Banned books
From a recent article at guardian.co.uk by Alison Flood:
From Suzanne Collins’s post-apocalyptic hit The Hunger Games to Stephenie Meyer’s vampire bestseller Twilight, American parents have been making it their mission to complain about some of the most popular books published in recent years.
So…how many of these have you read?
1. “And Tango Makes Three” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
2. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie
3. “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
4. “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins
5. “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
6. “Lush” by Natasha Friend
7. “What My Mother Doesn’t Know” by Sonya Sones
8. “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America” by Barbara Ehrenreich
9. “Revolutionary Voices” edited by Amy Sonnie
10. “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer
For more information on book challenges and censorship, please visit the Office for Intellectual Freedom’s Banned Books Week Web site at www.ala.org/bbooks.
Say Cheese
Does anyone else look at this picture and mostly see material for Lie To Me?
An Introduction to the CLDR Project
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, education, english, online tools, technology, university on May 3, 2011
Children’s Literature Digital Resources.
Australian schools can now access the full texts in this online resource.
Others can access the Auslit resource through university and other library databases.
NAPLAN is evil
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, politics, university on April 11, 2011
How, in just a sniff of time in just one lecture, am I going to be able to convey to my preservice teachers all of the evil in schooling that has come from NAPLAN testing?
I think I’ll start with this news article from today:
Parents of about 12 students in Year Nine at Miami State High School were asked last week to sign a waiver so their children did not sit the NAPLAN (National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy) tests, to avoid stressing the teenagers.
The parents of one student who refused to withdraw their son were told they were the only ones not to sign the form, out of those contacted by the school .
When Alexandra Fox demanded her son Mathew, 13, sit the NAPLAN tests, she was told that Mathew was quite good at English so could sit those tests, but he was not as strong in maths so she should sign the waiver for those tests.
Mathew’s father, Anthony Jarrah, said his son had no medical condition or diagnosed learning difficulty that would require his exemption from the tests.
“He’s a normal kid, has no learning difficulties or anything. He’s just one of those kids who takes a bit longer to grasp things,” he said. “They’re not educating kids, they’re not doing their best.
“He’s already 13 and it’s not that long before he’s out of school. All they want to do is to hide him all through high school like they did in primary, then once he leaves school he’s not their problem anymore.”
(Ferrari, ‘School uges students to skip tests’ in The Australian, March 11, 2011)
Is it time yet to make the call? Seriously, the (yes, very valid, very real ‘if done properly’) diagnostic function of the NAPLAN test is being compromised so much here.
Your performance will only make our school look bad.
What a delightful message to send to the students of today.
Learning Styles Don’t Exist
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, personal, university on April 8, 2011
I came to this interesting video via Tom Whitby on The Educator’s PLN, explaining the theory of learning styles and the relationship (or lack thereof) it has to helping students to learn something new.
I certainly remember doing quizes in class at high school and talking with teachers about my learning style score. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be though – I guessed language and visual based – so I went and did some online tests to find out. Here are my results for tests of Visual/Audio/Kinesthetic (VAK) style preferences:
From the University of South Dakota (2009):
you answered A-6 B-5 C-5
based on this info you are probably
a Visual
learner.
From Businessballs.com (learning and development resources) – simple test:
Visual = 9
Auditory = 3
Kinesthetic/Tactile = 1
Interestingly, taking the Gardener’s Multiple Intelligences quiz (again from Businessballs.com) I didn’t score so high on the ‘visual’, which I suspect may be conceived differently than in the VAK model:
| Intelligence type | your totals |
| Linguistic | 35 |
| Logical-Mathematical | 25 |
| Musical | 32 |
| Bodily-Kinesthetic | 24 |
| Spatial-Visual | 29 |
| Interpersonal | 34 |
| Intrapersonal | 31 |
So, I went back to searching for VAK learning style tests.
This one didn’t peg me as a visual learner. It also gave me some fancy numbers about how my scores matched up to the mean profiles for each style:
- Visual = 3 (correlations with mean profiles = -0.07)
Auditory = 6 (correlations with mean profiles = 0.56)
- Kinesthetic = 1 (correlations with mean profiles = -0.54)
Weird.
I suppose I should be less surprised then that I have ended up an English teacher that highly values multimodality 😛
Though, I never have put too much stock in quick, fr3e online quizes…
I’m going to show my class the You Tube clip next week. We’re about to talk about differentiation and I know that learning styles comes up every time!
…and community…another vital ‘C’!
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, reflections, university on April 4, 2011
So if we are to connect, collaborate and create in a way that
fosters social justice
then as well as adding ‘critical literacy’ to the C-list, ought not we also add
community?
The FOUR C’s
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, reflections, research, technology, university on March 30, 2011
We edu-tweeters often use the catchphrase ‘connect, collaborate, create’ to signal our pedagogical perspective.
But…what about this really important fourth C:
CRITICAL?
Surely this must become another essential C-word?
