teacher enthusiasm, fertile questions, prior knowledge, active learning and an animated community aren’t always enough. Maxim 6: Some academic texts need close and disciplined guidance.

Postscript: reflection on the writing

I’ve just got back from the beach and it’s now dark outside. I’m down here in the house alone. The fire is on – it’s been on for the two days I’ve been here – and I’ve put a couple of lamps on. I’ll write for an hour or so, then I’ll make myself some dinner. Some left-over fish from last night which I’ll spread on some grilled polenta. I’ve got a sauce in mind, but I’ll experiment as I go. I love it here.

The beach was beautiful. Because it’s a long weekend, there were quite a few people walking along the tide line, a few of them with their dogs. There were men ankle deep in the water with their fishing lines out, and a couple of families had brought their food down and were building a small fire for a barbeque. I like it when I’m the only one on the beach, but this evening it felt good too; there was a kind of holiday atmosphere. People were relaxed, loose-limbed and smiling.

As I walked away from the main groups round to a rocky headland, I saw a woman with a camera, pointing it at the sky behind me. After I’d passed her, I turned around to see what she was trying to capture. It was the last of the sunset. Brilliant orange and dark grey puffs of cloud against a pale blue sky. Like a Turner painting I saw once. It was exhilarating. I walked along the beach in the growing dark. In this mood, at this moment, after a couple of days of on my own with my own slow routines and with time to mull and to step back from the rush, things seemed connected and meaningful.

This writing, and the thinking that it encourages, is a part of what gives me this sense of connection and meaning.

I’m doing this writing and this little research project partly for myself, but also partly for the 90 postgraduate students I’ll be teaching in a couple of months. I want to model what I’m asking them to do: to get to know a student like Josh, to think about his reading, to use the literature to inform their growing understanding of the issues they’ll face as teachers of reading and writing in schools. I want them to write reflectively about all of this.

But will they have the time? I’m 62 with over 30 years of teaching experience to draw on, so I’ve got a perspective that a new teacher can’t have. I work part-time, so that helps. I’ve got a house down at the coast which I can come to every now and then. I’ve got ways in which I can extract myself from the pace of the everyday.

Will my postgraduate students have time?

Do our school students, in our classrooms?

Or are we all hurtling at exponentially increasing speed, in schools with only enough time for the relatively trivial, towards a fairly gloomy future?

6439-12~New-Growth-II-Posters

Posted in literacy, My English classroom | Tagged community, education, EnglishCompanion, Josh, learning, literacy, reading, teacher training, thinking, writing | 8 Comments

The walled city: Josh Part 1

Posted on June 9, 2009 by steveshann

I want to start this post with Josh.

Josh is the boy who has agreed to be a part of a small research project I’ve decided to do. The idea is to trial a task I’m going to be setting for my postgraduate preservice teachers in a university unit called ‘Literacy Across the Curriculum’. I described this project in an earlier post called ‘Headlights in the fog‘.

I taught Josh English last year, when he was 15 and in Year 10. He was immensely keen to do well, anxious to do all the right things, but never got the grades he would have liked. His English teacher this year has said things are pretty much the same: conscientious but there’s something missing in his work, as if despite all the time he puts into the subject, he doesn’t yet quite get it.

A fortnight or so ago I had my first chat with Josh. He told me that he wasn’t much of a book reader, preferring to learn about the world from the internet or from documentaries. And, as we were talking about Othello (which his class was just beginning to study), he said something like:

I don’t much like Shakespeare. I don’t really get it. It’s not like poetry, where you can put your own spin on things; there’s always something in a poem that makes me think about something I’ve experienced or thought, and you can kind of get into the poem that way. But Shakespeare’s not like that. I don’t get anything from it. Like I was reading the beginning of Othello last night, and it just didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t get what it was all about.

I went away from the chat with an image and some questions.

trapped in castle The image was of a walled city, Josh and his current known world on the inside and the rest of the world, represented in this case by Othello, on the outside. Josh is feeling hemmed in, wanting with a part of him to get outside the city, though in the grand scheme there are things he’d rather be doing than exploring Othello, which he assumes to be dated, lifeless and largely irrelevant to any of his deepest preoccupations.

The questions were to do with Josh’s reading of Othello. It’s clear he’s not reading it with any significant success. Is this temporary, the way we all often feel before tackling a big text? Does he have some preconceptions about Shakespeare, English and/or learning which are shutting him out? Are his reading skills too undeveloped to make sense of the play? Are there specific strategies or approaches that would help him make sense of what he is reading?

***

I’ve been reading together with my colleague Karen LaBonte, some of Stanley Fish’s Is there a text in this class? The authority of Interpretive Communities. Fish raises some questions which make me reflect on Josh’s experience. These include:

Does the language of a text determine its true meaning?
If not, if meaning is determined by something other than the formal meanings of the words that are used, what explains the meaning a reader gets from a text?
Is the meaning determined by the norms, values and assumptions agreed upon by the community to which the reader belongs?
How does the reader of a text progress from one meaning (determined by these ‘interpretive communities’) to a more developed or sophisticated or broader reading?

I’ve probably made it sound dry and theoretical. In fact I found it to be talking about the kinds of issues that English teachers continually come up against. How do we help develop students’ understanding? How do we respond honestly when we know two apparently contradictory things: on the one hand that a student has missed the point in a text, and on the other that there is no determined single interpretation of a text?

[I was also reminded, as I read Fish’s book, of an author I used to love reading when I was working as a psychotherapist: James Hillman. Hillman playfully suggested that books and ideas were alive, that they had an existence independently of the author or thinker. Bion (also a writer in the psychoanalytic tradition) used to talk about ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’. Fish does the same when he talks about ‘norms and values’; it’s not people who hold them, it’s the norms and values which hold the people. I always enjoy texts (fiction and non-fiction) that have a wiff of an animated world!]

But mainly I thought about Josh, locked in his walled city. How might he, or his current teacher, or I – or all three of us, in different ways – help him to get out?

How might he escape the walled city?

Josh’s understanding of Othello is constricted by what he has experienced and what he understands to be the purposes and goals of studying Shakespeare in an educational institution like our school.

Many times, and especially with students like Josh, I’ve sensed a disjunction between what I assume to be the purposes and goals of the English classroom, and what my students assume. I think (but I’m not sure) that when Josh opens Othello at Act 1 Scene 1, he is imagining something like this:

I’m about to start another Shakespeare play. Full of unfamiliar words and strange sentences. I need to understand this, I need to know what’s happening here … because that’s what English is all about, isn’t it, unlocking the meaning, finding the meaning, analysing a text so that you get what the author is saying. And I’m doing this because there’ll be questions somewhere down the track about Othello. They’ll want to know if I know what it’s all about. They’ll want to know if I understand it, if I can analyse a passage and show that I’ve got it. And why is that important? Because if I can do this I’ll get a good mark, I’ll have a sense of achievement, and it will probably make my subsequent studies easier too if I can understand this play now. So I need to understand this beginning, to get off to a good start, and those definitions and explanations down the side of my text are going to be very helpful … though I’ve tried that in the past and I still don’t really get it.

These aren’t my assumptions. If I were his teacher this year, I’d be approaching the teaching of Othello with a different perspective, which would sound something like this:

Can’t wait! Another opportunity to explore the psychology of human interactions, the way power and prejudice play out in our lives. Another opportunity to immerse ourselves in the ways in which rhythms and images in the hands of a master can draw us deeply into already-half-experienced, half-realized aspects of what it is to be human. Great storytellers remind us that the way we experience the world is not unique; that we’re not alone in that sense. English is all about learning more about the nature of the world, and in English we approach this broader task in quite different ways than the historian, the mathematician, the musician, and so on. I need to help Josh experience the language, see the images, understand the emotions and ambitions … and to make lots of different kinds of connections between what he finds in the play and what he has experienced in his life. Much of this will involve him getting out of his seat and involving himself in a piece of theatre.

Fish talks about institutional norms, goals and purposes. I rather suspect that Josh is closer to some generally accepted institutional norms than I am. [I wrote about this in my blog post Play the game!‘]

There’s another way I might explore this.

Fish tells the story of a student asking her teacher, at the beginning of the first class of the year, “Is there a text in this class?’. The teacher assumes that the student is asking “Is there a prescribed textbook that we will need for this course?” It turns out, though, that the student is actually asking, “In this course, are we assuming the existence of a stable text?”, a question which makes perfect sense given that the student had done a previous course in literary theory.

Same words, but with quite different meanings depending on the institutional norms which have hold of the hearer.

Maybe I could explore two versions of the statement: ‘In this class we’re going to study Shakespeare’s Othello.

Josh might hear this statement as meaning ‘In this class we’re going to be looking closely at Shakespeare’s words in order to understand what Shakespeare was meaning.’ This interpretation comes out of his understanding of what school and learning are essentially about; gaining good marks through analysis.

The teacher, on the other hand, might have meant ‘In this class we’re going to be exploring our different readings/responses to a play by Shakespeare in order to understand this complex world we live in a bit better.’ This meaning comes out of an assumption that school and learning are about developing and deepening present understandings about reality, rather than their being merely steps taken to clear the next educational hurdle.

Posted in literacy, My English classroom | Tagged assessment, classics, culture, English, Josh, learning, literacy, reading, student expectations, teacher training, thinking | 6 Comments

Alex the parrot, Elizabeth Bennet and the soul’s code

Posted on May 27, 2009 by steveshann

As I read Maja Wilson’s Rethinking Rubrics and followed the discussion about this book on the English Companion Ning, I kept thinking about a growing divide amongst teachers around the question of what we’re meant to be doing in the classroom. Are we preparing kids for the next stage in their education, or is our business bigger than that? Maja is strongly of the second camp; we are teaching kids to write well, not to jump the next hurdle. The older I get, the more I see this divide as problematic and significant . I think this blog post is going to be about this divide. But, if so, it’s going to get there in a very roundabout way.

*****

In last weekend’s Canberra Times, Ian Warden wrote a scathing review of a book called Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process. Warden writes:

You do have to have a heart like a pebble not to be left teary by her story of a parrot whose last words to her were: “You be good. I love you”, but you need to have a mind like a souffle to admire her whole, schmaltzy, ultra-anthropomorphic book. It offers hardly a glimpse of Alex as a bird. Instead, he’s discussed throughout as a feathered toddler.

Alex the bird had some considerable attributes; he could speak, think deductively and communicate in some interesting ways. You Tube has video of Alex working with Dr Pepperberg. But, says Warden,

… it’s not obvious why this is of enormous consequence.
Pepperberg thinks that it’s of enormous consequence because we can no longer dismiss animals as mere brutes – but does any thinking person think of birds, say, as stupid things? Don’t we marvel at them and their mysteriousness? Nothing about them is fully understood yet. The complexity of their songs and shouts and of their social arrangements! Their bewildering feats of migration! Their sensational aerobatic abilities! Birds, as birds, inspire awe in thinking people.
…Pepperberg expresses no interest in Alex’s birdness and no appreciation of birds per se.

I loved this angry review. This is how I feel about some of what goes on in our classrooms, with children being made to perform unchildlike tasks, often to please a teacher, parroting back information for which they can see no use and to which they feel no connection.

*****

A couple of days ago, a much-valued Twitter colleague Karen LaBonte suggested that we have a look at the following YouTube video.

I found it deeply moving. As I watched those little faces live the song, I was catapulted back in time over 55 years ago when, as a very young child, the world was a place of heart-quickening wonder.

Birds as birds. Children as children.

*****

51gNHXVR3QL I couldn’t stand Jane Austen when I was at school. Even doing an English unit at university couldn’t convince me that she was worth reading. Nothing of any consequence seemed to be happening in her novels, just rather meaningless social engagements, tame flirtations and inconsequential misunderstandings. Surely the world contained many more interesting things than these!

A month ago, inspired by Dana Huff and Heather Mason, I decided to give her another go. I’m reading Pride and Prejudice.

