Response to the Gods' Man assignments

Please craft a 500-750 word response to the packet of Gods' Man assignments that I gave you last week, paying attention to the questions below as guides for your writing. 

• What did you notice about the assignments when taken as a whole group? What is valued? What is emphasized? What is not? What is missing? 
• What struck you, in particular, about certain individual examples? Please be specific in this section and "point" to others' work. 
• What revisions did you make to your own assignment based on what you saw in others'? Why? 

Looking Ahead

I know, I know. It's been a long time coming...

So, here's a vision of what's to come.

Oct 30: Crafting your Gods Man assignment for a student audience

Nov 6: Draft of Gods' Man assignment due (draft #1; written for a student audience) with scoring criteria and scoring procedure; I-Search memo 2 due--please take my cue after reading my response to your Memo 1. One of my jobs here is to serve as your primary resource in the search!

Nov 13: I-Search Memo 3 due; formulate some preliminary findings and wonderings to present to the class vis a vis your research related to the teaching of writing...everyone gets 5 minutes to show us how smart you are.

Nov 20: I-Search memo 4; Gods' Man assignment (draft #2) due to Dr. Cook

Nov 27: No class/Thanksgiving

Dec 4: I-Search Memo 5 on blog...shitty first draft of your ISearch paper. Sign up for a conference with Dr. Cook this week!

Dec 11: Digital presentation of your research process and findings, using at least one digital composing tool (Animoto, for example, or others that Hicks mentions and demonstrates in Crafting Digital Writing). Each of you gets 10 minutes to engage us, educate us, enlighten us. You should have a complete draft of your ISearch paper written by this date.

Reflection/closure memo about your I-Search process due on your blog (for your readers!)

Dec 16: I-Search papers due to Dr. Cook.


**I have canceled the Literacy Sponsor interview and paper for this semester.**

Designing a Writing Assignment, Step by Step

Sorry for the late, late post, folks. I got carried away preparing for my trip (I leave in 2 hours!), and I forgot to pay attention to my blogging responsibilities. My apologies. Thanks to all of you who emailed me to remind me to get the lead out.

So, please, post your Gods' Man writing assignment proposal here, for all of us to admire. Please be sure you've attended to each of the 5 questions I posed to you on the assignment sheet for this week (a-e). I look forward to reading your ideas and to watching you develop them over the course of the weeks to come.

Storybirds! as they fly through my window...

YOU ARE CREATORS OF ORIGINAL DIGITAL TEXTS!

Here's Nate's retelling of Gods' Man: http://storybird.com/books/uninvited/?token=4ugubuczgz

And, Jessica's: http://storybird.com/books/running-21/?token=m2bu6vuk3r

And, Jocelyn's: http://storybird.com/books/epyllion/?token=rszpb2p4sf

And, Allie's: http://storybird.com/books/humans-2/?token=9q8268ew5t

And, Danielle's: http://storybird.com/books/control/?token=d4ksb2ju43

What questions are demanding your attention?

One of the requirements of the course--and of the Secondary English Education program--is for you to complete a research paper on an inquiry question related to the teaching of writing in secondary schools.

Now, when we think about teaching writing, we need to be sure to think broadly enough, of all the various nooks and crannies that are involved in teaching writing, learning to write, practicing sound pedagogies, and doing it with a purpose and a vision. Also, we need to think about the field of Composition, a scholarly field within English Studies where folks have been studying the teaching of writing for centuries. Also, we need to think about teachers as human beings and writers, with foibles and insecurities and societal imperatives to fulfill a mission. Finally, we need to refer to our course texts to be reminded that there are established ways (already!) of teaching some aspects of writing to kids.

So, what is interesting to you? I've identified some sub-areas within the teaching of writing below with some "starter ideas" for topics and issues. Please build on what I've started here!

A. Pedagogical approaches to teaching writing: methods and theories of teaching writing based on what we know about how people learn to write and learn to become writers.

B. Controversial issues within the teaching of writing: Plagiarism in an era of Creative Commons; the role of personal writing in preparing students for college and careers; the relevance of Writing Workshop; the literary analysis paper--what does it teach students about writing?; What is the problem with computer-scored writing tests?

C. Student perspectives on writing and the teaching of writing: What do the students think? (No one ever asks them!)

D. Composing in a digital age: How are rhetorical situations changing? How do those changes impact the teaching of genre, format, and purpose in an English/writing class?

E. Learning from writers: What can teachers of writing learn from writers? How do we build a community of writers within the walls of a classroom in a compulsory education system?

