BCTELA

Nicole Widdess teaches in Richmond and is the Curriculum Co-Chair for BCTELA. She is committed to teaching diverse learners and is passionate about literacy. Her current focus is teaching students in the middle years.

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As one of the Curriculum Coordinators, I am pleased to share that our Curriculum Pack sub-committee has developed new submission criteria that reflect current thinking, research and pedagogy. These criteria are also aligned with the ideas and research presented in the pedagogical considerations section of BC’s new K-7 and draft 8-12 English Language Arts IRPs. We hope that the new criteria will support you, our members, in writing up and submitting units of study for publication.

When you submit a curriculum pack, a member of our committee will provide descriptive feedback to assist you in revising and readying your unit for publication. Once accepted for publication, you are eligible for curriculum resource funds ($400). If you are interested in crafting a unit to be published by BCTELA please be sure to review the criteria below. Please send your unit (or proposal for a unit) to Nicole Widdess at NWiddess@richmond.sd38.bc.ca. Once your proposal or unit has been reviewed, we will be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.

 

Overview

• Identifies essential questions and enduring understandings

o These are the big ideas/inquiries that will guide the unit and the skills/strategies (including cognitive and metacognitive) that will be used/developed by students

• This overview should demonstrate links to the 2006 K-7 and/or the 2007 Draft 8-12 ELA IRPs m cuts across outcomes from the 3 organizers and 4 suborganizers of the ELA IRP

Assessment

• formative assessment/metacognitive activities

o formative assessment practices that help students learn to analyze and critique their work and to set personalized goals in relation to shared criteria

o offer students opportunities to generate criteria and strategies that are both contextual and meaningful

o a variety of assessment activities, including performance-based assessment

• summative assessment m performance-based assessment that includes detailed rubrics and links back to enduring understandings

Lesson Sequences

• a clear, detailed outline of suggested lesson sequences including m gradual release of responsibility

o assessment-to-instruction m metacognitive activities (e.g. using and/or generating criteria, self-assessment, goal-setting, and reflection)

o reading, writing, and oral language activities

o well-structured lessons that help students connect, process, and transform and personalize texts, concepts, and/or understandings

Diversity Considerations

• suggestions for adapting based on students' individual strengths and needs

• ways to differentiate based on student interests and context (e.g. text choices, variety of output options, variety of instructional modes)

Additional Documents

• performance rubrics

• handouts used in the lessons

• resources used, and suggestions for alternative resources

Reflection

• what worked especially well

• what came before this and after this in the year

• how this unit built on or was able to be built upon by other inquiries/units

Would you like support in developing a unit that integrates strategic teaching, formative and summative assessment, gradual release and the use of diverse texts using learning outcomes from the new IRP? Consider attending the Saturday Institute at our Fall Conference October 25, 2008. The 2008 Conference will be held at the Delta Hotel in Richmond this year. BCTELA Executive members Krista Ediger, Joanne Panas, Leyton Schnellert, and Nicole Widdess will be facilitating an institute on backwards design tentatively called "Designing Units with the End in Mind." A description of this institute follows:

So many best practices...how do you put them all together to create engaging, pedagogically-sound units that will help your students learn what they need to? Come and spend the day with us-learn about inquiry and backwards design, modeling and gradual release, assessment-to-instruction-and put it all together in a framework for a unit you can use. To get the most out of this session, bring a topic for a unit and sample texts you might use, and any brainstorming you might have already done.

The Curriculum Pack sub-committee members are looking forward to a year of learning together as we explore the new English Language Arts IRPs and develop new curriculum packs to support their implementation.

Jill Kedersha McClay is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta.

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When our two daughters were toddlers, my husband always said that whenever one of them yelled, "Look, Mom! Look, Dad! Look at me!" we were bound to see something we didn't want to see: a little girl dangling one foot off the edge of a cliff, or displaying a mouth full of half-chewed spaghetti and meatballs, or the little one hoisting the older one off the ground in a back-breaking effort. Something to make us cringe, afraid to yell "stop that!" for fear of disrupting the tenuous balance they held. They were testing their newfound strengths and freedoms, and if such testing made their "parental units" cringe, well, so much the better.

