Peabloggy

Rochelle Gutierrez, PhD, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign visited our Learning Sciences Institute recently to present her work on pedagogy and student math teachers. Her presentation draws on Latina/Latino studies to offer a potential framework for reconceptualizing knowledge and for engaging teacher candidates in a process that acknowledges the complex identities of students.

It’s an interesting perspective in identity, power, and shape-shifting which addresses the unique student-teacher relationship of knowing/not-knowing and learning about each other while engaging in learning math.

Watch the video.

Music City’s own Redneck Woman demonstrated that even amongst the glitz of fame and glamour of fortune, education is still important. Singer Gretchen Wilson aimed to set an example for her daughter by completing what she had not had the chance to–high school. Wilson passed the General Educational Development (GED) exam last month and will graduate with her high school diploma next week.

A story like this may get minimal coverage compared to all the juicy scandals in Hollywood, but it is nice to see someone famous honoring the tradition of education. In addition, at the age of 34, Wilson proves it’s never too late to finish school. By completing her GED, Wilson shows that no matter how much stardom you have achieved or material goods you have acquired, education is still personally meaningful.

-Teresa Bagamery Clark

I have written poetry for at least 20 years. Last week, I gave my first poetry reading in two. My experience with poetry led me to read about Poetry Out Loud, a national creative arts competition for high school students, co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

While doctoral studies do not leave much time for penning poems, I have kept my hobby alive, and I feel pleased that many high school students are fueling their interest in the arts by participating in  Poetry Out Loud. Now, if I could just get my professors to let me submit chapbooks for my final projects, then I would be set. Poems about quantitative methods, anyone?

-Teresa Bagamery Clark

I will not lie and say that I loved gym class all of my life. In fact, I really did not care for it until about my junior year of high school, which, incidentally is when I finally shed all that baby fat. That year, my friend, Jenny, and I were reigning badminton champions in our physical education (PE) class. As a senior, I enjoyed playing flag football when the weather was just right for lining up in the school yard. Although, running the mile was another story; I always speed-walked it. I have never had the endurance for continuous running.

I support adding a half-credit of PE per semester for Tennessee’s K-12 students. Exercise is good for body and mind, giving students the opportunity to develop fitness habits as well as to ease tension before a big exam. I hope that the schools are also incorporating nutritional counseling with the added exercise, as those go hand-in-hand in combating obesity and developing healthy patterns for life.

-Teresa Bagamery Clark

I am by no means an expert on charter schools, so I hesitate to post on this topic. But, as I look for teaching jobs for next year, I’ve been thinking about unconventional approaches to education and the possibilities they hold. I spent eight weeks in a comprehensive high school student teaching with 12th graders, and I learned firsthand about many of the limitations involved with teaching 130+ students in 55 minute class periods every day. So, when I heard about Big Picture High School, I was intrigued.

The Big Picture Company, based on a school model based on The Met Center in Rhode Island. The Met model, which is being replicated at Big Picture Schools around the country - including one here in Nashville - focuses on tailored curricula with a vastly smaller number of students than typical students. Teachers are assigned 14-15 students, and they work with those students over the course of four years to develop projects and secure internships that address each student’s unique interests. Teachers have time and opportunity to invest in students’ lives - “one student at a time” - and students see a direct correlation between school and the things that are truly important to them in life.

I’m sure there are drawbacks to the approach Big Picture schools take, but I am intrigued enough to find out more. Eliot Levine’s book, One Kid at a Time, catalogues the Big Picture model as it originated at the Met School, and is worth a read.

- Rachel Bowers

As I write this post, my eyes wander to the stack of 90 student essays that have just been graded. I feel that I have performed one of my first true feats of strength as an aspiring English teacher. Next week, my students will begin rewriting sections of these essays (I can already hear the groaning!). What weighs most heavily on my mind, however, is how little students appear to be reading the novel their papers address. For the crafty student who listens in class and skims his Spark Notes, it could be easy to make all A’s and yet never crack open a book.