It’s wonderful. So much is happening, in every paragraph. Elizabeth and Darcy struggle with the same tensions which pull against each other in our own lives; between feeling and thought, passion and order, truth and convenience, intuition and reason. It’s like looking through another’s eyes at a world so unlike the world I inhabit, yet it’s so familiar. I’m up to page 300 and Elizabeth’s flighty young sister has just run away with Wickham. Elizabeth says:

… she is very young; she has never been taught to think on serious subjects; and for the last half year, nay, for a twelvemonth, she has been given up to nothing but amusement and vanity. She has been allowed to dispose of her time in the most idle and frivolous manner, and to adopt any opinions that came in her way.

On the English Companion Ning there have been over the past months a series of discussions and blog posts [here is just one of many] about literature and its contribution to our understanding of the true, the good, the beautiful and the just. Michael Umphrey often writes powerfully and poignantly about what he feels we might have lost when we left behind a world held together by shared values and an accepted authority. I first read Pride and Prejudice in my teens during the early 60s, at a time when the incense of freedom was in the air. Was this Lydia’s world? Were we then being abandoned by a laissez-faire world to ‘adopt any opinions that came our way’? Are we continually drawn back in our imaginations and longings to the world of Jane Austen because in spite of its apparent flaws and inequalities, it describes the same world of order and authority that the folk tales and myths describe? Where might we find healthy order and authority we can trust in today’s world?

****

How can we understand motivation (and its shadow, lethargy)? What gives us energy? The writer James Hillman (in a book called The Soul’s Code: in search of character and calling) links motivation with an idea about individual destiny.

The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks…

I will be using many of the terms for this acorn – image, character, fate, genius, calling, daimon, soul, destiny – rather interchangeably, preferring one or another depending on the context. This looser mode follows the style of other, often older cultures, which have a better sense of this enigmatic force in human life than does our contemporary psychology, whcih tends to narrow understanding of complex phenomena to single-meaning definitions …

We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms. (page 10)

In support of his idea that each of us was born was a unique calling or fate, Hillman quotes Vladimir Nabokov as follows:

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap. (page viii)

Hillman goes on to suggest that our ability to acknowledge or sense the existence of a calling, or fate, or necessity, is a key that unlocks energetic motivation. Without it, we drift without a rudder.

David is a 15 year old student in my English class. We’re studying satire. David is no easy conformist. Earlier in the year he wrote a satire in which he lambasted our school’s traditions and values.

Last week David and a classmate gave an oral presentation as part of our study of George Orwell, and afterwards he reflected on his performance as follows

Today in class Alan and I gave our oral presentation. Leading up to it we were both talking about how bad we were at public speaking. We both felt that we hadn’t really performed that well in the past…

Over the weekend one member of my extended family asked me what I would like to be when I grew up in life and I replied ‘a lawyer’. I am very proud of my vocabulary and my ability to find flaws in other people’s arguments. A few hours after answering their question I was pondering being a lawyer and realised that one of the major distinctions between a good and a bad lawyer was the ability to present your case well. This was when I started hyperventilating (not really, I just got kind of freaked). For a moment I felt that this was the dead end for the path in my life the ended up being a lawyer. Then I realised that there was still time. There is still a lot of time left for me and time means chances, chances to improve. Now I eagerly await our class’s next oral presentation where I can try and further my dreams of lawyer-dom (I don’t think its a word but it sounds cool!)

I’ve been reading some of my classmates’ reflections on the orals and what we’ve learned from the exercise. I somehow feel as though I have learned more than them for some reason… I think it stems from how my reflection has a larger time scale than just “the next oral presentation”.

I noticed that as English classes go I am getting along a lot better in this one. I’m kind of scared though because I know that the Doc has a radically different teaching style than other English teachers. My own style of writing goes very well with this style but I can’t help but feel that once I get outside of this class (in which I feel like I’ve performed well) I will go back to mediocrity in the field of English.

****

It’s time to try to tie all this together.

The classroom is an alive place to the extent that it has windows to the outside world. This is fundamentally different from the idea that one stage of schooling is a preparation for the next. Students have got to know, at some intuitive or conscious level, that what they’re doing is relevant to their bigger lives: that it matters in terms of the world they already experience and will experience again as adults; and that it matters in terms of the person they are wanting to become.

Maja’s writing students know that she is teaching them to become writers, to make sense of their own experiences or to learn more about the world. They’re not becoming better writers in order to pass the next exam.

Students can behave impressively in enclosed classrooms where the focus is simply on the next assignment, the next exam or the next stage. But this kind of performance is impressive in the same way that Alex the parrot is impressive. We see little of nature’s intricate watermark.

The singing children touch their (and our) hearts and sway with the music because singing together expresses a longing for the true and the beautiful which they all intuitively feel and reach out towards.

Pride and Prejudice makes sense to me now that I’m freed from the necessity of responding to my teacher’s question about the nature of Jane Austen’s irony and can instead see, through the windows of the text, the world I inhabit.

David’s motivated molecules are excited by the sense that he’s furthering his dreams of lawyerdom.

A couple of nights ago, the day after doing his oral presentation, David sent me a message via our class Ning:

Hey Dr. Shann,I just finished the English homework and I want to do more.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged Beauty, classics, classroom, EnglishCompanion, James Hillman, KarenLaBonte, MajaWilson, MichaelUmphrey, motivation, Ning, teaching, thinking, writing | 9 Comments

Why am I passionate about the English discipline?

Posted on May 21, 2009 by steveshann

english_literature

A colleague on staff has just written to us, partly as follows:

As you may or may not be aware, our Year Ten RaVE syllabus includes a fairly extended unit on Theory of Knowledge (Epistemology). All of us deal, in one way or another, with knowledge of one sort or another. All of us, in my experience, are passionate about the subject(s) we teach – indeed I think we all see that passion as a prerequisite for good teaching. In attempting to improve the boys understanding, I would like to put together a short anthology of comments about that passion. I am asking if any members of staff from any departments would be prepared to write, say, 250 words on why they are so passionate about their subject. It would be very useful indeed if the piece mentioned what you believe to be the essence of the subject about which you are passionate.

Here’s my response, influenced in part by many wonderful discussions on this kind of theme on the EC Ning over the past 6 months:

There are two related essential aspects of the English discipline.

The first is its contribution to our knowledge of the world; we come to understand, through many different kinds of literature, dimensions of the human experience which the other disciplines don’t touch on in quite the same way. When we read a novel or a poem or certain kinds of non-fiction, we come to understand both that our own internal worlds and life experiences are a part of a shared human experience, and paradoxically that the world is made up of people with different perspectives and dilemmas. Literature is a lens through which we can see aspects of the world more clearly.

The second is that we learn better how to read and write, and with any luck we increase the pleasure students experience in their reading and writing. Each of these two terms (‘reading’ and ‘writing’) is defined more broadly than it was 50 years ago, so that reading now includes our searching for meaning in films, images, websites and the news media (for example), and writing includes the ability express ourselves in non-traditional ways, such as through multimedia presentations, digital narratives and the like. Nevertheless, reading and writing still retain at their essence the ability to receive others’ thoughts and perspectives (read) and to explore and express our own (write).

There are two related questions which underpin the English discipline: Why do we value certain texts? To what extent is meaning determined by the author, embedded in the text, or created by the reader?

Why am I passionate about this? Because the kinds of reading and writing we do within the English discipline contribute to a greater love and understanding of the true, the good, the beautiful and the just.

Posted in My English classroom | Leave a comment

Play the game!

Posted on May 16, 2009 by steveshann

Last Tuesday I walked into my Year 11 class in a rage. I was full of what my father once called ‘Steve’s white hot indignation’. I’d just read a number of comments on our class Ning that indicated that some of the boys were not taking the course (which I wrote about in ‘Searching for meaning in the English classroom’) as seriously as I thought it deserved.

So I let fly. I talked about rigour, discipline, responsibility, attention and standards. I said how unacceptable I found it that some interpreted openness as vagueness, flexibility as laxness, a relaxed classroom atmosphere as an excuse to goof off.

The boys sat silently during my rant.

That night when I logged onto our class Ning, I saw that a number of boys had written about our lesson. One boy (I’ll call him Leonardo) called his blog post ‘Play the game’. He wrote:

.. in Years 11 and 12, it’s barely even about the learning at all. … In most subjects, we learn how to pass the exams… how to structure an essay, how to deliver a speech the way they want it, etc. School is all about how you play the game these days. It’s all about doing what you can to get an A, regardless of what you’re learning. … And I guess it does teach you stuff about the real world. Teaches you to try to beat the system, that menial busywork sometimes is what you need to do to do well in life, and, most importantly, no matter how much you hate your job, the best revenge is success.
I don’t think this is what the people who planned this school system had in mind. I guess those guys at the Board of Studies think that the system as it stands is a genuine attempt to educate kids in the subjects they selected for us. Simply put, they’re wrong.
…The reason why we (I) am having trouble with this course at times is because I have been trained to think like that. I do what I can to do well in the HSC. And I think some others in the class (although they may not know it) think the same way. Blogs aren’t marked, so I don’t do them; projects require organised creativity as opposed to just knowing shit, and suddenly I’m confused; Dr. Shann asks for dedication to the course but he can’t put a date or a number on it, so we just don’t try, et cetera, et cetera.

Another student, Allen, wrote:

Leonardo’s blog ‘Play the Game’ pretty much sums up how I feel about the course. It’s school, I’m here to do my Higher School Certificate (HSC) and get ready for uni, and while all the other courses seem to concur with this, English Extension doesn’t and hasn’t. I think this is why I don’t blog regularly or in depth. It’s like Leonardo said, “It’s all about doing what you can to get an A…”, as long as it helps me to do well in the HSC, the rest doesn’t seem too important. The creativity and responsibility inherent in the course has tripped me up; I’m looking at how I get marks in assessment pieces, not looking for the ‘something else’ that’s expected.

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FISH As I read these blogs by Leonardo and Allen, I thought about the book I’m currently reading, Stanley Fish’s Is there a text in this class: the authority of interpretive communities? It’s an immensely stimulating read. In it, Fish argues that the way we make sense of the word (indeed what we actually see and experience in the world) is determined by the norms, values and expectations of the communities to which we belong.

the mental operations we can perform are limited by the institutions in which we are already embedded. These institutions precede us, and it is only by inhabiting them, or being inhabited by them, that we have access to the public and conventional senses they make. (pp331-332)

… if the self is conceived of not as an independent entity but as a social construct whose operations are delimited by the systems of intelligibility that inform it, then the meanings it confers on texts are not its own but have their source in the interpretive community (or communities) of which it is a function. (p335)

… all objects are made and not found, and … they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion. (p229)

What is the interpretive community which confers these meanings that so many students express, either eloquently as Leonardo and Allen have done in their blogs or in their actions as they focus on graded work and sidestep the deeper learning?

It is our society, no doubt, with its concerns about national testing and scores and cut-offs for university entrance. In the USA this has reached some lunatic proportions, as Alan Sitomer reports in the English Companion Ning in a post called Halt the Dip-Shittedness!! And while these societal trends and norms might be totally out of step with the needs of the 21st century, they are nevertheless firmly fixed in our practices, as Greg Thompson points out in ‘Is it the test, or is it?‘ :

It is far easier to teach a fractured curriculum because the result demanded is a standardized test that seeks the ability to see myopically, one subject at a time. … This fractured approach has long been the model for education. The assembly line reality of the industrial age required each worker to do one thing and to do it well. Employee A did not need to know what Employee B did to complete their task five feet further down the line. That worked. Today, standardized testing requires each student to know how to do each thing in exactly the same way in order to produce the same product. The world they live in however, requires them to see the integrated picture. The test does not fit with reality.

Leonardo and Allen are doing no more than seeing the world as their interpretive communities – the society and their school – dictate.

