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: angelnelson24

“Feed the Elephant, Don’t Weigh It”

“Feed the Elephant, Don’t Weigh It”

Fall 2013 Early British Literature.  A book in my hand that we later learned to call “The Brick” and a small room filled with less than twenty students. Almost all of them Berkeley bound kids with stiff backs and the latest vegan craze stinking up the classroom. Well it wasn’t their food that stank that the classroom, it was their attitudes.

 

You read what over the summer?

I just finished reading Jane Eyre and all of Jane Austen’s novels.

Oh, interesting but I don’t think that’s sophisticated enough for me.

I can’t text like that. I have to write grammatically correct or I’ll go insane. Texting is really messing with writing and makes everyone sound stupid.  

Tablets and computers will never be equivalent to a book when it comes to learning.

I’m so embarrassed that I’m apart of this generation.

 

So how do you survive two years of literacy bullying? You pretend to be like them so they don’t leave you out of discussions or judge you about the things you prefer to read.  Professors stood behind the students and secretly judged those who pulled out a laptop or started to fall asleep during their two hour monotone lecture. So in the next two years it was slowly instilled into me that literacy came only in the form of a twentieth century or earlier novel. Literacy only came from reading and writing tiny print on a white piece of paper.

 

Fall 2015 Introduction to Literacy Studies. Thank you Kim Jaxon for teaching me that for once they weren’t completely right.

 

In a weird backwards world the nerd girls had become the “social queens” and I had become the outcast “tough cookie.” My parents taught me to read whatever I had wanted as long as I read. So for the longest time I grew up thinking that reading was reading. Everything and anything was good enough (except for Twilight because let’s be honest). Of course I couldn’t see that my idea of literacy and their idea of literacy had been molded by our sponsors. Deborah Brandt and Margaret Finders really made it clear to me. So while both my parents, who wouldn’t call themselves readers, encouraged my literacy by letting me read anything from Vogue, National Geographic, Harry Potter, and Goosebumps; their well educated parents pushed a different genre of literacy on them.

 

I look at my grandmother, myself, my sister, and my cousin. One writes letters with carefully written cursive, one texts, one blogs, and one tweets.

 

My point? My point is that we are all different, we all communicate differently. The way we communicate is greatly influenced by the world around us. Time has become a sponsor of our literacy without us even knowing it has. When something important needs to be said my grandmother will write long letters taking almost two pages to express how upset she feels about a situation. My 16 year old sister will write a two paragraph blog with relevant gifs on Tumblr about how annoyed she is with her school’s dress code. My 11 year old cousin will tweet out in less than 140 characters and tags about how excited she is to be going on a field trip to the Exploratorium. And I’ll simply text the only three people I actually care to talk with emoticons and abbreviated words. My grandmother didn’t have a cell phone or social media to express her concerns. She had some stationary and a pen. I grew up when cellphones were just becoming apart of everyone’s life. My sister and cousin grew up with social media being an influence on everyone’s life.

The time we grow in up not only influences the way we communicate but also sponsors our literacy. We might all have the same concerns but we are going to communicate them differently. One’s not better than the other and one form should not be valued over the other.

So if I decide that I want to become a teacher, I want students to understand that what you read, how you communicate, how you learn and understand can never be limited to one way. No one has made me see how important this until I arrived to Room 442 where certain interesting and exceptional beings blew my mind away.

Article Groups Were Fire

Article Groups Were Fire

Young Thug, Blue Scholars and Cunnilinguists? Crap what did I get myself into. Hip-hop isn’t my choice in genre but it was my choice for article groups. I didn’t know anything about different rappers or artists. It’s not that I don’t like hip-hop it just doesn’t grab my attention like it does with everyone else. But this isn’t the point.

The point is that I learned so much from not just my article group but from all the other article groups as well. I learned about the connection between poetry and rap. I learned about how important it is to engage students with their learning and how old methods aren’t always the best way to teach students.

I enjoyed the Maker group. It was fun working under some pressure and no real guidelines. The only problem I had though was that I would have loved to actually have a little more guidelines or an example of what to do. That’s just me as a person though and I understand the whole point of having to come up with your own idea with whatever tools are given.

