The Round House

The Round House by Louise Erdrich was an excellent read, though not without its challenges.

I think this text would be appropriate for a high school audience. The depth to which issues of rape, sexuality, violence, and emotional trauma are addressed in the book might make it too difficult to teach to a middle school audience. Aside from these issues, the difficulty of the text is mostly found in its informal style and shouldn’t be too difficult for high schoolers to approach. As this is a coming of age story, its themes should be accessible to a high school audience.

I could see this text being used both within a lit circle/book talk setting as well as being explicitly taught in the classroom. The Round House offers ample opportunity for analysis of linguistic choice and its impact on tone (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.4). Students could analyze the impact that casual language, simple sentences and short paragraphs have on the tone during specific occurrences in the story. The narrative also interacts with time in a way that warrants analysis (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.5). Students could analyze the impact that the retroactive retelling of the story has on the narrative or analyze the interjection of “Linda’s Story” as another narrator takes over the narrative.

This book comes with some difficulties that are obvious and some that aren’t quite as obvious. Content-wise, teachers who want to teach this novel will need to be careful with the issues of rape, violence, trauma, racism, and sexuality that occur within. Some students may struggle with these topics, some parents may push back, and administrators who haven’t heard of the novel will likely need an explanation before it is incorporated.  Structurally, the challenge of this novel is mostly found in its casual style (which is ironic for a novel that handles such serious issues). The novel doesn’t make use of quotation marks which can make fluency a little challenging at times (also a stylistic choice which warrants analysis). The first person narration also leaves parts of the story feeling ambiguous (another stylistic choice which warrants analysis). None of these challenges are crippling however, and most of them are actually further reasons why this novel would be great for teaching in the classroom. Nonetheless these challenges do need to be addressed and handled carefully by any teacher who wants to teach this text.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It by Cris Tovani

My first reaction as I was reading Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It was to feel incredibly privileged. My experiences related to reading and comprehension were quite different from the ones described in the book. I grew up with parents who read to me, read with me, and encouraged me to be reading on my own frequently. My mom is also a primary school reading interventionist so her specialty is literally helping young kids develop the skills related to decoding, fluency, and comprehension. As a result, it has been a rare experience for me to encounter literature that I felt like I couldn’t make meaning from. It’s not that there weren’t times when I struggled to understand a text or to make meaning, but from a young age I was given the skills to be able to overcome my confusion with a text, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.

As I was reading and looking through some of the appendix materials, I recalled times in my schooling experience when my teachers used approaches similar to the worksheet found on page 129 (related to identifying places in a text where a reader is stuck). I’m sure these assignments were incredibly helpful for some students, but I honestly remember struggling with these assignments a lot, simply because I struggled to identify places where I had been stuck in a reading. Looking back, I’m sure there were places in the readings where I had to reread something to make sure I understood it, or where making a connection to my personal experience helped me to understand a confusing part, or where by continuing to read past a difficult section I was able to figure out what was going on. But to me this didn’t feel like getting stuck, it just felt like reading (a point that Tovani makes), and so with worksheets like the one that focuses on sticking points, I found myself making stuff up just to get it done.

The second reaction I had to the reading was to realize what an incredible resource this book could be to me, especially since it offers perspectives and experiences that aren’t primarily similar to my own. As a teacher, I recognize that an area of difficulty for me could be helping students who “read it but don’t get it”, simply because that is not an experience that is super common to me. It was helpful that the text broke down the process of constructing meaning from reading because it helped me to examine the process that I go through without thinking about it.

Overall, I’m excited to use this book as a resource in my classroom.

EWU's TPA guidelines and edTPA Making Good Choices

I was working on a draft of the ‘edTPA Lesson Plan’ portion of my final unit plan project today and found myself becoming increasingly frustrated. I was taking a stab at each of the sections but kept feeling like I didn’t know exactly what belonged in each box. After lamenting my difficulty finding any succinct guide in a quick online search, I decided to take a break from the lesson plan for the time being and work on my blog post assignment for tomorrow, and boy am I glad I did!

The readings for this blog post were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Up until now, I haven’t received any direct instruction on the edTPA format, and I found that while comprehensive, on its own the lesson plan format isn’t necessarily intuitive. I know what “Lesson Connections” means, but it’s difficult to remember everything that that one section can contain when the only prompt is “Lesson Connections”. 

The “EWU edTPA Lesson Plan Guidelines” article was particularly helpful in that it succinctly and clearly laid out each section of the edTPA Lesson Plan document and asked questions to direct how one might fill out each. Reading it was kind of like taking a quick look at each section under a microscope: the details really started to become more visible. When I take another crack at my edTPA Lesson Plan draft I plan to make direct use of this article.

The “edTPA Making Good Choices” article was also helpful but in a different way. It was not as succinct or easily applicable as EWU’s Guidelines but it did give a better glimpse at the big picture of the edTPA. It also gave some better descriptions of the more nuanced parts of the edTPA, like the descriptions of how and what kinds of research to include in the “How specific do my references to research and theory have to be?” section. This article might be more difficult to apply directly to the lesson that I am planning right now, but it will be a great reference to turn to when I feel like the EWU Guidelines aren’t quite enough.

Book Talk: The Once and Future King by T. H. White

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

Description:

Based largely on Le Morte d’ Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, The Once and Future King by T. H. White is a book that is difficult to categorize. It is both a retelling of the Arthurian legend and a social commentary surrounding the thinking and events of World War II. It is both hilariously fantastical and mysteriously dark. Its symbols and structures are common to the traditional fairy tale and yet it threatens to upset the thinking of a student of philosophy.  It is at once a snapshot of humanity’s past, humanity at the time when the book was written, and a look into humanity’s future, all wrapped up in the Arthurian tale. White uses the iconic symbols, characters, and themes of the Arthurian legend(such as Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, the Round Table, The Questing Beast, The Quest for the Holy Grail, Merlin, and many others) to comment on the nature of humanity, war, love, power, justice, morality, nationalism, failure, class, time, progressivism, and much more. The scope of ideas within this book is quite near boundless.

Rationale for choosing this text:

I selected this text because I believe it offers ample opportunity for critical analysis. It is thematic, full of both archetypal and complex characters, and comments on social/moral issues. The Once and Future King would be appropriate for a vast majority of High School students and probably some Middle Schoolers as well. The only elements of difficulty are length (it’s actually four novels in one), allusions (including other languages here and there), sentence complexity, and some difficult dialogue (eye dialect, slang vocab, tracking difficulty). To get the most out of this text, students will want to search the internet for references they don’t understand at first. It’s not the most accessible text, but I think most High School students would be up for the challenge, and the challenge is well worth the reward.

Teaching ideas:

There’s ample material within The Once and Future King from which to derive a variety of lesson/unit plans. There are at least half dozen characters that would make great subjects for analysis of complex characters (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.3). Being a thematically rich text, The Once and Future King is also a great opportunity for students to engage in the development of themes across a text (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2). Additionally, while sometimes challenging, the linguistic choices made by T. H. White also present students a great opportunity to evaluate those choices and explore how they enrich and develop the narrative (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.4). There are quite a few lesson plan and curriculum ideas that have already been developed for this text and I believe it’s a relatively common part of any curriculum that discusses the Arthurian Legend.

Potential challenges:

The length and complexity of The Once and Future King could be initially intimidating to some students or instructors, but I really don’t think it’s inaccessible by any means. It’s not a book that a novice reader can just pick up and “get” (I’m not even sure that an expert reader could just pick up this book and “get” it); it is a highly allusional and nuanced text. For that reason, it is a great text for students to practice critical reading strategies with. Nothing super graphic is described, but the story does contain quite a lot of death, mayhem, dark emotional turmoil, incest, a love triangle, a whole bunch of morally challenging material, and the boiling of a cat. I don’t see there being huge concerns with regard to administrators’ or parents’ responses to the text, and if there is an issue it’s pretty easy to omit the offending material. Students might complain a bit if they’re required to read some of this text and aren’t given ample time to discuss it.

Additional thoughts:

The Once and Future King is a high cost/high reward book as long as it is read critically, otherwise it’s mostly just high cost. If you teach this book (and you should), be prepared to spend some time helping your students chew on it for a bit. It’s worth the hard work.

Social Justice in the Classroom

When thinking about social justice in the classroom, it’s easy to first think of these big, systemic, societal issues that discussions about social justice typically revolve around. And surely, if we aren’t thinking about societal issues of race, class, gender, economic status, and oppression, then we really aren’t thinking about social justice. But for this post, my thoughts drifted a little closer to home. My thoughts were mainly focused on the microcosm of my future classroom and the issue of social justice on that level. What happens in my classroom can’t be separated from those macro-level issues of social justice, but if I as a teacher am going to have an impact, it must first start with my students in my classroom, and with regard to that, these are the thoughts I had:

I think the first step in addressing social justice in my classroom starts with acknowledging my own biases. This doesn’t necessarily mean that my biases are wrong and it doesn’t mean that I need to shun or reject my biases, but I do need to recognize the personal lived experiences and perspectives that I bring to the classroom and be constantly and mindfully mitigating how I let that impact my instruction. I also want to be sure that my students are mindful of the biases they also bring into the classroom. It’s unreasonable to expect myself or my students to take on an entirely objective perspective when it comes to social justice, but we can all be mindful of our biases and I think this is a great first step to addressing these issues.  

In addition to acknowledging our biases, I don’t think I can overstate the importance of knowing my students. Knowing some of the status quos that my specific students are encountering can help me as an instructor to challenge that status quo. Knowing the ways in which my students might be encountering oppression (either as the oppressed or as an oppressor) can help me know how to engage these issues.

Teaching students to think critically is also hugely important when it comes to issues of social justice. In line with our previous reading and discussion from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, oppression is propagated and maintained by ignorance; the most effective way to combat oppression is to teach students to think critically.

Popular Culture and Critical Media Pedagogy in Secondary Literacy Classrooms

This article was an excellent follow up to the Freire reading from last week. It was helpful to see a practical application of the philosophical view proposed by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I’ve been a fan of teaching students media literacy since before I even knew that I wanted to be an English Teacher. For better or for worse (as a tear rolls down my cheek), books are not where most people today engage with literature. A vast majority of people consume information through sources such as videos, ads, online articles, and social media posts. I therefore, have been of the conviction that as a teacher of literacy, it is my job to present my students with a variety of forms of literature, especially those with which they will most likely be engaging.

What I hadn’t considered before reading this article are the implications that this kind of instruction has on issues related to oppression. Media of a variety of forms certainly plays a large role in shaping students’ ideas about the world and themselves, but the interaction between the influence of media and oppression was something I hadn’t considered before. By neglecting to include media literacy in our instruction, we as teachers are allowing the power imbalance between media and consumers to persist.

I appreciate that the article made points with specific regard to a number of different oppressed groups. One point from the article that I think is important to note is the idea that ignorance perpetuates oppression, and that by the very nature of being young and impressionable, our students are an oppressed group. There are indeed many forms of ignorance (and thus, oppression) that prevail in the presence of media illiteracy, and our students should be in the practice of combatting that ignorance with critical thinking. We do them a disservice by not including media literacy in our curriculum.

“Pedagogy of the Oppressed” Chapter 2

In the second chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed there were some points made that I found informative and helpful, and then there were some points that I found confusing or challenging (not a bad thing).

Overall, I thought the chapter did a good job of clearly outlining its contention with the modern education system (the “banking concept of education”), but I think it struggled to articulate a proposed solution with the same degree of clarity. It must certainly be taken into account that this is but one chapter out of the book and it’s possible that the narrative goes on to further detail the proposed solution (“liberating education”). Even if it does not however, this would be congruent with the point being made in chapter 2; Freire is taking on the very role that he is proposing for other teachers by simply “problem-posing” instead of oppressing true thought by dictating solutions.

By way of example:

The lack of a clearly articulated solution within the chapter led me, as a student of this chapter, to begin thinking up my own solutions, along with further questions. If my role as an educator is not to provide my students with knowledge, then what is it? What is the real difference between the role of the teacher and the role of the student in the classroom? How can I, as a future instructor, shift my role in education from the arbiter of knowledge to that of the co-seeker of knowledge? How can I promote true thought instead of providing insights and answers? Even if a teacher can move successfully into the role of the problem-poser, is it not simply another way of imposing one’s own authority over the students by selecting which problems will be posed and how to pose them? As I asked these and other questions, I realized that Freire’s point was most forcefully made in my response to the chapter: in the lack of a given answer to a problem, a student will respond to the challenge with critical thinking and questioning.

I still don’t feel like I’ve come up with a clear solution to the banking-education problem that Freire has posed in this chapter, but his point has been made and it does make me interested to see what the rest of the book has to say.