Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Ferguson in the classroom – today and beyond

A former student of mine, now in education herself, posed this question on Facebook: "Teacher friends, tomorrow is the day before a vacation [Thanksgiving]. How are you addressing the [Ferguson] grand jury announcement."
Still from Carlos' upcoming video

My response is longer than seemed appropriate for a Facebook comment box, so here goes...

First of all, I'll reframe the question: how have I been and how will I address the issues around Ferguson in my own media studies classroom? It really began on the first day of school this year when a student asked me if I'd been keeping up on "what was going on in Missouri." That student's question and a Teachers Teaching Teachers show with Dr. Marcia Chatelain prompted a piece that I wrote for the Guardian. PBS NewsHour also published How to talk to students about Ferguson written by Dr. Chatelain that's a great resource for educators.

Speaking of NewsHour, since we're a Student Reporting Lab my students' work was also featured on the NewsHour segment Teens reflect on impact of Ferguson unrest. Their work and that of the other schools in this segment shows thoughtful, student-produced commentary. So, in addition to addressing the opening question, I think it's important that educators not only discuss these kinds of issues in schools, but also share the wisdom that's generated by our youth with a larger audience. Our students have perspectives that need to be included in our civic dialogue.



An amazing resource for educators to bring timely civics issues like Ferguson into the classroom is KQED Do Now (if you're a science or arts teacher, there are also relevant activities for your students too). The weekly Do Now discussion for September 26, Should the members of a police force reflect the larger population? had approximately 600 comments from students from around the country. My students summarized that discussion for a Do Now Round Up in October, Diversity and police departments.

For many years I've collaborated with Paul Allison on youthvoices.net, which hosts the discussions of students in the classes of teachers mostly associated with the National Writing Project, but open to all educators. If you want to get a look at what teens are thinking, here's a sampling of the Youth Voices discussions about Ferguson and related issues.

One of the things I try to stress in all my teaching is the idea of perspective taking, where students consider complex issues from multiple angles. Harvard's Visible Thinking protocol, Circle of Viewpoints, is one way to foster productive discussion around sensitive issues like Ferguson by considering the perspectives of many different stakeholders.

For example, a student of mine has interviewed members of our local police department to find out how they are responding to incidents like the Mike Brown shooting in our own community (e.g. Dillon Taylor, Darrien Hunt). By the way, this student journalist I'm talking about is the one I mentioned in the third paragraph, the one who asked about the events of Ferguson on the first day of school this year. While his classmates race out the door at the end of the day today for Thanksgiving holiday, he'll stay after school to finish his video.

These curricular conversations have been happening over the Ferguson issue and other important ones throughout the year and will go on long after the media storm passes. To me what's important is the role that media creation and productive online discussion has in the lives of our students, our future leaders.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Making teachers happy

Some of the happiest and most effective teachers I know are the ones that incorporate the concept of making in their teaching. Personally I see it in arts teachers when they're preparing for a showing or performance, or the chemistry teacher in the lab.

Here at the Project Zero Perspectives conference: Making, Thinking, and Understanding conference in San Francisco this weekend that's organized by Casie, I've started reminiscing about all the learning by making that's been going on in my own classroom and with the adult learners I work with at other times.

At today's conference David Perkins set the tone by noting how, among other things, the maker movement transcends traditional disciplines and prescribed studies. That sentiment was amplified in a session by Jen Ryan who discussed the Agency by Design (AbD) research done with Shari Tishman and Edward P. Clapp, that's identified two core concepts – making empowers learners and that empowerment leads students to recognize that they are fully capable of redesigning their world for the better. At the end of the day, Daniel Wilson noted that much of Project Zero's nearly 50 years of research has shown that learning is active, social, and visible.

Since making is a prominent feature of the conference and in education today, I thought I'd share some of the maker projects of the adult students I worked with this summer in the Michigan State University Master's in Educational cohort in Galway, Ireland. It showed me again how joyful teaching can be when we make things.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

The glory of unfinished learning

Photo by Sarah Beth Anderson
If you're a writing teacher, you've probably encountered the following situation: a colleague from another discipline waves a student paper at you and complains "these kids can't write." It happens to me at least once a year.

