Rethinking literacy education…
(Reprinted from LibraryRemix.com)
Literary summaries and analyses. In developing a library collection, teacher can’t agree.
For some, there is a double standard with regards to literary guides such as Blooms Literary Themes or the Understanding Literature series published by Lucent. One school where I taught shelved every volume (every edition) of MasterPlots “for teacher use only” because…a plot summary and analytical overview is a “refresher” for teachers and “cheating” for students!? Cliffnotes, SparkNotes…the cheap way out of reading required materials.
Others teachers welcome the guides and the fresh, updated takes they offer. They generally believe that any student willing to read the guide is probably immersed in the literary experience. It’s for these teachers that I share the 60 Second Recap, a great site, whose mission is to “make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and, frankly, irresistible to today’s teens…to help teens engage with the best books out there … not just to help them get better grades, but to help them build better lives.” This is how the site introduces it’s mission:
“Eat your lima beans,” Mom used to say.
And now that you’re out on your own, honestly, are lima beans a staple of your culinary repertoire?
There, in a lima bean, lies the problem confronting the great works of literature. We’re all forced to read them in school so we can get good grades so we can go to a good college so we can get a good job so we can forget all about that literature they used to force us to read so we could get good grades.
The 60second Recap™ aims to break this cycle of canonical irrelevance. We want to help teens (yes, teens of all ages!) engage with literature. We want to help them see it not as some chore to be endured, but as — dare we say it? — the gift of a lifetime. How? Through the language of our time — the language of video. Video that’s focused, engaging, informative … and short enough to hold just about anyone’s attention.
Smirk if you must. Consider this yet another mile-marker on civilization’s road to perdition. But here’s the fact: You won’t get non-readers to read by forcing them to read more. You’ll get them to read by opening their eyes to the marvels awaiting them between the covers of that homework assignment.
With the 60second Recap™, teens finally have an alternative to the boring, text-based study guides that have burdened them for generations. And — who knows? — maybe that’s just what they’ll need to begin a love affair with literature, one that will last a lifetime.
The site offers teens an opportunity to join ClubRecap, where they can get quick instructional videos that clarify literary concepts and terminology, as well as comment on the recaps offered through the site and request additional recaps. The opportunity to participate in community is irresistible to a generation of young people hooked on the power of social networking!
One thing I’d like to see here…the opportunity for teachers to post video segments into a blog or website…for guided, manageable instruction.
If this isn’t literacy in action, I don’t know what is…(originally posted on HistoryRemix.com)
Students in Matt Z’s “Minorities & Prejudice” class have kicked off a blog in an effort to raise awareness about the topics and issues they study in class. While their initial focus was centered around the atrocities of genocide, students quickly decided that limiting themselves to one topic would be limiting the blogs outreach. While still in it’s infancy, I think this type of “activist” effort among students represents education at it’s best: Students exercise personal voice in an authentic setting (public blog) and effect real change by sharing what they know beyond the classroom walls.
You can follow their efforts by visiting: Peace at Hand.
Originally posted on LibraryRemix.
Sheila P. introduced me to Wordle, an awesome little Web 2.0 tool that allows students to visualize word usage with a text. Many Eyes from IBM (still in Beta) is the visualization tool on steroids. This is what IBM says about the project:
Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.
I like that this tool will work with various forms of data (numerical to textual) and create any of 18 different types of visualization (from graphs to word analysis and maps). Registration is free (for now) and worth the play time.
Just got finished teaching this classic novel and it’s a wonderful book to be teaching in our current economic climate. The book is about the infamous Jazz Age and about the materialization and excess of the wealthy and what can happen to the American Dream. In America today we are just coming out of almost 20 years of living the “high life” and people buying more than they need, etc. Students reacted well to the book and of course they were involved more in the love story but I think they see the connection to “cruel rich” and their stuck up attitudes, etc. Next year we will be teaching it to sophomores and I’m not sure they will see the deeper meaning as my juniors have. Well, anyway it’s a wondeful book that is so full of symbolism that I really enjoy teaching.