Learning from: Mary Poppins
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, university on March 28, 2011
I’ve been keeping an eye out for a range of texts (‘literary’ and ‘pop culture’) that I can use in lessons with preservice English teachers. I’m looking for things that are interesting texts in their own right, as well as can shed some light on an important aspect of secondary education or English curriculum.
My find for today is: Mary Poppins (1964)
In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun –
you find the fun and snap!
The job’s a game!
An uplifting message and one which bears a clear connection to Games Based Learning.
There are certainly conflicting discourses in the song though – I’d love to take an extract from 1984 to compare and contrast here, the one where Orwell describes how the proles are kept in line through pop music and the lottery…
‘a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down’ (eek!?)
Another one of my favourite songs from the movie (and no, I’m not generally a fan of musicals) and another that I think bears exploration is the Chiminey Sweep song. I’ll let you do your own reading of that one!
Chim chiminey
Chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-oo!
Good luck will rub off when
I shake ‘ands with you
Or blow me a kiss
And that’s lucky tooNow as the ladder of life
‘As been strung
You may think a sweep’s
On the bottommost rungThough I spends me time
In the ashes and smoke
In this ‘ole wide world
There’s no ‘appier blokeUp where the smoke is
All billered and curled
‘Tween pavement and stars
Is the chimney sweep worldWhen the’s ‘ardly no day
Nor ‘ardly no night
There’s things ‘alf in shadow
And ‘alf way in light
On the roof tops of London
Coo, what a sight!I choose me bristles with pride
Yes, I do
A broom for the shaft
And a broom for the flumeThough I’m covered with soot
From me ‘ead to me toes
A sweep knows ‘e’s welcome
Wherever ‘e goesChim chiminey
Chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-ee!
When you’re with a sweep
You’re in glad company…
Put your money where your mouth is
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, university on March 26, 2011
Stepping it up this week a bit in the ‘modelling-best-practice’ stakes…
It occured to me that as I am advocating the importance of studying texts and their traditions to…well basically, the development of human society as we know it, that I’m not doing enough of this in my own university classes.
Last week I got a real buzz relating the theoretical material in this unit to contemporary texts and practices, namely to the story of Terminator II and to the ‘Pirates vs Ninjas’ meme. So this week I am using another text as a way to relate to theory, this time going into even more depth.
I have chosen the film Pleasantville. I am going to use this film to explore ‘critical literacy’ and interrogate the resistance to critical reading of text in secondary English.
Yes I am.
Now, to construct the learning experiences.
In the lecture I am going to focus in on metalanguage, showing students how historical paradigms of English curriculum (skills, cultural heritage, personal growth, critical-cultural) have been revisioned in two more recent literacy frameworks that have had significant influence on contemporary English curriculum – Luke and Freebody’s ‘Four Resources’ model, and Green’s ‘Three Dimensions’ of literacy (which we have already been using at length). I’m also going to rock their world by showing them how subject-specific pedagogy relates to more general theories of pedagogy, such as the ‘Productive Pedagogies’ that are used here in QLD, as well as to theories of learning such as Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.
The two hour tutorial though. Hmmm.
My message in the coming weeks will be to embrace ‘workshops’ as well as individual and group ‘project based learning’ as alternative approaches to lesson organisation. I want them to start thinking about how we traditionally do “class” and what learning experiences are encouraged there. As I’m electing to ‘put my money where my mouth is’ this week I suppose I should give them a taste of this too…but what to do?
Perhaps I will split the two hours into a ‘workshop’ and a ‘project’. Will I have time for both? I’d like to also screen the first ~20 minutes of the film in class, giving me 30 minutes for the rest of the workshop.
That leaves ~50 minutes for students to complete a seperate project. But what?
I’ve been watching Bianca do this – I know I need to start with a driving question or challenge…
…
…and thus I am away to make coffee and have a think about this.
Ideas welcome x
Motivation and Participation in Asynchronous Online Discussions
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, research, social media, technology, university on March 24, 2011
I was very interested to read the findings of Xie, Durrington and Yen (2011) published in the recently released issue of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. Given my current use of Twitter in my own university unit for preservice teachers, I was glad to read that others were also observing a relationship between participation in online asynchronous discussions and students’ level of motivation. I have reproduced their abstract here:
This study investigated the relationship between students’ motivation and their participation in asynchronous online discussions during a 16-week online course. Fifty-six students participated in
online discussion activities as a normal part of their classes. Their motivation for participating in online discussions was self-reported three times throughout the semester. The findings continue to
indicate that students’ motivation has a significant relationship with their participation in online discussion activities at time two and time three. Students’ perceived value, autonomy, competence,
and relatedness have different levels of impact on their online discussion behavior. This study also found that students’ intrinsic motivation and their perceived value of online discussions remained at a moderate-high level over time, although the perceived value had a significant drop from the midpoint to the end of the semester.Keywords: Asynchronous Online Discussion, Motivation, Distance Learning, Collaborative
Learning, Learning Community
Reading this article has motivated me to collect my own data in the next week of classes, to gather some initial responses from my own students. I look forward to hearing their views!
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