Literacy for the iGeneration

We had a guest speaker on Tuesday who shared her work in an urban school and how a group of exemplary teachers spoke to their students and the way those words helped the students develop a sense of agency or power in their world. I will definitely have her speak in the future.

We spent the second half of class going over Living Narrative with me explaining the five dimensions and just what narrative is.

Honestly, I’m frustrated. Not with the students, but with the course as it’s written. It’s not working well for me and I feel as if I’m constantly scrambling to make it work. I wish I could just pitch the syllabus and start over.

First change: Living Narrative needs to be front loaded. The students had little frame of reference on which to hang the text. I was pleased that a significant number soldiered through it and made sense of it. But it was tougher than it had to be. I commend those students who stuck with it.

Second change: The experiential assignments. Pitch ‘em. In the future we’re going to do community mapping. I think that will be much more meaningful especially in light of the literacy focused class. But we’ll see what the students come up with. I have faith that they’ll make lemonade out of lemons.

There will be more. I’ll capture my thinking in this blog and hopefully will be able to create a course that works for me.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this course is a highly personal course and necessarily reflects the instructor. Of all the courses, it’s the worst one for following someone else’s syllabus. Taking up the 620 syllabus last semester was easy. Taking up the 670/690 syllabus in the past was easy. But this one is really really hard.

But I’ll tough it out. I hope my students are kind in their evaluations at the end of the year.