21st Century Literacy Lessons

This past week at our ISA Faculty Retreat, we watched and discussed the ubiquitous “Shift Happens” video. I was worried that everyone would have seen it already, but it turned out to be a great jumping-off point for our conversation about integrating Web 2.0 tools into our teaching and learning at ISA. Here’s the video just in case someone reading this hasn’t seen it yet, enjoy!

We also read and responded to “The Shift to 21st-Century Literacies” from the November 2007 issue of NCTE’s Council Chronicle. I been using this article in my methods classes for pre-service English language arts and reading teachers, and I think it achieves a good balance of research, theory, and concrete examples.

I definitely recommend reading the article in its entirity, but the pull quotes will give you a good taste:

“As technology continues to evolve, always moving toward the more sophisticated, our literacy capacities must also grow more sophisticated.”
~Kylene Beers

“Because the technology is always changing, and because the tools are always changing, it’s a hugely challenging time to be a teacher.”
~Sara Kajder

“Out-of-school [and workplace] literacies are becoming more and more divergent from in-school literacies.”
~William Kist

“There’s a fallacy that kids aren’t reading and writing anymore.  They are, but they just are reading and writing differently than what we’ve traditionally done in schools.”
~David Bruce

Next week, we are planning to spend some time working with ISTE‘s new National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers as well as the ones for Students!

As part of my interview for the Internship/Service Learning Coordinator position at ISA, I was asked to write a statement about the role of internships and service learning in the education of students at the International School. I thought this was a great task and thought I would post what I wrote here as well.

I believe internships and service learning experiences are crucial in terms of preparing students for global citizenship in the 21^st century. These authentic inquiry-based experiences enable students to learn more about themselves, the world, and their relationships to that world. They also provide a real-world, hands-on context in which students can make interdisciplinary connections between their inquiry project and the academic learning done  before, during, and after the experience. Internships and service learning opportunities help make students’ educational experiences more relevant and personally meaningful to them.

Internships give students the opportunity to deepen and broaden their learning in existing areas of interest and to discover new passions. When they are immersed in learning that is meaningful to them, engaged in projects that they have chosen and constructed for themselves, they are able to experience flow, that “optimal state of intrinsic motivation where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing” (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow). Career exploration also allows the student to try out different possibilities at a crucial time in his or her academic career, when the student is making important decisions about which post-secondary path to embark on.

According to Alvin Toffler, “the illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn” (Rethinking the Future).

With the social networking potential afforded to us through technology, our learning networks can be truly global, and we can connect, collaborate, and create change in partnership with others around the world. I believe internship and service learning experiences provide unparalleled opportunities for students to engage in 21^stcentury literacy activities, improve their multimodal and social media literacy skills, and begin to see themselves as active, engaged citizens of the world.

I’ve been preparing for my interview for the Internship Coordinator position at The International School of the Americas (where I taught English from 1997 until 2005), and I’ve been thinking a lot about how I would like to integrate 21st century skills, multiple literacies, and web 2.0 technologies into the Internship curriculum. It seems like the perfect complement to students’ real-world exploration of their potential futures, since they will undoubtedly be connecting, collaborating, and communicating more and more with colleagues online as they move into college and the world of work.

If I became the Internship Coordinator at ISA, I know I would enjoy helping students develop and refine their resumes.

But I’ve also been thinking about how the concept and function of the resume is being impacted by the increasing practice of employers “googling” job applicants. It seems that the 21st-century resume has really become your web footprint.

With this in mind, I’ve been experimenting with the idea of helping students create online versions of their resumes that would give them control over their Internet identities and also enable them to hyperlink to relevant websites and upload supporting documents.

The most comprehensive web resource I’ve found on e-Portfolios is Dr. Helen Barrett’s Electronic Portfolio site. Using Google Pages, I’ve posted my own Professional Portfolio here. I’m hoping the selection committee will take a look at it, and if I get the job, I hope to use it as a model for getting students to create them, too!

In “Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Mrs. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenges of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time” Mark Federman raises what he calls “the real question of our time–of any time–namely, what is valued as knowledge, who decides, and who is valued as authority.”

By tracing the history of information and communication technologies Federman provides a context for understanding the huge shifts that are occurring in contemporary culture as a result of the Internet.

