I did a minilecture on the Miner (Nacerima) Yosso and McDermott & Varenne readings. Just to clarify some of the main points, then set them to discuss the other readings. It was fascinating to see the different groups dig into the different readings. Some groups really got into Recitatif (my personal favorite) whereas others spent time on the Young book (also powerful, but very different) and then another spent time on the grocery shopping activity (shopping using SNAP allowance). Each used a different text and approach, but each got to an interesting place.

We then spent a brief time workshopping the personal narratives they’ll be performing in two weeks. There were a lot of questions as to what those should look like. Several students asked if they could do a multimodal type of presentation rather than an oral presentation. I thought about it and remembered my digital story, so I said yes and showed them mine. Luckily I still have it in my file space. I hadn’t watched it in quite some time, and realized it’s a bit too fast, but I’m still proud of it. It serves its purpose. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a little self indulgent, but I think it serves its purpose. I realize doing it served a particular purpose, but I’ve moved on from it. But it remains a decent example of a digital story and I think I’ll include it in the syllabus next time I teach this class.

We then headed over to the Golisano gateway for a presentation by the Teen Empowerment group. Wow. knock my socks off. They started out with some introductory work, explained who they are and what they do, and then several members presented oral works or just talked about their lives. Mindblowing. The rawness of their emotion and their pleas for teachers to be advocates and activists is powerful. I am so impressed by their willingness to put themselves on the line – to be vulnerable in front of strangers. What an incredible group of people.They took my breath away and in the short hour we were with them they probably had more effect on the students than my whole semester with them did.

They also showed a movie about the school to prison pipeline. It was eye opening for me. I was unaware of the connections between school suspensions and kids winding up in juvenile detention and jail. I’ll be a little less flippant about suspension issues from now on. Following the movie they did a fishbowl where the youth first brainstormed what stood out in their minds about the movie and then went into deeper detail. I had to leave at that point, but it was fascinating watching the students work through the film. It reinforces my belief in the power of the fish bowl and of discussion for understanding a text.

I wish I had known about this in advance. I would have changed my syllabus to include it so that the students could stay for the whole thing. In fact, a few of my students did.

So the TE folk owned the night. I was fortunate to have attended, and I think my students felt the same.

We decided that rather than a final exam we’re going to do presentations of the literature reviews. They’ll break into two separate groups (a mix of topics) and share for 10 minutes and discuss for 4. They’ll also upload their abstracts to the course wiki so that they can see what others have written.

They also decided on the grading scheme. They will get an A in the course as long as they complete all the assignments. I have to post what they’ve done on Blackboard (haven’t done that yet). They will also reflect on their learning in the last chapbook entry and will hand in their chapbooks on the last day of class. That won’t give me time to read and comment. I’ll just be able to read. I think that’s ok. I don’t have to comment on everything.

I had alloted only 15 minutes to discuss the Thompson article (Tiffany, Friend of People of Color), but our conversation went on for a long time. This group has good inquiring minds. We didn’t get to the Young book. Next week.

We ended with a brief sharing of their dialect study. I want to do more with that next semester. Not just accents, but also grammatical and lexical differences.

Next week we’re also going to workshop the personal narrative. I wanted to take them to the Teen Empowerment presentation at 6:30, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. There’s just too much to do. The strange thing is, class is almost over. Between me being gone for AERA and them attending capstone night, thenn two nights of presentations (personal narratives, literature reviews) there are many meeting nights left.

Crazy. The semester went really fast.

There is much I want to change in the course to make it work for me, but in hindsight, I’m glad I did it this way. It helped me to see what does and doesn’t work for me. It also gave me a greater appreciation of what a great group of students I have. They’ve really rolled with things.

It was basically two very distint classes. The first half of class was spent learning the International Phonetics Alphabet. I was nervous about teaching this because I had never take a class in it, so I asked Kenny Fasching-Varner to do it, which he graciously did. It was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to doing it again next time I teach the class. There were several important points he made.

1) Letters don’t make sounds. They represent sounds. So it’s not a letter sound correspondence but rather a sound letter correspondence. The sounds letters represent are based on where they fall in the word, their relationship to other letters in the word, as well as the history of the word. We didn’t talk about the history of the English language and spelling – that’s something I want to do in the future. I’d like to devote a whole night to just this.