Hmmmm….a worthwhile thought, here: Teachers, Textbooks, Secondary Lit. As Aronson notes:
…why are we laboring in the fields to create engaging nonfiction, while they are filling up schools with educational materials, and there is not the slightest communication between us?
I posted this to LibraryRemix, but couldn’t resist posting this “classic” analogy to LiteracyRemix:
Can’t say it better than this:
There is something really interesting and important about the teenager-library fit. Too often teenagers are seen as troublesome. Too often libraries are viewed as marginal. Somehow — as in a novel — the outsiders find each other and build something strong and useful together. I think that the next person to write an article, or do an NPR report, on the digital future, must spend some time with teenagers in libraries, and use that mixed environment as a predictor of our mixed future. FROM: NonFiction Matters
I recently wrote a post in LibraryRemix titled Twitter in the Classroom. School Library Journal recently provided an excellent example of this application in action: Twittering Dante: New models for student writing in the digital age (Lauren Barack — School Library Journal, 4/1/2009). The article take us beyond a simple example to challenge us to rethink how we teach writing in the 21st century.
(Re-published from: HistoryRemix.com) I’m having a hard time shrugging off the hesitancy on the part of some students to exercise their voice outside of the safety of classroom walls. For some it may be no more than a difficulty in distinguishing between what situations constitute free speech…differentiating between the freedom to use profanity for recreational purposes and the freedom to express dissenting opinions in a respectful and thoughtful way. As a colleague pointed out, for some it may be a residual of living in a larger “culture of fear.” I think what worries me is the possibility that for some it might be a lack of ENCOURAGEMENT to exercise their voice…to hone the skills of discourse rather than parrot (or recite) the facts. Is this a consequence of the “easy information” of technology? Food for thought: a web conference held in 2007 on Digital Democracy and the Freedom of Speech at Temple University. The essential questions and topics for discussion are worth a look.
Michael Wesch, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University leads and engages us in the concept of Media Ecology. His The Machines Are Us/ing Us video swept YouTube and has been viewed as one of three drafts over 10,000,000 times. Beyond excited that he’ll be keynoting at this year’s Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association, I can’t imagine a discussion of literacy today without including his work.
In the past week I’ve read the book “The Reader,” by Bernhard Schlink, and seen the movie. The tagline of the marketing surrounding the movie release asks: “How far would you go to protect a secret?” Some secrets in the movie are easily revealed to the viewer: Hannah’s illiteracy, Michael’s youthful obsession, Hannah’s role in the atrocities of the Holocaust. Still, there are secrets in this book that are less transparent: most notably, the collective guilt and the internal struggle that the children of the perpetrators (along with the survivors)endured (even embraced) in order to bring the horror to light.
There were 6 other viewers in the theater with us. Each was of an age that they would have some memory of the time and events in the film. I wanted to crawl into their minds. I was at the same time bothered and relieved that there were no young people in the audience who might be insensitive to the thoughtful silence in which these older viewers sat through the entire reel of credits (no bloopers here), and exited the theater, quiet and somber.
I found a file at work, just the other day, that revealed a challenge made to the book by a parent in our school just a few years ago when the Oprah list ushered the titled into our school library. How sad it is to know that the eroticism in the early part of the movie–necessary to the character development–will keep this film version out of our schools, where it would undoubtedly spark thoughtful dialog around not only the issues of action/inaction faced by people in the aftermath of WWII, but also which face us today. (Also posted in LibraryRemix and HistoryRemix)
Literacy--the ability to read and to express ideas--widens the world; illiteracy narrows it. And how can we teach literacy, if we do not consider all of the mediums of literate behavior in which our student engage. LiteracyRemix is an exploration, an experiment, and exposition of ideas as we rethink how we view and develop literacy...in the classroom...in a library...across the curriculum...and throughout life.