Get Lit(erate)

Despite my extensive prior experience with blogs, I still found professional blogging as a pre-service teacher a challenge. Throughout the course of this semester, I have primarily struggled with finding an appropriate tone and voice for my writing, often erring on the side of sounding too academic and impersonal. In response to this tendency of mine, here is a GIF that captures how I wish I’d felt while writing these posts:

Anyway, upon reflection, I published a few pieces that I thought exemplified creativity, design, and professionalism.

Most Creative Post: On the Writing Process

As I wrote this post, I had the opportunity to reflect on both the successes and embarrassments of my writing career. I chose to open with a lighthearted anecdote from elementary school, which both enriched my voice and breathed life into an otherwise potentially dry piece of writing.

Best-Designed Post: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Digital Media in the ELA Classroom

Although I don’t think any of my posts were particularly aesthetically impressive, I think my use of a full-page-width image with a linked article worked well for this piece. The image drew the reader’s eye and clearly placed my post in conversation with other articles on the topic. I also referenced several other resources throughout the post, which would also help readers to easily reference related information.

Most Professional Post: Supporting Novice Writers

In this post, I clearly connected my personal reflections on pedagogical practice with best practices I had learned from course readings. I incorporated several external resources and ideas and communicated them with a professional, casual-academic tone.

People’s Choice Award: Kayleigh Norgord

Kayleigh’s blog uses visuals well and consistently connects to course readings. She has a consistent, professional voice; additionally, she took the time to add concise pull quotes on her home page so that readers could easily ascertain the main idea of each post before clicking on it.

As I was brainstorming my experimental multi-modal piece, I stumbled across an iPhone app, Clips, that allows the user to splice short clips of video together in real time. I’d been inspired by hand-drawn videos like this, so I was excited to find a quick-and-easy route to achieving a roughly similar result. Although the app also has fun features like captions and stickers, I opted for a more streamlined approach for this mini-piece. For this piece, I chose to combine image and text with no sound; that is, no sound other than the ambient noise from my apartment that I couldn’t figure out how to remove. I’d take more care in the future to get a consistent shot, but the image drives the narrative because since there’s no sound, the viewer is beholden to the words appearing on the screen to understand the meaning of the sentence. Additionally, I tried using expressive handwritten “fonts” and visual enhancements for emphasis on certain words (e.g. “so,” “finally,” and “spring”).

Using handwritten words in video opens up room for a creator to visually interpret a text based upon what it means to them. For example, if I were to teach a novel through a reader-response lens, I might encourage students to use Clips or similar apps to create video reactions to key moments in the text. Students could either make short videos of themselves reacting verbally to the text or do something similar to the example above. Either way, this visual style allows for more student creativity and multiple forms of expression and reaction.

I’m not sure if this app (or a similar one) is available for Android, but for those students who own iPhones, I would encourage them to experiment with this app to create a text focused on a social justice issue. Since short thirty-second videos are easily uploaded to YouTube, I think Clips would be a great avenue for students to experiment with form and develop their voice as advocates. It’s also very intuitive, so students would not need advanced knowledge of video editing to be able to use the platform productively.

I’ve had relatively sparse experience with creating multimodal texts; while I had a few memorable “video projects” in middle and high school, the only adult experience I’ve had creating multimodal texts has been creating a series of fundraising videos for a local nonprofit. That said, I am an avid consumer of multimodal texts–namely, YouTube videos and podcasts.

As a future ELA teacher, I would be excited to bring multimodal texts into my classroom–both for their capacity to address social justice issues and their ability to transform texts that might otherwise seem inaccessible to students. I could foresee myself overseeing a class project similar to “More Than That,” which was created in response to a limiting characterization of Native Americans on ABC. Depending on my student population, I could challenge my students–in a group or individually–reflect on assumptions people had made about them and respond critically by creating a video or a podcast episode. Developing students’ sense of social responsibility as communicators is important; in the language of the Jenkins whitepaper, “One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others” (Jenkins, 2006). Giving students the opportunity to create digital texts would help them practice using sound persuasive techniques and ethical writing practices. I think that using a multimodal approach to social criticism and critical reflection might appeal to students as media consumers, and might feel like a more familiar/interesting medium for expressing ideas.

Visual poetry also has a lot of potential pedagogical value. Having students create a video that assigns images to certain phrases would challenge them to translate poetry into a concrete visual, which could facilitate a deeper understanding of the text. Especially since poetry units are often confusing and disliked by students, adding a multimodal component to the unit could encourage more earnest participation and help students to experience these texts more fully. I remember one of my teachers playing a recording of T.S. Eliot reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and being struck by Eliot’s use of tone and pacing to develop the poem’s meaning. Encouraging students to create visual and/or recorded poetry could unlock new avenues of meaning and academic interest. Also, using “found images,” as in this student’s multimodal version of e.e. cummings’ “Let it Go,” would give students experience citing visual resources in a video.

