Continue your discussion of paper topics here. Take the time to read over your classmates' comments and my comments on the previous post.
11 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I also think it would be a good idea, as you said, to include details from speaking with Rod. That brief two hour oral history changed my entire outlook, so I think conveying those details in my paper would serve as sort of a gateway for reaching others. When thinking about this topic Flowers did come to mind, so I'm glad to hear that my brain is working in the right direction. I hope I will be able to bring some originality to this idea, and really find a way to engage and empower others the way that short experience did me. I'm thinking that I need to present my experience with Rod as the main focus of where I'm rooted in this idea and use Flowers as support. Do I seem to be on the right track?
I don't want to put "blame" on the female teachers as much as to try and enlighten that an unrecognized (and valuable) literacy genre exists, whether it is "approved" of or not. Please realize that I don't want to come across as saying: "This is a problem because you are a FEMALE teacher!"
Preferrably, I want to enlarge the literary spectrum and mindset so that others (particularly, but not exclusively, the female teachers) reconsider and reevaluate what "literature" is.
I am also not advocating that such a genre is "better" than another or that it should receive a canonical status -- but simply that it has some value and shouldn't be banned. When such genre is banned and even belittled, it turns off many young readers (who are primarily boys) to reading. They feel that what they value has no "real-world" value, and so they boycott the entire system and stop reading.
Thus, I want to look at the role empowerment would/could play in a literacy project involving these issues.
Also, I can't say that the boys have "outperformed" the girls in my classroom in basic reading/literacy skills. However, I can say that the boys are more engaged in such tasks and eager to read/write more (and better) than before. Though that may seem insignificant, I am happy with that because educational research shows that better readers read more often (no duh, huh). So one main goal I have is to try and get students (especially boys) to read the things THEY want to read because I know they will (and are) improving. I do attribute this to the simple fact that I do value what they are interested in. And so though they may still lag behind in my own room, they have and are closing that gap.
I just think that it could be very empowering to male students if schools widened that circle of literacy to include their genre, instead of excluding it, as it currently is.
Melissa, I think including some of the information from your oral history is a good idea. One of the aspects you may want to consider is how did what Rod have to say impact you, how could that impact others and how could a program be put into practice? You said in your original blog that you wanted to engage and empower others" To do what? How would you work toward that goal? Flower has a wealth of information regarding fieldwork and the implications that go with it. I would just think of it as “if I were going to create this program, what would it be like” and compare it to some of the work Flower did. That’s how I’d approach it, I hope I’m not steering you in the wrong direction. That is, also, the perspective I took it from in writing my proposal. I took it from the approach that I would take if I were actually designing a project. Since Dr. Wilkey had in his instructions that we “may want to focus on the community fieldwork you plan on doing next semester” it seemed appropriate. There’s also the perspective of Coogan vs. Flower that we discussed in class.
Jill: Not only are female-related issues close to my heart but there’s lots of material available from our readings to choose from. We’ve already seen some well-chronicled offerings from Flower, Mathieu and Welch. I would recommend the Lorraine Higgins / Lisa Brush, “Writing the Wrongs of Welfare” article - it made interesting reading and I would consider it worth visiting / revisiting. It follows eight women who participated in an eight-week writing project. Of course you can always spread the net a bit to include female student-mentors and community participants to get a broader spectrum and more complete picture of the service-learning writing process.
Rabe: Your focus on how boys learn sounds like an interesting (and worthwhile) area of study not just for our final paper but possibly as a thesis focus. If we work to understand individual learning patterns and utilize that information, there’s a better chance students will experience greater motivation, and in turn less likely to get lost in the system – there is no downside to this. One of the big plusses for you is that you have a model [classroom] to work with. Although no doubt you have to follow a curriculum of recommended texts, perhaps you have some flexibility / can find some creative ways to engage the boys. Freire’s philosophies are still a staple for me and you might find something there you could incorporate into your research or use as a reference tool.
It's funny that you mentioned Freire because before this class, I never had heard/known of him or his thoughts. Yet, as I was skimming over the texts again for the proposal, I seemed to find myself drawn to numerous passages and excerpts derived from his philosophies.
Clifford: I am very interested in reading your paper. In my other class (Introduction to Graduate Studies), we talked at length about “the canon,” how it came to be and the question if it needs to change. A book I read for that class called “Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education” by Gerald Graff mentions this topic. He believes that the debates over canon revision should be an opportunity and says that adding popular novels to curricula should not threaten anyone. He says that “The Grapes of Wrath” was even disdained by academia when it was first published (Graff 89). He believes that in some cases, analyzing the process can be as important as the content. He says “anything can be made difficult based on questions you ask” (Graff 100). I would recommend this book to you. It sounds right up your alley. Plus, I think your topic is very interesting and I like (and appreciate) your approach.
