The audience for my capstone project will be fellow ELA teachers. This represents a shift as my capstone has developed. Originally I had thought my audience would be a mixture of students and teachers. As I’ve honed my project to include the theory of transliteracy, I’ve decided that my capstone includes elements so theoretical that it is most appropriate to explore with other educators. For me, exploring transliteracy is truly a question for developing in my innovative teaching. In other words, it is so far on the edge of my comfort zone that I have not landed in a place where I am ready to stand behind it fully and espouse it as the best new practice. I would feel uncomfortable having students be an audience to the capstone project in that regard, but I would feel it is appropriate to bring my fellow teachers along on this journey.
In the Learn More section, therefore, I will need to include some definitions, background, and research on transliteracy. I would like to include some of the video of Marshall McLuhan that we as a cohort explored for our 702 course.
5 Comments
The idea of transliteracy has made me challenge my philosophy on literacy, the direction of my capstone project and my future instruction as a language arts teacher. The question, “Will reading as we know it become obsolete?” keeps echoing in my mind.
After reading and listening to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on the development of literacy over the centuries and in different cultures I began to wonder if my notion of literacy was limited. Literacy has not always been reading a text from left to right to understand and transmit ideas. Before written language, people communicated ideas, culture, and their shared history through oral stories memorized and taught. The “academics” of these societies were poets such as the Greek, Homer. Communicating and forming a “village” was done orally and symbolically. When language developed to the written form, only a small population was educated in its use and only the wealthy could afford to use the materials for written communication. Reading and writing became a function of an elite portion of the society. It was arguably a social class divider. It was not until the advent of the printing press that written transmission of ideas became accessible to the general population. A shift in the “village” appeared. Now communicating could be done by an individual alone in a room sending an idea and received by another individual alone in a room at a different time and place. The notion of a community became simultaneously more global but also more individualized and isolated. Literacy morphed from a group collaboration to an individual activity. This history represents those cultures where language is phonetic, typically western civilization. Historically and currently for many languages , literacy is not even a left to right scanning of phonemes to make meaning. In some languages reading and communicating is a visual representation of symbols that carry their own meaning, for example, in languages such as Chinese or Japanese. The distinction is important when considering the brain’s process of making meaning. This is, afterall, the foundation of literacy. In linear text with a phonetic alphabet, the brain translates meaningless bits of sound/text into meaning. In text that is symbolic, the eye and the brain processing can hop from place to place and makes meaning from symbols that carry meaning in and of themselves. The digital age is marrying the ideas of literacy being oral, visual, and textual. Digital communication gives us the ability to be both individualistic and collaborative. It also expands our village to the global community. Has the pendulum swung from far left to far right and is it now coming back to the center? Is transliteracy an ideal place to land? I am pushing my thinking to question my bias toward traditional reading and accept the positive aspects of transliteracy. I value reading as we know it. I think it is also safe to say that as a whole, we are still a world that values literacy. “Reading” conjures the image of a person alone with a book or screen reading text. In 300 years, will “reading” be something entirely different? Will it be obsolete? If you hand a 12 year old a copy of The Hunger Games, will she know how to decode it? With my current love of curling up with a book and losing myself in another world, I know my answer is “I hope not”. And I think not. At least in my lifetime, I don’t believe traditional reading will disappear. Yet it is undeniable that transliteracy - communicating ideas through varying formats - is here to stay. The value of transliteracy to support literacy is the new direction of my driving question and my capstone project. At the outset of my new driving question and without the benefit of having done the literature review research or my own action research, I can already see how the idea of transliteracy is changing my teaching practices. I am embracing not only the textual aspect of reading, but also the oral, visual, video, digital, and collaborative aspects. Most teachers are already practiced at drawing out students’ prior knowledge at the beginning of a learning unit. We know that background knowledge is a key component of building student understanding. So take for example, my 8th grade ELA unit on “Suspense”. Before digging into rigorous texts, the new curriculum introduces the Big Idea by introducing the students to Alfred Hitchcock. What kid today has even heard of him, let alone seen one of his movies? Where there is a lack of prior experience, audio-visual presentations are a helpful and engaging way to shore up students’ foundation. The new curriculum, StudySync, provides videos of Hitchcock to expose the students to the background knowledge. Collaborating with other students to hear their stories and experiences is valuable. Previously, this would all have been accomplished by yet more reading, which was problematic because it required the labor of reading to get to the pre-reading idea. StudySync seems to be designed with transliteracy in mind - it provides video presentations done by students with mini-lessons on skills and content. Each text is also available orally - the program will read the text (in this case with a British accent). Students can slow it down, pause, repeat,and highlight the text to follow along. These transliterate strategies are more engaging for students. I also find that the content is more accessible for reluctant and struggling readers, students with special needs, and second language learners. A box to stand on. The goal of the graduate program of education at Touro University is “to promote social justice by serving the community and larger society through the preparation and continuous support of professional educators to meet the needs of a constantly changing, challenging, and diverse student population.” When I first joined the Innovative Learning program, my understanding of the overall program did not take such a large, deep scope. I came with the desire to challenge my own thinking around the uses of technology and new teaching & learning strategies. I had realized that I had become too comfortable with my repertoire of pedagogical tools, classroom management routines, and teaching strategies. I was using a quickly stagnating “bag of tricks” and needed to stretch my comfort zone. I purposefully, and a bit fearfully, chose an area of study that I knew would push on my current biases. As well, over the years I had noticed an increasing need to address the needs of a changing population. In this regard, my goals and the T.U. program goals were already aligned. My observation has been that students are coming to us with heightened anxiety, a range of special learning needs, and from a diversity of cultures that increases through time. I have always felt that justice demands that each child receives what is due to him. Not the same treatment - but what is particularly needed to address specific needs. It is the distinction between equal education and equitable education. That goal is a philosophical underpinning. The very practical part of me knows that I need to walk away with concrete activities that I can use in my classroom so all of the deep thinking around innovative learning is not just an academic pursuit that will be shoved aside in the fast paced day of a classroom. Authenticity. As I’m wading through the process of reflecting on the content of the courses and creating my own capstone, I am constantly aware of my tendency to hold on to what I already know. I fully realize I come from a conservative family background, a traditional teaching past, and have a temperament that doesn’t like to take risks or be involved in conflict. Pushing the comfort zone is not simple. I can also find myself hyperfocusing on one idea and following it down a path I later question. Often I just don’t know where to start and sit there spinning my wheels in mud without driving anywhere! I also realize that I am an interrupter (middle child of 7 - it’s a bad, learned habit of survival in that pack of siblings) and can talk too much during class. What I desire from my cohort buddies is that they offer their honest thoughts and that they feel free to “bust me” when I’m too closed minded, narrowly focused, frozen with uncertainty, or need to listen more and talk less. Knowing the group already, I trust their intelligence, kindness, and ability to do all of the above with a sense of humor. An encouraging word. One thing I hope to do for my cohort is to offer encouragement throughout the process. We’re all full time teachers/coaches and we lead full, busy lives. It often helps to hear the good things about our projects, blogs, and teaching dilemmas. I can offer some insights based on 20+ years in the trenches. My experience doesn’t make me a better teacher than anyone else, but it’s given me a whole host of failures and successes to draw upon to help others. |
Nancy JaminetArchives
December 2017
Categories |