Similarly, I see young adolescents testing newfound strengths and freedoms in their literacy world. The difference is that they are not clambering to be noticed, and so we adults may lose opportunities to guide them well. In this article, I want to consider some ways in which young people are engaging in exhilarating, precarious feats of literacy, unsanctioned practices of strength and ingenuity (and questionable taste) that sometimes make adults queasy, powerless, and frightened for them. What opportunities and perils does our literacy world offer to children and teachers? How can teachers encourage today's young people to engage in productive literacy relationships in safety, looking both ways while crossing the literacy streets? To consider these questions, I will highlight ways in which new literacy environments blur boundaries and transform some fairly traditional practices in original ways. Then I will suggest productive ways for teachers and parents to engage in literacy relationships and practices with young people. Such work is, I believe, a moral imperative, not merely a pedagogical one.

Literacy is all about relationships-it always has been and always will be. When Frank Smith (1985) wrote about children's desire to become members of "the literacy club," he understood that people seek out relationships through literacy. The contemporary literacy world offers us new ways to make relationships, in public and in private, with friends, kindred spirits, and strangers near and far. Literacy affords both immediacy and distance in our relationships, allowing us to enter a more expansive temporal frame. We can reach out to the past and future, not only in the grand sense of authors' works lasting for generations, but in a more personal sense of ordinary people holding our moments in time. Even the most immediate and personal of literacy practices-writing a diary-places us in the flow of time. We preserve diaries to re-read on a quiet night in the future and recall, perhaps with a changed perspective and clearer eyes, our self from days past. Personal notes and letters-from surreptitious notes passed in a boring chemistry class to the final draft of a life-changing love letter-are messages sent and received, which, if preserved, enable us to reflect on tangible evidence of our past.

Our literacy practices have always relied on technology, and each generation uses the technology available. The technology introduces some degree of distance into relationships. Such distance is both an attraction and a danger. Because of the technology, we open the door to posers and masqueraders-witness Cyrano's complicit identity theft of Christian in pursuit of the unsuspecting Roxanne. Like Cyrano, we crave opportunities to hide our physical flaws and to reveal our true inner essence. Today, the Internet allows such revelation in anonymity. It allows us to be most clearly ourselves while, as one young man put it, avoiding the "essentializing" categories of gender and age (Tobin, 1998).

So the ability to make relationships with strangers through new literacy technology is not a new phenomenon; nor is relationship via digital technology entirely new. In 1879, Ella Cheever Thayer published a novel, Wired Love, certainly a very contemporary sounding title (Collins 2002). The sub-title is A romance of dots and dashes, and Thayer's protagonist develops a relationship through the dangerous new medium of the telegraph. The novel details the developing romance between two telegraph operators, Clem and Nattie, in frontier towns of the American West. The couple's romance has several turns that are as new as today's blogs: other operators listen in and "flame" them, Nattie attempts to pass as a man online (but Clem "sees" through her ruse), and a flesh-and-blood impostor poses as Clem to a disappointed Nattie-another case of identity theft. Like many contemporary people who form a digital relationship, Nattie and Clem are awkward when they finally do meet in person, tongue-tied and uncomfortable (Jackson, 2005). Clem moves to Nattie's town, but she eventually complains, "I had more of your company on the wire." Their solution is to string telegraph wire between their apartment buildings, and they wire each other late into the nights. As You've Got Mail, and other chick flicks confirm, dots-and-dashes technology has its place for would-be lovers.

Cyrano and Clem notwithstanding, new literacy environments do allow us to make relationships in some new ways, and, as always, the newness is part of the attraction. But certainly many of the old verities are still in place. Young and old meet online, in chat rooms, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), and palaces, playing with multiple personas and switching genders at will. There are bulletin boards and chat rooms for aficionados of every possible stripe, and support groups for every known interest, malady, or condition. Now, young people are not bound by the isolation of geography or familial and cultural restrictions; they can become members in communities, with these potentially life-saving connections.

 

Blurred or disappearing boundaries

 

New literacy environments allow relationships with unclear or no delineation of conventional boundaries, and many traditional literacy boundaries do not hold in traditional ways. Here I want to consider just two such boundary transgressions: the boundary between private and public, and between child and adult.