Kenny lead us through the process of hearing the sounds and thinking about how the sounds are made (changes to the throat, larynx, tongue, etc.) It was fascinating. We talked about how the sounds change according to our accent.

The second half of class we discussed the book Literacy and Racial Justice by Prendergast. I loved the book. I thought it to be well argued and supported. Kenny had warned me that students often resist the book, but this group of students was phenomenal. They really dug into the book and thought about it. I had them write an exit ticket on their way out, and the majority of the students got the point of literacy as white property. That was so exciting. A number of they also said the book raised points that they had never thought about before. That was also exciting.

It was a good night.

The only downside was some confusion about capstone attendance. But I think we’ve got that straightened out. In the future I’m just going to hold class as usual and give students the option to attend capstone for extra credit. I don’t like the whole extra credit game, but I want to be fair to the students who make the effort to attend. The other option is to make it a course requirement that the students have to attend one professional literacy presentation during the semester and capstone will count. I’ll have to think about it.

We started out with a presentation by Mrs. Sigler on what is available in our library and how to conduct a literature search. Although our library is small, we have a fabulous set of electronic resources. Our most valuable resources though are people like Mrs. Sigler. She knows so much, is so good at her job, and is incredibly supportive of our students. We are fortunate to have her. I hope the students make good use of the library in all their classes.

After Mrs. Sigler’s presentation, I asked the students to use the behavior rating sheet I gave them last week to identify patterns in their behavior and to set a goal. It is to be private and something for them to work toward and track in their chapbook. We then took some time to identify topics for the literature review and to begin seeking some articles.

Following break we spent some time discussing the experiential assignment (either looking into what facilities are available for the hearing impaired at movies or the shopping experience of a little person). What amazed me was the number of people who connected the little person assignment to the tv show (which I’ve never seen). I’m not fond of the experiential assignments, but I think they were effective for raising awareness of how the environment disables people. I think too that the students got it when I talked about what constitutes a “norm” and how norms shift based on the population.

Then yet another shift to talk about the readings. A lot of interesting things were raised about the Elliot video and Gatto’s article. I don’t particularly like the Gatto article. There’s not a lot to it in my opinion. I’ll have to shop for something different that accomplishes the same thing. Interestingly, some of our own stereotypes and beliefs are starting to come out in the conversation. It will be our task, over the rest of the semester to openly, honestly, and supportively examine those beliefs that arise.

We ended with workshopping the narrative analysis assignment. I shared an exemplar with the students, but didn’t go over it. I figured they could read it. It’s actually quite straight forward. We spent the time in partners analyzing one of the strips of talk provided by Dr. Sangmeister using the five dimensions. The students did a really good job of analysis. What I most enjoyed seeing is that they backed up their analysis with evidence from the talk. What we didn’t get into though (and that’s my fault) was the “so what.” What does the analysis tell us. That’s something I’m going to have to do better in the future.

I also gave the students the option of selecting which Loutzenheiser article to read. They are both good articles and are different, yet I think the two of them are similar enough that reading one is sufficient. Next time I teach the class I’ll just use one and find another article that addresses the same issue from and eled perspective (Loutzenheiser focuses on secondary). I love the Lorde piece. It’s short, but so rich. When I read it, I can just feel the words rolling around in my mouth. She’s so angry and really takes white feminists to task, but does so in such a powerful way.

I’m beginning to feel better about the course. More in control of the structure of the course. I’m feeling much better for having taken out the media analysis and the experiential assignment number three. I hate giving assignments and not supporting students adequately in their completion of the assignment. As I told the students, I’d much rather have fewer assignments and do them well than have lots of assignments and just pass over them. I know there are arguments for having the students engage in lots of different writing and writing genres, but it just doesn’t work for me. That’s why it’s good for students to get different instructors throughout their program.

I’m looking forward to Tuesday’s class. We’re going to hear Dr. Karen Sangmeister talk about the pedagogy of respect and how it’s instantiated in teacher talk. Then we’ll spend the rest of class wrestling with the concepts in Living Narrative and doing some analysis of various talk and text using the 5 dimensions as well as some discourse analysis (deictics and modals). I’m interested in seeing what connections the students make to literacy and language acquisition.