CCCC 2006: Day One

March 22, 2006 by

Ahh. Day one, and how do I spend it? Fiddling about for a while in my room. I didn’t go to a morning workshop, so there seemed no reason to rush. I did go downstairs to make myself a nametag and check on all my NCTE coworkers, to make sure that no one needed help. I decided to go ahead and lug my heavy laptop to the workshop so that I could take notes on the session. I was fortunate enough to get a seat near a plug, so I didn’t run out of battery power. The battery on this thing seems to only last about an hour :-/ Perhaps I should see if I can buy an extra battery for it, or maybe this is another excuse to get that baby Mac that I want.

There is no wireless in the meeting rooms so all I could do was take notes. No live blogging from CCCC it appears. Delayed blogging will have to do, so here goes:

I’ve broken in on an afternoon workshop, Fostering and Sustaining a Community  and Culture of Digital Writing, with Doug Eyman, Dànielle DeVoss, Joy  Durding, Angela Haas, Stephanie Sheffield, Martine Rife, and Suzanne Rumsey.  The room is relatively full of people, but I managed to get here early enough  to get one of the outlets in the room. The group has introduced themselves,  and Danielle even introduced the handouts and CD of resources (and an excellent parallel Web site with copies of the resources).

After a brief introduction, we’ve been set to work as a group to think about
quuestions sent to folks in advance–basically defining the genre of digital
writing and exploring the pedagogical and professional issues and goals involved.
Issues that came up include:

  • Lack of professional development
  • Challenge of working in a completely paper-based classroom and meeting
    students current literacy demands
  • How to build community and programs, at the beginning of the process
  • Conception of literacy in general, not just decoding words on a page
  • Distinguishing between technology as a media and technology as a mode of
    delivery
  • Goals: using tech because we can, or because students really need this
  • How does it shape community
  • Not just techne of it but also critical analysis
    of the media

There was lots of discussion of the term digital rhetoric, with one definition that focused on “anything you can transmit by the Internet”–an oddly limiting definition. Also focusing on word and image, none of the other modalities. Someone mentioned CAPTology (computer aided persuasive technology). Most visual assignments focus on image as argument/persuasion. Need to consider other modes of discourse.

Sharing of group goals for the workshop, and for exploration of digital rhetoric at home institutions. Importance of sharing, fact-finding. There was discussion of whether the word digital was necessary. If rhetoric is communication by any available means, isn’t the word rhetoric enough? And that exchange led to a crowd favorite question: “What is the opposite of digital rhetoric–analog rhetoric?”

Throughout the session, there were many video clips and Web site examples of
writing and pieces for students to discuss and explore. All were excellent,
but my favorite has to be the World of Warcraft video–”Grab  your dick, and double click for porn.”

There were a number of specific assignments described, and I didn’t begin to
get them all written down. Here are a few:

