What's Up With Responding?

In my last post about mid-terms, I mentioned that my 1101 students had given me some important ideas about how the rest of our semester should go.  With that in mind, I'm going back to them again with a problem we are having in our class and hoping that in this space we can help each other out.

My students are not regularly responding to each other's blogs.  I even gave class time for this on Monday and flipping through blogs last night to add my two cents, I noticed that there wasn't much responding there. 

Responding to other's writing is a large part of this class and something that I really hoped the blog space would help with, but some how it's not.

Experience tells me that when my students aren't doing something that I've asked them to do, it's because they don't see the value of it, and if they don't see the value of it, it's because of something I've done or not done.

So . . . in a grand experiment, I'm using my own blog as our writing into the day and a place to practice some responding and think about the value of it. 

Midterm Reflections/ Exam

I've just finished reading midterms for my 1101 class.  They have been so honest and insightful.  For the most part I now have a very clear picture of their experience in class so far, where they are with their understanding of literacy, and how they see all of the moving pieces (daybook, blogs, projects, readings) of the class working.

They have also given me some great suggestions about the second half of the semester.  I have to admit, these are my favorite part, because it lets me know which things seem like valuable use of class time and which things do not, in a way that wouldn't happen if I simply asked "Do you think time to write in class is useful?"   "How can our class help you going forward?" is much more difficult (at least I think so) to answer in a way that the teacher wants to hear.

Here's what I've jotted down in my daybook based on what they've said:

1) Allow students choose their own readings and topics for blog posts/
2) Allow students to choose topics for blog posts
3) More free-writing in class
4) Talk about form, purpose and audience in connection with ethnography projects
5) Work with interview questions
6) Work with the idea of artifacts
7) Focused writing time on ethnography in class.

Coming right up oh brilliant students of mine!

This list alone makes me feel like we have had a very solid midterm exam experience.

Underlife

In response to Brooke's "Underlife" with my students today . . .



Twitter, twitter
Tweet, tweet
About what's being said -
But in critique of it
Cuz critique is not
Engagement here.


Underlife then,
On a social network,
Heavily engaged
But "disruptive"
Surveillance begins.
Conversation moves
Deeper
Under
And becomes deeply engaged
Away from watchers.

Quietly engaged.
Under the radar
While "teacher" looks into backs of laptops

Convincing herself that students
Know their roles, their positionality.

Their place.

As receivers of knowledge rather than makers.

Dumpster Diving and Storify

I've been thinking some more about Pickles the Cat and the idea of Dumpster Diving has come across my screen and into my readings quite a bit lately.

So, in order to create an example or how interesting and easy to use Storify is for my students, and to give them yet another quick image of possibility for their ethnography project while still thinking about the rhetoric of help

Julia's Coffee Dig

One of my favorite places to work is Julie's coffee on Monroe Road.  It's an independent shop attached to the Habitat to Humanity Store that sells awesome coffee, has an incredible used book section, and lovely places upstairs and down to work.  The furniture is all recycled from Habitat donations.  Because of my obsession lately with the Rhetoric of Help, I thought this a fine place to begin a little literacy dig in order to model the ethnographic projects my 1101 students are going to be getting into.  In this post/ dig I'm focused on the art in the place.  What can be read about the place based on these photos of their original art?

Wall Art In Loft

Ceiling Collage - Taken from Loft

Assessment Thinking - An Experiment

I've been thinking a lot about assessment over the past couple of years, and Chris Gallagher's article "Being There"  where he talks about the teachers and the students as the major steak holders in education and thereby assessment.  For me, and for colleagues Tony Scott and Lil Brannon, whose article studying assessment in First Year Writing should be coming out very soon, this rings true.

With that in mind, my students and I worked today to decided how we wanted their first project, a digital literacy narrative, to be assessed.  I gave them a quote from Gallagher's piece and some time to write and think about that, what they wanted to get out of our class by the end of the semester, and what they thought were most important aspects in our reading talking and thinking   so far that might show up in these products.

Here's our brain storming.

(Quick aside. This classroom has those cool chalkboards that slide up and down and I feel like the professor in Good Will Hunting  - but cooler because we aren't using all those numbers) every time I get to use it!)

From here, we talked about what we felt was most valued and important, and while they worked in writing groups, I came up with the following rubric for us to work with.

_______  (10) Effort/ Risk Taking

_______ (10) Effective Use of the Digital Tool

_______ (10) Narrative hangs together ( Coherence/ Organization)

_______ (30) Reflects what we’ve learned about literacy

_______  (30) Is the narrative appealing?  Do we care?

________ (10) Grammar/ Conventions

We talked about it and agreed upon it, which feels great.  The students are happy with the way things are weighted and what is valued.  They will also turn in a reflective letter with the project.

This "Rubric" feels a little better than one I've just made up by myself, and CERTAINLY better than one handed down from on high by a text book company or testing corporation.  It's  really, really subjective.  Of course, there's no getting around that.  But something is still bugging me about it.  

Thoughts?

Hanging with the Wrong Crowd of Words- an Inquiry

In my 1101 course we are embarking upon a journey of inquiry blogging - among other things  I started last summer with the UNCCWP SI group of 2012 with an inquiry around the rhetoric of help, where I got particularly caught up in Pickles the Cat - a character from a children's book.

I'm planning to keep that project moving and actually do an enthnography around the literacy and rhetoric of help along side my students.

But today' post, is a meandering one - inquiring a little more deeply into this idea of literacy and always it seems lately, connecting it back up to the rhetoric of help that has been pinging around in my head since class yesterday.

One of our readings for class last week was "Words Become Us,"  Convocation speech given by Ann Imbrie.  It's a say story of sorts in that one of the characters commits suicide and Imbrie goes on to ponder how the love affair with words, particularly borrowed words as teen agers led them to such different outcomes, she as a successful college professor and he as a victim of suicide.

One of my students picked out the line "it's possible that Gordon simply fell in with a bad crowd of words, that he borrowed the wrong words, that Milton's  words, say rather than Mick Jagger's might have redeemed him."

This idea of a bad crowd of words collided with the term "broken English" that can out of our dual conversation about Amy Tan's mother and another student in our class who has always made phone calls for her mother.

And it all made me think of the real, concrete power of words - and who gets to decide which words have power?  Is my English "broken" when I say "chester drawers" for bureau" or when one of my students who speaks multiple languages finds it easier to write in his first language to get thoughts out and then translate to English so that I can read it?   Right now, a big motivation for me is written on a white board in my home office "Dead discussion. You will not win cuz I will not loose." - It's a lyric from "Can't be Touched" - a song that I have to turn down when my children walk through the room and that I most likely wouldn't be blasting in my office in Cameron.  But it fills me with power when I need it.   Is allowing ourselves to "hang out" with these languages and words "falling in with a bad crowd of language?"    Is the code switching we all do, the lyrics and the movie lines, and quotes from books not in the cannon - the deviation from "proper" (whatever that is) English, hanging with the "wrong" crowd.

And so is the rhetoric of help bound up in this idea of "raising children up" to hang out with the "right" crowd of words" marking their home languages as "wrong" and broken?