Educational researcher Tovani (2000) calls this phenomenon “fake reading,” and she has experienced it first-hand. She claims that she read the first and last page of assigned books, found the Cliff notes, and managed to write high scoring essays without every actually reading and interpreting a text on her own. It was not until she began attending an adult book discussion group that she found she could no longer get by with faking it. The other book club members were relating personal experiences to the novel in a way that only true readers can. As I continue to tweak assignments and projects during my current teaching unit, I keep Tovani’s book club in mind. How can I push students to become personally invested in their readings?

–Katie Harris

I came across an article this morning on USA Today about the graduation gap between urban and suburban schools. As I just finished a paper a couple of weeks ago for the Social Context of Education class in the Ed.D. program, this article seemed all too familiar. Educators have been attempting to bridge performance gaps for years because it is a HUGE problem in K-12 and higher education. As I went through the articles for my paper, the impact of neighborhoods and parental involvement seemed to stand out as primary reasons for student success and failure, and this could tie in to the results in the USA Today article. It is a very touchy subject, but the reason why suburban and urban schools differ so greatly in graduation rates might be more contingent on what happens after the student leaves school.

-Landon C. Clark

“Where is the country of Taliban located?” a high school girl asked me in class one day, after watching part of the movie Osama (which, incidentally, is about a girl living in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s reign in the ’90’s).

I quickly realized that this student (and many others) were confused by the historical events in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which we are reading right now. I devised activities on Afghanistan’s history; I brought in movie clips of more moderate madrassas; I explained the different forms that Islam can take. Tomorrow, however, my students have a chance to learn about these things first-hand.

One of the strengths of a large school district like Nashville Metro lies in its diversity. Yes, it can lead to racial and ethnic tension in school, but it also enables classroom discussion to be that much richer. Four older students will be visiting tomorrow to participate in a panel on being female, Muslim, and Middle Eastern. They come from Iran, Iraq, and even Afghanistan itself.  My classes have prepared questions to ask, and I have as well.  I hope that my students’ horizons, as well as my own, will be stretched out just a little further after tomorrow.

–Katie Harris

Most writing is meant to have an audience. With the exception of private journaling and “notes to self,” most of us write in order to communicate with others - whether it be to inform, persuade, or move our reader. Schooled writing, however, is often only read by the teacher. Students see no value in many of the writing assignments they submit, and for good reason - many of them do not have an authentic purpose.

I’m realizing, though, that it can be difficult to find “authentic” opportunities for students to write in the absence of school publications. Most high schools offer opportunities for students to publish in the school newspaper or yearbook, but they must be enrolled in an elective course to do so; English classes do not contribute to these publications.

Over the past several weeks as I’ve been teaching seventh grade in my middle school placement for student teaching, I’ve seen how valuable it is for students to share their writing in some way - either by reading aloud to the class, or posting it where others can see. I’ve been brainstorming other possibilities for “publishing” student work, and somehow incorporating the standard English curriculum (which often focuses on expository essays) into school publication opportunities. Ideas, anyone?

- Rachel Bowers

Wednesday was parent-teacher conference day in Williamson County, and I lost count of the number of times I heard something along these lines from parents of seventh graders:

“So and so does his homework, but he’s always trying to do the least amount of work possible so that he can hurry up and go play video games. I don’t know what to do besides take the computer away during the week.”

I was shocked. I know that kids often want to avoid or quickly finish homework in order to move on to more appealing activities like games or sports, but it was striking to hear from parents about the sense of urgency their kids feel to get to the computer screen - an urgency not unlike the sometimes neurotic email-checking that I, and so many other adults, engage in every day.

We live in what researchers and theorists have named an “attention economy” (Lankshear, Knobel) - and in this economy, the demands on our time and attention exceed the amount of attention we have to give. After Wednesday, I realized how important it is for teachers to discuss this overtly with students, and other adults. How do we prioritize and sort through the demands effectively? And how do we teach (and learn) habits that can help us focus on a task for half an hour without clicking on “Send and Receive Email” about fifteen times? I’m still trying to figure that one out.

- Rachel Bowers