Having reviewed several examples of multimodal texts, I’m excited to learn more about different tools I could use to incorporate digital storytelling into my future classroom–both as texts to analyze and potential creative projects.

In general terms, student writers need their teachers, peers, and writing coaches to recognize what they’ve done well and offer suggestions for improvement–both for the assignment and for the writer themselves. Those reviewing a student’s work should not be mere editors, but rather, writing coaches and teachers alike should focus on implementing strategies that will encourage students to become independent writers (Harris & Silva, 1993).

As a writing coach, I have used a few strategies to give feedback on student work: I try to highlight the writer’s successes and have primarily focused on inquiring about “Higher Order Concerns (HOCs)” including “thesis and. . . development”(McAndrew and Reigstad, 2001). As a writing coach, I think it’s my responsibility to ask guiding questions that will help students revise and re-draft wisely. Since I am tasked with fewer students than a classroom teacher, I have the opportunity to sit for longer periods of time to give feedback to individual writers. That said, I think teachers need to support student writers by breaking down an assignment sufficiently so that students have the opportunity to practice guided pre-writing, to complete an outline, and to have a teacher review their thesis before they launch into drafting the paper: particularly if these students are English-language learners (Harris & Silva, 1993). Even if they are unable to give detailed feedback on every single student’s work, teachers should check for progress and comprehension to help novice writers better understand their individual writing process.

Additionally, I believe that a shared task between teachers, peers, and writing coaches is that students should be allowed–even encouraged–to produce bad writing before they arrive at their finished product. Per The 9 Rights of Every Writer, “Fear of failure increases stress and minimizes willingness to take chances. Without risk, it is nearly impossible to grow as a writer” (Spandel, 2005). I would contend that this is true and that, furthermore, creating a classroom culture that is averse to failure will stifle students’ creativity and their will to challenge themselves. Practically speaking, peers should be coached through the peer edit process and given guidelines about how to respectfully and productively evaluate their peers’ work. In my own classroom, I might even change the term “peer edit” to “peer feedback” to steer students away from merely correcting grammatical errors. The goal of feedback should not always be immediate “correction,” but should reflect the goals of an individual student. Rather than doing students’ work for them by rewriting and reordering their sentences, teachers and writing coaches should ask clarifying questions and make qualified suggestions in order to guide the student towards a clearer thesis, improved structure of ideas, etc.

Finally, novice writers need empathetic readers. Especially for struggling writers, writing can be an intensely vulnerable process. Regardless of the assignment, writing can expose both students’ true opinions and their academic areas of weakness. Teachers and writing coaches should communicate through their words and actions that they are on the student’s team and that any constructive criticism is crafted for their betterment as a writer.

For more strategies for supporting novice writers, please see McAndrew & Reigstad (2001) for tutoring strategies or read this feature from KQED for suggestions of “digital tools” to support novice writers in ELA classrooms.

The first writing experience I can clearly remember was in third grade, Ms. Armstrong’s class, in a suburb north of Milwaukee. At least once per week, we had “quiet journal time,” which, to my recollection, was radically unstructured. We may have had an occasional prompt, but all I can remember is having free quiet time to create and absolutely loving it. Unfortunately, at that time I was still in my Captain Underpants stage, and wrote–and turned in–at least two rather unsubtle poems about toilets.

In retrospect, I probably should have had the good sense to keep the potty talk to myself, but my early school journals exemplify an enduring truth of my writing process: I imitate what I think is good. Ideally, cheap imitation eventually gives way to something more original, but I’d be lying if I said there were no Mary Oliver sound-alikes in my college poetry portfolio. I’m not embarrassed by this constant cycle of imitation and adaptation, though, because it’s been critical to my development of writing skills. Without having seen concrete examples of beautiful descriptive language or concise, exemplary academic writing, I would have had no idea where to start on many writing assignments.

Currently, my writing process differs depending on the task at hand. For more formal writing assignments, my planning process strongly resembles the Flowers & Hayes model: I spend time generating ideas mentally and/or on paper, and then organize those ideas into a rough outline (Flowers & Hayes, 1981). I will then start fleshing out those ideas by adding bullet-pointed sentences or phrases to each section of the outline. However, if I am responding to a shorter prompt, I will copy and paste the prompt onto the top of my working document, and forego a typed outline in favor of jotting a few notes and then diving into full-sentence writing. As I write, I check and re-check the prompt against my work to ensure that I am adequately addressing the question. Throughout most of my drafting process, I switch rapidly between “translating” and both the “evaluative” and “revision” sub-processes of “reviewing” (Flowers & Hayes, 1981). I start writing a sentence, rewrite phrases, change diction, and keep forging ahead–often flagging sentences or paragraphs to revisit when the draft is complete.