  • List the different digital communities  you belong to and think of the ways that you interact in those communities. An  idea that was somewhat a combination of things included in the ReadWriteThink  lesson Defining Literacy in a Digital World and Paying Attention to Technology: Writing Technology Autobiographies.
  • Focus on an exploration of the Variety of ways that we represent  themselves in those different communities, including analyzing current representations and creating creating new ones. Doug Eyman described a variation where students began by investigating themselves online. Another example was to have students create a profile for a group or organization that they belong to. Parts of the conversation overlapped with the ReadWriteThink lesson plan Naming in a Digital World: Creating a Safe Persona on the Internet.
  • Analyze various Web sites and then apply what you learned to designing your own Web site, an idea shared by Joy Durding, which she used with 9th graders. I rushed up to ask her to submit it to ReadWriteThink. She had the resources. She just needs to make it fit our format. And it’s definitely a lesson that we could use on the site.
  • In discussion, ask students to consider what you need to know to compose
    the various digital texts that they interact with. While mentioned as a simple
    point of discussion with students, the idea seemed like a possible lesson plan
    idea to me. It could be a sort of variation of Defining  Literacy in a Digital World, which really focuses on reading. What we need  is a parallel Composing Texts in a Digital World lesson plan that focuses on  the ways that people create these various texts. I’m thinking not of something  that teaches all composing skills so much as asking students to look at available  texts and analyze the composing skills behind the texts.
  • As discussion swirled, another lesson plan idea came to me, and since I had
    my laptop, I just began writing. I tentatively named the lesson Exploring
    the Digital Divide: A Social Action Project    . It seemed to me that perhaps an important  project was to ask students to do some actual exploration of the issues of
    access around them. The working overview that I came up with is “Students define
    issues of digital access and the resources necessary to take advantage of digital
    resources. With their definitions in hand, small groups complete an environmental
    scan of the digital resources available to them in a specific setting (e.g.,  the classroom, the school or local library, the workplace) and determine how
    they are effected by the digital divide in a local community. Inspired by this
    field research, group members propose and complete a social action project
    appropriate for their findings.” It may be too much, so I may end up focusing
    it more; but it’s a start and I think it could be a useful lesson plan.
  • Dànielle described a postcard assignment. She has students get postcards
    of the university and then analyze them: how does this represent the university?
    After exploring, they create their own postcards that represents how you
    feel about your school? Might be able to create a ReadWriteThink lesson plan
    that does similar things with postcards from their state or region, or they
    could use other documents on their location (e.g., pamphlets and resources
    from the chamber of commerce or visitor’s bureau). Another variation might
    be to ask students to look at historical postcards to determine what they can
    tell about the place and time as it is communicated in the text of the card.
    Juniors and seniors might get postcards from college visits and complete the
    assignment as Dànielle described it.

Filed under Personal Journal, Teaching with Digital Tools Tagged with ,

11/23 Journal

November 23, 2005 by

Cleanapalooza is 90% over. The living room is inhabitable again, and there’s enough space in the kitchen to cook.

Spent the afternoon in Salem, with my mom, sister, and niece. Mom had an eye doctor’s appointment, and we went along to give her company. While she was in the doctor’s, we took the car and did a little holiday shopping at a nearby Walmart. Didn’t buy anything overly exciting, but did manage to get some little things out of the way. After Mama’s appointment was finished, we went by the fire station where my brother works. It’s an older building in Roanoke. It was beginning to snow, so we didn’t go inside. Just said howdy, I gave him my leftovers from Sonic, and we were on our way back home. We ordered various pizzas for dinner so that we weren’t distracted from Cleanapalooza.

Filed under Children's/YA Lit, Personal Journal

Writing like a writing teacher

June 26, 2005 by

Perhaps this will interest no one other than me, but I think it’s a reminder of how we sometimes forget who we are and what we know. I struggled for weeks with the text I’m trying to write. I’m still trying to write it, and in many places it is crappy extraordinaire. I’ve just been unable to write anything useful and equally unable to figure out why I can’t write anything. I mean. Look, I’m a writer. It’s what I do. While I was stuck, I was writing lesson plans and Inbox entries and even a conference presentation—but I couldn’t write my manuscript.

I was sitting on the Selfes’ porch last Thursday, writing and rewriting the same damned pages. Gracie was lying nearby, but she wasn’t any help at all. Cindy was even sitting across from me for a while, writing like the writing fiend that she is. There’s something really odd about trying to write when your role model/idol is sitting across from you. But that’s a different entry.

The point was that I couldn’t write, and I had over the course of the weeks blamed a million things. The desk wasn’t comfortable in the apartment, so I rearranged things and even got a lightweight TV-type table to solve that problem. The chair wasn’t comfy, so I bought a folding chair that was better. Still stuck. I rearranged my writing and set up so that I was writing in the comfy stuffed “living room” chair. Still blocked. I tried writing in the CCLI. I tried writing at multiple machines, Mac and Windows, different locations. I still wrote crap or couldn’t write at all.

So here I was on the Selfes’ porch. I had a good chair and a large table. I had writing stuff all around me. I had doggies to pet. I had a great view of woods and wildlife. I was hoping for a moose, but one never showed up. Still, I was stuck writing crap. Okay, it was thickly humid and 90+ degrees and I was dripping like a popsicle in hell; but I knew that the heat wasn’t the problem. I hadn’t been able to write anywhere, after all.

