I am attaching a letter that I wrote to Representative Arcuri.

Simple version:  Tell your representative why the Writing Project is important to you, your kids, community, school, students, colleagues, and/or profession.  Ask your representative to sign the letter that is being circulated by Representative George Miller, chair of the House Education and Labor Committee (see the letter at  http://nwpworks.ning.com/page/house-dear-colleague-letter).

The following paragraph tells why it is more important this year than ever before.  Copy it or paraphrase it.  If funds are consolidated, the NWP stands to lose too much!

I am writing to urge you to support the National Writing Project as it faces losing
its federal funding. The NWP is currently at risk as a result of the administration’s
proposed strategy to consolidate it with five other literacy programs which would
only offer funding to state agencies competing for it with new, unproven
programs. The National Writing Project has a thirty-six year program of success
in improving literacy among students by profoundly supporting the professional
development of their teachers.

Find your local representative at:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

Feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might be able to help.

Thank you,

Cynthia

Find my letter to Representative Arcuri here

Imagine participating in the Flat Classroom Project. You have to make a video (or whatever) with people you’ve never met before, many of whom are from different cultures (and timezones). No matter WHAT you focus on, think about the “habits of mind” you learn: the classroom is no longer about merely the content or the grade, it’s now about learning about others and ourselves in order to find out what is meaningful to all parties, so that we can collaboratively construct something. It’s about considering their points of view alongside ours, even though they may be very different. Ultimately, it’s about learning that there are other ways to see the world.

If we’re reading Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (as they do in the FCP), for example, we learn that there are other ways to read this book. Which is not at all to say that people from different cultures experience reading differently in a cognitive sense (though they may), but rather that a person from the US and a person from India, for example, are likely to react in a completely different way to Friedman’s point that the flattening of the world is sending many jobs formerly done in the US to countries such as India, where labor is cheaper. From what I hear, many Indians are delighted to see their economy booming from this “flattening”; a lot of Americans, on the other hand, tend to complain about “outsourcing.” If you’re a highschooler who has only ever heard one side of this argument — on the radio and from your unemployed uncle who blames his situation on “outsourcing,” how eye-opening might it be to hear the perspective of someone from India that does not come to you pre-filtered through the lens of US economic interests?

Working with people we’ve never met before, people who we may be very different from, makes us much more keenly aware of ourselves, of how we look from outside, which, according to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, is a sign of intelligence (see their “6 facets of understanding“). The ability to scan our ideas and beliefs is what educational theorists and cognitive psychologists call “metacognition.” And teaching kids metacognition, or how to think about the way they think, is THE principal goal of all educators; teaching kids to think about how they think through reading and writing, the principal goal of literacy educators. For example, consider how the goal of writing instructors is to teach students not how to write about ______ topic or even how to write in ____ genre, but rather to understand their own process of writing….so that they can transfer that understanding to any new situation that they encounter OUTSIDE of their English class, be it to a paper for history class or a letter to their congressman.

Similarly with reading: our goal is to help students develop an understanding of understanding how they read, or, in other words, how to read different types of texts by practicing with a few in our classes (they will “transfer” their learning to all situations, presumably). For example, I want to teach kids to be able to anwer this question with confidence, the way we — their English teachers,and skilled readers all, can: When I encounter a very difficult text, how do I make sense of it? Like I say, as highly skilled readers, teachers tend to take this skill take for granted (if we even realize that we possess it).

But the skills of reading metacognitively (e.g., knowing that we need to stop periodically to paraphrase a difficult text, and perhaps read footnotes and look up challenging words or concepts) are what give us the confidence to tackle nearly any text we encounter. Building such well-founded confidence should be our goal for all of our students. And this focus on metacognition doesn’t happen only in English class: just as English teachers teach students how to think about how they think through reading and writing, I would imagine that biology teachers teach students how to think about their thinking about the natural world in terms of systems (bodies, symbiosis/parasiti, ecosystems, etc.). Math teachers, about the way numbers organize our world, etc.

And as we know, if we remember, say, Galileo, paradigm shifts, or different views of the same thing, are usually, when you get down to the place where beliefs begin to determine reality (and power and economics) are not politically neutral. Often there are whole institutions (like the Church in Galileo’s case) that are built upon maintaining a certain view, and people will often fight (sometimes violently) to ensure that their view remains the worldview or the “received” or “accepted” point of view.

A fancy word for describing all of this is “ideology.” We all have “ideologies” — or belief systems that we buy into; they manifest in our assumptions. Assumptions are beliefs that shape our thinking and world that we often are not aware of, and that we usually share in common with others in our “in-groups.” For example, if I host a Superbowl party where the guys watch the game and the gals serve the food and gather in the kitchen and nobody thinks twice about the situation (i.e., it seems “normal”), then we all buy into the same (sexist) ideology.

Taking stock of what we each think is “normal” and “abnormal” is usually a great way to begin getting to the bottom of what ideologies we ascribe to (or the belief systems that we buy into, systems that by their very nature, value one thing while devaluing another, thus giving power to one thing or group while disempowering or devaluing another).

