Reflections on Creating a Multimodal Project

Throughout the process of deciding on questions to ask, putting together the interviews, and looking for common themes, I found a great deal of insight into how constructing multimodal compositions are actually very different from writing. The revision process was more transparent as I literally dragged and clicked to rearrange clips. I thought frequently that in some ways, once I got the hang of the software, that this would be more pleasantly challenging to do than write a paper, and there is a great deal of value in teaching the process.

While trying to create a narrative, grouped by theme or idea, I gained insight into the ways in which this composing process also inserted my point of view. We had agreed to arrange the interview clips together without inserting our own commentary, to let the students speak for themselves, and yet our hand was still very much in the message that was created. One salient example that Nikki pointed out to me when I remarked that none of my students actually talked about race and language in their interviews, was that by juxtaposing them with her students, who were very explicit about race and unspoken rules of code switching, those themes became more apparent in my students' silence.



I think that the iMovie composition process could stand alone as a summative assessment for my students. I also think that once given the time needed to practice with the software so that they have the appropriate skills, they are more like to experience a flow state while working. I had the same feeling as I was working through the new technology, that I was getting better and better at making the program do what I wanted to communicate a message. It was a deeply exploratory and independent learning process and the product was its own reward. I could see this also being very motivating for students who struggle with the traditional writing process. Video editing seems like it might a great access point. In a perfect world we would have the time and technology in class to do a project like this.

However, the visual arranging of pieces could also be done with more traditional compositions, like written text. Anything that brings greater awareness to students about their own ways of thinking will help them become better writers. I also think that it is more practical than Atwell's or Hillock's rigidly structured classrooms, and more democratic. Students could realistically have as much experience with the technology as I do, and I suspect some will have more. Using a tool that we learn together could be a powerful learning/teaching experience for students and disrupt ideas about the teacher as an expert.

I also felt that by publishing our work on the web, even if it was only for fellow classmates—or maybe prospective employers—it changed the way we felt about the finished product. One thing that I appreciated about Atwell was her insistence that students should write with publication in mind, because after all, that is a major purpose of writing. Publishing work on a website that they designed not only meets state standards, it can instill a sense of pride (hopefully not terror) in students about their work.

Peer Review and Feedback

It is obvious from this week's readings that there are many ways to go about generating, giving, and receiving feedback for developing writers in our class. It is also clear that giving valuable feedback—both as teachers and students—is something that takes intention and practice.

Fulwiler (who totally looks like Hemingway) attempts to show us the product of several different drafting stages, although I felt that at times he could make parts of the process a bit more explicit in order to be useful. While it is nice to see the process in action, this doesn't really tell me much about how I would implement revisions in my own classroom, especially when you consider how different 8th graders' literacy practices are from those of college students. I think his instruction for revision takes a lot for granted - that students know what good writing looks and sounds like. Some of his suggestions (I appreciate that they are not commandments) help, but others (Let Form Follow Content) are way too vague for students who have had limited exposure to different genres.

I found this site to be helpful because it includes different concrete strategies for teaching peer review as part of writing across content, which is great for Common Core!

I also like the idea of experimental drafts and playing with genre and constraints. In some ways this takes the pressure off the drafting process because nothing is really a “final” product. Being afraid of writing most often stems from thinking that the first draft has to be perfect. What do we do as teachers to both challenge students to produce quality work and get them over the first hurdle of writing?

The next hurdle seems to be giving and receiving useful feedback from peers, which Winn and Johnson, as well as VanDeWeghe, find to be one of the most culturally relevant practices.

In particular, I appreciate VanDeWeghe's use of the word disposition, namely, finding ways to encourage young writers “to develop the skills and dispositions to interact wisely with other writers” (p. 96). I think we often think of skills, even writing and critical thinking skills, as things that can be acquired quickly, within a few repetitions. Disposition seems to imply that this is something that takes time and repeated effort to cultivate. It might take more than one or two mini-lessons, in fact it might take an entire year or years of school to get students to a place where they can provide helpful feedback by habit. Dispositions take into account all of the developmental aspects of our students:

Responding well calls for not only identifiable skills but also intra- and interpersonal skills, along with such crucial emotional and cognitive dispositions as empathy and reader-based anticipation. (VanDeWeghe, p. 96)

While there are many ways to teach it—either as a class like Ackley, or as a set of mini-lessons—I think it is important to model peer-reviewing. This was a cute and rather helpful video (see clip below) I found featuring students talking about some of the pitfalls of peer reviewing.