This is not how I see the world. My interpretive community sees schools as places of learning, where naive mental constructs of how the world works are challenged and matured. It sees classrooms as communities of inquiry, peopled by budding scholars, eager to learn more about what is true, good, beautiful and just.

So what happens when the norms of two interpretive communities clash? Which prevails? There is plenty of evidence that the world of learning is David to society’s Goliath.

But I’m encouraged, both by the outcome of the David and Goliath story, and by a couple of sentences which Leonardo tacked onto the end of his post:

English Extension and Studies of Religion are the only classes that allow us to be creative and have a relaxed teaching style that is more about us becoming educated, reflective, well-rounded individuals (if you’ve seen ‘The History Boys’, that is exactly what I’m talking about).

So what I’m saying is, give us a prod every now and then like you did today, because we are trying to untrain ourselves from what we know, or at least I am.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged Alan Sitomer, assessment, classroom, community, curriculum, English, EnglishCompanion, Greg Thompson, learning, Ning, text culture value[s], thinking | 7 Comments

What I think I know about reading

Posted on May 1, 2009 by steveshann

I have a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s linked, I think, with a sense that in these blog posts on reading I’m exposing myself, running the risk of looking foolish. This isn’t going to stop me, especially given that I often tell my students that successful learning always takes us into unfamiliar and risky territory. And given that I’m going to ask my postgraduate students to take the same risks, it would be doubly hypocritical to stop now. But I feel uneasy all the same.

Why foolish? Well, the world seems full of folk who have thought about, researched and implemented ways of promoting adolescent reading, and the safe way forward for me, as a teacher of ‘literacy across the secondary curriculum’ to postgraduate trainee teachers, would be to cull the best of what’s ‘out there’, then to present that to my students. Instead I’ve decided on a three-step program:

bring to the surface and expose to the fresh air all those preconceptions and assumptions that I make all the time, in my own teaching practice, about how to promote a reading culture in my students;
test those assumptions against the experience of a student (his name isn’t Josh, but I’ll call him that from now on) who I taught last year and who has agreed to be a part of my short research project;
compare the results of these first two steps with what has been written on the subject.

The queasiness is connected to the risk that what I do in Step 1 (which is the subject of this blog post) will look like either the bleeding obvious or the missing-of-the-bleeding-obvious … and that this blog post will be somewhat embarrassing to read in hindsight.

But I think that’s what learning is inevitably like. If we’re going to be active learners, we need to take these kinds of risks.

natures-true-learning-curve1

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Where to start then? Maybe with a story.

The other day Andrew, one of my Year 11 English students, told me that he found it difficult to engage with our course because none of it seemed relevant to him. “I’ve got my life pretty much mapped out,” he said, “and I know what I want to be doing in 10, 20 years from now. I can’t see where all these books and all this writing fits into that. I can’t see any connections.”

When we sit down to read with the expectation that the material is going to be meaningful, that it is going to connect us more strongly to what we see ahead of us or alternatively yearn for, then adolescents (like us all) will read. Without this conviction, we read ineffectively and without pleasure or purpose, like Andrew.

Reading a book is like forming a relationship; we should expect that something good will come out of it. Indeed it is not simply like forming a relationship; it involves actual relationships (with a friend, a teacher, a parent or a community), or it feels like it holds out the promise of future relationships.

A boy I taught over 20 years ago suddenly comes to mind. Dan was 11 at the time. He was full of a confused tension (as I was) between, on the one hand, wanting to be able to read (and therefore focussing on READING and seeing my flash cards and readers as keys to what he desperately wanted to be able to do), and, on the other hand, wanting to be able to be Dan-in-the-world (and therefore focussing on being, and belonging, and connecting, and understanding, and responding). Neither of us saw the strong connections between these two impulses. But suddenly, towards the end of the year and after a sustained imaginative involvement in an exciting classroom project where he had become a particularly active member of our community, he began to read, out loud and to his father, material from the project.

Experiences in the classroom like these account for certain assumptions I have about reading, and about my role as a teacher interested in promoting adolescents to read more and better.

I assume that I do more to encourage adolescent reading by setting up the conditions that will promote connection, knowledge and community (in other words, by concentrating on my subject and on fostering community of learners) than I will by focussing on the reading needs of individual students.

The implications of this are:

The more I can infect my class with my love for the subject, the more individuals in the class will want to read. Reading is a means to an end, not the end in itself.
The more my students know about the subject, the more they will want to read, and the more they will understand from their reading.
The more the class inquiry is centred around clearly identified fertile questions, the more purposeful and effective the reading will be.
The more each student feels he can make a meaningful contribution to the learning of the class as a whole, the better he’ll read.
The atmosphere in the class – the sense in which it is experienced as a community of learners and budding scholars – will impact on the amount of good reading done.

Could I perhaps express these implications as maxims, ones that I could then test out in the next two stages of this little research project, when first of all I interview Josh and then I read books about reading?

The more I can infect my class with my love for the subject, the more individuals in the class will want to read. Reading is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Maxim 1: Reading is stimulated by a teacher’s love for the subject matter.
The more my students know about the subject, the more they will want to read, and the more they will understand from their reading. Maxim 2: Prior knowledge is a gateway to reading proficiency.
The more the class inquiry is centred around clearly identified fertile questions, the more purposeful and effective the reading will be. Maxim 3: An inquiring mind directs a reading that is purposeful.
The more each student feels he can make a meaningful contribution to the learning of the class as a whole, the better he’ll read. Maxim 4: We read better when we sense we are agents in the learning of others.
The atmosphere in the class – the sense in which it is experienced as a community of scholars – will impact on the amount of good reading done. Maxim 5: Belonging to a community and the urge to read are linked.

How do I know these things? Because I’m a reader myself, and they are true for me.

Maxim 1: Reading is stimulated by a teacher’s love for the subject matter.
Some years ago I read some of the philosophy of Spinoza because a my PhD supervisor’s face would soften when he quoted Spinoza. “Steve, listen to this!” he would say, “The love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with a pleasure secure from all pain. That’s good, isn’t it! That’s a good thought! A fine thing to think about!” Reading Spinoza wasn’t easy, but I persisted and ended up writing an appropriation of Spinoza’s Ethics, which I called ‘On the natural laws governing learning’. I was infected by my teacher’s love for his subject.

Maxim 2: Prior knowledge is a gateway to reading proficiency.
There’s research about this, much of it sharply critical of reading tests which fail to take this into account. But I’m talking about my own experience here. When I first opened Spinoza’s Ethics, I came across sentences like this one: “God (Deus) I understand to be a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite attributes.” I could make neither head nor tail of this. I didn’t know what it meant, or why he had written it. Talking with my teacher helped. So did finding out about Descartes and the ways in which Spinoza was reacting to things Descartes had said. Discovering something about Spinoza’s life made a difference, too, especially knowing what he rebelled against in his own religious community. Slowly a vague sense of what Spinoza saw as being real and of value began to take shape, and I found myself being able to read the words, to make some sense of them, and to use them as stepping stones to later passages in his Ethics. They began to become pleasurable to me.

Maxim 3: An inquiring mind directs a reading that is purposeful.
Ten years ago, as I embarked on my PhD, I was deeply drawn to two questions, one of which had come out of my 20 years experience as a teacher, and the other from some of my personal experiences and from my work as a psychotherapist. The first question was What is the nature of stories, and why are they listened to by my students with such reverence? The second was Why are so many people dizzied by their experience of the world? In one way or another these two questions guided my reading over three years: Freud and Jung, Winnicott and Hillman, Spinoza and Neitzsche. Some of it I found very hard going, but the questions which troubled or excited me kept me focussed. I wanted to know more about things that mattered to me.

Maxim 4: We read better when we sense we are agents in the learning of others.
For some years I was an organiser of a professional reading group for teachers at my school. We selected educational books to read and discuss together. We would read the book, usually over a school holiday, and then meet for an extended dinner (in a fine old dining room, the food and wine paid for by our school). One evening, in the midst of an animated discussion, one of the other teachers (someone with whom I often disagreed) said: “Come on Steve, say more. It’s good to hear what you think.” The sense that others valued what I had to say was animating and no doubt encouraged my close reading of subsequent book choices.

Maxim 5: Belonging to a community and the urge to read are linked.
Many members of the English Companion Ning are currently reading and discussing together Maja Wilson’s Rethinking Rubrics. There have been hundreds of responses to it, pages and pages of them, and it can be daunting keeping up with the flow, following the different threads, as well as making sure that we’ve read the text itself. Why do I enjoy it so much? Partly, of course, because the ideas are interesting in themselves and I can see ways in which my own teaching is being influenced by the exercise. But it’s also that sense of belonging to a valued community which encourages me to keep reading, to stay connected, to be involved.

**************

So, my assumptions have thrown up five maxims which I can test in my case study with Josh and then in the reading that I do afterwards.

I’m left with a further thorny question, though. What do I mean by ‘reading’? Am I only interested in finding out about Josh’s experiences with the written word? With books? What about the internet and TV documentaries (both of which Josh mentioned spontaneously yesterday when we had a brief chat)? Am I including in ‘reading’ all those ways in which he pursues knowledge, in which he tries to understand the world better? Am I then, including listening? Viewing? Discussing? Should my course with the postgraduates restrict itself to words on a page, or have a much broader view of what ‘reading and writing’ entails? If I go the broader definition, how do my maxims stack up then?

Questions for a later post.

womensbookgroupgraphic1

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged classroom, community, disorientation, EnglishCompanion, Josh, literacy, MajaWilson, reading, teacher training, university | 2 Comments

Promoting adolescent reading

Posted on April 29, 2009 by steveshann

In an earlier post (A broken sleep) I wrote about preparing to teach a postgraduate course called ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’.

With guidance from some wise souls who read the blog post, I came up with an assessment item which is designed to give my postgrad students an opportunity to test their own and others’ assumptions and experience about how to promote adolescent reading against the experiences of an actual student. I described this in my subsequent blog past Headlights in the fog.

So where to now?

I don’t start teaching the unit for a couple of months. In the meantime, I’m wanting to think much more deeply about how we teachers (in all subjects) can most effectively create better adolescent readers.

The professor who originally designed this ‘literacy across the secondary curriculum’ unit has given me some books she thought I might find useful. They are

Best Practices in Adolescent Literacy Instruction edited by Kathleen Hinchman & Heather Sheridan-Thomas
Informed Choices for Struggling Adolescent Readers by Donald Deshler and others
Reading Success for Struggling Adolescent Learners edited by Susan Lenski & Jill Lewis

These three books – soon to be joined by Cris Tovani’s Do I really have to teach reading? – are sitting on my desk, as yet unopened. I’m reluctant to dip into them just yet.

Why?

I remember being deeply impressed, some years ago, by the idea (I can’t remember where I heard it) that reading a new book is an act of courage. When we pick up a new book, we are making a decision to enter into the world-view of someone else, and in order to do this we need to – at least temporarily – set aside our own world view. We need to let go what we ‘know’, and what feels like solid ground. This can be an uncomfortable and disorienting experience. Of course we sometimes discover our own world-view reflected or supported. But there’s a risk involved.

This is something I have always felt, at least with most theoretical non-fiction. When I want to learn from the way another experiences and sees the world, I need to temporarily turn away from the bearings that currently guide my vision and my action.

And I’m not yet ready to do that.

[And suddenly the face of a particular struggling reader comes to mind, a young boy I know well. This boy has had significant times in his school life when he has lost his way, and he is now only gradually recovering a more solid sense of himself in the world. If reading and learning feels to him like taking a risk, like a call to set aside a hard-won sense of self in the world, then perhaps that’s a factor in his ongoing reading reluctance?]

Instead, before I read these books, I want to have a go at bringing my own perspective and assumptions to the surface, to articulate them, to make them more concrete and visible, to test them out a bit to see how durable they might be. Only when I’ve done that will I be ready to let go of them while I read some of these books.

So, over the coming weeks, I’m going to ‘test drive’ the draft assessment described in Headlights in the fog.