Here are my reading notes from his insightful analysis of how and why we need to redefine literacy for the 21st century.

Looking Backwards

Ancient Greece: knowledge = memorization; authority = orality

From orality to literacy: “disruption of a new communication form that seems to threaten the very structural foundation of the culture”

Literacy: “the separation of the knower from the known through the intermediation of proxy representation and inherited authority”

Written word = ideas can travel separate from the person

Literacy separated the knower from that which was to be known, and inserted both a proxy representation  in the form of words, and an author who asserted his authority with respect to that representation, between the knower and the known.

Literacy = translating representations (alphabet) into reality

Authority = literate person’s interpretation + power of unseen/unknown author

Such tremendous power is invested in the written word and in the command of the written word – that power being a cultural construction that has survived for nearly two thousand years. When we invoke knowledge that we obtain through the proxy of an author’s book, we assume some of that author’s patina of authority.

Gutenberg –>growth of literacy–>Age of Reason and Enlightenment–>knowledge institutionalized by universities–>objectivity privileged

Scholarly publication: authors inherit the authority of other authors; “stand on and contribute to the aggregated authority of institutions of authors”

University degrees = “proxy representation[s] of institutional authority”

To sum up the argument to this point . . .

Literacy changed society’s notion of what was to be valued as knowledge, and how new knowledge was to be created, and who had the authority to do so.

Transition

The transition from cultural epoch to cultural epoch is not an easy one. Roughly speaking, it takes about three hundred years for the foundational knowledge ground of a culture to change, that is for the society to change its conception of what is valued as knowledge, who decides what is valued as knowledge, who controls access to the knowledge itself, and who controls access to those controls. The time span is relatively easy to understand: for the transition to be complete, there cannot be anyone left alive who remembers someone that remembers someone who was socialized and acculturated in the prior system of knowledge.

Looking Forward

Electricity: Literacy is “under attack” by modern media

The telegraph “undid” the effect of the written word by “enabling the instantaneous transmission of information from person to person across a vast distance”

Communication changes–>knowledge and authority changes–>access to both knowledge and authority changes

Maximum disruption to society and culture occurs at the halfway point in the 300 year transition period
This is where we are right now!

If “literacy is no longer the dominant structuring force of our society and culture, the burning question is, what’s next?”

At this point in the speech, Federman uses a thought experiment – a story about reading customer reviews online to decide which washing machine to buy – to demonstrate the shift in the locus of authority from the few to the many.

For more examples of this phenomenon, see The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki or Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold.

Google = the wisdom of crowds in action:

Google’s effectiveness in returning relevant results to search requests is not based on the adjudication of a panel of experts, but rather on millions of what I might call “lay indexers,” that is, millions of average web users and webpage creators who collectively provide the wisdom and guidance from which relevant knowledge emerges in response to queries.

Shifts from . . .

closed system of knowledge–>open system of knowledge

power and authority vested in single person or institution–>collective wisdom

Establishing the credibility and reliability of both information and sources comprise an emergent information seeking problem that is subject to multiple, interdependent processes and contexts, [which are] connected to literacy.

Allen Foster’s emergent model of interdisciplinary information seeking as a “concurrent, continuous, cumulative and looped” endeavor of opening, orientation, and consolidation.

Opening: seeking breadth of knowledge, to expand the “information horizon”

Orientation: defining the problem, developing a picture of the topic as a whole

Consolidation: assimilating, integrating, refining information and knowledge

“Today’s youth and tomorrow’s adults live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity. . . a world of relationships and connections.”

“They are thrust into a so- called learning environment that is as removed from their lived experience of the world, as ours is from the ancient Greeks.”

Today was the last day of the San Antonio Writing Project Summer Institute.

Our Visitor’s Day was a great celebration of our teaching/learning/writing journey together.

Here’s the piece I published in our 2008 anthology.

How I Spend My Time/Life/Love

In On Beauty, Zadie Smith writes, “love is how you spend your time.” And I believe that’s true. I believe you demonstrate your love not only by what you do, but how you do it, and why—towards what larger purpose.