In the past I've told these colleagues that maybe the assignment wasn't clear enough or that perhaps they should treat this as a draft, as another step in the writing process, that surface errors are most likely related to performance – not competence. But a lot of times content area teachers don't plan on doing multiple drafts of a paper, and I sense that they walk away from our conversation even more convinced that student writing skills are on a gradual decline.

But I just came across a book that sheds more light on this. According to Lee Ann Carroll in Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers, research shows that student writing appears to be weaker when they encounter new and unfamiliar expectations. Student writing develops because they must take on new and difficult roles in a discipline that they've probably never encountered before. It's reasonable to assume that students' new learning is creating all the cognitive load and that their early writing reflects this.

This all reminded me of the 1972 Donald Murray essay, "Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product." In the essay, Murray notes that since most English teachers were trained to analyze a product like a sonnet by Shakespeare and that they focus their critical attention on student writing as if it were a product. According to Murray, the problem with that approach is that a teacher's "attack does little more than confirm the student's lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves." Murray instead argues that teachers should "glory in the unfinishedness"of student writing.

So now when a colleague approaches me with the complaint that writing teachers like me aren't doing enough to prevent the next generation's slow slide into illiteracy, I've got another answer. Content area teachers might anticipate initially weaker writing as students deal with new concepts in unfamiliar disciplines – that's a sign that they're learning.

Then I'll advise them to make sure their assignments are clear and to build in some time for revision.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

DIY photo gifts

Whether it's the holidays or some other special occasion, homemade gifts are often the best ... and cheapest to make. Everybody's got photos, and everybody can make stuff out of them. Here are some DIY photo projects my students did in my photography class this year.

Monday, March 31, 2014

Out of Eden

Paul Salopek has embarked on a seven-year Out of Eden walk across the earth to create a "global mosaic of stories." I'm looking forward to talking with the people from the Out of Eden Learn team later today about their efforts to create a community of learners around Salopek's journey. Join us here if you want to learn more.







Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Digital Learning Day 2014 - Students as teachers, part three

On February 5 my photography students will be having their own DIY photo gear film festival. I've written before (and even before that) about how students show themselves to be capable teachers if given the chance; this is another example of what happens when we put students more in charge of their own learning. The assignment was to create some do-it-yourself photography gear on a shoestring budget. For example, the video below shows how one of my students created a stabilizer for $25, a piece of equipment that could run as much as much as $200 if purchased retail.


Here are some of the other student videos:  Lupita, Cassadey, Gaby, Evan, Sean, Claire, Sarah, Allegra and Steven.

One of the common denominators in these projects is the joy that can be seen in the making of these projects. Of course they also learned a lot in the process. The next step in this sequence is for these same students to use these pieces of equipment in the documentary they're producing this quarter. Should be interesting.

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Growing a food curriculum

Tomatoes Before Frost by me
The local food movement is well established, and with it comes a growing interest in bringing food sustainability into the K-16 curriculum. Over the past couple of years on Teachers Teaching Teachers we've had conversations with locavore educators from New Orleans at Our School at Blair Grocery and New York City's The Green Bronx Machine, with the director of Fresh the movie, and also with the people from Wooly School Garden.

Maybe because it was the end of autumn and I'd just harvested the last of the veggies from my own yard, maybe I was just hungry, but whatever the case when I was at the NCTE annual convention this November I attended two workshops that focused on food. One workshop, maybe the best I've ever attended at NCTE, showcased a partnership between BreadLoaf with students from the Navajo Nation and at Fern Creek High School in Louisville, Kentucky – the Navajo Kentuckians. The Navajo students and the teachers from Kentucky provide a powerful example of what can happen when educators mix food and learning. Students in the Louisville school have even shown gains on recent state tests that, according to the teachers, are due in part to their program. Another presentation at NCTE shared what Dr. Alan Webb and colleagues have been collecting at FoodCurriculum.com a website that has lots of good info and resources for teachers interested in starting some edible education.

In addition to dedicated and passionate educators, something that stands out about the efforts mentioned above is their cross-curricular nature. Students are connecting literacy, chemistry, biology, business, botany, health, and politics, to name a few – and the they're highly engaged in the learning. And maybe most significantly, a common denominator in all these stories is how they're transforming their communities for the better.