For optimum experience please listen to this song while you read :Both Sides Now
Post 6: Selecting texts for your classroom
In the
fifth chapter of the book “Multiple Voices, Multiple Texts” the focus is now on
how to pick that will help the students to learn, to grow, to assess previous
knowledge, to build for future knowledge, to entertain, and not to alienate. It
has to do a lot of things and the authors know that there are many factors that
need to be taken into account when picking a text. This is the first chapter
that I have not heard them talk about traditional phonemic teaching and how bad
it is for the students, I guess 70 pages in and 5 chapters later they feel like
their point has been made.
The authors
are quick to point out that the face of “literature” as we know it is changing.
They talked about being able to use movies and clips in a classroom and how
they can be great supplementary texts and in some instances a primary source
for students in the classroom. I agree with this concept completely, students
do not read as much as they used to and as sad as that is I think that we can
use film to bring students back to the idea that reading and writing can be
helpful. I want to do a screen writing portion for my students and help them to
see that writing theme, plot, setting, characterization is as important in a
movie as it can be in the books they read.
And though
this book was written in the 90’s it talks a lot about the changing climate of
education and the culture of the classroom and how diversity is ever increasing
and that the traditional majority is becoming the minority. I teach In Gallup
and this is especially true. The authors talked about how a text needs to be
relevant to the students that they need to have it in their lives and in their
understanding and it needs to be a part of who they are. A bunch or rich dead
white people have less to say to them personally than a Native American author
who struggled where they struggled and found a way to add to the conversation
of authors. So, by using texts that are near and dear to them with ideas and
landmarks that they can not only visualize in the pages of a book but they have
seen them for themselves. A book about the grandeur of the Grand Canyon can
only do so much, whereas if they have walked angels landing and enjoyed the
majesty of it they will be that much more likely to give it a chance. And, if
they are anything like me, when you give a book a chance it usually draws me
in.
The authors
want to point out that textbooks have their places and especially modern
textbooks that have taken all the research into account can give a lot to the
students. But they talk about all the things that aren’t book, the movies, the
music of the age, the artwork around them. I have my students do a unit project
that is a multi genre project. They pick a few possibilities from a list of
about 10 things in order to respond to the unit question. They can take a
picture, paint something, compose a song, a poem, and write a traditional
essay, a political speech, among other things. The book talks about how making
the student creates information in a myriad of ways can be helpful to their
learning and their growing. Find a way to take what they know and show that
they have learned with doing things they know how to do.
I know the world has changed so much. Technological advances are incredible and in many ways we still teach in almost the same way as 30 or more years back. There are so many resources that we could use to teach. Valuable resources that we need to take advantage of. We can incorporate more diverse texts some of them like you said that have been written from a perspective closer to the students. I like the idea of giving students the opportunity to use other ways to do some activities. They can explore and learn so much if we let them.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post. Providing students with ample opportunity to show their thinking and learning through various mediums is really important. I think this is a necessary component to literary thinking and it is often an untapped opportunity. Thank you for the post. -Jamie
ReplyDeleteI agree that video and PowerPoint is a major component to the classroom, which can detract from the reading aspect of learning. I've recently discovered that the internet has an answer for this as well. As you may already know, that a lot of informative videos like Bill Nye the Science Guy, for example, have tons of worksheets that accompany the videos . Shoot, I even saw one on Gattaca and Jurassic Park.
ReplyDeleteGreat way to incentivise engagement in a video too.
Hi Ryan,
ReplyDeleteI think your idea of picking a song that fits this article at the beginning of your post is very cool. It's almost like the way we watch a movie or a drama. However I soon found out that, maybe it's because I am a ESL learner, it's not very easy for me to read an English article and listen to an English song together. In the end I did them separately.
Like you said, although this book is written in the 90's, the phenomenon—that students read less and less and the format of a text is more and more—is still, and even more prevalence. I think one important advantage of including other form of texts into school teaching is that educators could teach students how to analyze, interpret and make right judgement about the mass media they are forced to contact every single day, instead of absorb all of them without critical thinking about the hidden message from merchants or government.