As our class comes to an end, I’ve come to the conclusion that literacy is infinite. There are infinite types of literacies due to all the different ways we can receive and produce content and there are types of literacies that have not yet been invented. We will always be learning a literacy (or several at once) in our lifetimes. The author, Scribner, writes that as individuals we create our own specific literacy for certain purposes in our lives. We all have different needs and therefore must learn different literacies, which means we cannot define literacy as a static and all-applying thing. It is ever-growing, ever-evolving and unique to each of us.

Since literacy is so complex teaching and learning literacy is a huge problem. Which literacies can we deem the most important? How can we prepare for literacies of tomorrow? If everyone is different can we even teach the same literacies? All these questions are demanding to be answered by today’s educators. I believe we should approach the problem with localized lesson plans and standards to fit the needs of certain regions. Teachers can not be expected to teach every literacy skill, especially skills that are unhelpful to students. We must do the best we can to stay current with regionally popular literacies in attempt to teach or prepare our students for literacies they might need. It is a huge effort to undertake, but this is the way to maximize everyone’s potential to succeed.

Teachers will need help though. I believe everyone has the chance to be a sponsor for some type of literacy and we all attempt to offer help to anyone reaching out. Teaching that friend how to work a social media site leads them on to greater connections. I also believe that the self is the best teacher. Having the initiative and drive to push oneself to learn something is the most valuable skill.

Before this class, I had not given much thought to what literacy was. I thought it was basic reading/writing and only a problem in impoverished areas. My view has been expanded to include texting, reading maps, working a computer program, to reading a tide book. I see now that literacy is everywhere and as a future teacher I have to be aware of the evolving definition. I was inspired by Henry Jenkin’s ideas about creating a participatory classroom since we live in a participatory world. I plan to have students collaborate often as they are their own expert in some way to further their knowledge and my own on material. I will also be flexible in allowing different types of media as assignments to be turned in. I have experience the more collaborative and multimedia options as assignments in my own classes this semester and feel these classes have been the most memorable and constructive to my education. Plus, they were just plain fun.

For my internship I was place in Chris Persson’s class at Chico High. It was a great experience because of Chris’s amazing personality and her ability as a veteran teacher. She had me reading teacher classroom management skills and lesson plan books as well as allowing me to observe her class. I observed the class for many hours, graded students’ work, picked out potential lesson plans and helped students with questions. I witnessed students who made me question whether I really wanted to do this (one made a javelin and chucked it with a war cry at another boy while they had a sub) and then had moments that reaffirmed my desire to be a teacher for kids with amazing potential. They had to give speeches on topics of their choice and I heard incredible things from these 14 year olds. I learned Chris’s disciplinary style and how even when you hate some material you have to act excited about it in order to give a good lesson.

One day she told a particularly misbehaving class that she would call their parents if the acted up. She spent the whole class on the phone leaving voicemails along the lines, “Emily is a joy to have in class. But I’m having difficulties in getting her to stay on task. Her disruptions in class are not acceptable and I need your help in dealing with them. Please call me back.” After about five of these, the 9th graders were dead silent and mortified. When they left she told me she had actually only been calling her own house, but the rest of the week the student were on perfect behavior.

She hates Animal Farm but you wouldn’t know it. She got the kids to sing Old Major’s song and has many of them enjoying the book. After they leave she’ll grumble about it though and ask me if I was really sure I wanted to be a teacher.

Even with all the ups and downs of the semester, I could see that the students absolutely adored her as a teacher and that she loved them.

I also was lucky enough to observe Alicia Bates, the co-teacher, in her final stages of becoming a teacher. So now I know what to expect (mainly be ORGANIZED and PREPARED) for mine. Chris also says she would love to have me as a student teacher in a few years. Hopefully, I receive her because I feel I learned so much from her in this short amount of time.

Overall, 332 was my favorite class of the semester and I’m so glad I had the opportunity for my internship as well.

I’ll admit I was a little skeptical of what Tomb Raider had to offer in a classroom setting when I first sat down. However, George gave brilliant connections as to how the beginning walkthroughs of games where the user passes obstacles through a process of trial and error with only a little prompting to classwork. In my education experience, typically assignments given included detailed rubrics, steps and my teachers held our hands most of the way through it until we get to the end where we were left to complete the scariest part all alone. Yet when I was given more flexibility in projects and less structured processes to finish it, through collaboration with peers and problem solving I got much more out of the assignment.

I found the games that took potential real life scenarios and made them a series of problems to solve to be the most interesting. I feel that I would be more likely to use these types in a classroom since they are so relatable to real life issues, necessitate creative problem solving and require working with others. Plus, they just sound fun.

The gaming group also pointed out how successful games are in the classroom since so many students can relate to games. I suppose this caught my attention because 21st century students are gamers which relates to my own article group.

I am part of the 21st Century Literacies Article Group and have learned that this topic is much larger than I anticipated and therefore much more difficult to condense. It is so important that teachers educate students on these new literacies and even prepare them for using tools that are not even in existence yet. 21st Century Literacies are not going away and are fast becoming necessary tools people need in the real world outside of the classroom. But we already knew this, we are a part of the tech-savvy generation so the issue for most of us is incorporating new technologies into our future classrooms.

I focused on the digital storytelling aspect of 21st century literacy because I found it everywhere was I understood what it was. I would recommend anyone in the class interested in using digital storytelling in their future classroom to got to http://edtechteacher.org/index.php/teaching-technology/presentation-multimedia/digital-storytelling for ideas.

