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Reading Together

Perusall logoWe’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. Link here to Perusall. Instructions for joining on the Assignments page.

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Author: mgruner

The Last Post

The Last Post

I’d like to start this out by stating how legitimately surprised I am that this semester has gone by so fast. What the heck? I’m sure this is a twisted metaphor for life and all that, but it’s far too late at night for me to go there.

For the final project I plan on teaming up with Steven and his project, but I also had an idea of my own to summarize this semester’s teaching (life) lessons. I want to do something with illustration and a kind of comic page. I’m sure it sounds weird, but I’d like to wrap up the semester with something funny and thorough, and a decent example of multimodality. I could totally be that person who turns in a 5 paragraph essay though! (Though actually, anyone who does would have quite a bit of pressure on them at this point and would probably write one heck of an essay.)

Also, when it comes to multimodality, I don’t know much about using Twitter for it except for where we have all endeavored this semester, but it did remind me of how some authors create webcomics. One webcomic in particular – dare I say it – Homestuck, is a particularly interesting model of multimodality. It incorporates text, music, video, illustration, animation, and even video game aspects into it as well as a burgeoning pile of references and external links to other works across the expanse of the internet. It strikes me as odd that that style of story telling could be so immersive and honestly could be applied to other forms of entertainment and teaching.

As for Twitter, I don’t see myself using it anytime soon except to read what others have to say. I’m sure it is a useful resource to those who use it, but I feel like I have enough to do between managing my Facebook and my Tumblr art accounts. I am too long winded to enjoy the text cap of Twitter. I’m glad that it is helping getting important information out there though, and I think there really is no limit to how useful social media can be, even with the down sides they carry with them as well.

Multimodal Thoughts

Multimodal Thoughts

The multimodal approach to composition is certainly an interesting one. Multimodality allows for endless creativity within projects that would normally be restricted to writing projects, which are usually in an outlined format. Multimodal work is fascinating and it incorporates quite frequently all the dimensions of learning we as a species can think of. Music, writing, visual images, and pretty much any other experience-able outlet of communication is open to interpretation and application.

However this very same freedom may also pose a problem when it comes down to writing something in the grade book. We all know the educational system is all sorts of messed up but still we are all to be subjects within its tyrannical rule. So how do we as teachers and potential teachers use multimodality in our teaching in a way that is tangible to students? I have to admit my least favorite work in school was the “do something with the material and have fun!” assignment because I didn’t know how to approach it and it left me more confused than anything. It’s hard as a student to be given that sort of freedom and be expected to make something great.

While the articles we read did cite some pretty neat things students did with their assignments, how many students were lost with the lack of structure? Not everyone excels at do-it-yourself teaching and not everyone has access to make cool things happen. Students are usually more worried about passing the class than rocking out to some neato assignment especially when they are in grade school and they have a bunch of other classes they are stressing out about.

Because of this, I think the approach has to be thought out and not just tossed at students. Yes, we are used to doing the same stuffy assignments and they don’t leave us much room to develop, however going from outlines to freestyle and back to outlines is quite traumatic when you’re worried about keeping up that GPA.

I think something that is worth noting is when teachers integrate multimodal approaches and encourage it in a classroom setting. Many teachers do. We watch videos and try projects out throughout school, but when it comes to higher-caliber classes it is usually back to the essay. Though some classes want multimodal approaches and demand them – but not all students have had a chance to experience this before being immersed in it and expected to float.

Still, I think it is a great idea to expand the learning processes of students. There is – like in practically everything – more than one way to go about completing a task, allowing students to take different approaches certainly only aids the learning process. It allows people to examine a single issue through many different lenses and apply their own skills that they have developed throughout their life in a way that they can apply themselves.

 

5 P Essays and Where Not to Find Them

5 P Essays and Where Not to Find Them

I see all kinds of writing in my daily life. Much of it is for entertainment, and some of it is for education or persuasion (and often in educational writing, persuasion to get you to believe it!). All in all, I see many kinds of writing and pretty much none of it is – you guessed it – five paragraph essays. Nope. Not a single one. Unless I’m proofreading my own writings or a peers for a class that has decided to have us write one.

Now before I continue I’m going to be honest. I’ve written so many essays that I’m used to them. When I first started writing them they were daunting and terrifying, but now it is little more than routine, add the right ingredients and you at least have B material. I’m a high achiever aren’t I? Still, the practicality of such an assignment seems pretty much nil. I really don’t see it in everyday life and the structure of that kind of literature is not often repeated. Sure, we like to see examples and quotes backed up by evidence in scientific texts, but it certainly is not that same, dull, format.

Most kinds of writing I see are written in colloquial English. Free flowing and personalized. I also read a lot of scientific articles and they too, unless in a scientific journal, are less structured and more about content instead of style. A matter of fact I would stand by anyone who argues that a standard five-paragraph essay in all its sandwiched glory is little more than pointless filler with no true purpose other than to demonstrate that one can write a five-paragraph essay and meet the guidelines -not very creative.

On the subject of essays though, I will admit I’m not much of a fan of them in the first place. They also seemed so forced and lifeless (though the best ones I’ve read broke up the traditional structure in a marvelous way) as though the only real thought put into them was properly embedding and cite quotes.

All of this reminds me quite a lot of Russell’s activity theory. He essentially states that writing cannot just be writing and students can’t be just taught to just write in general. Just like his ball-handling speech. They must be taught to write a specific way to use writing to achieve a certain goal. We are all mostly taught that to write “well” we need to be able to whip up a great 5 paragraph essay and to be able to do so made us skilled writers. The emphasis on those essays in elementary through high school can be, potentially damaging I believe because it excludes so many more genres and styles of writing. Not to mention they are completely dreadful (to me anyways) to write even if they are an easier way out after at least 9 years of practice writing them.