F. History: What is the history of teaching writing? Of teaching rhetoric? How far back does it date? What is the relationship between writing, rhetoric and composition? How can this history inform our teaching of writing today?

Some ideas to get you started! For this week's post, please share with us 5 (yes, five!) potential directions you might take for your I-Search project this semester. Be sure to give us some sense of:
1. what the exploration would be about
2. where you think you'd need to explore to seek out data and perspectives

I look forward to seeing what kinds of ideas you come up with!

Crafting Digital Writing, Part I

Last week, I asked you to read the first 3 chapters in Troy Hicks' new book about digital composing. For some time now, we have been noticing and participating in the digital writing revolution, as have your soon-to-be-students. But, so much digital writing is still considered to be "out of school" writing, good for connecting with friends but not good for literary essays or explanatory reports. Students tweet and text and update on their own time or "in secret" during class. Students hand in hard copies of double-spaced papers to their teachers. This has created the false sense that social media belongs "out there" while academic writing belongs "in here." But, of course, as Hicks and others point out to us, that binary is ridiculous because all of it is writing--social media, academic essays, and everything in between--and all of it is relevant to living life in the 21st century on the planet Earth.

So, like so many questions in teaching, we have to ask ourselves about how to blend, how to connect like things:

How can we invite purposeful and relevant digital writing into our English language arts classrooms?

Hicks' focus on purposeful, relevant digital writing is significant; never do we want our use of digital writing to be without purpose or relevance to kids' lives and to our responsibility to standards and curricula. In response to this first chunk of reading from Hicks' book, address the following questions in your post this week:

a. Who are you as a digital composer? What are your strengths? What are your areas of not-knowing?
b. What are your "takeaways" from these beginning chapters of Hicks book? (show me you read!)
c. What surprised or intrigued you about Hicks' discussion of digital composition? (be specific!)
d. What disturbed you or left you feeling unsettled? What questions or concerns came up for you as a teacher candidate?

I look forward to reading your responses and to bringing them into class next week. Thanks, folks!

Murray, Yagelski, and a Classroom Culture of Writing

For this week's blog reflection, I would like you to go back to the reading I assigned for Week One: Don Murray's seminal essay "Teach Writing as Process Not Product" and Bob Yagelski's hopeful article about transforming the way we teach writing so that it's more about the writer writing and less about the writer's writing. As I explained to you in class, these two pieces of foundational writing help to form my beliefs as a teacher of writing. Now, you can begin to figure out your own beliefs (I hope you do!) by reading the things that have influenced me as a teacher and by forming your own epistemology and beliefs about how people learn to write and learn to see themselves as writers.

This is not to say that you should spend your time here on the blog poking holes in our readings. This is not English class; this is about pedagogy and tangible things like real students and paper and pens. And, when we read about and discuss pedagogy, we are not looking for "BAD" or "GOOD" ideas; we are looking for POSSIBILITIES. So, please, put your teacher hats on when you write this blog post this week, and play the Believing Game...try to push aside your "doubters hat" and to envision the possibilities inherent in creating a classroom that welcomes student writers and student writing, errors and complexities and all. What does it look like NOT to teach writing as a product or as an assessment? What does it take on the teacher's part to actually teach writing as a process? What does that require of us as humans?

In 300-400 words, tell us what you took away from the Murray piece AND the Yagelski piece (especially because Yagelski discusses teaching a class exactly like our class and discusses his students who are English teacher candidates at SUNY Albany). As you're composing your thoughts, please remember that the purpose of this blog post is for you to demonstrate to me that you understand what the authors know, you've processed what they said, and you're attempting to make sense of their perspectives in light of your own. I look forward to reading your comments and reflections on these readings. Also, please try to revisit the blog before our Wednesday class to read and reply to some of your classmates' comments as well. As we move forward, I hope to cultivate the give-and-take that blogging requires of us.

Observation

Spent nine eleven

Making, sharing, creating.

Building something good.

Welcome!

This blog will serve as our class home away from school. It will sometimes be a place where we all contribute a little bit of writing; it will sometimes be a place where I post your assignments and related articles and links. It will sometimes be a place where we offer our perspectives on an issue related to the teaching of writing or, sometimes, a place where I will model the assignment I have given you. So, please bookmark this blog on your personal computer so that you can return here at least once a week to check in and to contribute. For this week, to let us all know you've arrived at the blog and to begin to introduce yourself to us, please post a greeting to the class and to me, your professor, along with a meaningful life quote that you carry with you, like a mantra or motto or motivational phrase. Tell us, in your post, where this quote comes from and why it has been important to you in your life. Your post should be no more than 100 words. Thanks! I look forward to beginning our adventure together.