Something about having Cindy sitting across from me made me think about the problem differently. I started quizzing myself. In my make-believe world, I imagined what it would be like if Cindy were to ask me how my writing was going and what I was accomplishing. I knew how to answer that question. My chapters just didn’t feel right. One section was all choppy lists. They read like things that I had written, since parts of them had grown out of Lists of Ten; but they didn’t fit together and try as I might, I couldn’t make them sound not like lists. The Intro sounded something like I would write for an Inbox message. The research section sounded something like a very extended Theory to Practice section from a lesson plan. That or like a self-contained article of its own. Nothing fit together, and none of it felt right.

Now, I realize that I was giving myself a writing conference. Or more accurately, I was making believe that Cindy was giving me one. But it wasn’t solving anything. All I was doing was thinking through the reasons that my text sucks big. Defeated, I started my inner voice of self-hatred and despair. I remember thinking, “You idiot. You’re a writing teacher and you can’t write. What the hell is wrong with you? This is totally wrong and you should be able to fix it. You are writing about writing, damn it. You’re supposed to know how to do this.”

In the middle of this tirade of self-hatred, I suddenly told myself to fucking stop it. The self-hatred wasn’t getting anywhere—but the writing teacher was. Again, I remember thinking, “Okay, you’re a writing teacher. If a student came to you and was this stuck, what would you ask the student to do? You’d tell the student to freewrite. To just journal away about the crap and the problem and whatnot.”

Naturally the evil voice of self-hatred perked back up. “That will accomplish nothing. You’ll waste writing time, and have useless text.” But somehow, I made all the voices just shut up. I shut them down, and I just wrote this:

I want this chapter to explain the basic parts of writing a good assignment. The point is to outline the basic things that a writer needs to do in order to get a good assignment. The tips that are included are all good by themselves, but they aren’t unified and there is no flow to the section. I could try to focus on a single lesson idea as it evolves, essentially writing down the process that I would follow to create the writing assignment itself. Perhaps the best thing is indeed to write a lesson plan and take notes on the process that I follow so that I can show that lesson as a case study of sorts–how it fits together, how the parts flow into one another and into the other parts of the curriculum, and how the piece is assessed.

I think that the problem so far in the text is that it’s all this distant, non-person voice. I mean it’s the voice of the Inbox and whatnot, but that voice isn’t allowed to have an “I” so the text is in some ways w/o its author.

I had to stop prematurely because the ECAC folks were arriving as I was writing the last bit. I didn’t have time to even reread or rethink it. I just hurriedly got the idea down. But the more I did think about it during the ECAC gathering, the more I realized that last idea was it. That was why I was blocked. Those last two sentences finally told me why I was stuck. I had hidden myself and tried to write a text where I didn’t exist. I’ve gotten so used to hiding myself in my Inbox writing, that I was trying to cut myself out of the book—and that’s why I’ve been stuck for 3 weeks. I was trying to silence my voice, and as a result, I couldn’t say anything.

Today, I’ve finally had a chance to go back to the bits that I’ve written over the last weeks, and it’s all so obvious. Every place the text is awkward or convulted, I was trying to write without letting myself into the text. Once I rewrote a bit, allowing myself first-person pronouns and giving myself permission to write about MY experience in addition to the general info and the research. It all works so much better.

I’d like to believe that the breakthrough was being on the Selfes’ porch, sitting across from Cindy. But really, I know that’s not it. The breakthrough came when I started thinking like a writing teacher and applying what I knew to where I was stuck. It wasn’t the desk, the chair, the heat, the books and articles that I did or didn’t have. It wasn’t any of those things. It was that I was trying to write with a voice that wasn’t mine.


