Holly's Response on Mulitmodal Literacy

I really enjoyed reading about using technology in the classroom.  I thought the article made several interesting points.  The first being that "The majority of students were not reading books for leisure" (217).  I thought it was interesting that students aren't reading for fun.  It surprises me a little since I read for leisure so much, that students aren't reading in that manner.  I do wonder why they aren't reading. If it's just as the author said because they are more interested in technology or if there is another reason that students are not reading for non academic purposes.  I know that during the semesters, when I'm busy studying, I rarely read for fun.  I spend so much time reading for class that I often either don't have time or can't make my eyes focus on text any longer.  I wonder if students have the same feelings when it comes to reading outside of class for fun.

The other thought I found interesting was that the social networking and using of technology in the classroom was engaging the students and motivating them to write more (225).  That thought made me wonder why that was the case.  Is it because many students spend quite a bit of time using social networking sites and find this style of writing to be more comfortable? Or is there another reason students are responding so well to this type of writing?  I think this would be something interesting to explore.  However, I would also then wonder that if this seems to be working well, then how can we implement this in the schools?  This seems like it could be fairly expensive and I wonder if this would be a hindrance to implementing this in the classroom.

Travis Dalsis—A Response to “The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts”

One of the main arguments stated is that just as there is a sophisticated cognitive interaction between print texts and an individual; likewise a similar sophisticated interface occurs when reading visual texts and hypertext.  Proficient readers of print text unconsciously utilize an array of cognitive functions to infer meaning and build understanding of a print text.  Walsh argues that reading involves “decoding, responding and comprehending at affective and cognitive levels, critiquing and analyzing” (25) that requires dynamic interaction (not static) with a text.  Additionally, Walsh emphasizes that we make similar transactions when reading visually or interactively on a website.  These new literacies require different strategies to decode the information.  As a reader enters an informational Internet site, he/she must understand the non-linear pathways that access information.  Reading is no longer left to right, up and down, but also contains multiple pathways through hyperlinks.  Students don’t chunk information sequentially as the writer intended.  One student may learn about a specific fact related to wolves using one hyperlink, while another will learn and experience a different fact from a different hyperlink simultaneously.  It’s interesting to posit the hypothesis that multimodal texts give more autonomy to the reader to control their own literary experience. 

Additionally, it’s interesting to notice that students who are asked to create cross-text connections have different mechanisms (internal and external) to do so.  Students who are using print texts are confined to their own cognitive schema and that of their peers (i.e. in literature groups).  However, if a student has access to the Internet to make cross-text connections, the community of available resources broadens astronomically!  Collaboration becomes instantaneous—the reader collaborates with technology the same way a print text reader may collaborate solely with a peer or their own previous experiences in reading print texts.

Overall, this article provided interesting insight and made visible some of the invisible processes that take place when reading multi-modal texts.  New literacies are shaping the educational landscape and to understand how we process information on different platforms positions educators to possess more agency.  The use of technology: projectors, Smart boards, laptops, digital e-book readers, and mp3 players has done something to education.  Educators have seen the cultural landscape and reacted to the ubiquitous forms of technological interactions that take place regularly.  Instead of calling them irrelevant to the learning process, we, as Walsh concludes, need to take our knee-jerk reactions as symptoms of our lack of understanding and add to our knowledge base analysis of multi-modal texts.

Ryan Fries' response to Vetter's, Positioning Students

Vetter’s observation of Gina’s classroom

In this article, Vetter begins with an observation of Gina’s 11^th Grade English class. She notices that Gina has a unique and valuable ability to improvise and change the classroom discussion when students become disengaged. Her approach to classroom interaction was to call upon cultural resources to facilitate identity. She uses open-ended questions and suggestions for becoming readers and writers for a purpose and to imitate what they read in their own writing in order to become better. Gina is concerned with her students’ identities because many of those students have already determined what position they will be in life and have preconceived conceptions of their limitations. Gina teaches in a school of Latino and African-American students.

Vetter looks at to key factors in the facilitation of learning: Identity Process and Positioning Theory

Initially, I didn’t see much difference between the two as both theories draw on the notion that cultural, social, and historical aspects of students create the type of readers and writers they will become. Their experiences in reading, writing, and learning are viewed by them as a process of becoming the individual that fits within these constructs.

Positioning theory takes this concept a step further by identifying that students actually value learning more depending on the position they are given within a learning environment. For example if a teacher uses encouraging language to position a student they may give constructive criticism from an inclusive approach that positions the student as a member of the classroom community. She may say, “This is good and I like your writing here. But remember we also talked about using imagery to paint a picture in our story.” This juxtaposed with more humiliating forms of criticism, “No, this isn’t what I told you to do.” Humiliation leads to the alienation of students from the classroom community and can lead to their rejection of educational norms in general.

Ryan Fries’ response to Thein, Beach, and Parks’, Perspective-Taking…Teaching Multicultural Literature to White Students

Ryan Fries’ response to Thein, Beach, and Parks’, Perspective-Taking…Teaching Multicultural Literature to White Students

In the article, authors Thein, Beach, and Parks discuss the process of using literature as a means of changing students’ cultural perspectives and how this process is often rejected by white students because they assume it implicates them as vicegerents of institutionalized racism.

The article observes Daryl’s classroom with the following racial breakdown:

Race White Asian-American African Latino

Number of Students 8 4 1 1

After a semester of multicultural literature that often challenged and allowed students to become engaged with each other, the assumption was made that the effect of such an approach resulted in a shift in white students’ perceptions of discrimination, oppression, and social class. Although the white students claimed that the class changed their perceptions, the actual effect was perceived to be minimal at best.

