Week 5: AAVE and Grammar

Ah the precarious topic of grammar...it was about time we began talking about it. I don't particularly recall many classes where I was taught grammar. In my education, spelling, mechanics, and language use came with personal experience and observation from third parties. I think I am part of a very small number of people with my situation, and I wouldn't trade it for any number of formal grammar classes. Respectfully, this gives me a unique point of view to differing American vernaculars.

With each English teacher, one needs some amount of time to situate their own pedagogy in how to treat issues of different vernaculars. When reading the Godley article on "Dialectically Diverse Classrooms", I got a chance to think about some of these things. Having a less than formal education on grammar, I subscribe fully to the idea that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is not only as valid/ equally relevant to "standard English", but also gives us a lot (in a pedagogical sense) in analyzing structures of power in race and language.

Godley pointed out quite a few things that stand in the way of AAVE being more widely accepted by teachers, but two really stood out for me: 1) pushing through superficial understandings of AAVE as a vernacular and 2) the definitions of corrected and incorrect use of language. Of the two, the former seems to be the one that is fix by time and teacher training (in fact, Godley gave me the impression that not much can be done about older generations of teachers and that the future holds the key to the shifting paradigm; I don't completely agree with this sentiment but neither does Godley). However, the definition of "correct language" is something I still wrestle with. For example, Godley laid out this example: "I play on Derrick team." I know this is grammatically incorrect and Godley argues that this constitutes more as "data" to one's own use of language. From here, one can use the data to help them move more towards standard English. The approach is nice, but I fear that this kind of correction (along with cultural stereotypes) only serves to strengthen the power of standard English. At this point, my own self doubt about my pedagogy kicks in and I question how much students do need to know about the "Standard English" protocols.

The best answer I can come up with right now is viewing standard English similarly to the "white race". The comparison I draw is partially based on the power of the white race giving the illusion of standard English as optimal. Additionally, just as the white race is invisible, standard English is invisible in a different way. English teachers tote it as "practical" and a necessary skill for students to navigate the professional world. For my money, the invisible operation of standard English  yields power to those already empowered. Gaining this kind of meta cognition for our students feels more necessary than standard English.

Links for the week:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mdover/website/Social%20Welfare%20Policy%20Main%20Folder/Professional%20Writing%20for%20Policy%20Practice/checklistPDF-Urban_AAE.pdf

This link leads to an academic PDF dealing with AAVE. There is something really satisfying about seeing real research behind the syntactic, morphological, and grammatical legitimacy behind non standard English forms. I just wonder how this might fit into a high school English environment. Is there room for this?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/

While perhaps predictable, I find using this website quite helpful in establishing a student centered environment. Not only does it provide fun and casual humor, it also supports non standard English words, in great detail. For example, one might find that "shawty" has origins from the dirty south. Even more so, students use this a resource in class. I think finding a way validate this resource, as a teacher, means to give more power to the disempowered.

Simple, but something I had to "lol" out loud to. "Y" is so confused! Poor "Y"!

A Week 4 Post: Hillocks and Me

I will say that this week's reading of Hillocks was certainly an enjoyable one: very accessible and reasonable. I got to read chapters 1-3 and they did help me see fact, judgment, and policy writing. All of these chapters were formatted with a short introduction followed by a case study-like story. Before I reflect on the chapters and their content, I want to speak on the format of the chapters first. The stories did help me contexualize the formation of "argument writing" inside of the classroom, and that is something we have been lacking in our grad school readings, in my humble opinion. Being said, I did sometimes just get lost in reading the stories. The bullet points for the lesson plans being layed out helped me stay focused, and reminded me that I wasn't just reading a story but also analyzing pedagogical practices. But, due to the pacing of the stories, I got more involved in the development of the characters, teachers, and the classroom than looking at the actual lesson plan. I don't think the story form can't work, but breaks to step out and have the author, along with the reader, process the lesson would have been nice and helpful.

Alright, now onto the more meat and potatoes of my reflection of the three chapters. Personally, I want to focus on the third chapter on "Arguments of Policy." I absolutely loved the points being made in centering the students writing on topics that are most important to them. The book elaborated by describing that allowing students to conduct their own research their own topics leads to greater engagement and focus on topics that matter to them. And which catch all term does this relate back to? Yep, good ol' Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Internally, I had a bit of a revelation on research: it is kinda stuffy. Asking us to go find sources and use them to form arguments causes researchers and readers to buy more into what they read rather than what they synthesize from opinion and other texts. Plus, I foresee this kind of teaching as a form that can yield collaboration from other teaching domains. What kind of awesome could come from a research project that asks students to make a claim on policy using research from social sciences in an ethics class, scientific research from biology class, and centered in good writing practices from English class?! It might take a lot of collaboration, but I feel it would be well worth the effort.