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Filed under Personal Journal, Teaching Composition Tagged with

Musing on Martin’s Big Words

January 12, 2003 by

got loads of cleaning and organizing done, though no real
writing. looking for some kind of small magnetic board for the office,
but all i seem able to find are big magnetic white boards. not exactly
the ideal solution

have been thinking about the MLK lesson plan that i’ve been
working on. letting it simmer mainly. i’m still sort of between feeling
unsure if it’s a useful lesson or just a lesson with a social agenda without
any other real purpose. i
have it has a 3-5 lesson focusing on the Martin’s
Big Words book. have students talk about the notion of ‘big’ words
and then go out to choose their own ‘big’ words. the other alternative
is to give them MLK quotes and have them choose ‘big’ words which they
compose into a found poem, or something of that sort. i dunno. maybe it’s
just that the theory section seems so gaggy to me right now:

To talk about Dr. King’s life is to talk about horrible
things: racism, bombings, murders, assassination. Yet it is also to
discuss wonderful things: love, peace, harmony, pride, determination.
What do we tell children about the "bad" things in the world?
How can we "give [them] hope… provide [them] with reasons to
embrace life and its possibilities" (Stanley 41)?

Ultimately, Stanley resolves, "Education is the only solution
that I know to these dilemmas. Education, understood not as technique
or training, not as schooling, but as part and parcel of ‘the engagement
of being human,’ i.e., the shared act of making meaning of meanings
inherited from others" (41).

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the NCTE Executive
Committee issued a statement
that concluded similarly: "We assert that the long-term response
to violence and cruelty — indeed the only truly effective response
— is education, an education in which social justice and the dignity
of all people are held paramount."

In this activity, students focus on this kind of educational goals.
Through an exploration of Dr. King’s use of non-violence protest and
the power of words as a weapon for social justice, students learn
more about Dr. King’s life and think about their own impact on the
future. And by turning from King’s words to their own hopes for the
future, the activity makes specifically highlights hope for the future.

Further Reading
Stanley, Timothy J. 1999. "A
Letter to My Children: Historical Memory and the Silences of Childhood."
Teaching for a Tolerant World, Grades K-6: Essays and Resources.
Ed. Judith P. Robertson. Urbana: NCTE. Pp. 34-44.
     Stanley’s article focuses on talking
to his children about whether Nazis are "bad guys." While
not directly about King or African American history, the piece is
a relevant discussion of the things that we do and do not talk to
children and students about, when we discuss the, how we discuss them,
and why we discuss them.

i dunno. it’s ok i guess but it feels so PC instead of sounding like me. it’s like i’m not even there. some stuffy theory paraphraser is. or maybe the problem is that i’m trying to justify teaching MLK rather than why we’re teaching about the idea of "big" words and such. i don’t have to finish it till at least tomorrow.

Filed under Children's/YA Lit, Personal Journal

Traci’s 1st List of Ten: Ten Ways to Ask Students to Re-Think the Classroom

July 1, 1998 by

Originally Posted July 1, 1998 to ACW-L, WCenter, NCTE-Talk, and TEACH and at the Daedalus Website

  1. Place your students in the future. It’s the year 3098. A team of archaeologists discovers your classroom, exactly as it is now. What do they make of their discovery? How do they describe the space? What do they imagine happened in the place? How do they support their findings–that is, what things in the space support their conclusions? Students could form teams (writing groups) and work in online InterChange conferences to gather ideas about the space. They might write a group paper or individual papers reporting their findings to the organization that funded their archeological dig. Or they could write a “newspaper article” (whatever the equivalent to a “newspaper article” is in 3098). You might even ask them to write about their discovery as an email message to a friend or family member.
     
  2. Ask your students to work as ethnographers in the classroom–explain the idea of participant-observers, and have your students observe the community in your classroom. What social structures exist? How do members of the community interact? How do the physical structures in the classroom affect the community? By comparison, you might ask students to observe the ways that computers work in other places on your campus–what kind of community is built (or not)in public access computer labs, around workstations in the library, and so forth. Students might examine the differences: how does the community change, and why does it change?
     
  3. Make your students classroom designers. Give them carte blanche to rethink the set-up and layout of the room–move the desks, tables, machines, and so forth. Add equipment, furniture, and/or resources. If you have a drawing program on your computers, they might even sketch out their designs. After their rethinking, have students write a proposal to implement their changes–ask them to include an explanation of the changes they would make AND a detailed justification for the changes. For example, saying that they want to add a conference table to the room isn’t enough–ask them to explain why the conference table should be added and how it will affect the learning that takes place in the space.
     
