Community knowledges and literacies

March 29th, 2010

These are notes taken during the session …

Community knowledges and literacies

Teaching top-down without calling it teaching.

If I was being paid to do this . . . I would do this . . .

Compensation for learning.

Is it true that people do not have a motivation to learn or is it that they have the motivation to learn in other ways?

Does the community address other ways of creating knowledge? What is knowledge within a structure?

How do we harness that power within a learning community?

Community as experts.

Notions of power. Resistance to power/authority/context.

How curriculum has been structured for 100 years for specific job tasks.

Unequal childhoods. Annette Lareau

Literacy narratives in conjunction with a books.

Dickie

What it means to be a 21st century citizen-learner?

March 29th, 2010

There are notes from the session:

What does it mean to be a 21st century citizen-learner?

On one side the blogs, twitter, facebook -those who are comfortable, semi-comfortable, and those who are not. How does one teach/train to make those two come together in formalized and informal environments?

How do you help people become productive?

What are you doing with social media? Students are less effective media-makers than 5 years ago. They are web-savvy, but not used to constructing their own meaning?

How do we teach students to facilitate learning? How do you teach students to be literate without the technology?

The structure of the way we do things is not good.

People are intrinsically interested in what they’re learning; the value comes in with the project that students are invested in.

Idea of citizens as having a civic responsibility.

Using social media to make change in communities. Differences between social interaction and community action.

What are the characteristics of a productive environment? A caring teacher. Teacher creating a sense of shared purpose. Passion.

The active component of doing something productive [is key]. Students are doing the learning for us and the teachers act more as facilitators.

Problem-based and problem-solving learning.

Teachers who are not savvy with digital technologies/media. Takes a lot of creativity on the teachers’ part.

Using paper, pencil, cardboard, etc. to get around lack of access. Remediating facebook page into paper.

Finding individuals who know what you don’t know. This helps that sense of community. Both can learn things as you go along.

Having a written component to something seems to ground the learning.

Making the problem the key aspect of the learning.

The art of rhetoric as the key to citizenship.

Dickie

Learning to learn

March 27th, 2010

Session 6: rm 340

Learning-to-learn components should be built into every literacy educational event, particularly those that have anything to do with technologies. Why? First, regardless of the skill or the system being taught or learned, new approaches and technologies will soon manifest themselves: these days sooner than later. So stepping back and articulating how students and teachers learn new skills, approaches, and technologies is an essential step in preparing for the new learning experiences that are bound to follow.

A twist to a learning-to-learn methodology is the fact that these days we (literacy educators and “students”) are often upside down in terms of literacy practices and learning approaches. In other words, our clients/students as a group may know as much about the subject as we do. Each teaching opportunity is an opportunity for the TEACHER to learn literacy skills and learning approaches from the clients/students in the class.

Every time we fail to learn from those who we are teaching, it is a lost opportunity to sample the literacy culture of that group of clients/students. It is a loss for us and for the others in the class. I do not claim that all young people know all that they need already. The scope of their understanding of rhetoric, systems, style, etc. is often spotty and under developed. We (more experienced) teachers/program developers will always bring important concepts, approaches and skills to the table. But we also need to be able to learn along with our clients/students as we help prepare them (and ourselves) for jobs and cultural experiences that don’t currently exist.

Please post comments below…

jeff.dollard

The relationship between teachers and learners re: literacy

March 27th, 2010

Session 6: rm 102

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Courtney Werner
Session 2: relationship between readers and learners

Brenda, Hudson center, working with…I’m not really sure.
Melanie Morrison, library media specialist with Columbus city schools.
Every school should have a library media specialist, working with lots of media and research, from K-12 all the way, and YES YES YES we NEED this! Every school building should have a media librarian, and people and community changes quickly, and SO DO THE LIBRARIES, so we need the people in those libraries to really help these students.
Librarian/media specialist, term over the last 5 years, college degree and a masters, have to take all the courses the classroom teachers need to take, and then the media and audio visual training and then a masters in technology. MILS.
Pam, Jeff, Nancy. Me and Jess.
Professional development, every quarter there are classes open to them.
Nancy outreaches to the high schools and middle schools. Hire grad students to do that work with her.
Teachers workshops at northgate was where Nancy first started.
Melanie: teaching and literacy, it’s difficult to get it, when you have 3500 teachers and need to get teachers on the same page with best practices. Professional development 3 days per year. Trying to get the schools on the same page, some are passing proficiencies and having their readers, looking closely at teaching and literacy. Looking at it personally, on a personal level, of third of them are working on it to get the other 2/3 of teachers up to speed. Relationships, rigor, relevancy. Relationships with children, how are you doing this, are you making it important to them. You realize it’s all being done differently with all of these other teachers. So when you have teachers with best practices, then the students are passing the proficiencies.
Jeff: how do you work to identify learning needs of teachers? Based on test scores? And/or teachers identify learning and development goals that they have for selves
Melaine: example, large pop of English as second lang. worked with ESL teacher, her 8th grade got 6% higher than entire district in reading scores. Should be asking her, Cathy, how do you do that? Using textbooks that are actually useful, competency and fluency in reading, writing, and thinking. Teachers should be emmersed in learning best practices for those three days.
Melanie: Best practices, same kinds of best practices that I’m thinking about, getting into rigor and knowing about that sorts of things, so it is about about about the fact of being exposed to how other students change and learn. Awareness and being a reflective practitioner

