Think it... Write it... Speak it

As someone who is quite fond of applying critical lenses to texts and movies, I decided to create a text set to help students learn how to apply these lenses. I chose to focus on a feminist lens for this text set but others could be applied as well; reader response, for example, can be used with all literary works, but a critical race lens, and psychoanalytic lens, among others, may also be applied to some of these texts. Given the topic of the text set and themes of some of the texts, I imagine this would be most appropriate for a diverse 11th or 12th grade high school class. The main reading in this set is a novel by Khaled Hosseini calle d A Thousand Splendid Suns . I went back and forth quite a bit between this and Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa, but wanted a title with a male author to use in conjunction with various Wisconsin State Standards that ask students to question the author’s life and background and how it may influence the story or characters in the story. Both of these ...

  Feminist Lens Graphic As a future English Language Arts teacher, who hopes to teach at the high school level, I wanted to create a visual lesson for a topic that I thought might be confusing for some. I know that some people have a difficult time with critical lenses so that felt like a good way to go. I first thought about creating a visual for several critical lenses but figured that would be overwhelming and there wouldn't really be enough time to go over everything that needs to be covered in a single class period. I eventually settled on the feminist lens because I thought it would be the most fun to make.  Creating this graphic was more challenging than I had initially assumed it would be because I wanted to use references to movies or TV shows that would be relevant to and representative of all teens. I also wanted the images or scenes to be fairly obvious in their depictions of women so there was no confusion in what a person should be looking for. I picked a few que...

 As a future English Language Arts teacher I don’t believe there is a single topic in ELA that doesn’t directly involve, relate to, or rely on literacy in some way. With the past year’s challenges in education the use of technology has played a vital role in classrooms across the world. I was recently introduced to multimodal compositions as a means of responding to literature and texts in place of the traditional, albeit sometimes boring, essays we are so accustomed to. This is a relatively new concept to me and one that I sometimes struggle with. To respond to texts, students can choose to create digital collages and poetry, book talks and trailers, infographics, or interactive timelines, the choices are limited only by your creativity. I’ve found that, for me, creating something other than a traditional essay requires a deeper understanding of the text you’ve just read because there’s usually less space to make your point. Multimodal compositions also provide a more engaging w...

The end is near, and the awards are upon us. I'm excited to see who the winner of the "People's Choice Award" shall be, because there are several classmates who've created some truly great blogs! I loved reading "Lester's Lessons", Olivia's blog was always enjoyable because her thoughts flow seamlessly across the page, and every time Casey wrote about poetry it made me want to love poetry (Even though I still don't, yet.). The blogs in this class were creative and a pleasure to read. award images - Bing images If I’m being honest, and I will be, blogging this semester was a challenge. I struggled to find my voice in composing a professional blog; should this sound like an academic paper, a conversation, some mix of the two? Even though I knew it should sound like some mix of the two I wasn’t entirely sure of how to accomplish that and some of my blogs sound really awkward and I occasionally rambled. However, as challenging as it was, it was a...

Dry-Interactive Timeline I knew very quickly once I began reading Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman that I wanted to create an interactive timeline for this book. The events in the book take place over a very short period of time and there are some major events. I also knew that I wanted civic engagement to be a component of my timeline since Dry is a cli-fi novel. Rather than incorporate images and videos that might have told the story of the book, I chose to use videos, images, and websites that would educate people on climate change while also highlighting the importance of water and how the world could potentially run dry one day. I used the dates from the novel with a short synopsis of what was occurring on that day and then included different media on climate change and water. I really enjoyed the process of creating a multimodal response, maybe a little more than I thought I would.  multimodal composition - Bing When I started to think about the types of media I wanted to ...

In my limited time as a writing coach I’ve had some really positive interactions with the students I’m working with, but not many opportunities to read their work. For the first set of papers, I believe we were instructed to provide feedback on in-text citations. This was relatively simple, and to be honest I was pretty relieved because I realized that I didn’t feel very confident in providing feedback. Prior to this class I always focused on things like grammar but now knew that I wanted to look at higher order concerns, and I was nervous about how to do that. I received two other papers that were variations of the standard book report. I feel like I still focused on things like sentence structure but used the rubric as a guide for my feedback, so I was able to make some comments about topics that were missed or confusing. First and foremost, I think student writers need their teachers to teach them how to write including structure, organization, main ideas, thesis, etc. I also thin...