There are plenty of Ted Talks on youtube about the 21st Century teacher and what they need to do. I watched many of them (none particularly stood out) and a message often repeated was that as teachers we need to also learn from the students. Educators are not always the specialist in the room anymore and involving students in our development as teachers is critical if we wish to continue teaching relevant information to students.

I read “On Being A Double Agent” by Lauren Witherington, an assistant professor of education at the University of Arkansas, she had gained experience teaching in middle and high school English classrooms for seven years prior towards getting her PH.D. The link is here: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/critical-pedagogy/double-agent/.

This article begins with her explaining how she would give advice to fellow and unexperienced TA’s right before they went to teach their classes, because of her experience in a classroom already. Witherington raises the issue of how little or no pedagogy training college professors receive typically before going on the job. As a liaison between the education and English departments she witnessed desires for innovated teaching methods and more challenging curriculum. She calls for college professors of all subjects to be more formally trained in pedagogy since even the best lectures are relatively inadequate. Pedagogy is not valued enough in our education system for future professors compared to the esteemed research. Witherington proposes two possible solutions: challenging pedagogy classes required during grad school and “induction programs” for the newly hired faculty like the one in place for k-12 teachers. Of course, some universities have policies like these in place but not enough of them do. The author concludes that formal training to teach at the university level improves the classes and the students’ knowledge, which is what should be the goal.

I liked this article because it discusses all the things we are doing in our own classes learning about our future careers as teachers (like activities and collaboration) and raised the point of how college professors are prepared to teach. I have had several college professors and I can distinctly recall who was a “good” teacher and who was a “bad” teacher. The bad ones where typically lecturers, unprepared for anything that veered off the schedule or syllabus and seemed to be uninterested in student input. Maybe had they had the formal pedagogy training classes while they got their PH.D. they would have held my attention more. This article reminded me of the article by the New London Group in class today. The authors kept bringing up the change in culture and literacies and how we had to evolve our teaching style to accommodate those changes. Well we also have to change the way we teach our teachers in order to really educate all levels of students the new literacies.

Before reading this article I knew little about PH.D. coursework and I was shocked to learn that many do not learn how to teach at the college level in depth before taking on a teaching position. I have had many experiences teaching a variety of topics and skills to people for years, but I am still learning and am eager to improve or get ideas. This class gives me potential tools, ideas and skills that I will be able to use in my hopefully innovated classroom. I feel that a future professor should also be gathering as much training as possible in order to provide students the best resources. Besides how can we poorly educate the educators and expect brilliant results?

As I was watching Hobart Shakespeareans I was watching some of the elements of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom come to life. Here was a teacher connecting to the students and getting the students to connect to the material. This documentary was further proof that involving the students through active learning allows them to flourish. These kids not only did their own production of Hamlet, but got to meet an outside experts Ian McKellen and Mike York, and fully understood the text.

Keep in mind that these are ten year olds. I’m almost twenty and still can’t get through a Shakespearean play without checking my understanding on Sparknotes after every Act. It’s not as if these kids were genius prodigy children, they were typical Latino and Asian American kids most likely from immigrant families. But through Rafe’s teaching they were reading and grasping book and topics most high schoolers struggle through. This classroom read To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, and Catcher in the Rye. This is the reading list of my high school English classes and I can attest that my experience with these books were not so in depth and interesting as these Hobart students experienced. The fact that these fifth graders were able to read and comprehend what is normally considered 9-12th grade material makes me question our literary standards and policies here. Are we holding the majority of students back from their full academic potential by assuming they can only handle a certain level of reading? I think we are. With enough effort to break material down in an interesting, participatory way I believe elementary classrooms all across America can accomplish the student success rates of Rafe’s classroom. Money does not seem to be an obstacle either (besides the obviously expensive class trips to the capital but I believe that to be more of the social studies subject of Rafe’s class). This school was in the middle of LA in a poor and rough neighborhood. Their classroom production was low budget. Their were no fancy gadgets shown aiding the class. With a dedicated teacher to engage students what is thought is nearly impossible is an attainable goal.

The best part about this documentary is seeing the students’ light up with what they were learning. Seeing their ah-hah! moments, emotional reactions to texts, and being excited to be there is what I hope to see in my future classroom.

I am part of the Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom by Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley book club, aka the best book club there ever was. I think we all were a bit surprised at how interesting this book actually is. I’ve never actually read Moby-Dick but after reading this text about teaching it I want to read it, which is proof that the method developed in this text actually works!

I was lucky enough to be in charge of reading the first two chapters and got a basic introduction and rundown of the TSG (Teachers’ Strategy Guide). It all boils down to this: we are part of a participatory culture now and we need to change our teaching styles to reflect this culture. The method developed encourages participation, brings in non-English perspectives on texts, expands on core literary practices, uses other media that relates to literature and does this all with both high and low tech activities. It’s about getting the students excited about what they are about to read and then having them validate their own knowledge through participatory lessons.

We only got through half the book today, but it was mostly about specific ways we approach texts now, what motivates us to read and how bringing this awareness into the classroom creates a “community of readers.” They give examples of activities and games the experimented classes did and showed a seven step process of the TSG for Moby-Dick. Three experts involved in the project describe this through their expertise perspectives. In between the briefings we all talked about how awesome the activities mentioned were and recalled participatory activities we experienced in our own education.

This book could help future teachers of literacy reach and effectively teach more students in ways that will not only get students engaged in their literacy but also potentially enable students to learn new literacies by showing them new medias.

We’ve all had that boring teacher that just lectures for an hour and assigns books that we could never see ourselves willingly reading. At the end of the class most students do not come away with any interest in texts or desire to further pursue the topic. This TSG is designed to get students of today’s technological advanced and community minded society interested in what they are learning.