A final word on VanDeWeghe: he makes a salient point that “many ingrained curricular values and mandates work against higher-level response and the time it takes to teach (and learn) it well” (p. 99). We will have to untrain our students to give evaluative or affective responses just like we will have to untrain them to seek “teacher answers.” Which may take a good deal of time.

As far as Ackley's method of peer tutoring, I am intrigued by the idea of making a high school or middle school writing tutor center. I know that I learned the most about literature when I was peer-facilitating study sessions. Having to teach a concept to someone else often helps you understand it better yourself, so I see Ackley's tutoring model working not just for “advanced” writers, but writers at all levels, seeing themselves as having something to offer their peers in terms of writing advice. It is also a great way to leverage and create student leaders.

Given some of the pushback against “writing as process” models (which give White kids the space to use literacy skills they already know from home, while expecting students of color to know it without having been taught, thus putting one group ahead of another) it seems as though there isn't much discussion in Ackley about the role of language and power in peer-reviewing activities. I did find an interesting article on race, gender and status in peer reviewing interactions. 

Since VanDeWeghe basically references Simmons for the entire article, I was curious to read it for myself, and I have linked it here if you are interested.
http://users.ipfw.edu/wellerw/Responders_training.pdf

Critical Writing/Literacy/Thinking

Reading Hillocks has been so helpful in clarifying my thoughts about what teaching writing looks like. I only know from my own schooling experiences what NOT to do. The three most common methods for teaching writing in my middle school and high school were

1. Learn the six traits of writing (Grades 4-6, until it came back to haunt me in 10^th grade)
2. Write a lot of essays
3. Read good writers

With the exception of the last one, I wouldn't call any of these great pedagogies on their own, and even the way they were implemented didn't really include much actual scaffolding or instruction in writing like what was described in Hillocks book. Most of my writing skills came from the last one, and I can think of only one teacher who showed me how to read like a writer in order to do this.

The alternative to critical thinking.

What I like about Hillocks is that it teaches critical thinking as the crux of writing. After slogging through the misery of 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grade writing, I finally had a 7^th grade teacher who at least created assignments that required thoughtfulness, and held us to incredibly high standards. I think what Hillocks gets at is that so few writing assessments and instructional practices require students to think about audience and purpose—like the Common Core Standards seek to address—and at least as a partial result, there are many “literate” people who do not know how to read or construct a solid, logical argument.

I would have loved to have writing instruction like what Hillocks describes, but that is not to say that it is a perfect practice. For example, one of the many competing chronologies within Hillocks is what students know and what they contribute in class discussions. At several places in the introduction and early chapters, Hillocks points out that the students don't seem to know how to make or recognize basic rhetorical arguments, then provides examples in discussions where students actually draw sophisticated conclusions about the irony of a piece of work or identify important details. It is at times unclear whether students should be treated as naïve about argument, or as he says in the introduction, do “we need to ask them to be as experts, even at the beginning of learning something new, reporting their thinking to the class and challenging one another's interpretations and conclusions” (p. 10)?

Hillocks also seems to adopt the implicit assumption early on that there is an objective “truth” to be reached, without a focus on teaching students to question what makes something a “fact.” That's not to say that logic and reasoning are not good, but we need students to recognize at the same time that the conclusions which we draw to be logical are also based on assumptions that we have because of our culture and history and those assumptions need to be examined in the process. The first example of critical literacy practices doesn't appear until page 52: “”Eventually, students need to learn that every expression, whether in words or visual images, is an intentional construction ad implies the creator's attitudes and agendas... but at early points in teaching argument, it is probably sound practice to go with the easier question.” When implementing Hillocks practices, I would question when to introduce those critical literacy pieces because I think that with appropriate scaffolding, you can and should do it early on.

