The last two weeks of the worst semester ever

Statistics paper due Monday. I hope to get done by tomorrow. Good luck.
Presentation in my rhetoric class. I have a good start. It's due Monday.
A fifteen page paper over the emergent theme of my class project for Qualitative. (That's not counting my final proposal for my pilot study which is due the next week). That's due Tuesday.

So, if I can get my stats paper done tomorrow, then I could get my qual. paper done on Friday and Saturday, and work on the rhetoric stuff on Saturday and Sunday.

I hate my life right now. I just want to be home.

Reader Response, Emotion, and Affect

All right. Here's the situation. I spent the semester reading about rhetoric, emotion, affect, and motives. We read Adam Smith, Burke, Massumi, Sedgewick, Worsham, Hardt, Schell, Albrecht-Crane, and others. And everything I picked up reminded me of reader response theory. Now, I noticed that sometimes when I said the phrase "reader response" that people might have what Massumi might call a bodily vibration--this was usually a negative affective response, but I wondered why in rhetoric and emotion, when Boler would talk about finding an "expressivist pedagogy of emotion" why no one mentioned reader response. It just seemed like reader response theory fit. Well, my professor told me that she leaned more toward reception theory rather than reader response. She explained that reception theory had more to do with how groups or cultures were affected by a reading, something like that. So I thought it was interesting that there was this alternate literary theory, that seemed like reader response that was out there and I knew nothing about. But trying to write the paper seemed impossible until Donna gave us the option to map the paper using Cmap. It's free! And actually, mapping is just as difficult but in a different sort of way. Because I'm not really even sure what my question is.

I think it is strange that these people talk about reception theory and it is so very similar if not identical in some ways to Rosenblatt, but no one cites her. Actually, several of the articles mention a book about critical theory and only in the introduction does she mention Rosenblatt who she just discovered at the end of her research, and she wasn't able to include her in the book. Actually, Harkin in her College English article mentions that same book.

Isn't that strange though? So, I was reading this rhetoric stuff and thinking that they saw it important for people to have personal emotion or affective responses to events or readings. My professor's perspective was that there really is not universal emotional response, so it's not really a "true" response. I think she might have meant that reader response theory does not include a cultural perspective or critique.

Cynthia Lewis cautions that reader response can allow people to focus too much on their universal personal experiences at the expense of understanding the cultural perspective. Her example was that when a pre-service class read Watson's Go to Birmingham that they were so caught up in the fact that they were reminscing about their Buster Brown shoes that they missed the point that the girl was almost killed in a bombing.

Okay, so I understand that. I don't want them to not interpret or not do some kind of cultural critique. I'm not sure that Rosenblatt does not say this. But what's wrong with having a personal response that is rooted in the text. What if you then analyze that "personal" response and may be create an awareness that it is not so personal at all.

I don't know. I need help with this.

Planning for next semester

Barb and I talked about the plans for the pilot study in the spring. I've been trying to work on IRB for Mizzou and the school district. Barb scheduled the mobile computer lab. One thing we don't have are six surge protectors to hook up the laptops. The battery power will run out in one class, and we will need it for second, third, and fourth block. She has first block prep. which is good, so that will give us time to set up.

I gave her a copy of the school-wide calendar, and she is having a student work add in school-specific events that may affect our schedule. Right now, I'm planning on observing in her class on Fridays. I need to check to see if we don't have school on some Fridays. If that is the case, we'll need to schedule the lab for an alternate day on those weeks.

I'm using this blog to record some of the thinking I'll be doing for this pilot study.

The Final Proposal

It's getting to the end of the semester, and I have to turn in my final proposal for qualitative research I. I haven't worked much on it this week. Last week, I was asked so many times what my dissertation topic was. I had a good "answer." This week A's uncle asked me, and I couldnt't seem to put it into words.

I do know that it is so good to say what I am thinking aloud, and to write down my ideas over and over again. So here is my thinking today:

Question: How do web logs impact reading, writing, and thinking in a ninth grade Communication Arts class?

Theoretical Framework:

I'll be looking at this pilot studies through the following framework (I'll need to narrow this to three to five. I may not use all of these.):

1. Communities of Practice
2. Connectivism
3. (Borrowed from Guzzetti and Gamboa) Literacy as Social Practice (Street, 1984, 1995, 1998)--this is probably really similar to Communites of Practice (by Wenger, I believe)
4. "Multiliteracties that adolescents engage in by choice" (New London, 1996)
5. "Recent and expanding notions of what counts as text and textual practices (New London, 1996)

This final project really revolves around the design of this study. And I need to get these words down on paper. At this point, I'm doing a case study, but at times I wonder if it is ethnography or phenomenology, among others.