Figuring out what I wanted to do in the world came easily to me. I’ve known I wanted to be an English teacher since I was in the 9th grade. I always loved to read and write and share in the beauty and power of words with others. I also loved everything about school. So once I realized “career student” was not an option, I naturally began to envision my future self as a teacher.

Figuring out how to be a teacher turned out to be a much more challenging process—and, in fact, a perpetual one. My early days in the classroom were punctuated by experiences that showed me just how little I knew about teaching. Ironically, the more I learned, the more I realized how much more there was to learn. While this realization was surprising at first, it wasn’t scary. Instead, I was delighted to discover that being a teacher meant being a life-long learner.

Year after year, I’ve grappled with questions about how to meaningfully and authentically fulfill my role as a teacher. So far, some of the most important things I’ve discovered are 1) to think in terms of teaching students, not teaching content, 2) to share my real, authentic self with my students, rather than a “teacher-ly” persona, and 3) to remember the answers to Tolstoy’s three questions: “there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing to do is to do good for the one who is standing at your side.” (The Three Questions, by Jon Muth)

“To realize one’s Personal Legend is a person’s only real obligation . . . [and the] universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” (Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist)

As Mandy Aftel says, “in a very real sense, we are the authors of our own lives.” But we do not write our Personal Legends in a vacuum.

I believe “love is how you spend your time”—and with whom. And I’ve realized that following my heart means not only devoting myself to teaching and learning and pursuing those endeavors the best way I know how, but also giving myself—my time, my energy, my passion—to a community whose mission and vision and purpose I believe in. I believe that in order for my life and work to have meaning, I must spend my time in teaching and learning communities whose core beliefs and values I share.

To my friends in the San Antonio Writing Project: Thank you for giving meaning to my life. I’m so glad the universe has conspired to bring us together. I’ve enjoyed spending time in community with you. And you know what that means . . .

Love, Honor

Today’s visiting writer at the San Antonio Writing Project was local writing teacher guru, Gretchen Bernabei.

Here are my notes from her time with us.

A lesson learned from Barry Lane: Go in the back door using humor or something surprising and new.

Kids learn so much better from each other than they ever learn from us; the things they learn sitting in rows are the things they learn one day and forget the next day. ~Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting

Dogberry logic (from Much Ado About Nothing)

Students have trouble with transitions/transitional phrases; they sometimes go back and add transitions like sprinkling salt and pepper

Students often get in trouble with repetition
Why should we not get rid of football?
Three reasons: first, it’s popular; second, everybody likes it; third, everybody goes to the games.

Theme song for TV western: “Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, brave, courageous, and bold”
What do we know about Wyatt Earp?—three things?—what does each mean?—all the same thing

Go to classroom library, pick a book like The Hobbit with unfamiliar/unusual character names.

Choose a name; male or female?; what is a character trait you would not want in a friend?

Write one sentence that says the same thing without using any of the words in the original.
Repeat. Do it together as a group on the board if needed.
Need to end up with five different sentences that all say the same thing.
Then, out in the left-hand margin next to the 2nd-5th sentences, write: also, furthermore, in addition, and in conclusion

Student example on the board:

Sky D is dishonest.
That girl with the hippie sounding name can’t be trusted.
Sometimes I catch that chick stealing.
Look up liar in the dictionary, and you’ll see her picture.
I just found out my “friend” over there in the tye-died T-shirt has been telling lies and stealing from me.

These paragraphs spin their wheels, they don’t have sentence-to-sentence progression from one idea to the next.

Draw a line under your paragraph.
Start a new version with the same first line.
Pretend that you know Sky D.
For the next sentence, tell one thing that you saw Sky D do that was dishonest.
Start the next sentence with, “When asked why she behaves in this manner . . .”
Start the next sentence with “Gradually, . . .”
Start the last sentence with “To this day, . . ”

Sky D is dishonest. She has been telling her mom she is at the library studying, when she is really at the mall with her boyfriend. When I asked her why she behaves in this manner, she told me her mom is too strict with her and that’s the only way she can see her ‘true love.’ Gradually, her lies have gotten more and more frequent and outlandish. To this day, her mom naively thinks she is going to basketball practice and doing community service at a nursing home when she is really making out with her boyfriend.

Providing the transition words was like the passenger reaching out and pulling on the wheel as you were driving/writing. That’s what transitions do; they drive the direction of the writing.