I’m going to pick a reluctant reader, a boy I’ve had in one of my classes, and I’m going to explore the nature of his particular challenges and strengths. I’ll try to find out what has worked and what hasn’t worked to help this boy in the past. I’ll speculate on whether there’s a significant disjunction between what he values and/or knows and what his teachers (including me) have assumed he should value and/or know. I’ll ask whether the student’s reading reluctance is linked to identifiable but currently unused strategies.

Then I’ll read some of the books sitting on my desk.

I’ve got a student in mind, but I haven’t asked him yet. I’m going to do that this afternoon.

Posted in literacy, University classes | Tagged literacy, reading, teacher training, university | 1 Comment

Headlights in the fog

Posted on April 15, 2009 by steveshann

sectional_workshop_struggling_readers A few days ago I was worrying about the ‘literacy across the curriculum’ course’ I’ll be teaching later in the year. In one of the many wonderful responses I got to that post, J. D. Wilson Jnr (quoting E. L. Doctorow) suggested that I was experiencing something akin to “driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

So I’ve turned on the headlights and can see a little way ahead. In this post I want to describe what I’m seeing.

I think I can see a focus question, a rough structure, and a couple of assessment items for the ‘reading’ component of the course. (It’s the reading component that I feel less comfortable with, so it’s where I want to start here.)

Firstly, and for reasons outlined in my earlier post, the focus question looks like being: “But I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?”

Secondly, the rough structure (dictated in the main by the university) is that I’ll have one 2-hour weekly tutorial over four weeks with my 90 students on the reading aspect of literacy, and the same later in the semester for the writing aspect. [This seems like a very rushed and concentrated timeframe, but I don’t think there’s any alternative.]

And thirdly, I’ve drafted two assessment items for the initial four weeks of the course, the part which looks as reading. The first is the keeping of an online journal which will be read regularly by me and available to other students. The second (and this is the one that I’m especially inviting comments on) is an oral presentation.

With grateful acknowledgements to Angela Stockman, Jim Burke, Teresa Bunner, Joan Porter, Amanda Goss, Dan Sharkovitz, J.D.Wilson Jnr, Mardie and Elfarran over at the English Companion Ning, here is how I’ve worded it in the current draft:

The oral presentation:

Find a student who struggles/struggled with his/her reading at school. This could be a family member, a student you remember from your own schooldays, a student currently at school, or even yourself.

Get to know this struggling reader. Investigate his/her reading experience in a single school subject (the one you teach). Explore the nature of his/her particular difficulties, challenges and strengths. Study and assess (formatively) his/her needs. Find out what has worked and hasn’t worked to help this student in the past. Speculate on whether there’s a significant disjunction between what the student values and/or knows and what the subject assumes he/she should value and/or know. Or perhaps the student’s difficulties are linked to identifiable but currently unused strategies which could make a significant difference? [If the student has already left school, reconstruct these needs from your research.]

Align Professor Lowe’s lecture, the textbook [which will probably be Cris Tovani’s Do I really have to teach reading?] and/or one item from our reading list with the particular needs of this student.

Then imagine that you have been asked to present your conclusions to the relevant school faculty staff. In particular you’re being asked to give advice to the faculty (which is likely to contain this student’s teachers in this subject for the next few years) on how to help the student with the necessary reading.

Then think about how you might go about presenting your thoughts to the staff? In a short film? In a podcast? As a digital narrative? With a talk supplemented by various media? In some other way?

Create your presentation and present it to our tutorial group in Week 4.

This assignment can be done individually or in groups of up to four. Your oral presentation should take no longer than 5 minutes/person. [This way, we’ll have time to see them all in the tutorial session.]

There are many different ways a group might approach this task: one way would be for one person to find the student and assess his/her needs, another couple would do the theoretical research, and a fourth would create the presentation. There would, of course, need to be regular and fruitful collaborations between all group members.

In addition to the oral presentation, each of you needs to submit a short written reflection from each of you [maximum one typed A4 page] on what you have learned from this task. [Perhaps this could be culled from a longer reflection written in your journal.]

Your written reflection might include why you chose this particular medium, what you have learned about assessment tasks such as this one, what you have learned about your own literacy skills, what you have learned about the relevance of reading in your discipline, and/or what you now see are some implications for your personal professional development.

So that’s my draft.

Does it work? Is it clear? Does it describe a stimulating and relevant culmination to a short course on reading across the secondary curriculum? Is it as good as it could be?

Posted in literacy, University classes | Tagged assessment, curriculum, literacy, reading, teacher training, university | 3 Comments

Schools, football clubs and a changing world.

Posted on April 14, 2009 by steveshann

club171 Our AFL (Australian Football League) season has begun. We’ve had three rounds so far this season and my team, the Melbourne Demons, have lost all three games. By significant margins. Not for the first time, we’re near the bottom of the ladder. Some things don’t seem to change much.

But appearances can be deceptive. When the Demons were winning everything in the 50s and early 60s, football was a very different game. The players were virtually amateurs, training was by modern standards a pretty relaxed affair, and on game day the coach’s role was to spur the players with a ‘blood and guts’ type speech before the game.

It’s not like that anymore. Football writer Martin Flanagan described what he saw when he spent a day with the Demons’ coaching staff before the first match of the season, a few weeks ago:

There was a last team meeting with midfield coach Mark Williams. Williams brings excitement and passion to the game. He and the midfielders discuss the structures they will adopt. I don’t understand a word. Football was a relatively simple game when I encountered it. Now it’s much more technical. Josh Mahoney takes the forwards. I vaguely understand what he is saying. It bears some resemblance to the game I thought I knew, although there is no mention of terms such as full-forward. The forward roles are numbered …The coach’s box defies description. It’s like being inside the mind of a six-headed creature that’s playing chess with mobile chess pieces that have minds of their own.

Everything about football has changed, and everyone knows it. I watch post-match discussions on TV and, like Martin Flanagan, understand very little.

Schools haven’t changed much. I’ve been teaching for 40 years and it’s never been a big effort to keep up. Structures are pretty much the same. Attitudes and assessment practices are familiar.

It’s a pity, especially given that the world has changed.

What will it take, I wonder, for schools to respond to a changing world as radically as football clubs have done?

Posted in Pedagogy | Tagged change, education, football | 3 Comments

A broken sleep

Posted on April 12, 2009 by steveshann

Last night I woke up at 3.17am. No, it must have been earlier than that, because I’d already been awake for while before I finally looked at the clock. Awake and worrying away at the thought that soon I’ll be teaching a unit without enough preparation.

It’s a familiar worry that has disturbed my sleep, in one way or another, many times in the past 40 years, usually in the form of panicky dreams where I’m appearing unprepared before an expectant crowd.

This one, though, was big enough to wake me up. In three months I’m going to be teaching my first post-graduate class of young teachers, and I don’t know if I know anything about the topic.

I probably do. I’ve been teaching for a long time, the topic is literacy, I’ve published books and I’m an English teacher.

But, if in fact I do know something about this topic, I’m not sure what it is. I want to find out what it is. And writing has always been the way I discover what I know.

[It’s with a tiny sense of relief that I realize that this is the first thing I know about literacy, that writing is linked to understanding, that I don’t write so much to express what I know as to discover it.]

To set the scene. I’ll be teaching about 90 secondary postgraduate pre-service teachers on ‘literacy across the curriculum’. These teachers are headed for all kind of classrooms: English, History, Maths, Music, Science, and so on. They’re being asked to think about the centrality of literacy in their professional lives and their classrooms, whether or not they teach English.

My task has been complicated by a number of things.

Firstly, every second post in the blogosphere seems to have the word ‘literacies’ in it, with a thousand different meanings of the word; so this can blur the focus.

Secondly, secondary teachers tend to think of literacy as the job of either parents, primary schools or English teachers; so there’s a resistance to overcome.

And finally this university unit was originally planned several years ago by a professor who can no longer teach the unit but who is naturally looking over my shoulder and encouraging me in a certain direction, a professor with years of experience and a passionate commitment to raising the standard of reading instruction. There’s no conflict; she is warm and supportive. But I’m not her, and I know that I need to find my own direction rather than just adopt hers. I need to be clear about where I want to go.

So what do I know?

I know what ‘literacy’ means. It means ‘the ability to read and write’. This means the ability to get meaning from all kinds of texts, not just books. And it means the ability to express oneself in lots of different kinds of writing, not just essays.Being literate in the 21st century means to be able to read and write skillfully in effective ways in valued contexts (to adapt a way of thinking made popular by Howard Gardner). Clarifying the meaning of literacy, particularly given the loose use of the term, needs to one of our first tasks.
I know that literacy is a tool, not a subject. We become literate through reading and writing in knowledge fields or disciplines. We use literacy in order to understand the world better. Furthermore, we read and write better when we know something about the subject matter. An exclusive focus on either reading or writing is almost always too narrow, artificial and inefficient. (Even in literature and creative writing classes, the focus is almost always on reading and writing about something substantial other than reading and writing itself).
I know that writing isn’t just about expressing what we know; it’s also about discovering it. I was once given a photocopy of an extract called ‘Writing, opening a deep well’, in which the following appeared: “As we simply sit down in front of a sheet of paper and start to express in words what is on our minds or in our hearts, new ideas emerge, ideas that can surprise us and lead us to inner places we hardly knew were there.” Peter Elbow describes this beautifully in the following clip:
I know the link between literacy, knowledge and social worlds. We come to know and understand more clearly and deeply through developing and articulating our thoughts in communities of thinkers. Thoughts, words and communities are an indivisible trinity. I know, therefore, that my postgraduate students will learn most about literacy if they are required to develop and articulate their thoughts with the others in our course.
I know that the course needs to practise what it preaches; that it would be be a travesty, for example, if instead of requiring the students to develop their understanding through the kind of interplay between thought, word and community that I’ve described, I lectured to them in a way that presumed that knowledge could be passed from one skull to another. Of course I want my students to end up knowing something of what my classroom experience has taught me, but they won’t come to it through simply hearing me speak.

So it seems that I know a bit, and maybe I’ll sleep better tonight.

But there’s a big area that I feel very unsure about. Reading instruction. The professor who put this ‘Literacy across the curriculum’ unit together is a reading expert. She has theoretical and practical experience in the setting up of effective reading programs for struggling readers. She has suggested, as a textbook for our students, Do I really have to teach reading? by Cris Tovani, a book that I don’t know yet.

So what’s the problem? There are over three months before our course begins, there’s plenty of time to books like this one and to learn from the professor and her colleagues.

The problem is that I have a deep-seated antipathy towards reading programs. One of my four children was a casualty of a too-rigid focus on reading, teaching it as if it were a subject rather than a skill for unlocking desired knowledge. In a book I wrote 20 years ago, School Portrait, I told the story of a boy driven mad by a too-narrow focus on the reading process, someone who seemed only to make some kind of breakthrough when reading became a way of fulfilling a deeper thirst to know more.

I think I woke up sometime before 3.17 this morning because deep down I’m worried that I’m going to have to teach something I don’t believe in.

Is this my own insufficiently examined narrowness, something the next three months will sort?

As I read Tovani’s book, and others like it, will I see that there are ways of teaching reading that sit comfortably with what I know?

Or am I going to have to re-examine some of my assumptions?

Posted in literacy, Pedagogy, Research, University classes | Tagged classroom, culture, curriculum, literacy, reading, teacher training, teaching, thinking, writing | 5 Comments

Some responses to the last post

Posted on March 28, 2009 by steveshann

picture-37 I copied my last post ‘Expectations, optimism and student performance’ over at the English Companion Ning, and an interesting discussion has followed over there, led by Michael Umphrey, J.D. Wilson Jnr and Clix.