Melissa: I am very excited to hear all the oral history presentations, and it sounds like yours with Rod will give quite a lot of insight from a unique perspective.
Anna: I am indeed using the authors you mention, including the work by Lorraine Higgins / Lisa Brush. I touch on the “hero” and “victim” stereotyping that they tried to avoid in their project.
I think conducting interviews with others in the community is a good idea and I actually hope to continue the conversation with the woman that Kristy and I did our Oral History interview with.
I'm not sure how to focus this paper around the community literacy work that I could b doing in the community. However, I would like to position this how Dr. Wilkey mentioned, in context with the community conversation about public housing and community development that I was a part of a couple weeks ago.
Anna - I would be happy to share my article review with you. I know you read it in its beginning stages during our peer review, but let me know if you would like to discuss it further.
I've been thinking a lot about my paper for the last couple of weeks and knew I had something that I wanted to talk about but wasn't really certain how to go about saying it, but then in Monday night's Intro class it finally clicked for me.
I'm going to be looking at what "community" means and how assigning value to a project comes from the that definition. Particularly, I'm interested in how a community literacy project should not be interested in just creating an artifact but also in creating a community of the interested who can assign their own value to the project. I'm also interested in how making the leap from a textual artifact to a hypertextual artifact can impact the value and reception of the overall project.
I do not know what resources everyone is using for their papers, but I’m finding that JSTOR is an excellent tool. Searching for keywords and combinations of keywords I’ve found so many relevant texts from authors we’ve discussed in class. So, if you haven’t checked out this resource I would suggest taking a look at it. In case you do not know, you can go to the nku.edu website, click on the library link, go to databases, and then pick the letter J – JSTOR is listed there.
Jason: I’m interested to see what comes out of your paper. Defining community can be a difficult thing to address even though it seems to be a straight forward concept.
Scott: I’d appreciate anything you have to help me with this topic. I’ll tell you what made me start thinking about why they are considered oppressed. I called my Great Uncle who still lives in Breathitt County to ask if I could interview him. So, as we’re talking about when the best time to come down there he asks why I want to interview him. I went into my spiel & said something about oppressed communities. He took offense to the fact that I thought he was oppressed. I tried to explain the ideology behind it & he quite sternly told me that he had a roof over his head, food on his table, and family within arms reach – he was not oppressed. So, I had to re-evaluate there for a minute. He still said I could interview him, but I guess I have to leave out the oppressed angle
11 comments:
I also think it would be a good idea, as you said, to include details from speaking with Rod. That brief two hour oral history changed my entire outlook, so I think conveying those details in my paper would serve as sort of a gateway for reaching others. When thinking about this topic Flowers did come to mind, so I'm glad to hear that my brain is working in the right direction. I hope I will be able to bring some originality to this idea, and really find a way to engage and empower others the way that short experience did me. I'm thinking that I need to present my experience with Rod as the main focus of where I'm rooted in this idea and use Flowers as support. Do I seem to be on the right track?
I don't want to put "blame" on the female teachers as much as to try and enlighten that an unrecognized (and valuable) literacy genre exists, whether it is "approved" of or not. Please realize that I don't want to come across as saying: "This is a problem because you are a FEMALE teacher!"
Preferrably, I want to enlarge the literary spectrum and mindset so that others (particularly, but not exclusively, the female teachers) reconsider and reevaluate what "literature" is.
I am also not advocating that such a genre is "better" than another or that it should receive a canonical status -- but simply that it has some value and shouldn't be banned. When such genre is banned and even belittled, it turns off many young readers (who are primarily boys) to reading. They feel that what they value has no "real-world" value, and so they boycott the entire system and stop reading.
Thus, I want to look at the role empowerment would/could play in a literacy project involving these issues.
Also, I can't say that the boys have "outperformed" the girls in my classroom in basic reading/literacy skills. However, I can say that the boys are more engaged in such tasks and eager to read/write more (and better) than before. Though that may seem insignificant, I am happy with that because educational research shows that better readers read more often (no duh, huh). So one main goal I have is to try and get students (especially boys) to read the things THEY want to read because I know they will (and are) improving. I do attribute this to the simple fact that I do value what they are interested in. And so though they may still lag behind in my own room, they have and are closing that gap.
I just think that it could be very empowering to male students if schools widened that circle of literacy to include their genre, instead of excluding it, as it currently is.
Melissa,
I think including some of the information from your oral history is a good idea. One of the aspects you may want to consider is how did what Rod have to say impact you, how could that impact others and how could a program be put into practice? You said in your original blog that you wanted to engage and empower others" To do what? How would you work toward that goal? Flower has a wealth of information regarding fieldwork and the implications that go with it. I would just think of it as “if I were going to create this program, what would it be like” and compare it to some of the work Flower did. That’s how I’d approach it, I hope I’m not steering you in the wrong direction. That is, also, the perspective I took it from in writing my proposal.