One idea I will keep in mind, to prevent raising alarms, is making sure to scaffold students with the proper rhetorical etiquette. By this, I mean to speak to how students phrase their arguments so they don't off put the readers. Connecting with Atwell, I'd expect these arguments to be read to people whom the issues directly affect (i.e. principals, teachers, policy makers).When asking students to speak to issues that affect them, strong opinions will undoubtably come out, in fact I hope they do. But if the students come into the writing with the idea that "I'm going to tell 'the man' to go jump off a cliff,", then they most likely will not get very far with their argument. There is a certain rhythm and rhyme to this kind of diplomatic measure. Hillocks says that this can be done by presenting claims based in fact and research. As a teacher, I would make sure that students also present a counter opinion and refute it with a clear and concise rebuttal (another Hillocks point from the introduction), and make sure they keep their writing emotionally motivated but free of the potential biases of that emotion.

Weekly links!

http://www.amazon.com/Theatre-Oppressed-Augusto-Boal/dp/0930452496

This is an Amazon link to a really amazing book I read in my theatre undergrad called Theatre of the Oppressed. It is based in Freire but uses theatre techniques and acting practices to help give the marginalized a voice in a safe yet politically charged space. Often, this is done through the use of role play; a theme touch on in one of the readings. I highly recommend reading it, especially since it acts as a great resource for engaging students in culturally relevant activities.




So, I came across a review of the Hillocks book while looking for this week's link. Other than the very distinctive British/ robot voice, I found it to be a rather simplistic summary of the book. I would argue that whoever made this video simply scribed a summary of the book with only a small littering of actual opinion. Taking a nod from Hillocks, I would say the review used little evidence, even from the text, to support their claim. I figure my own evaluation of this review was worth using one of my links this week, because we should stay critical of some of these review voices, especially as new teachers.

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/analyzing-famous-speeches-arguments-30526.html?tab=1#tabs

I love the spoken word. The way in which a text is spoken adds so much to a speech. All too often, I feel speech is shunted to the side. Thus, I was happy to find a lesson plan that connects argument writing with the spoken word. While I would probably create an alternative formative assessment, I thought the lesson plan was really well detailed with a daily breakdown of activities and engagements. Plus it reminded me of my intercession unit at Crosswinds, which I will always hold near and dear to my heart ("Why me?!"; inside joke).

Week 3 post

In our cohort, I am known often as the articulate guy or maybe even the guy who says weird things to get attention. I respect both lines and prefer the former. However, when reading Atwell for this week, I had nothing better or more succinct to say other than, "she makes so much sense." Obviously her care and thoroughness for her students borders on the level of breathtaking, but more importantly she helped me situate what a writing prompt in a class should look like. Well maybe not so much what is should look like but how it can be properly scaffolded and how we need to evaluate student's needs with writing. In particular, I love her use of time in regards to writing. She recognizes that deadlines and strict guidelines proves potentially problematic to the process the students must undergo to develop as writers. I can't tell you how much sense she made when she described the difference between, "Yes, I can" and "I guess I have to", in regards to teachers assigning writing to be done at certain times (this particular instance refers to teachers asking students to compose a writing due at the end of a class period; pp 91-92). For me, this clicked with my own struggles to come up with words in a timely manner or in a particular instance; sometimes those words strike me at a random time later on and I only wish I had the chance to think of it at the time. 

This is not to say that the classroom is not a place for writing (speaking in regards of the workshop space Atwell laid out). Instead, Atwell encourages teachers to give students time to foster their own positioning with writing by giving them ample time to workshop themselves. But then what should the writing workshop look like anyway if the aren't to work towards creating something by a certain time frame? I'll admit that this contradiction is somewhat challenging at times, but I think this time makes more sense when students are given space to develop as a writer in their own pace. Where I think Atwell forms pacing with writing is in a student's reading. Let me tell you that I appreciate her connecting reading and writing quite a bit. She states that, "Even when students do write everyday, growth in writing is slow (pg 93)", and this quote connects me with my takeaway from this article: reading development is writing development. Now I am not stating that writing is an antecedent of reading, rather they are complementary and help create a larger picture of a student's skill with language. Thus, not only is it necessary to give students time to both read and write in a classroom, in order to foster good habits, but we must begin to forge the connections between the two principals of English language interaction. Upon reflection of creating a workshop, it should be less about reading or writing, but rather allowing students the space to engage with English in the way they need to or want to. It's about creating an experience, rather than it being centered around a writing prompt or assignment. On a side note, I appreciated Atwell's description of her classroom space as a way to illustrate how she fosters creative engagement with reading and writing.

