IRW Unit: Myself and My World

My IRW unit would be part of a course that is based on the theme, “Myself and My World.”  It would be a built on a blend of cognitive and socio-cultural theory.  The arc of the class would move from the personal (the student), to another (another person), to society.  We would focus on inner, personal growth as well as the student’s place in society.  We would practice cognitive and meta-cognitive skill building, but an important part of the class would be focused on the power of reading and writing to shape people’s cultural and political beliefs.

I will focus on the first unit for this posting, and will follow up with a little information about how the rest of the course will look.

The first unit would focus on autobiographies in reading (perhaps one example written by myself) and in writing.    We would start with blogging and other low-stakes writing, including a personal introduction, followed by a difficulty paper and other reflection pieces on reading and writing.  We would discuss metacognitive aspects of reading and writing, and would work on study skills such as annotation and active reading. We would do teacher-guided peer reviews for content, clarity and organization.  Grammar would be discussed throughout the course as needed.   The culminating project for the unit would be an autobiographical essay describing a moment or period in time from the student’s life that caused a change in ideals or attitudes.  The finished essay would be composed and presented online for the classmates to see, which would allow the inclusion of images and hyperlinks.

I need to do more research to find a few good examples of autobiographies for students.  Here is one online autobiography that we might use in class. 

http://www.vachss.com/vachss/ca_2003_autobio.html

The second unit would be based on biographies, again, both in reading and writing, and the culminating paper would be a research biography of a person of the student’s choosing. 

The third unit would be based on a social issue or social change and the student’s attitudes towards that issue.  It would be a persuasive paper that discusses the issue in detail (allowing the student to do more research) as well as the student’s attitudes and thoughts on the issue.

The fourth unit would be a major revision of one of the previous projects, and a reflection piece on what the student learned over the course of the semester.

Take-aways from McCormick (1994)

The Cognitive Model

·         “Empirically based”

o   Reading processes are quantifiable, testable and broken into a hierarchy of skills

·         Based solely on a reader’s mental capacities

·         Schema theory: importance of a reader’s prior knowledge

o   It would seem that a reader’s social knowledge and context would play into this, but cognitivists don’t address this

·         Objectivist: there is one correct reading of a text

·         This is an old, powerful model that has dominated perspectives on reading for a long time

o   my question: Seems to be the root of college SLOs?

The Expressive Model

·         Readers create their own personal, subjective meanings

·         No hierarchy of skills, no direct instruction

·         Whole Language pedagogies

·         Reader response criticism

o   Democratized the reading process

o   But readers only looked at texts from their own point of view (too superficial)

o   Mainly literary reading

The Social-Cultural Model

·         Reading is reconstructing a text on the basis of a reader’s cultural resources

·         Reading used for shaping peoples cultural and political beliefs

·         Reading is social

·         Critical Literacy

o   Ability to perceive the interconnectedness of social conditions and literacy practices of a culture

o   Ability to analyze those conditions and practices

o   And possess the critical and political awareness to take action

Blogging in the Classroom

This is my first time using blog style writing in a class, and I have to say I really like it.  It is a totally new way to interact with classmates.  The writing process makes me define and analyze my ideas and attitudes, and then the public nature of posting lets me read other peoples’ ideas about the subject, which then in turn helps me to adjust or even change my ideas of what I think is important as a teacher.  One example is my posting about how I would structure an IRW class.  After writing and posting my thoughts, and reading others (and going to class, and doing the reading) I realized that my attitudes towards the class were very objectivist and product oriented.  I think there is some value to those points of view, but I came to this program to learn new ways of teaching and thinking about teaching.  So this exercise helped me to analyze, critique and even change the way I think about teaching.  It’s very useful.

As a reader, a “good” posting is one that is well written.

Sorry, that was my attempt at humor.  But it’s kind of true.  I like to read posts that have specific details related to the prompt, whether those are personal, academic or professional.  If a post is too general or vague, it is not interesting to read, and more importantly to me, it’s not helpful to me to in my process of defining my own ideas.  For me, the most interesting and useful blog postings talk about a topic in a way I’ve never thought of.  It’s a great way to learn and evaluate new ideas.

I don’t really read blogs on the internet, because most of the ones I’ve seen are political and those just tend to recycle the same stupid talking points of whatever party the blogger supports.  If any of you know of an interesting blog and would like to share it, please post in in the comments.

The paragraph above is another great example of why blogging (“new media”) is great: it’s much more interactive.  In general, I would like our blog postings to be more interactive.  I’d like more of us to post comments and continue our conversations.

I guess since we have only 15 people in our class, it is not too much of a burden to read everyone’s posting.  The problem might be responses, though.  Ideally, we should give some kind of response for each posting, but 15 might be too much.  We could deal with responses the way we are doing it this week, which is, “post a few comments.”  The only problem with this is that some people might get a lot of comments, and others might not.  I have noticed in myself how happy I am when someone chooses to comment on my posting.  Maybe by doing the “post a few comments” assignment, people will try to make their posts more interesting?  Or would it contribute to writer’s block?

Breaking into smaller groups might be the answer, maybe groups of five.  I’d like to mix up the groups throughout the semester, though, so that I can get to know and trade ideas with everyone in the class.  Personally, I might continue to read blogs of people in other groups, though.

Blech, evaluation and grading.  I am teaching an advanced ESL writing course, which is supposedly similar to a “basic skills” course, except targeted to ESL students instead of "remedial" students.  This class, and Eng 700, have inspired me to start assigning “blogs” for that class instead of journals on the college's version of iLearn.  I will require students to read and respond to their classmates’ postings, but I think for that class I am going to just require that the students do them, and check them off once they are done.  There are two reasons for this: first, that is how I usually deal with journals, and second, this is an experiment.  I’m not sure how it will work out for us in that class, so I don’t want to weight the grading too heavily.

In this class, we don’t want our classmates to rate our postings, and to tell the truth I don’t really want Mark to grade my postings.  Once that starts, I will feel much more pressure in writing and will not feel comfortable exploring and experimenting.  If I were in Mark’s shoes, I would just require that the blogs be done, and depend on the other two parts of the course to define a student’s grade.  However, as the instructor, when writing the syllabus, I might lower the weight of the blogs in the calculation of the final grade.

Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think that evaluating blog postings would be counter productive.

A First Pass at an IRW course

I am still in the beginning stages of understanding the ins and outs of teaching an integrated reading and writing course, but there are certain skills and knowledge that I am sure I would want to include in such a course.  I would want a good strong unit on active reading, with time to discuss and practice the skills necessary to be a good reader, as well as time for the students to think about (and write about) the metacognitive aspects of reading.  I would want to do lots of writing and reading over the whole course, starting with topics that are more personal and gradually becoming more academic and sophisticated—but I would still want the students to be personally invested in their chosen “academic” topics at the end of the course.  More than anything I would want my students to develop confidence in their ability to read and write and to develop a joy for reading— or at least to get to a point where they can enjoy reading.  To do this I would have students go to the library to choose a fiction book they would like to read, and give them time in class to read it (when possible).  To track students’ reading, I would have them keep reading logs over the semester, and turn in book reports once a month or so.