And coming “face to face” with someone from a “foreign” culture — someone who has a completely different view of things, so that what seems “normal” to them might seem abnormal to us — is a great place from which to begin questioning our beliefs, especially when we begin to realize that they probably feel the same way how “weird” we are when they hearing what we believe.

This could be as seemingly innocent as Norwegians thinking that Americans are disgusting for liking peanut butter, which, I was surprised to learn on my first trip to Norway, is a distinctly American thing. On the other hand, I found their “normal” way of eating spaghetti back then (in the 1970s) – spaghetti noodles doused in ketchup — yuk! — to be certifiably gross. But these types of beliefs can also extend to the political. For example, it feels natural to believe that our views of, say, women’s rights are correct and that “the veil” that many women wear in Islamic cultures is oppressive. But what if they <i>choose</i> to wear their veil, even when they are given the option not to? Who are we to impose our views on them? On the other hand, think about what people from countries like Britain, Norway, Canada, France, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Guyana — all nations among the many more who have had female prime ministers (i.e., presidents) — think of the US given the fact that we’ve never had a woman in charge in the White House.

This is not to say that the goal of education is to get us to change all of our beliefs. Rather, it is to say that changing our beliefs can be a very good thing, and that one hallmark of a highly intelligent (and evolved) person is the openness to questioning their beliefs, and the willingness, upon realizing that there is a better way of seeing things, to change them.

And guess what that is called?

Yup. Learning.

I guess that in a nutshell I’m saying that whereas the physical space of many of today’s classrooms seem to emphasize mastery of ideas and information in a vacuum, the “space” of an online classroom seems like it could potentially be more conducive to learning in the sense of the term that I describe here. One important caveat though: this is only the case IF AND ONLY IF the learning environment is deliberately constructed to allow students to reflect upon their learning (i.e., focus on their thinking about thinking — and/or in an English classroom, their thinking about their learning and thinking through reflecting upon their reading and writing processes).

But metacognition is just one benefit of online classes. There are many others, which I’d be interested to hear you say more about.

And since online classes are quickly becoming a very popular way of delivering higher education, I suppose that it would be in my best interests to think about teaching one and soon! But I would never trade the environment of the physical classroom for an online one altogether. The palpable sense of community and presence that comes from creating a physical space together is irreplaceable. I’m just suggesting here that perhaps the online “extension” can help us reinvigorate and re-imagine those physical spaces. And perhaps that the online ones are not so devoid of the experiential qualities we are so quick to ascribe to the seemingly polar opposite of the physical classroom.

Food for thought…

[cross-posted on 21st-Century Literacies]

Of course, any reasonably educated person (i.e., a teacher) will say, “Of course!” But my next question to that teacher is: “When is the last time you changed your syllabus? An assignment?”

If the answer is “I change things almost every time I teach them,” I know I’m talking to an excellent teacher — one who learns alongside her students, regularly reflects upon her practice, and is constantly making adjustments to improve or to better adapt her instruction to her students, the times, etc.

As Warlick says, we all continue to learn — as we adopt new hobbies, create new things, read, and so forth. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do any of these.

And teachers, as students’ primary conduit through which to learn not only about content (such as the American and British literary canon), but also about LEARNING, must need be avid learners themselves.

Warlick offers up this great aphorism: You don’t stop learning when you grow old, you grow old when you stop learning.

I’d like to add two more:

(therefore): 1) Good teachers never grow old.

and 2) Never trust a teacher who hasn’t learned something new today.

[cross-posted on Twenty-First Century Literacies]

Free Jung Word Choice Test (similar to MBTI)
personality tests by similarminds.com
]]> http://teachersareradicals.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/meyers-briggs-results/feed/ 0 Dr. S. http://teachersareradicals.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/education-week-former-apple-executive-to-lead-u-s-ed-tech-office/ http://teachersareradicals.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/education-week-former-apple-executive-to-lead-u-s-ed-tech-office/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:41:02 +0000 cynthia http://teachersareradicals.wordpress.com/?p=49 ]]> Education Week: Former Apple Executive to Lead U.S. Ed-Tech Office

Interesting article on Karen Cator — new WH ed-tech guru.  From Apple and has done siginificant work wtih P21.  Skeptics seem to think that P21 is a corporate conglomerate that is “thinly veiled” as a group interested in advancing an educational agenda.  My initial reaction to P21 was the same — I even wrote to them to see how I could justify quoting them when they didn’t seem to have any academics or educators on their board.  But I have since been reminded that  the NCTE partnered with P21 to develop 21st literacy standards – which is  a huge endorsement of legitimacy in my book.

Julian and Kimba

More than 30 years after Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer (1963) called for more research into composition and 40 years after the passage of the National Defense Education Act, which defined reading and writing in terms of national security, we now routinely communicate in something called cyberspace with technologies that must seem to many elderly citizens more fantastic than the gadgets depicted in popular sci-fi films of the 1950s. Those same technologies now provide instant access to information and events that are themselves a function of those technologies. For instance, in a bizarre kind of irony that seem to prove French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s (1983) arguments about appearance and reality, modern political conventions, so long a crucial part of the election process in American society, are now shaped by television and print media in astounding technological efforts to use those same media to shape public opinion: Television represents television representing reality. It all becomes in Baudrillard’s term, simulacra. [Yagelski, Literacy Matters (2000); 13]

Though I really can’t claim to fully understand what Yagelski is saying about political conventions, what he says about technology affecting and standing in for reality, and an acceptance of this symbiotic relationship by the generation coming of age today (the iPod generation, true digital natives) will indeed (and has already) transformed the world and how we know it. I want to explore this a bit.

