Reading together

Perusall logoWe’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together.

Instructions for joining on the Assignments page.

 

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Time photoOur course invites you to work with data collection and analysis, readings, and discussion around the field of literacy studies

Author: kathleencarley

My Reflection

My Reflection

Hello! Here is a link to my reflection. It is posted on Google Docs so if there’s any trouble viewing it please let me know.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ud4n7t1Jnmqz1nNVmSLnTTf7FVYAlBXAKsmL1dOMS1o/edit?usp=sharing

Blog 9 Moje Article

Blog 9 Moje Article

I think a really interesting and important aspect of Moje’s article was the idea of critical literacy being used in the classroom. Moje goes through a variety of ways that critical literacy can be used in the classroom and why it should be used.

According to the article, critical literacy is “..an author’s language implicitly or explicitly produces certain meanings that tend to support particular social relations and institutions. Likewise, readers’ responses to texts are informed by their past experiences as people of a particular gender, race, ethnicity, age, and social class. Critical literacy practices, therefore, involve the interrogation of texts to uncover the ideologies operating in them; they also involve the interrogation of the relationship among texts, readers, and the wider society in which ideologies are embedded” (Moje 407).

As a future educator I think that critical literacy is extremely important, not only because it engages students so that they can relate the reading to their own life, but that this may keep students interested and hopefully not bored to death. Allowing students to question things takes them out of the realm of having them point out strictly factual ideas, like perhaps the definitions of the words they are reading, and helps them put together a creative way to approach reading instead of something that seems like a chore. As well as assigned reading, student can choose their own novels, articles, or magazines in which they can analyze the different themes and conflicts in the book. This is also where the idea of book clubs come in, students can either work with others or independently. I think this idea offers personalization for students which is important so they can discover their own interests while also learning from their peers.. Students today have a lot of access to learning about current social issues through the media and I think this is great because they can apply issues going on today to what they are currently reading. With these ideas I think it’s important for educators to remain patient with students because obviously they will have much different ideas than us and other students.

Blog 7 Hybrid Pedagogy

Blog 7 Hybrid Pedagogy

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Peer_to_Peer_Learning.html

Throughout this course we have been discussing the ways in which students learn, one being peer-to-peer learning. This article from Hybrid Pedagogy, written by Sean Michael Morris, introduces an event that is to happen on May 3 on Twitter. Essentially, this event involves a discussion on twitter with the hashtag #digped to discuss the ways in which we can utilize different technology to engage our students while also taking into account the ways in which things are changing and have already changed.

This article is relatable to what we have discussed in class in that it takes into accounts discussions we have had about how teachers can adapt to changing technology and other forms. Instead of seeing technology as a threat to a teacher, the article states that we can view it as a tool to allow our students a newfound voice, an outlet, and a place to share with the public. This is the approach I will take when I am teaching. Instead of running scared from things I do not understand, I will make a large effort to constantly stay up to date with different ways in which I can improve my classroom for my students.

This idea also takes into account the idea of sponsorship. By logging on to the internet, students can access countless forms of sponsors. The internet itself is a sponsor because students have the ability to search for any book or article they could fathom. Students can talk to other students across the country and share ideas. As teachers we can guide them to things they can search for. Setting up a GoogleDoc for students to recommend books they have read to one another is another awesome idea.

I’ll end with this quote from the article I had linked. I think it sums up a great way in which future teachers can view the internet.

“When we come to recognize the Internet not as an array of sites and pages but as people, all facing outward, facing each other — as they might in a classroom — we glimpse the learning environment we’re a part of, and that we’ve been a part of for decades. The pedagogy we apply, then, becomes a pedagogy of the collective, an invitation to the vast mass to think, discuss, and share.”

 

Blog 8

Blog 8

The workshop presentations have been great ways for me to gain ideas about ways I can incorporate different forms of literacy into my future classroom practices. I really enjoyed the Gaming and Literacy presentation because it incorporated a little bit of identity into it as well (my group is Literacy and Adolescent Identity). For example, I am a pop culture junky so obviously I rocked that table, but at the video game table I completely failed. Allowing students to choose which table their interests are is awesome because they get to incorporate the things they do for entertainment in a way that teaches them something in the end. I thought it was really cool how everyone from our group was sent to different tables to win different things and that each table had a different subject.

I also really enjoyed the Hip-Hop and Literacy presentation because I think it is applicable to Junior High and High School English classes where different literary devices are being taught. Allowing students to bring in songs, whether it is Hip-Hop or any other genre, is a great way to teach students about the different literary devices in a way that allows them to choose a song that they love and enjoy while also teaching them what we need to. I also think it would be interesting as a teacher to find out what our students are listening to. During the presentation we had to make our own little rap which I thought was really fun because we got to use a digital resource. This is something I would definitely love to incorporate into the classroom.

Blog 6 Adolescent Identity and Literacy

Blog 6 Adolescent Identity and Literacy

My group is discussing and researching Adolescent Identity and Literacy. Our conversations in class have been a bit all over the place as we have been planning how to execute our website by splitting up subtopics within the broad topic of Adolescent Identity and Literacy. Our main focus during the in class discussion is the ways in which schooling can hold back students in their literacy studies. For example, the AR framework that so many schools use. We are focusing on the ways in which we (as teachers) can possibly get rid of these programs and set up our students with reading assignment that allow our students to explore their own interests and various reading levels.

Youth, Identity, and Digital Media written by David Beckingham discusses the ways in which digital media has affected our youth. Beckingham discusses the ways in which people view our younger generation as a “digital generation” but doesn’t completely agree with this viewpoint. Many believe that the digital generation is using the internet in innovative and creative ways. He states that recent studies have  showed that students aren’t using the internet in such ways but are mostly using the internet as a way to communicate among peers by reinforcing local networks (16). I found this to be very fascinating when relating this idea to the ways in which an adolescent uses the Internet to form an identity. The lines get blurred because while on the Internet, an adolescent can be someone they may not be in real life. This thought is frightening to me and I cannot really place why that freaks me out so much. I guess I believe that adolescents should find out who they are through real life interactions, but use the Internet as purely a source of communication and information perhaps starting in Junior High or High School.

However, I believe that digital media can affect children and youth in positive ways, as Beckingham points out that digital media allows youth to have more of a voice than they would otherwise. Beckingham encourages a balance between the new innovations of digital media while incorporating old educational frameworks.

“This does not mean that we are uncritical of youth practices or that we believe that digital media necessarily hold the key to empowerment. Rather, we argue against technological determinism, stressing the need for balanced scholarship that recognize the importances of our current moment within the contest of existing structure and unfolding history. This means placing contemporary changes within a historical contest as well as working to highlight the diversity in the landscape of media and media uptake (ix).”

Here Beckingham stresses how essential it is for us to push for a perfect balance between digital media and other learning practices to enrich our youth. In the process we can learn what is going to work best for our adolescence during the rise and expansion of media. As future educators we must figure out a way to incorporate all these things…. eeeeek.