What the real deal is between the

Teaching Problem Students by Jere Brophy
Issues Impacting Teacher Learning and Devel
Motivation
Knowing Multiple Intelligence Theory
Knowing personality theory
Learner Styles
Flexibility
Assessment does not = Grades
No mechanically teaching the test
Distance that exists between teachers and students
Culturally relevant teaching and how should it be done or tailored
Teaching as a human relationship

Things that inhibit student learning
Teacher monopolizing the classroom
Drill, drill, drill (drill and kill)
IRE [less teacher talk, more student talk]
Bad/rude/uncaring teachers
Trust
No opportunities for reflection
relevance

What change in mindset of teachers will enhance learning?
Desire to consider a mindset change.
Think of every environment as a pilot project.
Trust/safety

Getting rid of tenure. What does this do for our ability to teach and teach well
Showing ppl what the career opportunities are that these students can have access to.

Teachers who have been around reinvesting in the new stuff, recognizing the changes and buying in to them.

The invention of hugo gabare

The Best of the Brownies from the brownies book w. d. dubois came up with journal of African Americans and compilation of that from back in the day.
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synthesizing everything in terms of making a “white paper”
Dickie Selfe will be the broker ? somethings will be missed. Maybe take a look and see what we think are the take aways here.

What are we going to do with our conversations here?

He’ll send us a form via email that is anonymous form and spaces for us to give sense of what we’ll do next and what we found valuable.

Now, our session, is about creating an ohio wide research consortium.
Hoping to find some participatory research action that will be useful to ppl across ohio. Coordinated such that we could aggregate whatever we think of as data from those experiences. Why is this important. those are our two commitments, they might be overly ambitious, but they might not be.

Open up the topic of the title. Are methodologies and resources rich enough to incite progress. The DALN is a methodology and a resource ?
How can we promote things that will work well for us.
Ways we can work on the margins of something. There is capacity for other people to tap into about recreating it.
Resource of value to communities (hopefully), and we could use it for research or for our communities.

What other methodologies are rich enough for us to utilize?
Building in to a kind of project. The thing you’re asking ppl to do around Ohio has to be open enough and compelling enough for them that they need to be excited about it and invested in it. We cannot impose this on somebody, especially because we have no money to do that. Has to appeal to people broadly, but it also has to be useful to us. changing literacies in a difficult economic age/in this coming decade or so. Can’t be too onerus, and it needs to be compelling.

Going back to the idea of meetings. Sitting in on meetings, probably shorter than this one. We should have more meetings—a couple hours. Tried to get ppl from the literacy initiatives to come, but when it came down to it, it was a whole day and they didn’t have it. Meetings is one way to do it, and meetings with diverse participants. That’s what’s difficult. Going to the meetings that they are ALREADY HAVING. But finding champions. Ppl who are going to be champions for the project. Convince Strickland that there’s something of value to the state. Enlist champions who can leverage resources and enlist interest. How can we involve them.

Posing questions to learders—what kind of information don’t they have? What kind don’t they have that might influence policy? What do they sit around and think about there or talk about that. So maybe we need to listen in on THEIR business meetings—if only we could.

What about collecting narratives that aren’t about literacy? For example, teacher narratives—the need for teaching to certain things, not teaching to certain things, best practices, etc.

On one page, what are the main things we talked about, what do you need to know, and what don’t you know about these issues? What’s most interesting to you, what would be most compelling.

Concerned by political discourse of the recession as being tied to issues of STEM, that STEM is the solution to these issues. Some white paper should play up our role in helping state readers, national leaders, that we need to define literacy MUCH more broadly. The digital humanities have a role to play in how we define these. STEM isn’t the end all be all, but what about functional, critical, rhetorical, digital literacies?

It’s rare to get all of these levels of education. There’s not a lot of groups like the one we’re in on today.

Have to take all these learning environments into account that we hadn’t thought of before, so trying to see literacy across levels of education as well as within the community (which is often left out of the loop)

Really need to have a serious conversation with EXTENSION and work with the extension people to find out what the role of literacy is in these other initiatives and projects that they have, the self-idnetified needs, might be possible to leverage extension to do some of these things to get at the literacy issues in the state of Ohio to go ask for pilot start of resources from university and state, etc. also, same thing with community literacy groups.

