Post-Article Group Ideas

Group: Adolescent Identity and Literacy

Objective/part/focus: Identity

Learned: Lotsa stuff.

I really enjoyed this project, mainly because as a future teacher I found it not only relevant but interesting.  I focused on identity of adolescents and tried to keep that focused on literacy.  Honestly, not always successful.  I may have bitten off more than I could chew, but it was still fun.  There are lots of studies and fun articles and projects to browse, and I spent quite a few hours just reading different things about identity.  Lots of this was more psychological, but it is still helpful and relevant to my overall topic.

I found Alverman and Moje to be the most helpful/relevant to my topic in terms of literacy and identity through reading.  Alverman had more of a cultural and societal aspect whereas Moje focused more on classroom application.  Moje’s text vs. textbook concept sort of caught my fancy and I admit, I played around with it awhile and discussed it with the teacher at my site.  I could go on and on about identity because I think it plays a huge role in the classroom and I enjoyed actually reading data and sources to back up my thoughts and sort of play in new directions.

As far as the overall group goes, it was nice to have a bigger group within which to delegate different issues.  Everyone sort of had different ideas, so sometimes meeting in the middle was a tad interesting.  Adolescent identity can be a dividing topic; the concept of AR and ability groups were obviously passionate topics for some more than others.  There can be arguments made either way, and I hope we used enough research to let that dictate our thoughts rather than using our opinions to influence what we see in a source.  Both were interesting topics to explore.  As a kid, I never liked AR (mainly because in its earlier stages, there weren’t enough good books in the system.) But to be honest, now I have less of a problem with it.  I can see that it is attempting to provide a service by providing a consistent form of regulating reading in the classroom.  Regulation may or may not be necessary, but that is a topic I do not want to delve into.  Just because kids don’t love it doesn’t necessarily make it a bad system.  It is flawed like any other.  I think instead of blaming said system, we should change how we use it and formulate it to fit our classroom.  For example, use overall word count (which my mother swears every sane teacher should and does do, which remains unconfirmed by me) rather than points system.  A multiple choice test may not be the best way of evaluating student comprehension, but I must argue the fact that these same kids are dubbed the “scantron generation” at my site and multiple choice tests aren’t necessarily out of the norm for them.

Now, ability groups are something that was also a hot topic within our overall theme.  It is difficult to gauge based on one or two experiences (mine was great; Aly’s was not.)  Again, I would accept the fact that these are used in the classroom, and as I am not a teacher (yet), I shall not say whether it is right or wrong.  It is a system.  I think to be utilized correctly, I would apply a lot of Moje’s ideas and try and make it work for the kids.  Instead of labeling them (don’t negatively impact their struggling identities,) I would use it in the same way as we use our groups in this class.  Our article groups comprised of six girls with different backgrounds, literacy ‘levels’, and goals.  Yet we all managed to collaborate and create our tumblr page.  I think reading and writing and working in groups is important for kids to understand and be able to apply in life.  It sort of goes back to way earlier ideas of learning through real-world application and more of Moje’s ideas.

Gotta say, I am looking forward to reading more Moje next week. Heavy, but interesting ideas!