If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to have a look.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Leave a comment

Expectations, optimism and student performance

Posted on March 27, 2009 by steveshann

theclubdvd About an hour ago I was sitting with my 27 top set Year 10 English students. We’re studying satire, had just finished watching an Australian film called The Club and were talking about whether the students thought it was satire or not. The conversation was focused and intelligent, with many different views expressed. Some thought it was clearly satire, and identified satirical techniques and clear targets. Others thought that while it had satirical elements, it couldn’t be classified as satire because the author seemed more interested in telling an entertaining story rather than in exposing important flaws or follies. The conversation was intelligent not only in that relevant ideas were expressed clearly and convincingly, but because there was lots of listening and thinking going on. The class, I’m sensing, understands that satire is a big and complex topic, and that the aim is to allow the course and the conversations to expand our thinking. It’s fun to be a part of.

Then, as I drove home after the class, I heard on the car radio an economist talking about the current financial crisis. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned from economics,” he was saying, “it is that a community’s expectations can influence the course of events. If the community is convinced that hard economic times are on the way, it makes a severe recession all the more likely. If there’s an expectation that things will get better soon, the optimism stimulates recovery. Our leaders have an important role to play in fostering the expectation that we’ll come out of this recession strongly.”

I’m full of optimism about this class of mine. As I listened to the economist on the radio, I thought about expectations, optimism and student performance. I’m not the only optimist in this classroom; the students themselves are confident, articulate and successful. They seem to greet each new topic in class as an opportunity to engage with a stimulating text, to have fruitful conversations, to develop a deeper understanding about satire.

I teach two Year 10 classes, this one (the top set) and another (labelled, quite inaccurately for a number of reason, ‘mixed ability’). There’s not the same degree of confidence in the second class, not the same sense of expectation that a new text or a new discussion will be stimulating. This second class is a great class to teach, full of a more raw and intuitive type of intelligence. But there’s less optimism. Expectations are not as buoyant.

Is learning like the economy? Are the expectations of the leaders significantly influential? I’m sure they are.

Which leaves me wondering what I might do in my second class to raise the level of optimism and the expectation of success.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged classroom, English, satire, standards, student expectations | 2 Comments

Rubrics Part 3: a noun or a verb?

Posted on March 13, 2009 by steveshann

A noun or a verb?

Is a rubric a thing that we create (whether to give transparent feedback or to limit the creativity of our students, depending on your viewpoint)? Well, of course it is! ‘Rubric’ is a noun. Any dictionary will tell you so.

But what happens when we think about it as if it were a verb? I don’t mean this literally, of course. There are too many good nouns that have been turned into pretty awful verbs, and I’d hate to hear someone suggest one day, “Hey, let’s rubric this, shall we?”

I mean something very different. I’m wanting to highlight the change that comes when, instead of thinking of a rubric as an object which is created by a teacher and then used to give feedback and evaluate student work, we think instead of the creation of a rubric as a collaborative act that fosters community, as something which (verb-like) describes an action (or, more accurately, a process) rather than an object.

Too theoretical?

I want to tell a story to bring this back down to earth.

A week or so ago I drafted a rubric and described this in a blog post, which I posted here and on the English Companion Ning. I also shared it with my colleagues at school and with the students.

The responses I got here and on the Ning ranged from suggestions about amending the rubric to thoughts about the way rubrics limit the creativity of our students and avoid the really important feedback that students need. I won’t describe in detail the excellent points made – I think they’re worth reading in full. Most of it, though, led me to understand something new about the issue of rubrics. I think it contributed, too, to the students’ thinking about creativity and the struggle teachers have to respond constructively within the constraints of the systems that dictate some of what we do.

I want to give an example.

In the draft rubric (it was for a digital narrative), there was a clear implication that the students’ digital narratives should be ‘coherent’, that their stories should told in a way that avoided fragmentation. Dan Sharkovitch responded on the English Companion Ning as follows:

On your other blog you have a rubric. One element speaks to a student’s ability to write a “coherent” story as having more value than one that is “fragmented.” Those terms are profoundly problematic for a writer. Many of the short stories in Denis Johnson’s postmodern collection, Jesus’ Son, are in fact fragmented (e.g., Car Crash While Hitchhiking). Virginia Woolf, in To The Lighthouse, creates a narrative structure where, as Auerbach noted in “The Brown Stocking,” that Woolf’s writing evokes the shifting, fragmented nature of human consciousness because her narrative is fragmented.

This worry was echoed by one of my students when he saw the draft rubric, in particular when he saw that we were thinking of limiting the digital narrative to 12 images. ‘This doesn’t fit in very well with what I’ve done so far,” he said, and he described a plan to base his digital narrative around a frentic Dr Seuss book idea, where his experience of our course so far (which is the subject of these narratives) was fast-paced, fragmented, confused by divergent ideas coming in from all sides.

And so we’ve changed the rubric. We’ve ditched the limit of 12 images … and we’ve had a discussion about the appropriateness of a fragmented narrative when that’s the kind of experience the narrative is wanting to describe.

All of which brings me back to the ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ idea. Rubrics as objects have a limited (and sometimes a negative) effect. But when they’re thought about as triggers for a process for reflection and evolution, then maybe they have a part to play in what I rather grandiosely called in my first post in this series ‘searching for meaning in our English classrooms’.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged assessment, community, digital narrative, English, EnglishCompanion, rubrics | 1 Comment

Rubrics Part 2: Is it the discussion rather than the rubric that helps?

Posted on March 9, 2009 by steveshann

I’ve been thinking about the comments I’ve got to my last post on ‘The search for meaning: can a rubric help?

Maybe it’s less a case of Does a rubric help? and more a question of Does having a community discuss a rubric help?!

My colleague Karen LaBonte suggests that, no matter how collaboratively contructed, “all rubrics are a way we deceive ourselves and our students about everything from issues of power in the classroom and who doesn’t have it (hello, Foucault) to the myth that objective assessment is possible”.

Karen has suggested to me that it’s more honest to acknowledge that it’s the teacher who (no matter how experienced and knowledgeable) is making a subjective judgement, and that this should be reflected in the rubric.

I like this point and have had a go at amending the rubric as follows:

picture-26

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | 4 Comments

Rubrics Part 1: The search for meaning

Posted on March 8, 2009 by steveshann

It sounds so silly, pairing the search for meaning and a rubric. Like deciding what mark to give Anna Kerenina. But this is what we do all the time in our English classes, whenever we’re required to give a grade for a student’s creative work.

This is what I have to do today: create a rubric for a digital story that we’ve asked our Year 11 students to make. I wrote about these students and their course in my last post.

Right now I don’t want to get into the question of whether or not we should give grades for these kinds of pieces. That’s another topic. I have to give a grade.

Instead I want to think about another issue. Can we assess this digital story in a way that encourages honesty and supports a genuine search for meaning? And, in particular, might a rubric help?

These questions are especially important to me right now because of the nature of this particular course. The boys have been exploring a number of central questions. Why are certain texts valued? What makes a classic? Who or what determines meaning in a text? They are questions which attempt to take us into the battleground between the postmodernists who say that all value and meaning is relative, and the traditionalists who tell us that we frequently read texts ‘in quest of a mind more original than our own’ (Harold Bloom). It’s difficult, challenging work. It’s also necessary, given the influence of both postmodernists and traditionalists in the senior English course which the boys will do in their final year at school. The students (and I) struggle with unfamiliar and uncomfortable ideas; they (and I) feel tremors in the ground we once thought was solid.

One of last year’s students described this struggle beautifully:

I found that the long period of time devoted to this part of the course in 2008 allowed me to repeatedly change my attitude towards the questions that were being asked. I went from having never really thought about why texts are valued, to thinking that it had something to do with a text’s capacity to sustain differing meanings and interpretations, to a very culturally deterministic position, and eventually to a fragile and unsatisfactory impasse between subjective emotions and cultural pressures. I went from not really understanding the main text (Studying Literature by Brian Moon), to agreeing with pretty much all of it, to challenging some of the major assumptions behind it. The most important thing about development of understanding was that it gave me a long-lasting interest in, and respect for the complexity of, the questions that were being asked. But this did take time.

It was for this reason that we have decided against asking the students to write an essay. It’s way too early. Instead, because we want them to think about (and learn from) their wobbly thinking and tentative wonderings, we’ve decided to ask them to create a digital narrative. “Working in small groups”, we’ve asked them, “create a digital narrative which tells the story of your journey during the first 7 weeks of the course”.

All of which brings me to the central questions I’m asking in this post. How will we mark this? What are we valuing here? What might a marking rubric look like?

Recent online conversations with Maja Wilson (author of Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment) and a re-reading of the responses to (yet another) wonderful conversation on the English Companion Ning (this one called ‘Standards of writing’) have helped get rid of some of my fuzziness around the issues.

Maja Wilson (and others) have pointed out the need to distinguish between two categories: our ongoing responses and interaction with our students in what she calls our ‘interpretative communities’ (responses and interactions which develop our – students’ and teachers’ – thinking and deepen our understanding) on the one hand, and on the other our grading at the end of the process, which attempts to identify a stage reached. As Daniel Sharkovitz put it in the Ning discussion:

If we hide our responses to student work behind rubric masks, we will fail to give kids perhaps what’s most important in our response–the response itself.

So I have to keep reminding myself that the marking of this digital narrative task mustn’t be the sum total of the feedback I give my students about their experience of the course. It’s just the bit at the end. Secondly (and, if I’m understanding her right, this is again connected to Maja Wilson’s point about interpretative communities), the marking rubric needs to be the result of a shared understanding between students and teachers of what the goal is, and of what is valued in the attempt to achieve the goal.

In this case, we’re wanting the students to tell the story of their experience of our course; that’s the goal. And we have two values: honesty and the ability to engage an audience. We’re not (at this point of the course) interested in how well the students have grasped particular ideas, engaged with the texts or managed the routine and expectations of the course. We just want them to tell a story, and to tell it well.

So, will a rubric help? My sense is that it will, particularly if I publish a draft rubric and ask students to help me refine it. Doing this will get us to refine our values and our shared thinking about what this task is all about.

[There’s a wonderful irony implicit in this attempt. The course is, in part, an exploration of postmodern notions that the meaning of a text is largely determined by the reader, by the context, and assumptions and values he or she brings to the reading. By asking the students to create a digital narrative, and by putting myself in the position of a marker of that text, I’m saying that I believe the student has created the meaning and that the success of his text can be measured by the extent to which I have ‘received’ his meaning. In other words, the very marking of the piece positions me as a traditionalist rather than as a postmodernist. How would I respond if a student genuinely took a postmodernist perspective and challenged my right to do this? I think I’d have to take this as evidence that he had truly understood one of the possible perspectives our course teaches!

And, as I write, I can feel the slippery elusiveness of trying to capture the uncapturable, of trying to write a rubric which helps us evaluate creative work. But I’m going to have a go, even though by the end of this post I might be empty-handed.]

I’ve had a look at a rubric for digital story-telling, one that Kelli McGraw drew my attention to. It has categories for point of view and purpose, voice and pacing, images, economy and grammar. But I’ve got Dan Sharkovitz sitting on my shoulder saying:

let me offer you the one standard that I have been able to commit to memory, sort of. Certainly, it has helped me help my students … To be clear about my own bias, I came along during the days of Strunk and White, and the “vigorous writing is concise” mantra. And I thought if I really believe that, why use nine words if six will do? Why write thousands of standards, if one will do. Here it is, the one standard that I have actually been able to memorize: When students compose a text, they will use whatever is necessary to achieve their goal.

These words remind me, as I sit down to draft this rubric, that this is a creative task, that the goal is to tell a story, and that there are many different ways to achieve this in a digital narrative. One might rely on the images almost exclusively (in which case the rubric’s grammar categories are irrelevant and would derail those students who are overly constrained by what the rubric says). The same applies to a student who wanted to tell the story essentially through (a limited number of) words; he might feel obliged to provide music (if it’s mentioned) or come up with a balance of elements: words, music, images. The point here is that there are a thousand different ways of telling a story using the digital narrative, and the students should feel free to use ‘whatever is necessary to achieve their goal’.