However, in spite of all my praise for Atwell, I still need to pose a certain question surrounding her theories: how do we realistically fight against the tyranny of "deadline writing"? The easy question is to not assign deadlines to writing requirements. Yet, I combat this notion by proposing that a class (in itself) is a deadline imposed by the hierarchical school structure. Schools are saying that by the end of a quarter, semester, year, or whatever that the student should master the topic matter. Truth is, there is no "mastery" or true litmus for determining if one has gained full knowledge of "English". What are we to do, then, with writing and a classroom if it is not to master something? To answer this question for myself, I had to look at my own pedagogy and how this question might shape my classroom. My first answer is to reshape the idea of the class with a title beyond "English" and maybe to something more open like "Write your own short story." This solution, however, is more about the hook of the class rather than proposing actual solutions to the time problem. Next, I thought about having a certain number of requirements for the class and asking students to have to complete them in their own time. The problem with this idea is that there still is a deadline: the end of class. For those who procrastinate (like me), this idea becomes even more of "deadline writing" than traditional "deadline writing" might be. Right now, I cannot come up with one single solution to this quandry, but I know that allowing the resource of time will help students with their overall development as writers. When it comes to writing, it is not just about the product, rather the process plays a large part in growth and development.

Links for the week!

http://kckindergartentimes.blogspot.com/2012/01/writing-workshop-goals.html

Upon searching for writing workshop ideas, I found this blog from a Kindergarten teacher. This particular post shows a strategy where the students move their name tags to different writing goals they want to work on. I, surprisingly, like this idea even though I believe that writing development is personal. Making connections with other students while developing as writers is key to overall development in the same way that Atwell encourages/ requires students to publish writing works outside of the classroom (it widens the audience of the writing and makes students more accountable).

http://simons-rock.edu/young-writers/about-the-young-writers-workshop

http://www.slc.edu/ce/pre-college/summer/workshop/index.html

For anyone who knows anything about me, I love camps and I love summers that surround camp. Thus, the idea of a summer camp three week session that centers around giving young writers the space and time to develop is just so awesome. Recommending spaces like this for future students with an affinity or desire to write is something I can see doing in the near future.

http://www.learner.org/resources/series194.html

This DVD documentary of situating developing writers seems pretty real/legit, in terms of helping situate teachers in their positioning with their students. I haven't seen the film, but the trailer looks promising. 

And we're back: Teaching Composition Week 2 Post

It has been over 3 years since I last posted on this blog, and quite a few things have changed. I am now in grad school and working towards getting my graduate's degree in English Education. Perhaps unsurprisingly, courses in the grad program call for me to get back on the blog center. With this short introduction, I start my process yet again to unravel the many tenants of teaching, learning, and pedagogy.

Before reading the Winn and Johnson chapter 2, I never placed all the different types of elements involved in culturally relevant pedagogy (crp). I guess I just imagined crp as a natural content movement when one enters a teaching state of "flow", as Csikszentmihalyi might claim. However, Winn and Johnson really situate crp realistic and feasible terms that can help shape a classroom using it. Those terms being "academic success", "cultural competence", and "critical consciousness."

LINK ALERT: http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/mihaly-csikszentmihalyis-theory-of-flow-1674

^ I found this website while looking up how to spell Csikszentmihalyi. It seems like a really good website that makes educational theories more accessible.

For "cultural competence" and "critical consciousness", I tend to agree with all the points laid out. In specific, I appriciate how crp asks students to gain confidence about their cultures they live in by inviting those cultures in the space. Winn and Johnson put it best when they said that by this token, "learning happens as a result of, rather than in spite of, their presence." Additionally, when students gain a sense of their cultures being relevant, then they are more likely to evaluate it with a greater "critical consciousness." The process is completely tied up in each step connecting to the others. In a way, crp has it's own kind of "flow."

This begs one to ask though if these terms are more like steps than elements present in crp? Does one need to establish cultural competence before pulling out students' "critical consciousness"? Do both of these steps require students to feel "academic success" first? This will be something I pay attention to as I start to employ more crp in my pedagogy.

I had a lot to think about when I read the section on "academic success" in the crp break down. Now I totally agree with Winn and Johnson in their evaluation of hostile classroom spaces that superimpose a set of rules and guidelines that tend to hold down students rather than give them a place to have their ideas heard. By evaluating the standards of assessment and merging them with a students' own knowledge, one can hope to deconstruct the rigid evaluations in classic classroom spaces. Being said, I still think there needs to be some kind of standards to piggy back off of crp. I know that Winn and Johnson are not saying that one should give away "academic success", but I could easily see myself reading it that way. To me, this is done the best in two different ways. First, by asking students to set their own standards of success means to give them agency over the dynamics of the space. The other way is to use their own cultural stand posts and allow them to view the prompts and topics in their unique way.

Additional Links:
I found this video when looking for crp based activities. It isn't a complex activity, but seems to hit the bases well for all the part of crp. My favorite part is the fact that all involved in the class seem to be participating to make this "meta"-ish list.

This is one of my favorite moments from one of my favorite shows: Parks and Recreation. Ron is situating her own schemas of knowledge into a understandable metaphor for teaching complex dynamics of our taxation system. Albeit a bit too simplistic, this example shows off how culturally relevant teaching can take shape with many different topics.