  4. Enter an online discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the computer-based classroom. Ask students to use pseudonyms–Your discussion should include campus administrators, teachers from other disciplines, family members, politicians, teachers from other schools, alumni, and students from other schools (including, say, high schools, other colleges, and so forth). You might assign roles or have students choose for themselves, but work for a range of aliases. Urge your students to think carefully about the point of view of the speaker that they represent. Before the online discussion, students might write position papers from their speakers’ point of view, to help gather their ideas and think through the opinions. You might use the transcript later–analyze the range of perspectives, revise the position papers based on the group discussion, and so forth.
     
  5. If your students are used to coming into the classroom, logging in (nearly or completely) on their own, and getting down to work, begin one day NOT on computers. As your students enter, tell them that you want them to wait so that you can make some announcements. Once it’s time for class to start, take a survey. How many students followed your instructions? What did those who followed the instructions do instead of working online? What did those who didn’t follow the instructions do? Move to an online discussion about student-centered versus teacher-centered learning. Encourage students to discuss the ways that they are responsible for their learning and how the computer-based classroom compares to the other classrooms where they attend classes.
     
  6. Have students choose a historical figure they are interested in. Give them a chance to do some background research on the figure, and then tell them that their figures have been plopped down in your classroom. Ask them to write a paper giving their figures’ analysis of and reaction to the space. You might set some parameters to help avoid papers gone wild with make-believe–the figures know, for instance, that the space is used for education. The point of the assignment is for students to think about the computer-based classroom from another point of view. Students might participate in online discussion, in the persona of their historical figure (see Robin Wax’s “History Comes Alive on the Little Screen,” NEA Today, Sept. 1994, p.25).
     
  7. Think of your school as a human body, where does this classroom fit? Where do other places, people, and organizations in the school fit?–assign your students a paper that explores where your classroom belongs in the bigger organism. Ask them to consider the ways that your computer-based classroom fits with other kinds of classrooms on campus, how your computer-based classrooms adds or detracts from the bigger whole, and so forth. If you don’t like the metaphor of the human body, try another: the school as an ecosystem, the school as a city, the school as a company, and so on. You might encourage students to choose their own metaphor for the school.
     
  8. Assign students the task of writing a letter to entering students at your school who will encounter your computer-based classroom for the first time. What can they tell these new students about the space and how it works? What information do they wish they had had when they first began using the classroom? You might combine this writing assignment with the student ethnography paper (#2, above) &#151 asking students to write their letters after having observed the space and thought about the community that exists in it.
     
  9. Turn your students into computers(metaphorically, of course). From the computer’s perspective, ask them to observe, analyze, and evaluate the humans in the room. If the assignment seems hard to get started on, appeal to popular culture. Ask students to assume a thinking persona for the computer in the same way that Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data, Voyager’s The Doctor, or Lost in Space’s The Robot take on human qualities even though they are machines. Ask them to think about how the machine would evaluate the space. What role would the machine think it fills? What does it think of these humans who sit down in front of it? Papers might be first-person narratives on a day in the lifeform the computer’s point of view (“I was resting here happily, drawing fractals. I was sort of pleased with the fuschia one, and then I felt one of them reach over and move my mouse. Damn. They want me to work again. Don’t they understand how peaceful it is to sit and draw fractals?”), position papers (a computer writes, “Why I Should Be Networked”), or a reflective essay evaluating the roles that it has played over time (e.g., a hand-me down computer from the Math Lab reflects on the things it’s seen and the differences between the two labs it has lived in).
     
  10. Put your students in the future, looking back at your classroom. Ask them to imagine that they have come back for their ten (or twenty, etc.) year reunion. They run into one another and decide to find the old classroom. Miraculously, it’s still there (though it’s very likely to have changed greatly). For their assignment, ask students to reflect on their experiences in the place and to comment on how the computer-based classroom influenced their education (and the things they are doing now that they are graduates). The point is to ask them to think about what they think that they will value (or not) about having had a class in your computer-based classroom once they have moved on to other places and experiences. They might write their thoughts in the format of a letter or article for the alumni newsletter, or they might compose their reflections in a letter to a politician or campus administrator, urging more (or less) support for computer-based classrooms.

Filed under List of Ten

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