I think it is easy, however, to be culturally relevant while practicing Hillocks' style of teaching. Especially when it comes to topic selection for policy (chapter 3), the fact that students have to do their own research because there isn't any pre-digested information available, hits two birds with one stone: you have their attention and you have created a problem to which there is no teacher answer. Like Beach and Doerr-Stevens note, having students write about what affects them immediately creates engagement that goes beyond just talking about something they like. As Hillocks warns, “Having a good time does not necessarily result in learning anything meaningful” (p. 2). However, creating the flow state requires that students have some choice or control in the matter, balanced with enough challenge to stimulate and move them beyond themselves. The way we employ the strategies presented, no matter how much we tend to accept them as really good practice, takes thought and care.

In some ways it seems like it would actually be easier to just reinvent the wheel.

Trying to make Atwell fit.

Atwell has so many specific ways of going about the writers workshop, that it is easy to lose sight of what we are doing as teachers. I appreciate the occasion where she steps back, gives some of the philosophy behind her classroom and her actions, then acknowledges that how we execute these ideas may not be the same for everyone. However, her lists and appendices and charts could easily be read as a how-to for successful writing workshops. I think this is a dangerous mindset to fall into: follow these steps, get this amazing learning result. So often we look for step-by-step guides that will lead to success, much like the writing process itself, when it is about finding out what works for us as individuals and our students as individuals. Trying to make Atwell's workshop fit into a classroom that isn't hers sounds like a messy prospect.

Like most experts, she seems to have forgotten how she got to be good at her craft, and at times is unable to articulate what kinds of difficulties she had to overcome to achieve the desired classroom environment. For most of the chapter, I assumed that she was teaching little angel students who never objected to silent reading and writing time. Of course, she showed later on that this wasn't so, but it still makes me wonder why she doesn't spend much time talking about the limitations of the workshop model. We already bought the book, so she isn't selling anything.

Some of the wisdom that I took away from Atwell is about creating a space that sets kids up to be successful. Providing an organization system that they can follow, and coaching them in it, providing clear expectations for writing and reading behavior, creating a physical environment conducive to the workshop. I wonder, though, if there is a cost to running such a tight ship. As a student, having to learn how to follow this teacher's form of organization (yellow folder, blue folder, what?) when the next teacher has a completely different one can take up a lot of mental resources, which we know are actually a finite resource. It is January and most of the eighth graders I am working with still don't know to take out their folders and begin working on the writing prompt on the board when they enter class. It seems daunting in a class where time is already precious to spend even more time teaching students a complex filing system unless you are preparing them to be professional bureaucrats. To take her philosophy a step further, namely letting the students be responsible for organizing their work, why not have students come up with a system that works for them? There are obviously some drawbacks to this--for example, as a teacher you need some consistency--but perhaps the benefits would be enough to justify it.

Fortunately, much of her focus was on environment and how the students respond to it. One of the most interesting discussions concerning environment was the easel versus blackboard question. I too have felt that the board at the front of class can be more representative of an intimidating wall of knowledge to be banked into students heads. (Putting the chalk in the student's hands helps this). But creating a more intimate learning space with the easel seems like a very simple affordance that can have a big pay off in terms of how the lesson goes.

The drawbacks.

The discussion of the affordances of certain mediums in Andrews and Smith was by far the most useful part because in some ways, that is at the crux of digital literacy. It is not only about us as teachers recognizing the unique capabilities of mediums and the differences within and across them, it is also important for us to teach our students how to recognize this and weigh the benefits and drawbacks of certain mediums. Just as they study purpose and audience, students will now need the skills to decide on a medium for communication as well.

While clearly a divisive issue, I think the five paragraph essay can be counted as a tool for these means just like anything else. The argument against the five paragraph essay was that the form inhibits critical thinking. But the conclusion that really seemed to emerge from his evidence, if not the essay, was that we need, again to draw our students' conscious attention to the form and what it does for their writing. (I also think that his prompts, not the three-pronged thesis requirement, were what stifled his students thinking.)