But Thein, Beach, and Parks argue that even if the change wasn’t as dynamic or fundamental as they would have predicted it did allow white students to “try on” new perspectives which could be considered a major shift toward a change in their perceptions. Just the process alone of challenging previously held biases and beliefs creates tension and this often results in authentic discourse within the classroom. It is a process not aimed at changing the student fundamentally, but rather to instill value in the perspectives of others coming from different racial, ethnic, and SES’s. Multicultural literacy also leads students to be skeptical of majority opinions and beliefs within in the text which can lead to skepticism and critical thinking outside literary examples.

Ryan Fries’ response to Eckert’s, Bridging the Pedagogical Gap, Literacy...Reading Theories

Ryan Fries’ response to Eckert’s, Bridging the Pedagogical Gap

In this article, Eckert makes a distinction between two interpretations of reading.

First, is the theoretical reading or performing a reading of a text. This is the noun form of the word reading and brings with it connotations of literacy in the form of critical analysis. That is to say a reading of the text should comprise of advanced reading strategies to interpret nuanced meaning, symbolism, foreshadowing, and other skills required in secondary and postsecondary educational settings. Eckert argues, that students are able but are often ill-prepared to analyze literary works in such a manner and opt to leave such explanations to teachers.

In its verb form reading is, “[…]relegated to a lower, less scholarly, cognitive activity in which the reader has little agency in constructing meaning from text.”(112) This form does not encompass a critical interpretive approach to reading comprehension but is the action in itself. Eckert is concerned with the significance of the former. However, she argues that they are not separate entities entirely and that when taken from a pedagogical approach of “intersection” between the two, especially at the elementary level and continually thereon, literary interpretation “not only builds on students’ prior knowledge of textual situations but also encourages them to expand their repertoire of reading strategies[…]”(113)

Eckert specifically accredits scholars Iser and Goodman in the field of literacy theory. Iser’s approach considers the reader’s expectations in relation to words written in the text and as a result there exists an aspect of individual comprehension unique to each reader. Goodman’s approach may seem familiar because it deals with miscues in the reader’s predictions of a text. We often see this approach to literary theory in secondary education, when students are asked mid-text to predict what will happen next. Goodman argues that their answers reflect, “not what the eye has seen but what the brain has generated for the mouth to report.”(115)

Mitra's Response to "Multimodal Literacy: What does it mean for Classroom Practice?"

I think I may have experienced heart palpations while reading this. I realize that I often respond to articles on the teaching of English/language arts in this way, with anxiety for the teacher, and may sound a bit like a broken record. (A record player- how’s that for an outdated simile in response to an article on multimodal literacy?)  However, when Walsh writes that the “…'new' of the future is constantly replacing the 'new' of now” (212), I can’t help but wonder how a teacher is supposed to keep pace. Some of the technologies given as examples in this article, written in 2008, would already be outdated in a classroom today, and they were relatively new then.

Two things struck me most while reading this. First is that teachers and students are being expected to learn and work with multimodal and digital texts. Yet they continue to be assessed through print based material. In this way, there is an even greater need to disrupt curricular instruction to “teach to the test.” In other words, teachers will have to break from what the students find engaging and personally relevant, multimodal instruction and digital texts for example, to teach them how to perform on a standardized test.

Secondly, I wonder what this emphasis on digital technology means for students already disadvantaged at school, namely students from low-income homes. They have less access to technology and less ability to update the technology they do have to compete with their peers. There is no “public library” of technology for them to access, and if there was, it would not compare to what some students have access to from their own bedrooms.

GOLDIE GIBSON’s response to 2008 NCTE Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose and the Age of Composition

Kathleen Blake Yancey begins this article with the history of writing beginning in 1776.  She discusses how writing has changed over the last century, how it is changing in the current moment, and for consideration of what this history and current practice mean for the teaching of composition in the twenty-first century.  She breaks these considerations into four quartets.

                        Quartet One: An Impulse to Compose Tested

Quartet Two: An impulse to Compose Scaled and Experienced

Quartet Three: An Impulse to Compose Processed

Quartet Four:  An Impulse to Compose Electrified, Networked, Transformed

I will only concentrate on two of the themes in Quartet One.  In theme one, she brings to our attention that “Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed. . .” (318).”  I never quite thought of writing in that respect.  For many people, sometimes reading is easier than writing.  With reading, you take someone else’s work, read it and comment on it and then you are done.  With writing, it is work, a job.  One must use any and all parts of the brain to try and get something down on paper.  The content must be coherent.  If the content is not coherent and easily understood, then the reader or listener may not want to read or listen to the rest of your work(s). 

Theme two: Reading brought the family together with the “feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing. . . was associated with unpleasantness. . . and episodes of despair. . .” (318).

These words are so true.  I remember as a child that I wanted my sister to read “The Night Before Christmas” in the middle of July.  On the other hand, I recall my mother saying to me, “Goldie, sit down and practice writing your name and then find a book to read.”  The writing was grueling, but the reading was very enjoyable and relaxing.  Even Donald Graves (one of the article contributors) made a similar remark:

“Handwriting was one of those early school experiences I have tried to repress.

. . . Recollections of endless circles, precise spacing, and comments about my untidiness take away my energy. I had no idea that handwriting was for writing. . .” (319).   

Overall, I seem to keep reading great articles that support the claim that we need to find ways to make writing as much of a pleasure as reading.  We as educators must find ways to take the grueling out of writing and show our students that writing can be just as relaxing as reading.