Transition words came from 10th Grade Score Point 4 essay by Elisa Leal on Gretchen’s Trail of Breadcrumbs website

The five-paragraph essay keeps re-emerging in schools, like trick birthday candles, because we need something concrete we can teach kids to do. ~Thomas Newkirk, The School Essay Manifesto

There is no expository piece that follows just one structure; we mix the modes together. ~Harvey Daniels, Voices from the Middle

See Tom Romano’s article about multigenre writing in Teaching the Neglected “R”

Kernel essays following various text structures: an essay should track the movement of your mind, take the reader along the trail of your thoughts, trace the path of your thinking

Two hands: what you know and how you know it
Persuasive mix and match activity: spinner with different ways of knowing things; pick a truism out of a bag
Bakhtin: about 50% of human discourse is people quoting other people

Persuasive writing: “It’s good! Good for you! Only $1.99!” can be used to argue anything

Sound effects on The Good Writer’s Guide website; give writing assignment in conjunction with a sound
Challenge students to find their own sounds to add to their writing

Today’s visiting writer at the San Antonio Writing Project was the talented poet and teacher,  Jenny Browne.

She had many wonderful ideas to share, so I’m posting my notes here. 

The word “inspire” comes from the root meaning “to breathe in”

Yoga Breathing Exercise

The way we normally breathe only reaches one side of the brain; this exercise enables oxygen to reach both sides of the brain

Using your thumb to cover your right nostril and your pinkie to cover your left nostril, breathe in or out of one nostril at a time: in right, out left, in left, out right

Two sides of the brain: right/left
Two sides of your life: personal/professional
Two sides of your work: teacher/writer

Poetry Has Two Sides

Music and meaning matter equally
“Shhh” vs. “Be quiet” vs. “Shut up!”
The music makes the meaning feel differently

Jenny traveled to Sierra Leon as a volunteer, wanted to “save the world”
When you don’t understand the world around you, sometimes the best you can do is describe it
This began life-long devotion to paying attention

What questions to you have about reading poetry/writing poetry/teaching poetry?
What scares you? excites you? puzzles you? or intrigues you about poetry?

Poetry as a way of sparking students’ relationship to language
Poetry provides opportunity to magnify and clarify your relationship to the world

“You Must Revise Your Life” by William Stafford (essay in You Must Revise Your Life: Poets on Poetry)
Writing is a process that enable things to bubble up that you didn’t know that you knew
Poetry works best when it sneaks up on you 

Openness vs. Expectation

“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.” ~Charlie Parker

Don’t be afraid of sounding like someone else
If another writer moves you, use it—chew it up, spit it out

“You can’t edit an empty page.” ~Jenny Browne

The Observation Deck from Naomi Epel, Interesting suggestions for 5 minute warm up exercises or foci for revision

Charles Wright was an admirer of Paul Cezanne and tried to write a poem that worked like Cezanne’s paintings do

Don’t start with a plan
So how do you start? Where do you start?

“We can travel by poem” ~Jane Hirschfield

The less we talk about how we feel and the more concretely we describe the things that make us feel that way, the better our poems will be.

Writing Exercises to Try

“The Poet” by Jane Hirschfield
The poet as the muse that’s always working, that we can listen to/access
Invocation exercise based on the poem: write 2 or 3 lines beginning with “Let . . .”

Single most musical tool in poetry is repetition (and change)
Poems move in patterns; there’s energy in change (Pink Panther theme song)
Some patterns aren’t so good, for example, repetitive sentence patterns

I Remember by Joe Brainard is 4,000 sentences all beginning with “I remember . . . ” (here’s an article about it on poets.org)
“I remember . . . ” prompt

Or to get at connections: What are 7 yellow things you saw yesterday? etc.

Ars Poetica (poem about poetry)

“The Triggering Town” by Richard Hugo talks about the real subject that reveals itself in the writing of the poem
“The Triggering Town” essay in Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo

Coleridge defines poetry as the “best words in the best order”

“Doves” by C. K. Williams—it’s about the words, the way things sound

Work backwards—instead of starting with ideas, start with words
Write down 5 words you like for the way they sound
Write a line or 2 that use a couple of those words
See where these words might take you

“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
Exercise based on this pattern from the poem:
“I don’t know . . ./I do know . . . ”

Williams Carlos Williams saw a poem as a large or small machine made out of words

What is a poem?
Jenny’s working definition: an individual response to one of the world’s unanswerable questions
Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions—70 couplets
Is there a deeper truth in asking the questions?

