Okay. . .so I procrastinated. What else is new? Just finished Myers book while at the same time trying to keep up with today's football games and my fantasy football teams. I'm beginning to think this graduate school thing is really going to conflict with my football addiction. Priorities. Okay, so what does this have to do with Myers? Besides me attempting to communicate in the "expressive mode" by writing in "conversational prose"? Absolutely nothing!!!! (Notice four exclamation points for effect).
I think what most influenced me in Changing Our Minds was the tension between decoding/analytical literacy and translation/critical literacy. I teach, so I live in this tension daily. Although I am committed to creating a learning environment informed by the translational/critical literacy framework, I work with teachers who continue to operate under the decoding/analytical literacy paradigm. In addition, our district continues to insist that teachers teach math from the decoding/analytical literacy perspective. I have so much more to say, but. . . yawn. I promise to expound on my thinking soon.
4 comments:
And it isn't just your school or district. As long as standardized testing is the main way in which schools and students are evaluated, decoding/analytic literacy will be the way most of the students are taught.
I'm going to start using the term "transcrit," maybe it'll catch on.
A full-on ideological shift in curriculum and methods must take a long time--current teachers grew up in decoding/analytic schools and it's hard to break out of that mold, especially when doing so may be a matter of job security. What I am displeased with is the very small amount of time spent on learning how to communicate in authentic ways, especially via the internet, which has literally touched every aspect of our lives. Yet (in my school at least) kids were in the lab maybe once or twice a month and weren't allowed to explore or find tools that were meaningful.
Football? Pfft. ;-)
And yet in our school district, because the ELA model is a reading/writing workshop model, it would be very easy to leave the decoding/analytic literacy behind.
I think demanding a full-on ideological shift, or claiming one method of communication is more "authentic" than another is questionable practice. I still wonder if there is not a way ( a path, the tao) that finds common threads amongst the various "literacies" that would lead to a more unified vision of what being literate entails. But as Einstein realized a unified field theory is difficult to maintain.
So what did you think about Myers' whole rap on the teaching of all kinds of tools in translational/critical literacy? (p. 168) Hardware, software, cognitive strategies as tools, and internal talk....Maybe as teachers we can do what Myers says so few --zero, actually -- teachers in his study did and have our students investigate and think about all the tools in their own lives. Cool.
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