Category: Syndicated

Recently, I was fortunate enough to be asked to host the September 2015 Connected Learning.tv series: “Back to School: Creating the School Year We Want to Live In.” Below are the webinar archives, which bring together educators from 1st grade to college who discuss how they design classrooms that nurture kindness, support inquiry, develop student expertise, and how they nurture their own professional growth throughout the busy school year. #connectedlearning

In the world and work of an academic, readings and research are dropped into your lap. Sometimes the words come in the form of a textbook, appropriately purchased from the University Book Store because they, the professor of said class, would like you to buy their book from the book store to support this process.

Movement. The simple act of this knowledge passing from one brain and impacting another involves a series of steps that imply movement and transfer. University to professor, professor to publication, publication to print, print to university, and university to student.

Stagnation. When this knowledge has spent time within a space (universities policies, or professor’s computer/data collection) it begins to build. The process of ownership grows, and the “value” of the knowledge festers into a living and breathing monstrosity. It is at this juncture that Sheller’s idea of temporalities within mobility studies begin to connect with my own.

Sheller states,

“Along with spatiality and materiality there is also a growing interest in temporalities. Temporalities of slowness, stillness, waiting, and pauses, are all part of wider sensuous geography of movement and dwelling in which human navigation of embodied, kinesthetic, and sensory environments are crucial. Thus mobilities  research ranges from the individual body up to the most complex systems” (Shelly 797).

If I were to focus on the stage in which the research for this textbook of knowledge is curing inside the laptop of the professor, I must take into consideration the reasons and value of the stagnation. The professor could be gathering more research. Research that they would physically need to conduct and gather (whether by primary studies, interviews, experiments, or secondary studies) would be held to a specific level of cross examination and potency. While the physical data is gathering, the methods of the research must also be recorded. University standards would also apply to this research, and as the composition of a well organized and disciplined conclusion arises, the professor in question has claimed a specific set of ownership of this process.

But wait… Was it merely the countless hours of hard work and painstaking dedication to their work that merits ownership? The stage of stagnation has now become a pivotal plot point in this series of mobility. Simply by focusing on the accumulation of research, under a specific standard and qualification, I can attempt to gauge the level of ownership attributed to the professor who has undoubtedly labeled this process “my work”.

I find the act of understanding and placing value upon the stagnation of the series of mobility relating to the transfer of knowledge through textbooks to be essential to my research. Describing, dissecting, and pausing to dictate (or remove) levels of ownership can help understand the “value” that our society places on knowledge.

There are other various examples within the textbook industry relating to this idea of ownership and value. Sheller’s explanation of the value of mobility studies moves me to seek out these examples. I hope to grasp a few of its complexities and utilize this new field of study as I continue my own work.

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I just finished course design for the fall 2015 semester. If you were to shine a flashlight into this world every August, you would find me on a couch in the living room, hair disheveled, clothes unchanged for days, various food products tossed to the floor, and surrounded by books ranging from Vygotsky’s Mind in Society to Scieszka and Barnett’s Battle Bunny. I love this time of year. And once I get started on prep, it is almost impossible to stop. For me, imagining a learning environment, curating the texts, and designing for community and participation is like playing a great platform video game. Each course becomes a puzzle to solve as I imagine students inhabiting this world I’m trying to build. And I know–and hope–that they’ll take the world as it’s designed and mess it up. They’ll mess it up in all the best possible ways.

Imagining the course without students is actually easy…and tidy. The class is so clear in my head: what we’ll read, how we’ll talk about it, what students will make. And then other humans come in the room, and in most semesters, students do things and make things that I could not have imagined. And I learn. And we learn. What I learn mostly is that I have to be willing to let go of my favorite things I’ve designed for the course. I have to let students remix, mashup, and throw out our plans: their questions must drive the course even if we meander at times. I appreciate the struggle that comes from designing a course where it is safe to fail. Where failure is valued, not because “anything goes,” but because we are thinking through such complicated ideas we could not possibly solve them.

Course prep means I’ve probably opened 1000 links in the last few days and I’ve read or re-read 15 books in the last two weeks. And this devouring of material may be why course prep is so engaging: prep is so much more than putting due dates on the calendar. The reading and re-reading reminds me what matters in my field and points out the holes in my thinking. I finish this prep every time with a list of ideas to focus on for the upcoming school year. Here’s how it looks so far:

Multimodal-ing. I want to get clear(er) about multimodal composing: the whys, what assignments do, how to assess, how to give feedback, etc. I’ve been re-reading Gunther Kress and diving deep into Shipka’s recent work. Reading list is in process and a plan to gather a group of colleagues to read together.

Coding. I want to learn more. As I argue for an open web, I feel limited in my understanding of the structures of the web. My plan: time with Code Academy.

Writing. Leslie Atkins, Irene Salter, and myself signed a book contract with Teachers College Press. Our book–Composing Science: A Facilitator’s Guide to Writing in the Inquiry Classroom–aims to provide research and support for teaching writing in the science classroom, particularly in higher education. We would like students to experience writing practices that mirror the practices of scientists (so, no lab reports). We are super excited to be working with all we’ve learned from our NSF grant and the last couple of years we’ve spent teaching and researching together. My plan: level up in my writing with more precise arguments. We have beautiful student data to work with and I’d like to do it justice.

