Technology and Understanding

After developing a conceptual argument through a Foucauldean lens, I sorted the language through Wordle for motifs and themes.

 

Checkout Wordle! This website is an easy way to create a visual representation of words through “clouds.” I tripped over this website while reading Jan Hart’s blog, E-Learning Pick of the Day (check this blog out!). Once I had seen and used Wordle, I couldn’t stop thinking about where its place was in the reality of our classrooms and it seems to me that we can use it to engage students in applying reading comprehension stratagies.

How to do that? The Wordle cloud is concept map of recurring words within a text; recurring words are signals for main ideas. After reading, have students identify main ideas and then sort the text words through Wordle to monitor conclusions. The word cloud can be used before reading, too, as a tool to activate prior knowledge and establish connections. The cloud can even inflence how kids visualize connections as they develop inferences.

The image above is the result of Wordle’s sifting of the words from a recent paper I wrote. The process is simple–you just insert text and Wordle does the rest. I copied and pasted my entire paper into the Wordle service space and Wordle did the rest, sifting through my langauge to arrive at a cloud representation of the ideas. Look at the Wordle and draw some conclusions about my paper and then read through my blog to see if the message I send in paragraph form has any semblance of the graphic you see above.

The Wordle graphic above is a conceptual representation of a theoretical argument regarding the efficacy of RtI: Response to Intervention.  I have spent much time this fall researching Response to Intervention as part of a doctoral class: Moral and Political Foundations of Educational Policy. The goal of the course was to examine the role of social and cultural theory in contemporary education. As a result, I spent hours reading and analyzing how educational theory affects practical application of policy and eventually classroom methodology, especially in how such theory plays out in meeting today’s challenge of the growing achievement gap.

One of the scariest acronyms in public education today is RtI: Response to Intervention. Really, as with anything else, it’s not the acronym that frightens, but the simplicity of nominalizing a complex, permeating educational approach. Cloaked in terminology like “individualized” and “achievement,” RtI aims at conformity and mediocrity in its quest to bring learners into the mainstream of educational thought and expectations.

Although RtI is not new, the method is new to many classroom teachers who have been teaching whole class style for years. The method is theoretically positive but practically, requires retraining and practice for teachers. The positive part of RtI is the benefit it potentially offers for all learners: find a learner’s specific need/s and learning styles and then use that information to build the bridge of understanding and excellence.

 

However, if used merely to meet mandated levels of AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress), RtI becomes just another “and this too shall pass” bandage on a chronically diseased system. To be effective, RtI requires professional development for teachers as they learn to approach whole class instruction with an eye for the particular and individualized. It also demands support for these teachers in terms of time and encouragement as they reshape habituated methods into new “best practices.” In an absence of time and money, i.e. support, the concept of RtI intimidates classroom teachers, building administrators, and educational theorists.

Let’s Get Critical!

I have discovered my new favorite literacy workshop: Critical Literacy!! The idea of critical literacy is to read between the lines, to look for alternative points-of-view, to identify who is left out of text, to consider multiple perspectives; that kind of reading generates controversy and controversy engenders engagement and engagement raises the learning curve and the achievement bar!

A good article on the subject by Maureen McLaughlin and Glenn DeVoogd can be found in IRA’s Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy 48:1, September 2004 and an effective lesson on the subject is available at ReadWriteThink: Critical Literacy and Women in the 19th Century. Another website that has both information and lessons comes from Tasmania, The English Learning Area. And finally, a more academic article: “A Tale of Differences: Comparing the Traditions, Perspectives, and Educational Goals of Critical Reading and Critical Litercy” by Gina Cervetti, Michael Pardales, and James Damico.

I approach Critical Literacy is through a three-step process, moving from images, to engaging text and finally to content print materials. I suggest this method because words don’t get in the way…students are forced to make meaning with only visual clues…well, and of course, schema! That approach levels the playing field for students who are able to think and analyze beyond their reading levels. Most students and adults seem at greater ease when they are able to try out various meanings and points-of-view with images than they are with print text.

I start with a cartoon or caricature related to the content area or theme or lesson and get students to engage in careful and scrutinizing questions about the visual representation as the foundation of meaning making:

· Whose point-of-view is at work in the image?

· What emboldens an artist to portray this type of image?

· What does the artist expect others to see?

· How are expectations and actual responses different from one another?

Of course, this is not a complete list of questions…this is only fodder for kids to get started and begin to discuss who is left out of the joke or who is the brunt of the satire. Then the discussion goes on to why this happens and how or what we should do about it…political and social activism.

From there, I move to a print medium, but an engaging texts…a fractured fairytale like the True Story of the Three Little Pigs, a poem or short story that has a grabber at the end…if not the beginning. Get them using the same questioning strategy to explore print text: whose point-of-view is at work? How doe varying points-of-view change the story? Whose point-of-view is more valuable” Whose point-of-view is easier to hear or listen to? Why? Again, not an all inclusive list, but a start. An activity that extends that reading can be the creation of a new point-of-view…using the initial genre as a model or developing the new point-of-view in a new genre–use the poem to generate a fractured fairy-tale…

Finally, content text…and now the process is a skill or at least near skill and kids can begin to really question text and in their questioning make information knowledge…accessible and useable!