Learning is an Active Social Experience

Learning is an Active Social Experience

Legitimate peripheral participation. What a mouthful! However, the idea behind it is pretty solid and interesting. Humans – like all social species – learn information in regard to reality and the practicality of such information in a social setting. Surprisingly though, we are often presented with data and chances to learn in school where we, in an abstract way separated from the practice of such information, are expected to learn.

Even so, like our authors say, school is not completely separate from legitimate peripheral participation because we are still a part of a social group where we become immersed in learning even if sometimes the learning is not exactly the learning we were sent there to receive. Undoubtedly, many of us learned very early in our lives acceptable public social behavior and what behavior was bound to get us made fun of in school. Even if we don’t remember each and every thing we were taught as subjects in our classes, we still all learned in school as a part of the society of people who socialized there.

Lave and Wenger assert that “legitimate peripheral participation is not itself an educational form… (it is) a way of understanding learning, (31).” This I believe is important to learning how to teach while like they said is not necessarily instructions on how to do so. Instead, it lets us as teachers take a larger look at what is going on in the world of learning.

I have thought of this a lot in regard to my internship. Students in that workshop are asked to actively engage in their learning and communicate with one another ideas for how to approach the subject of their class. The setting feels more casual than a normal class setting, hoping to invite students to become their own teachers in a way and share their ideas and experiences with the other students instead of being only lectured. There are only about ten or less people in the room too, so we are a smaller group where it’s easier to be inclusive. That does not mean that all of the students are willing to participate though, and even sometimes students who seem like they are not actively participating may be doing so in a more quite and observant fashion. After all, like Lave and Wenger mentioned, LPP is not something that is absolute and polar – there are all sorts of levels of engagement with learning.

We two interns tended to aid in discussions mostly so far, exchanging our ideas and engaging with the students. We haven’t done too much yet so it’s hard to predict where we will be going with our internships, but so far it seems that we are almost a brainstorm session where we spawn ideas and discuss the use and ideas behind them, as thinking about how students can use these ideas to relate to literacy and language. Students mostly use their technology to watch videos and make blog posts pertaining to what they are learning; this combines the ideas of the classroom as well as people in the outside world.

Anyways, I hope I get the chance to relate my studies to the classroom more as time goes on. It’s hard to judge it based off of only two meetings. I always thought of learning as truly a communal effort and what we are studying only helps me fill in the gaps a little bit better. Even if I do have to read it more than once!

Bartholomae

Bartholomae

Bartholomae’s research paper brought to into focus several interesting points about students beginning their college career and what is expected of them when it comes to their scholarly writing skills. Students are expected to be able to achieve higher academic writing right out of high school – and many are not prepared – and learn to take charge of the information they present and feel comfortable taking a certain level of authority over the information they yield

One of Bartholomae’s arguments is the importance of taking scholarly authority. Of course to many papers, this is a very important part where the researcher is able to reveal their findings from a speaker with authority over the information being released. Bartholomae argues that when students deviate from this however, they often “…slip into the more immediately available and realizable voice of authority, the voice of a teacher giving a lesson or the voice of a parent lecturing at the dinner table.” (6). They then switch from talking about ‘I’ and confer advice in the form of the pronoun ‘you.’ This Bartholomae recognizes as an error because they have not yet developed themselves as someone who is speaking from a point of scholarly authority.

Another point Bartholomae brings up is the expectation that students must be able to use academic writing before they understand how to. Bartholomae seems to argue that this is a good thing and that only through practicing it will it get better, which I agree with, but I also question how students would be able to ever truly learn how to do that without a basic understanding of creating language that flows and can be easily understood. If someone never broke out of their comfort zone and experimented with exploring new language and ideas that would be problematic to learning as a whole, but not being able to write in a way that is understandable in the first place somewhat destroys the entire meaning of writing which is clearly to communicate.

It’s easier to build on basic ideas once they are understood than to leap into something that is way beyond the skill level of the person trying to complete them. It’s likely this is purposeful to see where students place, though and where they should start with their classes. Still, it’s hard for me to understand how it would be preferable for a student to write in a style that is difficult to understand or the words are used incorrectly to their intention than someone who uses more basic language that directly answers the questioned asked. This to me is a problem almost because every single teacher I have ever had has wanted information to be clear and precise in a paper. Students learn scholarly jargon along the way, but how they are expected to try – and almost undoubtedly fail – in something before they are ready for it seems a bit unfair. Students will over time, learn it.

However, ultimately I do agree with Bartholomae’s view that at some point students should teach themselves how to write completely academically, though I’m not sure it should be expected before they have even learned how to use it. However, formal writing itself should be used and is usually taught in high school anyways – students should already know when to include formal writing and not use colloquial language in a formal essay.

Bartholomae also addresses students writing to their audience. This is true with any sort of writing, really, and unfortunately in the case of student writing they do not feel what they know about a subject is good enough quite often (which leads back into authority and how students may struggle with it) and do not know how to address their audience. If a student doesn’t feel their knowledge of the subject is enough to break it down and talk about it or is afraid of mistakes, it’s certainly easier for them to attempt to try and play it safe.

I’m not really sure I understand all of what Bartholomae was saying myself, I did fall asleep a few times reading it be completely honest, and I gave myself some intense eyestrain reading it off of my iPhone. And now, what I do grasp I’m having a hard time formulating into something interesting and coherent to my audience here on this blog. I did, however find the subject interesting myself though, because it is something I have thought about before. I’m not really sure what the answer is. It almost seems like a chicken and egg question. Which came first? The basic writing skills, the academic prose, or the authority on subject material a student isn’t quite comfortable assuming?