Most importantly, I think that I agree with Atwell that we need our student writers to be publication-minded. Nothing has so great an impact on quality, effort and motivation as the social pressure of having one's work publicly lauded or critiqued. And it is essentially why we write. Not to please the teacher or to pass the MCA's, but to talk to one another in a medium that has its own unique capability:

“Publication in a writing workshop must be a given: student writers need access to readers beyond the teacher if they're to understand what writing is good for, and if they're to write with care and conviction” (Atwell, 1998, p. 102).

Links

One thing that resonated with me in Atwell is her focus on working reading into writing and writing into reading. They are not discrete categories in her workshop. This blog has many good writing prompts (many of which are built into a curriculum that addresses the common core standards), but in particular, the ones about reading and reflection are useful.

http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/post/24812417643/18-writing-prompts-about-reading

As we try to find our own ways to adapt and organize our classrooms, technology may be our friend. Some of these apps we are already pretty familiar with (like Dropbox) but this teacher also shares some organization apps that are pretty useful.

http://www.the-teachers-lounge.com/blog/2012/03/technology-timesavers-for-teacher/

I was interested in some of the implications that Andrews and Smith discuss (p. 121) for technology that actively changes the way we read and write. While my initial reaction was paranoia (Google is deciding what I should search) I also see the utility or at least the potential in this phenomenon for educative purposes. One example I thought of is this Google Chrome app:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-patriarchy/fiidcfoaaciclafodoficaofidfencgd

Drafts, Pedagogy, and the Classroom

Shitty first drafts.

I remember having to do the dreaded "free writes" in high school and they persisted throughout college.  I shuddered, like Lamott, to think of who might read my draft if I were to suddenly meet my demise.  I imagined that everyone else who was a "good writer" did it effortlessly and elegantly.  I felt more like the horse tripping over the low bar.  

It can feel like there is a lot at stake in writing because, as most teachers have pointed out, students are only shown the finished product of professionals as examples.  I appreciated the process-related models that emerged in Chapter 5 of Andrews and Smith (2011) because there seems to be more room for the much needed meta-cognitive aspect of writing.  I'm referring to the later methods in cognitive psychology.  Rather than teaching the model for writing, there seems to be a shift in focus to helping students recognize their process for writing and honing that ability.  I think as teacher of culturally relevant writing, this is also important to acknowledge, that our students know how to tell stories or make arguments in ways that are grounded in their culture.

I was afraid, reading the beginning of Winn and Johnson's chapter 2, that the authors were making a case for culturally relevant pedagogy as a some kind of magical antidote to education.  However, I appreciate how they linked it to critical literacy and the need for multiple viewpoints, and even acknowledged criticisms of the views that inform CRP.  I think that nuance in the discussion of race and education is sorely needed.  I also think in reality, half of our practice will be justifying culturally relevant pedagogy (the real thing) to our administration and co-workers depending on the district, which means we should equip ourselves with these kinds of resources if we are going to take up such a pedagogy.

Our Worthy Target: Planning and Practicing

A Wordle compilation of our planning document

“...we must consider why the conceptual material and tools we are teaching were created, what issues they were meant to address, and what work this knowledge can do.” (Smith & Wilhelm, 2006, p. 58)

Our planning and our re-planning were equally as important. In planning our unit, we strove to implement critical literacy and liberatory pedagogy into our work. In re-planning we made our lessons more relevant to the students based on what we had learned about them that day, knowing how quickly that might change the next day.

One of the greatest challenges we faced was gauging the difficulty or rigor that we should incorporate into our assessments. We didn't want students to fail, and at the same time, we didn't want to belittle them by providing only simplistic or juvenile activities. Our essential question—“How does the way we tell and read news stories influence how we view the world?”—sought to make them think about what we were doing in a bigger context, but at the same time, there were several moments where I felt we had overestimated their abilities. This is a unique kind of teacher-tension, where we are caught between wanting to push students to their best thinking and their best work, and knowing when we are asking too much of them.