Would like to do this in northeast ohio. Having a lot of colleagues that we didn’t even know were there, and the community colleges in our area have a different type of community. Dunno what kind of resources we have to put on such an unconf, etc, but we’d really really like to do this one. How do we get professionals to come?
Asking authors to invite someone outside of the discipline as a coauthor. Asking from outside academic settings, listing and getting just our neighbors and community members involved. How about communities looking into classrooms, and having a perspective from classroom perspectives and realities in the classrooms. Bridge the gap between teachers and students. The whole classroom level. As the content. As part of the discussion.

Maybe we should do this. The travel thing is an issue. There’s a movement of ppl doing unconferences, and talking about how they get funded and do it cheap, so maybe we should do this. Public library meeting rooms, we could use those.

jeff.dollard

Methodologies rich enough to incite progress

March 27th, 2010

Session 6: rm 140

Several registrants have suggested methods and theoretical approaches that we might use for assessment (of a formative nature for students and teachers) and for research into the area of changing composing, reading, and research literacies. I’m translating and paraphrasing, so please feel free to elaborate, correct, or complicated in the comments.

  • Collecting personal narratives that attend to the intersections of economic opportunities, literacy practices, values, and learning.
  • Using the PhotoVoice <www.photovoice.org> or StoryMapping <http://www.storymapping.org> methodologies to generate an Ohio-wide participatory action research project.
  • How should theories of gender from feminist and queer perspectives that intersect with digital literacies influence our state-wide research agenda.
  • How might we assess the effectiveness of a digital-literacy-across-the-curriculum program?
  • Include ways to assess the material conditions that enable and constrain our access to digital literacy

Please post comments below…

jeff.dollard

Written Language in Structuring Social Relationships

March 27th, 2010

Session 5: rm 340

Tweets posted …

  • Language & social relationships: narratives are indicators of social phenomena & social performances themselves
  • How to teach student to respond to each other constructively and respectively?
  • now, our students bring their home communities to the university with them. they aren’t leaving home to come to university. home and mode have shifted
  • identity is a narrative that ppl hold about themselves.
  • taking up agency by giving and forcing other cateogires in the census; taking pwr via literacy
  • grabill The difference between identity as “belonging to” and “I am” makes all the difference
jeff.dollard

What is the role of literacy in a recession economy?

March 26th, 2010

Session 5: rm 102

Notes during session (Dickie) …

What a great session. In addition to what Mindy wrote in the comments

  • Workplace retraining people really should be involved in this discussion/project. Their stories would be illustrative. They’d have nuanced stories about how literacy impacts their clients’ efforts.
  • It’s hard to get an “impact statement” from those struggling in this economy. But we need them.
  • the CSTW Minor in Professional Writing is experiencing a tsunami of interest. We assume that students are more focussed than ever on “getting training,” professional experience, and getting their foot in the door somewhere.
  • Recession hits summer college and HS jobs as people get bumped from full-time jobs. All levels are feeling it. Community colleges are experiencing overwhelming growth.
  • We suggest that students will want to move from service-learning classes => internships => graduating with jobs.
  • How is our literacy work (and the theories that underlie it, Bloome) can help “create jobs” like the new Social Media Strategists jobs I’ve been seeing lately (See participant, Angela Siefer and her business at the ShinyDoor).
  • Ideally people need to graduate with an area of expertise, technological abilities (and an ability to learn quickly), mixing it up with social media and crowd sourcing processes, and finally be able to be a literacy broker (take complexity and make it understandable using valid resources).
jeff.dollard

Assessment

March 26th, 2010

Session 5: rm 140

Tweets …

  • How do we assess remix projects?
  • assessment is a 4-letter word?
  • Are there digital genres that enable student/participant self assessment or assessment in general? Blogs, wikis?
  • what can the DALN tell us about relations? community based on a network/web embodied by how DALN gets taken up
  • assessment buzzwords: modeling, impact, crowd-sourcing, real-life, …
  • we talk about “doing the twitters” at the #crrunconf
  • Student designed rubrics.
  • The D word: deliverable!
  • How do students learn? How do we help them know how they learn?
  • Do we have false presumptions about literacy levels in the larger culture?
jeff.dollard

Mobile technologies for access; written language & structuring social relationships

March 26th, 2010

Session 4: rm 340

People use written language to construct social relationships and structures as well as to challenge and reshape extant social networks and structures.   How are people using written language in these ways.  How does mobile tech play into this?

Please post comments below…

jeff.dollard

Turning passive training into active training

March 26th, 2010

Session 4: rm 102

How to creatively teach tech communication by using technology – making training fun and interactive, rather than dull and passive.

Please post comments below…

jeff.dollard
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