[Is all this thinking helping, or am I just procrastinating? I’m not sure that I care all that much. It’s pleasurable thinking. It’s thinking that connects me to conversations – with Maja, Kelli, and Dan, soon with my students, and also with anyone else who cares to join in – which give me a delicious sense of belonging to a community of inquiry.]

So the goal is explicit (to tell the story of an experience of the course), and the values are out in the open as well (to tell it honestly and to communicate the student experience clearly and engagingly). There will be details as well: that it takes no more than 2 minutes to watch, with a maximum of 12 images and 250 words.

[I’ve never made a digital narrative myself. I should have a go. Maybe that’s my next blog post?]

There’s one final consideration. For reasons that are a bit foggy (the three teachers involved planned this assessment about 4 months ago), we decided to make it a group exercise. In groups of around 3 students, they produce one digital story which tells the stories of all the group members. [Or could it be a digital story that tells the story of one of the group members? I think this would be fine. Yes, we want the students to reflect on their own experience, but if the group chooses to write one story rather than three, then inevitably all three will find themselves thinking about their own experience. I think we should leave this open.]

Anyway, it’s a group exercise. Maybe one student will look after the technology, another think through how the story might be told, and a third could be the co-ordinator of the project. However they do it, the group aspect is important. Does it need to be reflected, then, in the rubric?

Let’s see. Time to have a crack at it…

***************

At which point, an interesting thing happened. The more I worked on the rubric, the more I found myself being drawn back to Kelli McGraw’s original. Here’s my adaptation of her rubric.

picture-24

So, there’s the draft. The crucial next step is to involve the community in its evolution. Does it accurately reflect the goal of the exercise? Does it reflect the values we hold?

We won’t be able to tell, of course, until my two teaching colleagues and the students see it. Then, with a dose of good luck and perhaps some careful management, we might move from a draft reflecting my meandering thinking and Kelli’s careful construction to something that is the work of one of Maja’s interpretative communities.

Does the rubric have the potential to help our search for meaning in our Texts-Culture-Value[s] course?

Maja?

Dan?

Anyone?

***************

And just as I was about to press POST an hour or so ago, I happened to notice another discussion on the English Ning, one that I hadn’t seen before, this one called ‘Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment’, where Maja Wilson writes:

Often, I don’t know what I value until I bump into it, so how could I possibly articulate all my values before-hand, even on a self or student generated rubric? I heard Tibetan throat singers on the radio years ago for the first time and had to pull my car to the side of the road because I was weeping. I’d never heard the sound before, and it moved me deeply. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you two minutes before I heard it that I valued anything about that unearthly sound. Imagine if that throat singer had read my set of “values” about singing, and decided not to do his gravelly resonant thing because my rubric indicated I wouldn’t reward it?

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged assessment, community, DanSharkovitz, digital narrative, English, EnglishCompanion, KelliMcGraw, MajaWilson, rubrics, standards, text culture value[s] | 6 Comments

Searching for meaning in our English classrooms

Posted on February 28, 2009 by steveshann

Michael Umphrey has recently suggested that we are witnessing a large-scale, slow motion holocaust as students succumb to a sense of meaninglessness.

I have a half dozen preoccupations as a teacher–things that I keep thinking about. One of them is all the boys I have who believe what they have been taught–that all morality is a set of fictions and fables, that all the goodness in history was only a veneer of hypocrisy, that life has no meaning, that they are free to do whatever they want, and that self-gratification is the only important guide. I think we are seeing a large-scale, slow motion holocaust. It’s not so apparent in middle class suburbs, but it’s spreading. [English Companion Ning]

This bleak image of a large-scale, slow motion holocaust has stuck in my mind. I’ve been thinking about it while listening to a group of senior students discussing books that they have valued, in a course called ‘Texts, culture, values’. Can I can detect this slow motion holocaust amongst my students? Have they given up on the search for meaning?

******

To set the scene, I want to delve a bit deeper into Michael Umphrey’s thoughts. He sees literature as having the potential to make a profound contribution to the search for meaning, in particular in the quest for the true, the good, the just and the beautiful.

Michael often writes about the relationship between certain literature and the true.

… literature matters as a way of exploring the big questions in life as part of a quest to understand life better. The best writers, I think, show us life in ways that allow us to think more clearly, with more subtlety about more important questions… Good books, I would say, show me many useful things to know about my life as a person. Better books empower my thinking about how relationships work and what relationships have value and how we can move forward. The best books deepen and complicate my vision of Creation and the relatedness of all of life. [English Companion Ning]

This search for the true is linked, for Michael, to Enlightenment notions of freedom.

Clarity of thinking would lead to freedom from folly, freedom from error, freedom from false gods, freedom from deception. [Michael’s blog on English Companion Ning]

Just as can find the true in our big stories, so also we can find the good. “ I think all stories are unavoidably moral,” he says. They are an antidote to the “moral confusion [which] is the great educational problem of our age.”

Helping someone see, through fictional characters, what actions tend to make durable relationships possible and what moves tend to make them unlikely is not performing a therapeutic act. The student need never say a thing about his or her own relationships. When I am talking about Lear’s children, I am pointedly not talking about anyone in the classroom. But if an increased understanding of the human heart leads to a bit more wise or moral conduct, then that student has become, through education, a bit more free. [English Companion Ning]

The third pre-occupation of the literature we should teach, Michael implies, is the just.

I sometimes think they need happy stories about the birth of kings (which is the coming into the world of justice). I think they need to know of better worlds, and how they are built and held together, and what strengths of character are needed. [English Companion Ning]

And then there is the beautiful. In so many of his eloquent posts, Michael conveys his sense that he finds certain literature intensely beautiful. Another English Companion Ning contributor, J. D. Wilson Jnr, speaks directly about this.

I teach the books I teach because I find them sublime and beautiful and I hope my students can come to appreciate the beautiful and the sublime. [English Companion Ning]

He understands the difficulties involved in reading some of these texts.

I am dyslexic and reading is very difficult (it was all through school for me) and requires more time for me than it seems to require for others but it has always been worth the investment of time … A student should not have to wrestle with Chaucer, Morrison, Shikibu, or Scheherazade or any author if the text itself does not have a value that makes the wrestling match worth the time spent wrestling with it. But too often, I think as a culture, we expect immediate pleasure or gratification, we do not want to tough it out. [English Companion Ning]

But are our students willing to make the effort? Do they see the point? Or is Michael right, that is this large-scale slow moving holocaust taking place, where students are turning away from any sense of purpose or meaning in life. Increasingly, he warns, our students are not interested in what literature (and culture, tradition, community, history and religion) might offer them.

******

So I observe my Year 11 class. Are the boys in my class searching, in literature, for the true, the good, the just and the beautiful?

My fifteen students are not typical. (Who is?) They are all boys, they go to a traditional private school, and they have all opted to do an Extension English course. Nevertheless, I’ve found similar yearnings and views amongst many other less eloquent students. So I want to tell the story of what happened in this class last week.

On Tuesday, my fifteen students all brought in a book that, for whatever reason (this was entirely up to them) they valued. The books were:

The Keys to the Kingdom by Garth Nix (brought in by Shannon)
Edward’s Quiet Book, a colorful cloth book made for Ed by his aunt when he was a baby, with buttons and zips and flaps and textures for him to explore
Earth Is Room Enough a collection of stories by Isaac Asimov (Daniel D)
Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer (Matt)
Wild Swans by Jung Chang (Cameron)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Michael)
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (Tom)
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by Mark Herman (Will)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowlings (Daniel P)
1984 by George Orwell (Monty)
Brisingr by Christopher Paolini (Corey)
Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkein (David)
The Pooh Story Book by A. A. Milne (Lukas)
Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse (Akira)
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Amani)
Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood (my book)

We sat in a circle and each of us talked about why we valued our book. Then the boys wrote about this in their Ning blogs.

What came out of this? Well, in their own ways, the boys talked about the true, the good, the just and the beautiful.

For many of them, their chosen book opened their eyes. The books spoke about what was true: true about their own national histories (Amani and Akira), true about the dark side of human nature (Tom, Will, Monty), or true about worlds and experiences very different from their own (Cameron, Daniel D and Matt). Amani described his book as being “rich with truth and intelligent reflections”.

As the boys talked and then wrote about their books, there was also a thirst to read about what was good and just. Whether thinking about life in the trenches, in a concentration camp, coping with the consequences of fallout after Hiroshima, surviving during Mao’s cultural revolution, or experiencing cultural and personal dissolution in Africa, the boys were wanting to talk about what was right and just. This applied not only to the non-fiction. Corey wrote of the main character in Brisingr:

how his life is completely and utterly changed, how he has to move and adapt to his new life, how he is put through absolute hell and has to rise to the situation. This was my valued text as I believe it beautifully and succinctly describe exceptional mental and physical endurance and strength of its main character, his perseverance and strength of character which allowed him to endure some very intense trials.

And then there was the beautiful. Some of the boys (Michael and Will, for example) found it in the author’s voice. Others, like Daniel R, Lukas and Shannon, found it in the worlds that the author created. Lukas wrote about The Pooh Story Book:

… Especially at a young age I had always thought, and somewhat wished, that the Hundred Acre Woods were a real place and constantly wondered if it really existed. Because of this the book became a kind of escape from the real world into much more of a simple and enjoyable lifestyle.

Even as I write this blog, several more reasons come to mind [about why] I value this book. I begin to think that maybe it isn’t the actual book that I value, but the actual idea of such a place with such characters and with such a way of living. I now realise that the stories and characters that were created by A. A. Milne never really had a background. Even though they are children’s stories that need no background, the fact that there is no past to worry about or to dwell upon as you read the stories has something to do with the enjoyment and relaxation I get out of reading them…

When I am reading the book, it almost seems as if it was being recited off by heart out of the head of an old man who has recited [it] over and over and has eventually fallen in love with the stories themselves.

And there was another strong element present. It’s not easy to find words for this. It’s something to do with belonging, attachment and community. It’s also something to do with love. Many of the students – a majority probably – talked about how the book was important because of its associations. Ed’s book was lovingly made for him by his aunt. Shannon’s book gave him access to a community of fantasy lovers that had previously been closed to him. Daniel D’s father had loved the Asimov book and that was a spur to Daniel reading it. Amani came to his book through a conversation with a respected teacher. Daniel P and David felt that their books had been milestones in their membership of the community of real readers. Lukas’s book was read to him by his parents.

My students value certain books because they’re searching for the true, the good, the just and the beautiful. They also value them because the books are part of their connection to others.

These others include us as their English teachers.

J.D. Wilson Jnr wrote in the English Companion Ning:

I try to use blogs and podcasts and movies and photographs and music and anything I can get my hands on that will help students see the value of reading difficult texts; to help them see what it is about the literature that moves me and shapes me. [English Companion Ning]

******

So, are we in a world where pessimism, cynicism and a premature disillusionment is spreading, where we’re on the brink of what Michael Umphrey has called “a large-scale, slow motion holocaust”? Quite possibly. There are signs of it in my English class, if I listen hard enough.

But there are other signs as well. In sometimes fumbling and sometimes very articulate ways, our students are saying that they are looking for something substantial, something that helps them find meaning, and that they want our encouragement and support in helping them to make the effort.

Are they willing to make the effort? Yes, if they’re supported by fiercely passionate teachers like Michael Umphrey and J. D. Wilson Jnr, who keep reminding us that literature matters.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged attachment, Beauty, classics, classroom, community, culture, English, ethics, MichaelUmphrey, Ning, texts, Truth | 9 Comments

Postscript to the story of Peter: the link between clearer thinking and better writing

Posted on February 23, 2009 by steveshann

After reading my story of Peter’s writing, Teresa Bunner wrote:

It might be that a chance to go back and reflect on his work allows Peter to see for himself that he still has some work to go. After all, writers don’t write one draft and move on to the next chapter.

This was good advice. And here’s what happened next …

**************

This morning, I walked to class with Peter.

“I read what you wrote yesterday,” I said.