Opening. I started a commitment last fall, after the DML work, to open up my class and make connections outside our space. I want to connect students to communities of practice they hope to join. I started by connecting with an amazing teacher, Wendy Fairon, and asking my future teachers to blog with Wendy’s 7th graders. The two populations of students blew us away with the connections they made to each other and to young adult novels. I’m hoping to continue this work with Wendy and with a teacher from Redding. I’ll also pair students–as peer response buddies (like a pen pal)–across sections. I’ve found that this outside audience is great for our blogs. I’m constantly in search of ways to connect my students to other authors, students, and fellow faculty.

Love the fresh start in fall. Let’s do this.

 

 

In this project I decided to look at the literacy in legal discourse. Specifically at the translation that occurs between the police reports and the court room. What you will see in these posts is an interview with Mike Ramsey, Butte County’s District Attorney, and Rick West, Butte County’s assistant District Attorney. In this interview we discuss the structure of narrative and language is used to construct these narratives to present them to specific audiences. Like the police report that is presented to the DA and the court case that is presented to a jury.

What you will hear in this first series of questions is how the DA works with police reports to create a story that is presented in a language that jury will understand.

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An interesting notion that is discussed in this portion of the interview is the idea of “cop shows”. The audience is expecting to hear language that is presented in media, the seem to be mixing the fiction narrative with the real life narrative. As DA Ramsey explains even the police are attempting to adopt this language. In reverse of this perspective that the DA’s office has been trying to get the cops to use more common language in narration rather than the “cop talk”.

This piece of the interview is discussing the translation that is necessary for the narrative to be conveyed to the general public.

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It is interesting to think about the details of language that are considered in the DA’s presentation of the narrative. Such as Ramsey’s reference to pronouns and West’s reference to making the language in the police report more choppy but clearer in the reference of “who” in the report.

This part of interview progress to the use of evidence and how it plays a role in the construction and presentation of the narrative.

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What is interesting about this idea of evidence is that language still plays a huge role in its impact. The evidence supports the narrative but also propels the narrative. The initial presentation of the story is crucial to success and use of any further support of the story.

The conversation of evidence continues in this section talking more specifically about pieces of evidence and their use in the courtroom.

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Something that is interesting about the position of the investigator is that he or she seems to play a crucial role in the translation of the story. They work with all the different avenues of narrative in order to help to construct the story.

Continuation of the use of an investigator and evidence in the courtroom.

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Ramsey’s idea of active listening and being part of the narrative that is occurring in the courtroom is essential to perpetuation of the constructed narrative that they are attempting to present. Acknowledging that there is a difference between the case that is being presented and the progression of events that are occurring in the court room.  I love the door story as a great example of use of evidence in the court room.

We discuss further the importance of timing and presentation of evidence in cases such as the door.

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Evidence can only come in with a witness, the evidence only has its place if a witness can put it in the crime. Which is interesting in the idea of narrative and literacy because the evidence’s effectiveness is based on its relationship to the human element of the crime or the case, which in many ways makes it a constant in a variable. The story of the object cannot change but the language and the person surrounding it can.

In this section we discuss how the DA progresses through a questioning sequence and how they account for the changes that can occur in that sequencing the court room.

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This relates back to the earlier idea of active listening. The person doing the questioning as to actively listen to the narrative that being constructed in comparison to the one they have built to be presented. And, then have to ask questions that can keep them on track with the narrative they are trying tell versus the one that is being told.

This section we talk about witnesses and how they tell their stories in the court room.

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This piece reminds me of learning to work with different personalities. Learning to account for the human element in telling and constructing a narrative is challenging and unpredictable. Which makes these narrative constructions so interesting because the solely based on human interaction, court cases are based upon the wrongs or disagreements that occur between people.

Some ending thoughts. I had a lot of fun doing these interviews and talking through how these narratives can be presented in court. I would like to research further the role of the investigator because they seem to play crucial role in how the stories are translated and told.

 

I have also included the complete interview here at the end, there are couple pieces that I did not include for the sake of length and relevance but I still found them interesting and if listen to them I hope you do too. Ramsey and West further discuss the role of the witness and creditability to can be established. In this idea of credibility we also discussed some of the aspects of child crimes and children as witnesses.

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For my project I am looking at some of the language used in law enforcement specifically at how language is used by the DA to construct a story. I have conducted an interview and I a now beginning the process of listening to my interview and breaking it up into pieces that will be put on a blog with both written and audio components.

When I first started this book I was lost. It took a couple of reads to understand what was going on however, the more that I got into the book I began to realize that this might have been the intention of the author. Since the two main characters are failing though the sky in a kind of chaos, the characters are not a hundred percent sure what is going on, and the reader kind of feels the same way as they attempt to navigate through the text. Nonetheless, once I got my bearings a little in the text there were some interesting analogies that caught my attention. While I expected the religious analogies I did not expect the references made to childhood fairly tales such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. What is interesting about these tales is that they are all very fantastical and operate predominantly in an alternate world or reality. Which fits the beginning of the book and the fall from the plane crash, realistically it would be virtually impossible for someone to survive a fall like that and therefore, the reader must suspend reality in order to believe that this is possible. There is also a relationship to the idea of the world that these actors live in, the person they portray either in reality or on screen seem to be polar opposites of each other. They are not who they appear to be which also questions reality.

Here I present a draft of my first attempt at a book review. I welcome any and all feedback on my review of Literacy Across Communities as this is my first time exploring this particular genre.