Write 3 questions you’re carrying around with you.
Write questions—trade—have other students respond
TS Eliot said good poets borrow, great poets steal

“Now, That Is Summer” by Jenny Browne
Exercise: steal one of the following lines . . .
The                  makes a map of                 
There are moments I pretend                 
All I want is to                 
Someone looks up and says                  

In Il Postino, Neruda confronts the postman, “That’s my poem”
The postman says, “Yes, but I needed it”
William Carlos Williams’ mailman wrote a “So Much Depends . . .” poem

Keep a reading notebook 

Asian Figures by W.S. Merwin, translated clichés from various languages—sound unique to us 

Metaphor: taking 2 different things and rubbing them together, in doing so we learn something new about both, it creates new qualities for both 

I see a                 
It looks like                 

Closing Moves

We’ve done 5 different exercises today:
Invocation exercise based on “The Poet” by Jane Hirschfield: lines beginning with “Let . . .”
5 words you like for the way they sound; a line or 2 that use a couple of those words
3 questions you’re carrying around with you
Stealing lines from “Now, That Is Summer” by Jenny Browne
Metaphors: I see a                 , It looks like                 

Drawing on all of them, see if you can piece together a draft of a poem

At the end of our time with Jenny we shared the poems she had helped us find, and, of course, they were wonderful. Thanks so much to Jenny for giving her time and inspiring energy to us today!

Sent out this invitation today . . .

The San Antonio Writing Project Summer Institute group would like to invite you to join us on Thursdays for our outstanding Visiting Writers series.  We usually have our potluck lunch around 11:45, and then visit with the writers from about 12:30 to 2:30.

This week, on June 19, we have local poet Jenny Browne coming.  She is an amazing teacher and writer; check out her website at www.jennybrowne.com.

Next week, on June 26, Gretchen Bernabei, author of Why We Must Run with Scissors and Reviving the Essay, will be joining us.  See her website: www.trailofbreadcrumbs.net.

Then, on July 3, we will be visiting with poet, publisher and writing teacher, Cyra Dumitru.  For information about Cyra’s work, go to www.riverlilypress.co and http://library.stmarytx.edu/pgpress/authors/cyra_dumitru/.

Please come join us for these very special events!

At the San Antonio Writing Project Summer Institute this morning, Ngoakona (1 of 3 South African teachers here with us) mentioned that it was National Youth Day in South Africa.

She explained a bit about the historical significance of the day, and I decided to read a poem I had written after I learned about the Soweto Massacre during my Fulbright-Hays trip to South Africa in the summer of 2002.

Here’s my poem (it’s written in the voice of the young people who protested that day):

Soweto Uprising/Massacre

We only asked to be taught
in our mother tongues,
or at least in English,
the lingua franca of South Africa,
the global language of freedom.

But the government said
“Bantu Education will be conducted
on our terms, in Afrikaans,”
the language of your oppressors,
spoken by no one else on the planet.

So we gathered together on June 16,
near the Orlando West High School,
thousands of school children
declaring, “Freedom today,
Education tomorrow!”

Our signs read
“Afrikaans Must Be Abolished,”
“Release our Detained Students,”
“Black Power,” and
“To Hell with Afrikaans.”

We were passionate, but peaceful
until suddenly, soldiers
and policemen appeared
firing tear gas and bullets
at our words and our stones.

Hector Pieterson, 13,
was the first to be shot dead.

We may never know
how many died that day;
some say 20, some say 200.
But we will always remember
June 16, 1976 in Soweto.

Tomorrow will be the first day of our San Antonio Writing Project Summer Institute.

This marks the beginning of our third year as a National Writing Project site; it will be my second summer institute experience; and it’s my first time as a co-director. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited.

If you’re already involved in your local NWP site, I don’t have to tell you how great it is to be part of this amazing professional network. But if you’re not, I strongly encourage you to find a site near you and join.