I think part of our anxiety about their lack of formal articulation was falling into the trap that Wiggins (2005) warns about: “We caution readers, then, to avoid the common misconception that goals for understanding represent statements that learners must “give back” by the time the lessons are over or that the understandings must be simplistic for younger learners or novices in a subject. On the contrary: The understanding of powerful ideas in use remains our worthy target.” (p. 142).

The fact that they could not produce a verbalized or written answer for our essential question does not automatically mean that our unit “failed” somehow. Their VoiceThreads demonstrated that they could produce stories that had the 5 W's. Their willingness to listen to each other's stories and identify the 5 W's also demonstrated a maturity that we had not see earlier in the week. Many of them could recognize when a news story was “unfair” without necessarily calling it biased.

We knew going in that the way we measured learning was as important as the learning we created. Particularly, the way “assessment” has been structured often serves a purpose that is counter-productive to liberatory pedagogy, for "[to] separate knowledge from interests is to present the former as value-free or objective, and to mask the power implicit in the latter" (britzman, 2003, p. 40). It is important to recognize the ways in which our assessments construct what “knowledge” is for our students and ourselves. I think in many ways our assessment disrupted more dominant ideologies about valuable knowledge—students were encouraged to use their own stories as something “newsworthy,” and they were given the freedom to communicate this in many different mediums—pictures, spoken and written word, and some with movement as well.

“Fortunately, many teachers intuitively know that the best way to achieve their goals is to enlist students' interests on their side. They do this by being sensitive to student's goals and desires, and they are thus able to articulate the pedagogical goals as meaningful challenges” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991).

Uncertainty, Predicting, and Surrendering

 

“The result was not a student who learned the right things, but a student who both learned what mattered in school and society and unlearned or critically examined what was being learned, how it was being learned, and why it was being learned. Learning involved ending up with knowledge and skills that could not have been predicted by either the student or the teacher." (Kumashiro, 2004, p. 28)

No matter how much we planned, we could never possibly plan “enough” to control the classroom we were about to enter. And while that sounds simple, it really isn't. As britzman points out in chapter 6, there are several dominant discourses about the teacher's ability to control a classroom, and its implications for how we view student interactions. In unpacking the incident with Derek*, I blamed myself for my failure as a teacher to predict the unpredictable. As britzman (2003) notes about two subjects in her study, “Both... invest in the belief that they must master the art of premonition and instantaneous response—both of which depend upon the teacher's ability to anticipate and contain the unexpected—to ensure control as a prerequisite for student learning” (p. 224). Essentially, my desire to control the situation, and the guilt that resulted from not being able to achieve the impossible, was at odds with my desire for an uncertain outcome in student learning.

I think that wishing for unexpected and unpredictable learning must go hand in hand with recognizing and valuing the necessity of unexpected and unpredictable behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes in our students. Dominant discourses about schools tend to view uncertainty as being unprepared. While “[such] a construct positions uncertainty as both a character flaw and a problem of management that can be solved by what inheres in the person,” I think that in reality, uncertainty leads to more depth of learning and more authenticity in the teacher-student relationship when those relationships aren't negotiated solely by outside forces (britzman, 2003, p. 225).

For example, I was confronted on several occasions with behaviors and demonstrations of learning that I did not expect, but that were very positive. Derek* was very willing to work with me on Thursday after our incident on Wednesday. I realized that I really had no control over how his day would go, beyond what I could ask him to do in the classroom.

Surrendering a sense of control allows me to exchange for a sense of peace about the ambiguity of working in a classroom. It no longer phases me that the students seemed to struggle so much with our lesson on Tuesday or that many of them could not articulate a learning outcome because that is not what learning is.

When I think about what a smoothly operating classroom should look like, I honestly think about a scene like this one (video). It is a busy street in Hanoi that has no traffic signals. And yet there are no accidents. Ever.

The reality is that our need to predict things is a need to control things. Notions about the need for control are formed by larger discourses about “adolescence” , and discourses about the purpose of schooling both of which are informed by economic and political interests that may or may not align with our own (Finders, 1998).

If we really want to delve into critical literacy, we need to be comfortable with not only intellectual uncertainty, but all of the physical and social uncertainties that accompany it.