I took it from the approach that I would take if I were actually designing a project. Since Dr. Wilkey had in his instructions that we “may want to focus on the community fieldwork you plan on doing next semester” it seemed appropriate. There’s also the perspective of Coogan vs. Flower that we discussed in class.
Jill: Not only are female-related issues close to my heart but there’s lots of material available from our readings to choose from. We’ve already seen some well-chronicled offerings from Flower, Mathieu and Welch. I would recommend the Lorraine Higgins / Lisa Brush, “Writing the Wrongs of Welfare” article - it made interesting reading and I would consider it worth visiting / revisiting. It follows eight women who participated in an eight-week writing project. Of course you can always spread the net a bit to include female student-mentors and community participants to get a broader spectrum and more complete picture of the service-learning writing process.
Rabe: Your focus on how boys learn sounds like an interesting (and worthwhile) area of study not just for our final paper but possibly as a thesis focus. If we work to understand individual learning patterns and utilize that information, there’s a better chance students will experience greater motivation, and in turn less likely to get lost in the system – there is no downside to this. One of the big plusses for you is that you have a model [classroom] to work with. Although no doubt you have to follow a curriculum of recommended texts, perhaps you have some flexibility / can find some creative ways to engage the boys. Freire’s philosophies are still a staple for me and you might find something there you could incorporate into your research or use as a reference tool.
Anna:
Thanks.
It's funny that you mentioned Freire because before this class, I never had heard/known of him or his thoughts. Yet, as I was skimming over the texts again for the proposal, I seemed to find myself drawn to numerous passages and excerpts derived from his philosophies.
Clifford: I am very interested in reading your paper. In my other class (Introduction to Graduate Studies), we talked at length about “the canon,” how it came to be and the question if it needs to change. A book I read for that class called “Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education” by Gerald Graff mentions this topic. He believes that the debates over canon revision should be an opportunity and says that adding popular novels to curricula should not threaten anyone. He says that “The Grapes of Wrath” was even disdained by academia when it was first published (Graff 89). He believes that in some cases, analyzing the process can be as important as the content. He says “anything can be made difficult based on questions you ask” (Graff 100). I would recommend this book to you. It sounds right up your alley. Plus, I think your topic is very interesting and I like (and appreciate) your approach.
Melissa: I am very excited to hear all the oral history presentations, and it sounds like yours with Rod will give quite a lot of insight from a unique perspective.
Anna: I am indeed using the authors you mention, including the work by Lorraine Higgins / Lisa Brush. I touch on the “hero” and “victim” stereotyping that they tried to avoid in their project.
I think conducting interviews with others in the community is a good idea and I actually hope to continue the conversation with the woman that Kristy and I did our Oral History interview with.
I'm not sure how to focus this paper around the community literacy work that I could b doing in the community. However, I would like to position this how Dr. Wilkey mentioned, in context with the community conversation about public housing and community development that I was a part of a couple weeks ago.
Anna - I would be happy to share my article review with you. I know you read it in its beginning stages during our peer review, but let me know if you would like to discuss it further.
I've been thinking a lot about my paper for the last couple of weeks and knew I had something that I wanted to talk about but wasn't really certain how to go about saying it, but then in Monday night's Intro class it finally clicked for me.
I'm going to be looking at what "community" means and how assigning value to a project comes from the that definition. Particularly, I'm interested in how a community literacy project should not be interested in just creating an artifact but also in creating a community of the interested who can assign their own value to the project. I'm also interested in how making the leap from a textual artifact to a hypertextual artifact can impact the value and reception of the overall project.
I do not know what resources everyone is using for their papers, but I’m finding that JSTOR is an excellent tool. Searching for keywords and combinations of keywords I’ve found so many relevant texts from authors we’ve discussed in class. So, if you haven’t checked out this resource I would suggest taking a look at it. In case you do not know, you can go to the nku.edu website, click on the library link, go to databases, and then pick the letter J – JSTOR is listed there.
Jason: I’m interested to see what comes out of your paper. Defining community can be a difficult thing to address even though it seems to be a straight forward concept.
Scott: I’d appreciate anything you have to help me with this topic. I’ll tell you what made me start thinking about why they are considered oppressed. I called my Great Uncle who still lives in Breathitt County to ask if I could interview him. So, as we’re talking about when the best time to come down there he asks why I want to interview him. I went into my spiel & said something about oppressed communities. He took offense to the fact that I thought he was oppressed. I tried to explain the ideology behind it & he quite sternly told me that he had a roof over his head, food on his table, and family within arms reach – he was not oppressed. So, I had to re-evaluate there for a minute. He still said I could interview him, but I guess I have to leave out the oppressed angle
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