My writing process likely differs from that of a novice writer in a few ways. Firstly, because I am a fluent reader and writer of English, I have the skill needed to jump back and forth between cognitive processes. Also, unlike a native speaker like myself, English language learners may review their work less instinctively, and may struggle to revise “on the basis of what ‘sounds’ right” (Harris & Silva, 1993). Furthermore, novice writers who also struggle with reading comprehension might need to spend more conscious energy on sentence construction and organizing ideas.

To expound on an earlier point, my writing process adjusts to both the task at hand and the medium being used. I conceptualize the medium of a text as part of a text’s “rhetorical problem” insofar as it affects my task environment as well as my audience and corresponding goals (Flowers & Hayes, 1981). For example, if I am writing for an online audience, I might adhere less formally to Standard English, but I will be more self-conscious about how the public will receive my ideas than in a classroom setting. If I am creating a multimodal text–e.g. a video or a podcast–I will need to mind additional considerations such as visual and auditory cues. Although I have much to learn about composing multimodal texts, I see a great value in teaching students how to adjust their writing goals and processes according to the vast array of media available to citizens of the digital age.

Hi, everyone! I’m Caitlin, a post-baccalaureate student in the Secondary English Education program at UW-Milwaukee. I earned my B.A. in Writing from Calvin College in 2015, and since then, I’ve primarily worked in nonprofit communications and development. About a year ago, I began to reconsider my career interest in nonprofit work and, upon further reflection, decided to pursue a career in urban public education. Writing and reading have been two of my passions for as long as I can remember, and I am excited to learn more about how to bring literature to life in the classroom. I’m also interested to learn more about how to cultivate justice-minded, trauma-informed spaces in ELA classrooms in urban public schools.

I have had a wide variety of experiences writing and helping other writers. My undergraduate coursework included several writing-intensive courses that required students to workshop each other’s work. In college, I also tutored undergraduate students in freshman-level humanities courses. Since college, I have written for nonprofit organizations’ blogs and other online communications; as such, I have extensive experience drafting and proofreading for various media. Most recently, as a special education paraprofessional, I have worked with several students to improve their writing proficiency.

To the students whose work I will read: I look forward to working together! If you are interested in reading some of my professional writing, visit the Chicago Jobs Council’s policy blog here.

As a Millennial, I came of age in Facebook’s heyday. Although I was one of the last of my peers to get a smartphone, online social media transformed how I interacted with my friends. In high school and college, my friends and I posted pictures, planned events, shared articles, and commented on each other’s content. Regardless of the specific platform, online social media gave us a venue to express ourselves and share our reactions in real time.

Since graduating college in 2015, I’ve managed social media platforms and online communications for a couple of nonprofit organizations. For direct service and advocacy nonprofits, social media can serve as a venue for encouragement and inspiration among passionate, often under-resourced public servants (e.g. social workers, job developers, educators). During a year of service with Lutheran Volunteer Corps, I also coordinated both a policy blog and a quarterly e-newsletter for a workforce development nonprofit in Chicago. Currently, I am a monthly contributor to Calvin College’s alumni blog, the post calvin, and continue to use Instagram and online news platforms to keep up with friends and stay informed of current events.

Given my extensive experience working with digital composition and online social media, I would be excited to incorporate both into my teaching where appropriate. I believe that preparing students to be literate co-creators of society necessarily involves building media literacy. Per the Jenkins whitepaper, “Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.” While I believe that these collaborative skills must be built on a solid foundation of individual capabilities (e.g. critical thinking), I cannot ignore how “participatory culture” has transformed the way students read and write. Furthermore, as an ELA teacher, I am responsible for helping to educate the next generation of citizens and enabling their intelligent participation in public discourse. Curricula that incorporate various forms of digital composition–particularly in courses focusing on rhetoric and persuasion–have the potential to build students’ knowledge of how language functions in politics, advertising, and popular culture. For example, teaching students how to analyze political ads for persuasive techniques and logical fallacies would prepare them to discern truth from propaganda–an essential skill for a citizen of the digital age.

Although incorporating digital media into classes could be enriching, I foresee several pitfalls, not least of which is that getting students to stay on-task on their smartphones can be extraordinarily difficult. Any form of media that poses potential distractions from learning should be thoroughly examined to determine if it would add sufficient value towards achieving learning objectives. In other words, using Instagram for the sole purpose of appealing to students’ habits would not necessarily add value to a classroom. Furthermore, smartphone addiction starts young, and encouraging students to stay plugged in even during class may do more harm than good. I Googled “smartphone addiction” and came up with a burgeoning list of articles from sources as diverse as Forbes, Psychology Today, and NPR. Given the research on how smartphones can affect the human brain, I would hesitate to incorporate them into my classroom at all.

Overall, while I think that digital media offers the potential to cultivate critical media literacy skills, teachers need to be discerning about how and when to add screen time and social media to their lesson plans.

This is a test blog post!

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton