Blog Highlights from this Semester

English 709 Blog Take-Aways

 

The most useful blogs that I wrote this semester were:

Week 2 on Van Woerkum’s “Active Reading,” because it helped me to flesh out concrete strategies for teaching the before, during, and after reading processes. For example, in the pre-reading stage instructors can assess how well students will identify with the chosen readings. In the during reading stage, students can make inferences and connect ideas with other texts through journal assignments, and in the after reading stages, the activation of new ideas is triggered by asking students to establish what they still would like to know, and having them conduct research to connect what they read with other texts.

Week 2 Summary of “A Historical Perspective on Reading Research and Practice” because the article provided a broad and comprehensive overview of specific eras of reading research, such as Behaviorist, Natural Learning, Information Processing, Sociocultural Learning, and Engaged Learning, and how these relate to the particular cultural moments that they emerged within.

Week 3 Summary and Response to two articles by Sugie Goen-Salter on integrated reading and writing were especially useful because they introduced me to the history and principles behind the IRW program at San Francisco State, and laid a foundation for our work on IRW strategies in English 709. My responses also helped me get a head start on the IRW Memo assignment due at the end of the semester.

Week 3 Course for developmental reading/writing students helped me to integrate my own ideas and assignments with the ideas we’d been reading about, including Van Woerkum’s active reading strategies and Goen-Salter’s IRW strategies. I found a way to create assignments using metacognitive strategies and activating schema, so I was glad to be able to connect my prior knowledge of teaching with the new concepts that we’d been discussing in class through this activity.

Week 4 Thoughts on the blogging process helped me to establish my own criteria for a good blog, to justify how I’d been writing blog posts, and it helped me become conscious of why I was finding certain blog posts more useful than others.

Week 4 Summarizing McCormick’s Three Reading Approaches: cognitive, expressivist, and sociocultural, helped to solidify my knowledge after reading McCormick’s book, and became a touchstone that I returned to throughout the semester. The three approaches provided a framework that was very useful for understanding what becomes emphasized (both consciously and unconsciously) in our curriculum. I found myself thinking of ways to integrate all three approaches in my own teaching.

Week 5 Ideas and Elements for my IRW unit plan helped me to integrate concepts and strategies we’d been discussing with my own ideas for an IRW course. I went a bit farther than necessary here and roughly mapped out an entire IRW course when the assignment called for focusing on a unit. However, I was glad that I laid a foundation for the end of semester work on the unit plan, and connected my own ideas with those of the texts and with prior class discussions. 

Week 8 Difficulties with a Challenging Text: This activity was useful because it gave me a sense of what students go through when writing a difficulty paper. I chose a text written by a right-wing ideologue who is known for dismissing the severity of U.S. poverty and viewing the poor as greedy “takers.” I found myself stuck before I could even consider the writer’s ideas because of what I saw as a dismissive and arrogant tone and a lack of concern for the suffering of others. Because I disagreed with the writer’s use of “facts,” I could not “make meaning” of the text. I did try to understand the reasoning behind his arguments and to address which assumptions were underlying the argument. Nonetheless, while the activity resulted in a stalemate, it was a fruitful one because it exposed me to how clashing ideologies can create roadblocks that inhibit true dialogue.

Week 9 Unit Planning Ideas helped me create an initial plan with my group on our American Dream unit. We mapped out particular texts, assignments, and activities that seemed to have potential for our unit, so this assignment helped us to get the ball rolling.

Week 9 Community Building article by Nicholas. I was intrigued by the author’s use of models from Native American tribes for community building. While this could potentially veer into the territory of “cultural appropriation,” I appreciated the author’s emphasis on building classroom communities based on mutual trust, respect, honesty, and consensus building.

Week 10 Bartholomae and Petrosky Chapters 1-3. I was very intrigued by B & P’s radical reconception of a basic reading and writing class. I liked the recursive nature of the writing assignments, and the course’s emphasis on viewing student writing as equivalent to that of published authors. I also think that having students develop their own theories of adolescent growth encourages students to develop a sense of agency and empowerment. While the “seminar-style” of this course would be difficult to execute in today’s community college classroom, I appreciate the values and objectives that this course promotes.

Week 11 The Discovery of Competence: From this book, I was inspired to include assignments in my own teaching that draw on students’ own competence, such as personal narratives, and I’ll ask students to connect their personal experiences to the texts they read. I will encourage students to participate in dialectical and metaphorical kinds of thinking by assigning a dialectical journal which asks them to directly respond to (and provide compelling interpretations of) key passages in the assigned texts. I will try to have students discuss topics that they care about and can become invested in, so that my instruction will “foster both engagement and responsibility” (81).

Week 11 The Discovery of Competence Chapter 9: I agreed with the authors’ approach to teaching multicultural texts, and thought about having my students explore the connection between self and world with a graphic organizer called "Text/Self/World," which gets students to establish an "essential question" that they want to explore, and to find connections between the text, the self, and the larger world. Reading this chapter gave me the idea to assign this graphic organizer in my unit in order to emphasize these relationships. I liked the assignment that asks students to keep observational notebooks in which they record events that reflect the ways in which people are marginalized or left out of the American Dream, based on their personal observations (185).

Week 13 Unit Planning Grid got our group’s unit plan under way by getting us to map out the readings and assignments for our unit, day by day. This was incredibly useful because it set the stage for the rest of our planning and helped us to visualize each stage of the planning process.

Week 16 Memo arguing for an IRW course helped me to recall the major points in Sugie Goen-Salter’s articles, and to connect these points with the strategies and methods that we’ve been discussing all semester in our class. Writing the memo encouraged me to try IRW strategies in my own classes, and I am excited to do so when I teach again in about a month.

Other students’ blogs which were most useful to me include:

Blog posts by Katie Bliss, who uses visual images in innovative and powerful ways. In most of her posts, Katie included pertinent visuals that helped to emphasize the points she was making, and this showed me how I could incorporate iconic images in order to emphasize my points, and to sometimes make a point visually instead of in writing.

Blog posts by Barbara Bradbury, because they would draw on Barbara’s experience as an instructor and offered useful in-class strategies (especially questioning strategies). I was interested in her unit plan project on advertising in the media and liked the use of a variety of texts in this unit, including internet websites, videos, and published texts.

I appreciated Susan Partlan’s critiques of a variety of readings, and especially her useful comments on my own blog and the blogs of others in class, which helped to keep a conversation going among us.

I enjoyed reading Katie Bierbaum’s insights into the readings, as she always brought new and original ideas to each text and interrogated them in useful ways.

I got a lot out of reading the posts on unit planning. It was interesting to see a wide range of possibilities for planning a unit, and to identify how each person’s interests were manifested in their choices of texts and assignments.