When I was growing up (boy do I sound old now!), there was TV and there was reality. The two were seperable. I now understand that they weren’t quite as separate as I imagined, that TV represented an ideal, and that I was being duped to believe that somewhere out there lived a Brady or a Partridge family whom I wished I were more like (not perhaps in the broken family part of the picture – my parents stayed together, for better or worse – they celebrated their 43rd anniversary a couple of days ago, but I was enticed by their physical beauty, the glamour of their seemingly average American – and mundane — lives, and probably the way that any problem that upset the cheery equilibrium their almost picture-perfect lives was neatly resolved within 22 minutes). Like many adolescents of my generation (I guess I’m talking about my friends back then), I had crushes on Keith Partridge (often confused with David Cassidy, who played him on TV), and Greg and Bobby, intermittently. These characters and their lives were real to me and I longed to meet them and have my love be reciprocated. Do kids today still have crushes on characters?

Bear with me please, because I honestly don’t think this question is as silly or self-indulgent as it probably sounds. Fast forward (ok now I AM aging myself) a couple or three decades and you have ______ (I don’t even know who kids are crushing on today – need to find out). But from conversations with my 11-year old niece, who seems fairly typical, and what I see in the media, it seems to me that if I were a kid today, and the David Cassidy were still playing Keith Partridge, I might direct my obsession towards the actor and not the character.

And why is this significant? Back to Baudrillard’s simulacra and “there was tv and then there was reality.” Today technology is, as Baudrillard and Yagelski are pointing out, reality; it is inseparable from reality, which is essentially what Baudrillard was presciently saying in his 1981 Simulacrum and Simulation. I want to write more about the whole celebrity culture thang another time, but for now I want to return to the question of adolescent literacy in the 21st century in light of this simulacratic (new word!) world we live in. And in order to do this, I’ll dwell a bit longer on the Bradys and Partridges. When I was a kid and I turned the TV off, Keith (and Bobby and Greg) remained out there. Though they existed in my imagination, I had the distinct sense that they were elsewhere.

Not necessarily so with today’s kids. Which is not to say that “kids today” are deluded into not knowing the difference between television and reality (I am positive that they are smarter and much more savvy than I ever was at their age), but that Web 2.0 changes the nature of our relationships with celebrity, reality, and thereby literacy. Not only do we have more access to celebrities through their blogs — and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that one motivating factor in “friending” or “tagging” folks through social networks like Myspace and Facebook is the desire to eventually be-“friend” a celebrity through the quick collapse of the six degrees of separation that social networking offers — but, and this is what is really interesting to me, we (can) also create our own celebrity in the level playing field offered through social networking.

This is different from (but integrally linked to) the now common mantra that “privacy is dead.” We do indeed share a lot if not every possible detail about ourselves with others through these media (at least “kids today” do – I guess I shouldn’t say “we,” but I really don’t like writing “kids today,” which is really what I mean). And I would venture to guess that none of these kids who are growing up with social networking as part of the way they socialize worry a lot less about a loss of privacy that encouraged by all this sharing of personal information than I –which is evident in that I have no real profile on these sites, and I don’t care to develop one. My friends who do have profiles on Myspace and Facebook (who, in this example, are usually a bit younger than I), have the sparsest of profiles or at the very least very “honest” ones in that they what they say about them jives precisely with who they are in “reality” or in “person.”

But for social networking natives (better than “kids today,” no?), the line between fantasy and reality must be somewhat muddied. Which is not to say that these kids are dishonest, that they are probably representing themselves falsely, etc., etc. Because “false representation” becomes, in this milieu, a somewhat specious concept. I’m going to temporarily postpone the ethical implications of this statement in order to pursue what I think is a more intriguing implication of this conclusion.

For some this will seem like Postmodernism 101, but again, I think it is worth working through for the sake of extending the discussion to think about the implications of all of this for teaching adolescent literacy. That we need to be integrating kids’ “voluntary literacies” into our classrooms goes without saying. Nor am I interested in concluding that our job as literacy educators is to remind kids about the distinction between “representation” and reality – though I do agree this “media-literacy-ish lesson” is, on some level, a very important part of what we do. But, assuming that this representation and reality are one (Postmodernism 101 again, I know), think about the imperative that this places upon literacy educators to help kids become competent in constructing representations. In other words, “creative writing,” in its new 21st century manifestation, whatever that might be, has never been more important to literacy educators. In addition to digital literacy and a command over the tools of argument and analytical thinking that are so important in traditional literacy instruction, an individual’s ability to craft images, to tell stories, to develop characters will become a key part of the cultural capital commanded by the most literate (and powerful, and wealthy?) individuals in our not-so-distant simulacratic future.