“Oh yes? What did you think?” he asked, looking anxiously at my face in the way that students do when they’re worried that they might have been found to be wanting. This look always distresses me, as it seems so often to be the instinctive reaction of students, no matter how hard I try to make my classroom a place where thoughts can be freely expressed, risks taken and ideas aired just for the sake of seeing how they sound.

“I’d like you to have another go at it.”

“Why, what was wrong with it? I’m pretty sure the spelling was fine. I put it through the spelling checker.”

“It wasn’t the spelling, though I’m surprised the spelling checker didn’t pick up a few glitches. No, it was something else.”

“Something else?”

“Yes, something else. But, before I say anymore, I’d like you to read it through to yourself when we get to class. See what you think? Don’t try to guess what I might be thinking. Just read it through to yourself, try to hear it in your mind as you read it, and then tell me what you think. And it’s OK if you tell me that it sounds just fine to you.”

As I said last time, Peter is a conscientious student. He’s also an extremely pleasant young fellow.

“No worries,” he said. “I’ll see what I think.”

So he read it through after we’d settled into our classtime, then called me over.

“I’ve had a read of it,” he said.

“And?”

“And I think it’s a bit jumbled up. I know what I’m talking about, but I’m not sure that someone else would.”

“So tell me now, in your own words, what you were talking about,” I said. I noticed that Peter was looking less anxious now, as if happy that he was being encouraged to discover some things for himself.

“Well, I was wanting to say that the satire works at different levels. On the surface it’s funny. But the more you dig down into it, the more you can see there are different issues that are being looked at.”

“Underneath the surface humour there’s a serious point being made?” I asked.

“A few actually. It’s as if there are quite a few layers when you dig down into it, and there are different points being made on the different layers.”

“What was your research question again?” I asked.

“Does satire have to be in the form of comedy?” said Peter.

“I don’t think that’s the question you’re actually interested in,” I said. “Or at least, if it is, I don’t think you’ve worded it in a way that conveys your meaning. You’re really interested in the question: Does satire have layers?”

“Mmm,” said Peter. “Or maybe my question is; “How deep does satire go?.”

We talked some more, then I suggested he have another go at the writing.

About twenty minutes later, he had written this:

pope

My question is how deep does satire go?

In the above piece of satire there are many levels in it, at the moment all the levels may not be apparent but I’m going to pull the levels out.

The fist level of satire is the comic level that is apparent, it funny because it’s not what you see with pope on a supped up car and channel V as a sponsor and the pope my ride.

The second level in this is the subtleties that aren’t easy to spot like V TV. What does the V stand for? Vatican that’s very funny because there’s is a channel on Foxtel called Channel V it’s a music channel, also that channel appeals to the younger audiences and therefore there’s another subtlety that isn’t easy to spot. On the pope mobile as the cars make badge it’s a cross which is funny but is very well thought out.

Another level on this piece of satire is this a radical thing that is shown, it’s not what you normally see the pope with but, the Vatican often takes radical stances on some things and this piece is also radical so it’s quite similar when you think about it.

The roman catholic church is known to have a following in which is very young generation, generation ‘x’, generation ‘x’ is known to be into fast cars, and ‘hip and cool’ things and therefore this satire shows that by the title pope my ride mimicking pimp my ride.

The author is showing all the levels in this piece of satire.

This is so much better than his first go, and all it took to transform it was a conversation to help him clarify his thinking and some further time to rewrite the piece.

We – teachers and students – can get stuck with ideas that writing ability is innate, that you’re either a good writer or not. While there’s an element of truth in this, incidents like this remind me yet again that good writing is connected to clear thinking, and that anything that helps to clarify the thinking is likely to lead to better writing.

**************

(Note: in my first account of Peter’s writing, I changed some details because I didn’t want there to be any chance of him being identified. But the postscript says such a lot about Peter’s personal qualities and thinking ability, that I’ve reinstated the changed details.)

Posted in literacy, My English classroom | Tagged English, Ning, satire, teaching, thinking, writing | 1 Comment

Student writing: raising standards without dampening enthusiasm

Posted on February 22, 2009 by steveshann

First of all, thanks to all of you who have looked at our Satire Ning. There’s a hush in the room when I show them our Clustr Map with visitors from other parts of Australia, many parts of America, and from Canada, Scotland, England, France and Finland. And thanks, too, to those who have sent me comments, which I have passed onto the boys. Karen, Scott was very pleased!

Those of you who have had a look will understand why I’m feeling quite buoyant about our satire project. There are evolving and maturing thoughts being expressed, good interactions happening, an obviously growing interest in the nature and potential power of satire … and the boys’ own original satire is beginning to pop up! As yet I haven’t been the target … but that will come!

But not all is rosy. Today I want to think aloud (and with you) about how best to respond to a piece of writing that is not well written.

I have asked the boys to explore a question about satire that intrigues, puzzles, concerns or otherwise stimulates them. They each need to discuss a particular satire which helps them to think more deeply about their chosen question.

One of the boys (I’ll call him Peter) has chosen the question: Does satire have to be in the form of comedy? It’s a good question.

Yesterday Peter found a satire on a politician’s attempts to be modern and ‘with it’. He wrote about this piece (and his question) as follows:

In the piece of visual satire in using is the politician with his car thing. The connection between this and my question is on first seeing the text you may laugh at it but as you think about it you see some deeper levels to this text they might be funny but there are some points in their like how young/old the politician is ect.

I think the author is trying to show in this text that the political party sometimes has ‘radical’ stances on some subjects when compared to the majority of others but this piece of satire and completely different to the party we know and therefore I think that the author is tyring to show how different the political party is.

Also I think that the author is trying o show how this political party has continued to have a lot younger followers and audiences and generation ‘x’ is into fast cars and therefore the party trying to appeal to this in this text. Although the writing in a bit seventies I think that’s what the author trying to show what the politician has brought to the party.

This text has shown under all pieces of satire there are man deeper levels to it whilst the first is normally comic the rest aren’t and are issues that the author thinks needed to be addressed.

I would recommend this to other students but all satire has deeper levels to it so I think that you can look at different pieces of satire.

Now Peter is a conscientious student who takes a lot of pride from being on top of his work. He’s found a good question and he has clearly been thinking about it. He has written more than many of the students. But the writing is rushed and full of errors, the thoughts he has had are not well-expressed, and he hasn’t yet found any strong or useful connection between this particular piece of satire and the question he is seeking to explore. He has completed the task, but not progressed in his thinking.

As I read his piece, I formed a picture in my mind of Peter doing the writing, his fingers flying over the keyboard, his mind on the clock and how quickly he could finish the writing; or, given his general conscientiousness, his mind distracted by anxious thoughts because he was sensing that he wasn’t really on top of this task.

My mental picture of Peter was influenced, perhaps, by a recent blog post by Jim Burke called Are we all becoming distracted teenagers? and also Michael Wesch’s video A Vision of Students. Today. Peter, like the students in this video, undoubtedly has a very full life of his own which is not necessarily visible in the classroom.

How should I respond to Peter? I want to acknowledge his conscientiousness (he is more on top of this course than some of his classmates, and he is obviously thinking about satire); but I don’t want him to think that it’s OK to write like this. The class is a new one, so I’m not sure how this piece of writing measures up to Peter’s usual standard.

How would you respond?

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged English, JimBurke, MichaelWesch, Ning, satire, standards, writing | Leave a comment

My English classroom: challenging student stereotypes about satire

Posted on February 15, 2009 by steveshann

Our Year 10 satire course poses the question: ‘Should satire have an ethical intent?” It’s a bad question, I’ve come to realize, because it implies an option: that satire might have an ethical intent, or that it might not. I thought so myself, once. I used to think that there were two kinds of satire: the kind that just mocked for the sake of mocking, and the kind that was trying to achieve something worthwhile. Through teaching this unit for a couple of years (we come to understand more deeply through having to teach!), I now believe that true satire always has an ethical intent, that satirists are incensed or frustrated or dismayed or even concerned, and that they are motivated by a desire to expose some vice or folly that the rest of us might otherwise not see.

The sloppy way we asked the question has contributed to a struggle many of the students are experiencing as they strive to see beyond their pre-conceptions about satire. Most of the students came into the course with a vague notion that satire was all about having a few laughs at someone else’s expense. They found our question ‘ethical intent’ at odds with their initial conception. There has been considerable resistance to the idea that satire has an ethical underbelly, that it plays an important role in a healthy society.

[Those] of us involved in education have not appreciated the strength of the initial conceptions, stereotypes and ‘scripts’ that students bring to their school learning nor the difficulty of refashioning or eradicating them,” (Howard Gardner p5 of ‘The Unschooled Mind’).

This is what we’re wrestling with at the moment in my two Year 10 Satire classes.

If you were to look at our class Ning, you might think otherwise. We’ve got blogs being written about the nature of satire, discussions happening about whether or not satire, by its very nature, must have an ethical intent, and there’s growing evidence everywhere there that many of the students have ‘got it’, that their initial ideas about satire have shifted. Andrew, for example, wrote:

In listening to the speeches of other boys in the class today I realised that a good satire isn’t just a piece of comedy that’s having a laugh at any old subject but rather one that points out the flaws or ridicules something that people take more seriously such as politics. I think now that it is also more important that there is something for the reader/viewer to learn in a piece of satire … [Satirists] seem to be trying to prove a point or influence the reader/viewer on the topic.

So, it looks as though progress is being made by the students, that the thinking is shifting.

But, as Gardner suggests, we sometimes underestimate the difficulty of refashioning or eradicating the underlying assumptions of the intuitive learner. At the end of last week I stood at the door of my classroom and asked the following question:

Would you say that it is a necessary precondition of satire that the satirist has an ethical intent?

Most said ‘sometimes’ or ‘mostly’, a substantial minority said ‘no’, and only a couple said ‘yes’.

This is neither surprising or frustrating. The boys are doing really well. Our classroom conversation are thoughtful and lively, and their thinking is shifting from clearly expressed but superficial understanding to more tentative and sometimes confused acknowledgment that there are unexpected complexities and challenges here. And it is a complex question. I’m not always confident that I’ve grasped the essence of satire myself, and I feel the need to keep on thinking about it. The boys challenge me to think further. The complexity is contributing to the aliveness of our discussions.

But I don’t want to let myself be fooled by the fun we’re having. The unschooled assumptions are sneaky, and have a habit of going underground for a while (as students respond as they imagine the teacher wants them to respond), and then of resurfacing later on.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ve asked the students to research a satire-related question of their own choosing, and to create some satire themselves. I’m hoping that these experiences, and the reflections and discussions that come out of them, will further undermine unschooled assumptions and build more durable and deep understanding.

If you’ve got this far and would like to have a look at our Ning, then please do so. The boys have been thrilled to discover that we’re starting to get visitors from other parts of Australia, and from America and Europe.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged classroom, education, English, Ning, satire, teaching | Leave a comment

First days in my English classroom: student disorientation

Posted on February 8, 2009 by steveshann

confusion-confernce1
In response to my last blog in which I described my first English lesson with a new group of Year 10 students, Jim Burke recalled that

the psalms charted a cycle in which we moved from Orientation to Disorientation (as a result of events, actions, or teachers like you jamming their switchboards as you did tonight) and New Orientation, which after awhile becomes their Orientation (the world as they know and expect it to be).

Jim’s response got me thinking about this stage of Disorientation, a dizzying which has continued beyond our first lesson.

There are many reasons why they’re feeling disoriented. New teacher, new year, new routines, as well as a topic (satire) which is proving elusive and more complex than they’d assumed.

But it’s not so much why they’re feeling disoriented that I wanted to think about in this post. It’s more how this disorientation has manifested itself over the last couple of days. What’s it been like in our classroom? How have the boys coped with feeling dizzied?

