Friday, July 31, 2009.
My last official day at Saint Xavier is August 7. I fly down to Texas August 15. I start at Angelo State on August 20. Meanwhile, I need a business card. So here is one I patched together that’ll have to last me until I get something more official.
July 29, 2009.
Monday, July 27, 2009.
Here’s a two-page flyer I designed for a conference I’m organizing next year.
Thursday, July 23, 2009.
I’m assembling my syllabus for two writing courses I’ll be teaching this fall. For the first time, I’ve established a series of images or icons–what I call a teacher’s graphic vocabularly–to help students understand the ideas I want them to learn and strategies I want them to practice. Examples are here , here, here, and here.
I’ve also developed a brief series of editing marks that I use when responding to and commenting on student writing. I first came upon this idea many years ago when reading Richard Haswell’s “Minimal Marking” (College English 45 (1983): 600-604) . And I’ve continued to refine what marks I use year to year.
Rather than editing a student’s writing–that is, providing all of the corrections for students, “minimal marking” is intended to indicate areas in need of revision. My version of 9 marks looks like this:
Two consequences of this practice: first, rather than simply edit according to a teacher’s visual cues and written corrections, students must ascertain the problem, determine what options are available to them, and then edit or revise accordingly– in other words, minimal marking is a teaching tool rather than an editing tool alone; secondly, this practice saves teachers time, especially when writing teachers have 25 to 35 students per class.
Some other advantages: Because I will have students work in writing groups, these 9 marks are easy for students to learn and practice on each other’s work. Also, because I hold individual and group conferences with students on their work, I can easily elaborate upon any mark they have questions about.
July 22, 2009.
Here are two drawings of the same idea. Which do you like best?
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Thursday, July 16, 2009.
In a post earlier this week, I mentioned that I need to develop a graphic vocabulary for the 5 categories of reading metaphors that I’ve developed.
Here’s a first go at that iconography:
As you see, I’ve changed the names of the categories slightly, including both verbs and nouns that correspond to the metaphor.
I also mentioned in that last post and other places that the core metaphor for reading is “movement.” Here is the icon for that foundational metaphor.
There are 2 other reading metaphors that follow from the “movement” metaphor: freedom and faith. Here they are:
Additionally, the 5 categories of reading metaphors above represent ‘positive” reading experiences of good readers; that is,
However, a struggling reader may not have these relationships with a text; that is,
What are the icons for these?
July 15, 2009.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009.
Came across the Batting Stance Guy after watching last night’s David Letterman.
It’s another great example of visual research and communication, AND the value of embodied display of information in sport, especially in the batter’s stance.
I will call upon this example when introducing “visual thinking” to my students.
Here’s an example from my favorite team, the Astros.
Sunday, July 12, 2009.
Today, after reading Austin Kleon’s blog on entrepreneurism and sharing knowledge, I began to think about the kind of workshops I can offer area secondary schools when I begin my position at Angelo State University next month.
And this thinking led me to think about the workshop I’ll be offering later this month in Estes Park, Colorado at the YMCA of the Rockies Conference Center for a conference organized annually by the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning.
(Here I am flyfishing on the Roaring River during a break at the conference in 2007)
The theme for the conference is “The Believing Game as a Model for Thinking” and is based upon Peter Elbow‘s work and ideas. According to Elbow, the believing game is
the disciplined practice of trying to be as welcoming or accepting as possible to every idea we encounter: not just listening to views different from our own and holding back from arguing with them; not just trying to restate them without bias; but actually trying to believe them. We are using believing as a tool to scrutinize and test. But instead of scrutinizing fashionable or widely accepted ideas for hidden flaws, the believing game asks us to scrutinize unfashionable or even repellent ideas for hidden virtues. Often we cannot see what’s good in someone else’s idea (or in our own!) till we work at believing it (source).
At the conference, I’ll be presenting a workshop titled “The Believing Body: Freedom and Faith in Reading” in which I introduce connections between reading metaphors and how readers develop belief in the value of reading.
In this workshop, I will lead participants in a reflective exercise on the metaphors we use to think and talk about our experiences in reading. I will ask them to identify the metaphors they use and the metaphors available in texts I will supply. I will conclude by asking them to consider how they might incorporate attention to reading metaphors in their teaching.
My research suggests that all metaphors for reading are grounded in a core metaphor “reading is movement” and that they can be organized into five categories: immersion, accumulation, manipulation, transportation, and transformation. (Reminder: I need a graphic vocabulary for these metaphors!) In other words, the metaphors we commonly use to conceptualize reading describe
In addition, if all reading metaphors are grounded in the “reading is movement” metaphor, freedom is also a central concept in reading; that is, if reading is movement, the freedom to choose what we read and the freedom to respond to texts as we wish are important expressions of and experiences in valuing reading. The opposite, then, is also true. If our choices in reading are limited or controlled by others, we do not and cannot practice the intellectual and emotional freedoms available in reading.
Young readers who may have developed powerful relationships with reading, often experience reading as oppressive and lose faith in reading in school when their choices and movements are dictated to them. (When students claim they are “bored” by a text, they are describing a bodily experience: physical oppression; that is, they feel “drilled” by the experience.) However, a reader’s faith in reading grows and strengthens when reading is experienced as free movement. In these cases, readers know reading intuitively as the conceptual embodiment of freedom and faith. They believe it in their bodies.
Given the ideas Austin commented upon in his blog and the kinds of presentations I’ve given in the past, I believe that this workshop will have value to area secondary school teachers when I move to Texas.
More to the point, I can see myself dividing this workshop into two expanded workshops.
Picturing Reading Relationships: The first workshop would be designed for English teachers who have students who struggle with reading. It would focus on helping students use drawing to understand the relationships they have with reading. Then I would introduce 9 reading response strategies that can help students build more productive relationships with reading.
Metaphors We Read By: The second workshop would be designed for secondary teachers across the curriculum who have students who struggle with reading. It would introduce the five basic metaphors for productive reading (and their opposites) and then provide strategies for helping students use drawing to respond to texts more productively.
I will think more on this and develop a brochure to send to area schools, as well as, a page on my academic website that describes these offerings I believe will find good audiences in Texas.
July 10, 2009.
Yesterday was my 55th birthday, and my lovely wife gave me the perfect birthday card for an illustrated professor husband.