Why teach digital writing?

This is a question I'll have to answer in my dissertation. Although students will be using these blogs to talk about literature, it is also about teaching writing as well. Students are doing so much out of school writing that school's don't even know about. It will be important to read this.

Take the "how comfortable are you with digital literacy" quiz.

NCTE Pittsburgh

Last week, I went to NCTE in Pittsburgh last week. We got there on Wednesday and went to the Church Brew Works. This was formerly (until ten years ago) a Roman Catholic Church. They decided to consolidate churches, and this one was going to be torn down . . . until they decided to turn it into a brewery. It was a beautiful church, and the beer was good as well. I also had the best pierogi there.

Aaron was very happy that there were so many Polish people there. He felt very at home. At the brewery we met two Pittsburgh natives. Aaron ended up meeting Rob, an optometrist for lunch on Friday. They visted the Penn Brewery. Enough about him.

Thursday morning I went a National Writing Project session to start the day. I went to one about New Theories in Composition and Rhetoric. One of the presenters was from Rutgers and the other was from Little Rock. Actually, the Little Rock person's new department chair was my former professor at Missouri State (SMSU), George Jensen.

It was interesting to hear her talk about rhetoric because it made me really see how much I had learned from both my rhetoric and qualitative research courses. I don't think the presentation would have been as valuable if you had not been reading some of these theoretical pieces. I feel like she made a few assumptions about what the audience would know--she didn't give any concrete ideas to bring back to writing projects--except for one.

She talked about in the summer institute interviews that they asked people to articulate their beliefs and then describe how they translated those beliefs into their teaching. She said some decide not to attend after this conversation. Really successful participants of writing projects do have an understanding of theory, although a Gateway writing project participant and I, Astra, had a good laugh because we don't have enough people to turn away!

Thursday afternoon I went to some NCTE sessions. I went to a session on Young Adult literature and a filled to capacity session on five-paragraph essays (they happened to be in the same room and I just planted myself). Guess what? Her study showed that there is no correlation between five-paragraph essay format and high scores on standardized tests. She said zero correlation. Could that be right? I mean, I know that it is correct, but zero?

I'll be posting more updates on this event.

Things to remember about teaching

Be very explicit on my first day of class about my expectations. I need to tell them that I teach differently. I need to tell them that this is a class that will be frustrating at times, but the goal is that we think as students and teachers. I need to tell them, like I told the high schoolers, that this will be a hard class but that they will learn a lot from it.

I need to put in my syllabus that if they turn papers in to me that they need to be typed.

I'm always thinking of things that I need to do differently, but as I type this my mind has gone blank.

I need to make sure that I have established trust and community. I think explicit expectations will help in this.

I want to make sure that we do literature circles, and that we do reading workshop in class. These are really important. I want to use contemporary young adult literature as the main focus. Or we could do two literature circles, one with the "canon" and one with young adult literature.

I'll continue with the notebooks, but I guess I'll collect them three different times and each time they will be worth one hundred points. I like the unit plan, the inquiry paper, the responses to what we read. I would rather have a blog than a discussion board because I want them to see what everyone is thinking, and it is a lot less clicking.

I will return to these ideas at a later time . . .

A New Conceptual Framework?

Why is this so hard for me?

Another conceptual framework:
writing and audience
media literacy
social constructivism
or democratizes education

Questions: How does this social software, or tool, impact students' thinking, reading, and writing?

It's social. They connect with each other. They connect knowledge.
Their writing has an authentic audience.

Writing and Audience
The potential of the internet coincides with many beliefs about teaching writing. How will students and teachers tap into that potential? Most teachers believe that publishing student work is important. But finding ways to do that can be difficult. Web logs are an option in publishing work globally while also expanding a student’s perception of audience. Most teachers believe that audience is very important in writing well, and many teachers believe that writing suffers when teachers are the only audience. So the web logs open their writing to a global audience.

According to Seely (2000), “The new literacy, beyond text and image, is one of information navigation. The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian-to know how to navigate through confusing, complex information spaces and feel comfortable doing so. "Navigation" may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st century.” Navigation is important, but what about understanding that navigation and having an awareness of how to read the media.

The use of the internet and synchronous and asynchronous technology will only increase. As educators, should we continue to solely depend on pencil and paper writing when so much of the work they do in college and eventually in the workplace may be centered in a more technological realm? Siemens (2005) suggests a new learning theory for the digital age: connectivism. He explains that the connections that people make between information is what is important know. He asserts that language is no longer internal, but a wide variety and amount of information exists, add that to the fact that “knowledge” is changing so quickly that it doesn’t “last” as long as it did previously.

For students in classroom with web logs, the information they learn may be far beyond the spectrum of what the teacher “knows” or “teaches.” Through a case study approach, I hope to follow the class as the blog about the literature they read in class, following their writing, reading, and thinking as they comment and respond to one another via web log.
Sub-questions:

How do they link knowledge?
How they use the web log in ways that the teacher did not assign?

Notebooks of the Mind

I'm reading Notebooks of the Mind by Vera John-Steiner. As I read, I'm seeing connections to blogging which I'll go into a bit more in a moment. For those of you trying or experienced with qualitative research, I've been trying to figure a conceptual framework for some research I want to do. I will have high school students use a blog as a complement to their English I class. They will use it for literature discussion, reader response, and maybe even writing.

As I was reading John-Steiner, I wondered if her book could be part of my framework. John-Steiner studies the creative thinking of musicians, artists, scientists, philosophers. So, are blogs the newest "notebook of the mind"? Maybe this is the approach I need to take.

John-Steiner also uses Vygotsky as a framework of her thinking (along with Bruner and Gruber)--maybe the sociocultural theory is a way to go, maybe I can say that blogs create an interdependence between students, the teacher, and the larger global community. John-Steiner writes, "Their view stresses the processes of thinking rather than its products; a developmental approach that focuses on the many transformations of thinking; and exploration of the ways in which humans are engaged in the construction of integrated and generative systems of thought. The premise that underlines their work is well expressed by Stephen Toulmin, who has written that Vygotsky's writings offer:

a novel unification of Nature and Culture that acknowledges the variety and richness of historical and cultural differences, without ignoring the general processes involved in socialization and enculturation" (p. 3).

Blogs are more about processes of thinking that become imagistic through the links that students may make. Technology is said to change thinnking. Blogs allow us to see and archive the thinking processes of students, how they "integrate and generate systems of thought." As well, blogs unify Nature and Culture. With this study I want to do, I will be able to look at cultural differences in the understanding of thought and technology--these blogs socialize and enculturate. The blog could show how students understand the processes of thinking, reading, and writing through the writing and linking they do on a blog.

Are what Steiner would call "creative apprenticeships" developed through this communicative tool? She writes, "Thought is embedded in the structure of the mind. One way to think of this structure is to view it as formed by networks of interlocking concepts, of highly condensed and organized clusters of representations. Some of these concepts are pulled rather easily into consciousness, while others become accessible only when an individual, confronted by new challenges, conjoins and transforms inner thoughts into overt and communicable forms that can be shared" (p. 9). Isn't that what blogs do. Each post is a representation and if they are linking then they form these networks which she speaks of.

Also, I wonder if when people first begin blogging, or if they blog without linking then their thinking is a little shallow, blogs without linking are merely online diaries, but through these "confrontations" of reading and responding to other students in the class, reading other online content to connect to their own blog they "conjoin" and "transform inner thoughts into over and communicable forms that can be shared" (p. 9).

Does the communicative technology of blogs somehow transform inner speech? Is that where this very personal and reflective writing comes from? Do blogs tap into inner speech? This gets into another ideas, but it might be worth exploring.

So, am I going to analyze the creative thinking and thought processes that occur when students blog as part of a high school communication arts class.

I haven't looked at the The Secret Life of Bees blog in a long time. I tried to check on Manila one time. There has got to be a free version somewhere that works similarly. I'll have to ask my friend Marcia. You need to post these thoughts and questions on your blog, so we'll have a record and keep coming back to it. Have been doing lots of thinking about this research. I think this is also about students navigating school sanctioned writing and peer sanctioned writing--does that make sense? Also, what is the goal of schooling? If it is preparing them for work, then technology is the way work is going (but maybe only for middle and upper class people), if it is for learning and being able to find information then blogging is the way to go. We have to start posting our discussions so more people can read them and discuss with us as we think about these ideas.

The interesting thing to me is that the blogs allow students to make these connections that teachers may not even think about and that students aren't even aware of the different registers they use in online writing and in class environments. I read an article yesterday about a blended learning approach where blogging is a complement to a physical class.

I also keep returning to this blog about connectivism. Tell me what you think.