Working in a team has always been a problem for me. I’m not really into relying on other people to get a project done. But for this class it hasn’t  been a problem. Working in a team where all our interests were in the same place made it even better. We all collaborated with each other and shared our ideas without any negative feedback. I felt that I learned a lot more with teaching each other than I do from some of the teacher centered classrooms that I have.

Hip-Hop in the Classroom

Hip-Hop in the Classroom

At first hip-hop might not sound like an appropriate way to teach students. But after thinking about all the things I remember learning they were often lessons taught through music and rhyme. It works and not only a good tool for the English classroom.

After reading several articles about hip-hop being a good tool to use in the class room. Dr. Pedro, a professor at NYU, spoke about using hip-hop and rap to help students study. He made a comment about how kids can easily remember song lyrics but have a harder time remembering school related things. He makes a point that students need new ways to learn things and teaching them the old way isn’t working as well.

Another article that I’ve read was about how the brain works when free style rapping. The research on two rappers showed that while free styling a part of the brain, that controls the part of the brain where planning and complex behavior come from, was used less. They also found a connection in the brain where language, emotion, and physical movement is used and actually rose in activity.

Tween to Teen

Tween to Teen

It’s weird. Not really weird but I guess it’s more of a feeling of nostalgia. It might have been written in the 1990’s but it’s all so similar even in 2007 and 2008. Almost twenty years later and it’s all still the same. Being a girl who’s been on both sides, I can easily relate. Margaret Finders takes a look into these two different social groups that are entering into the teenage girl realm. These group of girls discover what they value most and where their literacy is like from actions they have taken.

Just Girls follows two groups of girls through the first year in junior high. One group of girls, “Social Queens,” demonstrate to us the things that influence their literacy the most. Their need for popularity leads them to find things such as note passing and yearbook signing really important. Just thinking back to middle school I remember how amazing it felt to get a note passed to you from a boy or a girl. These girls talked about reading magazines and the influence their parents had on them as well.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the “Tough Cookies” who valued being an individual verses following the flock. They talked about how education was their goal and working hard now will help them achieve that. These girls valued their family and own interests. They would read classic novels and believed in being good.

I believe that from looking at these two groups of girls we can understand the major influences teenagers have on their literacy. These studies show us why some girls desire to read teen magazines and why others prefer to pick up an actual novel. It would be very interesting to see this study done today. Especially with all the social media and access to the world from their finger tips. Would both groups being using Tumblr but for different reason?

Literacy is Gr8

Literacy is Gr8

“What the hell does brb mean?” 14 year old me after getting a text from a friend. Let’s be honest we all have had to stop and try to decode jumbles of letters. I never had the guts to ask a friend what something stood for. I mean who wants to look stupid? My generation has been constantly put down and made fun of for texting, twitter, etc. And I believed them. I was ashamed of myself, my brothers and my sisters. Oh no! We’re not reading enough!

No, we’re just not reading the same way you were.

What I’ve come to understand is that this idea of literacy is constantly changing. What was literacy 400 years ago? The bible? They’d be terrified for your literacy if they saw you reading a magazine article and saying things such as ‘totally’. We are not in a crisis. We are creating a new language and learning to switch from a casual speech to formal literature. Jesse Stommel has addressed that when we text we are aware of everything we do. “He or she is aware of the ways that text-message-speak distorts Standard English — aware, in fact, to the point of revelry” (Stommel). There’s more gain than loss. I can easily go from reading a text to reading Sense and Sensibility. Just as Brandt has stated that we are piling all of this new information of old and new into us.

Yes, somethings have been damaged from our new form of literacy but we have also gained some new abilities. So I am not ashamed anymore. I am astonished that I am a part of this movement in literacy. I have gone from writing notes to friends to texting. I have gone from writing small formal papers to blogging for homework. Every day I go to class I am truly blown away with this new lenses. We are gaining a new form of literacy and we need to understand what exactly is going on. My biggest question is how should we utilize this if this new form of literacy isn’t so bad?