Some have reveled in it. They’ve posted cartoons and started discussions on our Ning. They’ve enjoyed wrestling the fact that a question tends to lead not to an answer but to other questions. Josh, who has won English prizes in the past and who, within minutes of it being raised, wanted to answer the question What is satire? with what he thought at the time was an adequate definition, subsequently wrote (with some relish): “My original idea about what satire is could be expanded!” Another wrote:

At first the idea of satire was really vague. After the first lesson of English I was in some ways more confused, [partly] by the topic [itself] but more because of its broadness. After yet another class the idea of satire is becoming more clear and the questions … known. So what I’ve gathered so far is that this is a really broad topic for what I thought early on was going to be fairly short and straightforward, just some laughs.

The confident boys are experiencing the disorientation as a pleasurable challenge.

But others are making some tentative complaints. Some have asked why I have produced a wiki which gives details about texts, questions, assessments, resources and dates, but nowhere explains what satire actually is. Others sit in their groups looking glum and waiting for someone to give the right answer. One boy tried to extract ‘the correct answer’ from me as follows:

“Dr Shann, is this satire?” he asked, showing me a cartoon. “What do you think?”

His body language was saying ‘I know there’s a correct answer, and I know that you know it, and I really want it, I’m a keen student and I want to do well in English, and I’m trying hard but it’s very frustrating that you won’t just tell me”.

“Well, what do you think?” I said.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what satire is. I need your help.”

“But you think this might be satire? I wonder what it is about this cartoon that made you think that maybe this is an example of satire?”

“I don’t know. I just thought it might be. But what do you think? Do you think it’s satire?”

Others have rushed to the dictionary where half-understood terms like ‘irony’ and ‘parody’ and ‘juxtaposition’ are carefully noted and neatly jotted down. But there are no lights in these eyes yet. For some, the definitions haven’t contributed to a deeper understanding of what we’re exploring.

And there are some students who shrug their shoulders and roll their eyes as if to say, “This new teacher is really weird.”

These are good kids, and the manifestations of disorientation are polite and suppressed. But I can sense their frustration, impatience and even some resentment.

As a young teacher these emotions used to bother me. They’re still uncomfortable, but now I welcome them. They suggests that something is happening. And, as Jim was suggesting, we can’t get to some new learning or deeper understanding without first feeling disoriented.

Posted in My English classroom | Tagged classroom, disorientation, English, Ning, satire, school students | 1 Comment

What do the students want to know?

Posted on February 3, 2009 by steveshann

First day of the new school year today. First class, Year 10 English, a class of pretty switched on boys. We’re starting a semester-long unit on satire, and I’d prepared reasonably carefully: a unit plan outlining where we would go in the first couple of weeks, a wiki which gave details of the whole course, and a ning ready for our collaborations.

The boys were outside the classroom waiting for the lesson to start. I opened the door, found 26 mainly-unfamiliar faces in front of me, said hello, then asked (while they waited outside the door):

“OK, who’s got a question for me?

Silence.

So I said, “Well, it’s been good meeting you,” and shut the door. I could hear them murmuring outside, some puzzled, some bemused.

A couple of minutes later, I opened the door again. “Any questions?”

“Why do we have to ask questions?” the first one asked.

“Thanks,” I said. ‘Write your question on the board.”

“What happens if we don’t ask a question? … Why did Tottenham lose last weekend? … Are we doing lots of writing this year? … What text are we starting with? …” And so on. Each time a boy asked a question, I gave him a whiteboard marker and he entered the room and wrote his question up.

The board was soon full of questions, and we talked about them one-by-one. They were good and helpful questions.

But two questions stood out from the rest. The room was especially still as they were read out. It was clear that these two questions mattered a lot to the boys.

The first was, “What are you like?”

The second was “What do you hope we will have achieved by the end of the year?”

The class finished an hour or so ago, but I’ve found myself thinking more about these two questions and their significance to the students. I don’t know whether my responses to the two questions enlightened them at all. I do know, though, that the fact that they wanted to ask these two questions, and the stillness in the room as I tried to answer them, told me quite a lot about what was on their minds as we began our work together.

Posted in My English classroom, Pedagogy | Tagged classroom, English, questions, satire, school students, student expectations, teaching | 2 Comments

Bringing the world into the classroom

Posted on January 28, 2009 by steveshann

I discovered John Holt when I was a young teacher in the 70s. His ability to closely observe and precisely describe children’s learning was an inspiration. So, when I decided to start writing this blog a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to use him as a kind of starting point for my current thinking.

In How Children Learn, Holt wrote:

Fish swim, birds fly; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to ‘motivate’ children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.

In his later years, Holt decided he has been mistaken. Not about people’s natural desire and capacity to learn, but about school’s capacity to bring the world into the classroom. Schools bred failure. They were too insular, too artificial, too full of fear.

Now, after more than 30 years as a teacher, I’ve come to two conclusions about what Holt has written. Yes, people desire to know; it’s as natural an urge as a fish’s urge to swim. And yes, we can create the right conditions for learning in a school and a classroom.

So I’ve been asking myself the question: How do we bring the world into the classroom so that children’s natural desire to learn can flourish?

Here are a few ways:

we teachers parade our own desire to know … to know more about our much loved subjects, to know more about our students and their passions, and to know more about teaching and learning. There’s nothing more deadening for students than to be subjected to a static, cobweb-entangled teacher who knows it all.
we leave room for the students to talk, think, explore and take risks. Curiosity is killed in a classroom which privileges the quick right answer that ignores life’s complexities.
we use the enormous potential of Web 2.0 to ‘bring the world into our classrooms’ Teacher blogs and conversations are rightly full of fury about the policies of many schools to block the internet.
we use clear goals and constant feedback (from us, from peers and from others) to help students see how to learn. Michael Fullan has talked about formative assessment as being the most potent way to increase student learning.
we give them time. If we rush through the curriculum too quickly, all children at the same pace, we create the fear which Holt wrote so eloquently about in Why Children Fail;
we trust the children to do the rest.

Sylvia Martinez written beautifully about all of this in her post on Sustained Tinkering Time. There she wonders what we might learn from successful reading practices (like SSR – sustained reading time) when we’re trying to help students become more technologically-literate. She writes that

student choice, plus time for unstructured access to lots of different computing experiences is crucial to developing literacy and fluency with computers. My vision includes a teacher or mentor modeling passion, collaboration, interest in the subject, and offering experiences that challenge students without coercion, tricks, or rankings. If I had to come up with a catchy acronym, I’d call it Sustained Tinkering Time (SST).

And, like Holt, she sees the underlying issue as being one of trust:

Without technology literacy skill tests, lessons on tools, and assigned projects, will students take more risks and try more complex things? Or will they do the least amount possible? I think this boils down to what you believe about learning – is it natural or does it have to be coerced.

Posted in Pedagogy | Tagged education, Holt, learning, Martinez, teaching, Web 2.0 | 7 Comments

A reflection on method and content

Posted on January 19, 2009 by steveshann

In a couple of weeks from now, I’ll be taking my first University tutorial. I’ll be with a group of education students taking a unit called Curriculum Studies. It feels good to be starting something new at this advanced stage in my teaching life!

Over the past couple of days I’ve been trying to imagine myself into the shoes of these students (none of whom I’ve met yet). What would they be expecting? What would be a good starting point for our first tutorial? They will have heard their first lecture from a colleague, in which he’ll attempt to shock any who might have assumed that curriculum is either value-free or benign; he’ll suggest that curricula coerce, manipulate and repress, and I’m expecting there will be some strong reactions. Alternatively we could talk about the first couple of chapters of a textbook on curriculum, in which many ideas, assumptions and beliefs about curriculum are raised; it’s a good textbook with some very useful ideas in it.

Either starting point would do, or any number of other possible ones. But as I’ve been mulling over the past few days, and now as I’m writing, I’m coming to see that the starting point is not really what I need to be thinking about.’

How we teach is just as important as what we teach. This is a lesson I’ve had to learn over and over again in my years as a teacher. The best lesson plans go awry unless the students sense that

I’m enthusiastic and knowlegeable-enough about my subject;
I’m looking forward to the collaborative work together;
I acknowledge that their own experiences are relevant and important;
I’m interested in their thoughts;
I’ll encourage – and if necessary insist – that they respect and listen to each other.

In other words, the curriculum is both product (the what) and process (the how). In a unit on ‘Curriculum Studies, this is a central idea, and one that is best taught through modeling.

cartoon

Posted in Pedagogy | Tagged content, curriculum, method, teaching, university | 2 Comments

Preparing new teachers to use technology

Posted on January 15, 2009 by steveshann

A while ago Lynne H asked on Classroom 2.0:

what are universities doing to make sure that their teacher candidates are prepared to use and teach their students to use technology?

Her conclusion was ‘not much’.

I read this at a time when I was beginning to plan a unit of work for postgraduate trainee teachers at a local University. So I turned Lynne’s question in on myself. What might I do to prepare these students to use technology?

I thought about what I have been doing with my own secondary students. (I teach English part-time, and this University work is new for me.) I don’t teach them about technology; I don’t know nearly as much as many of them do. Instead we use it; and I learn as I go. A year ago I didn’t know a wiki from a website. Now we use wikis in all my classes and in the new year we’re going to have a go at using Nings.

So how might I do something similar with these University students, so that they don’t just experience the thrill of Web 2.0 together but leave the University itching to use it in their classes?

I’d like some help here. I’m going to describe a proposal that I’m going to make to my co-teacher of this postgraduate course. So if you have any thoughts about what I’m about to propose (see below), your comments would be most welcome.

The unit

The students are training to be secondary teachers, and are from a variety of disciplines. The focus is on literacy across the secondary curriculum. We want to stimulate the students’ thinking about, and skill with, literacy.

A part of this is to give them opportunities to develop their own writing skills. Our first thought was to design a major project around a creative writing task to do with family. But I’ve been wondering if we might instead use this creative writing task to develop the students’ literacy skills more broadly, including the use of Web 2.0.

So I’m thinking of suggesting to my colleague that we shift the focus of this major task. Instead of asking them to present an extended piece about family, I’m thinking of suggesting that the students

choose one of the following suggestions as their major task, and
document their progress, from beginning to end, in a regularly written personal blog.

My suggestions for this creative task

Imagine yourself the possessor of a piece of knowledge and/or insight in your discipline that you urgently want to communicate to others in your field. Identify a professional journal or website for which you might write an article on this breakthrough knowledge, and write the article.
Increasingly students in schools are being required to be ‘Internet savvy’, and to communicate their ideas using the web. Here is an example from a student who decided to create a website on a topic which interested him, Postmodernism. Your task is to identify an educational issue that you would like to explore, and to create a website or blog which engagingly teaches an interested community about this topic.
Imagine that you are wanting to challenge a school staff about an educational issue dear to your heart. How might you communicate your thoughts on this issue to the staff? In a short film? In a podcast? Using VoiceThreads? With a talk supplemented by various media? In some other way? Create your presentation to an imagined school staff.

Any thoughts?

So what do you think? I’m relatively new to all this, and an old fogey as well, so your suggestions and challenges would be most helpful. Would such a task help address Lynne’s concern? How might it be extended, or adapted, or changed? I’d especially appreciate thoughts from trainee teachers or teachers who have just finished their training. Would this have been useful for you?

Posted in Pedagogy, Research | Tagged teacher training, technology, university, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment

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Notes:

Heloise and Abelard

Involving university students in research

Why Shakespeare? A student perspective

Andrew

Thomas

Reuben

Rachel

Jane

Katherine

Terence

Matthew

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The ‘So What?’ of reading instruction

Tovani Chapter 3: Parallel experiences

Ch 4 Real Rigor

Tovani Ch 5 ‘Why am I reading this?’

Ch 6 Holding thinking to remember and reuse

Tovani Ch 7 Group work that grows understanding

Ch 8 Assessment that drives instruction

Tovani Ch 9 Last thoughts

On the nature of literacy

DEFINITIONS

PROPOSITIONS

Preface

My final meeting with Josh

I. Josh

II. Readicide

III My maxims revisited

Postscript: reflection on the writing

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