The boundary between private and public is now porous almost to the point of disappearance. Cell phones, blogs, and web sites all have a disconcerting habit of being heard and read by other than the intended audience, or, in the turbulent adolescent years, by the audience we intend one minute but not the next. Adolescents and adults alike are caught in disgrace when posting highly personal thoughts on their web sites and blogs. There is a quality of almost magical thinking with which bloggers assume that their blogs will only be read by authorized readers. But as the distinction between private and public gets muddied, young people are also perhaps working this muddiness with a different sense of social acceptability. One young adult commented to me on the benefits of posting on her blog the details of her anger at a friend:

"Well, if she reads my blog, she'll know I'm pissed at her and know why. That way, I don't have to confront her face-to-face and have an argument, but she can stop annoying me if she wants. I think it's a way of being considerate when I'm a little mad about something a friend has done."

It had not previously occurred to me that complaining about one's friend in cyberspace could be conceived of as a considerate act-but then again, I'm not the target demographic. And that is a key point for those of us who attempt to teach children and adolescents about relationships in the new literacy world: young people make their own conventions, and adults need to inquire about their thinking before passing judgments.

A generation ago, a person's diary was sacrosanct, and reading it would be an unforgivable invasion of privacy. But blogs are not only public diaries, they are interactive as well; readers post comments in response to the authors' original entries. Emily Nussbaum (2004) notes the generational differences in expectations and attitudes about private and public writings in her discussion of bloggers:

For many in the generation that has grown up online, the solution is not to fight this technological loss of privacy, but to give in and embrace it....The teenagers who post journals have (depending on your perspective) a degraded or a relaxed sense of privacy; their experiences may be personal, but there's no shame in sharing....If teen bloggers give something up by sloughing off a self-protective layer, they get something back too-a new kind of intimacy, a sense that they are known and listened to. This is their life, for anyone to read. As long as their parents don't find out.

One oddly fascinating interplay of private and public aspects of literacy comes with a cross-over of old and new forms of communication. Frank Warren (2004-06) encourages people to write a secret-something they have never told anyone before- on a post card and mail the card to him. First intended as material for an art exhibit, the collection grows steadily and Warren posts new cards online weekly. The post cards range from the silly and embarrassing to the life-consuming and tragic. People apparently find comfort in telling something intensely private but telling in a way that preserves their anonymity. The way in which this project has grown (now including a conventional print book) is a case study in the boundaries between public and private, as well as in the overlap of old and new media.

The disappearance of the boundary between child and adult audiences and materials is perhaps the most startling and unsettling aspect of new literacy relationships for teachers and parents. Children are now able to enter, unsupervised, the best and worst of the adult world, with no filtering or gate-keeping. They travel faster than we do, often arriving at new destinations before the adults in their lives even know of their existence.

The absence of such boundaries can be dangerous, as children and adolescents are susceptible to predators. Just as in the past, when we could not be certain whom they met inside the movie theatre, now we can't be certain whom they meet inside the chat room. Adolescents have always tested and savoured their power to operate independently of parental supervision, and now this normal adolescent desire combines with their typically superior technological skill to make a chilling danger that can cross from the virtual world to the real. When the Media Awareness Network asks parents if they know what their children do online, most say that they do. When the Network asks children if their parents know what they do online, most say that they don't (http://www.media-awareness.ca/). This divide reminds us that we cannot be present-physically or digitally-everywhere our children roam. It comes down to education and trust. Moreover, when the Network asks young people how long it takes them to determine to their satisfaction whether an online contact is "safe" or not, young people generally indicate a shocking (to adult sensibility) confidence in their ability to make such determinations within a few minutes of online acquaintance.

 

Relationships with new audiences

 

While teachers and parents readily focus on the contemporary blurring of time-honoured boundaries, I want to return to some of the sustaining and encouraging aspects of such blurred boundaries with respect to making new relationships through literacy. The immense popularity of fan fiction sites, for example, attests to some of the positive potential for relationships in online venues.

Not a new development, fan fiction writing became popular among science fiction fans in the days of Star Trek's television popularity. The early trekkie conventions were places where fans could circulate, in costume if they wished, and exchange fan fiction. As these conventions were held in the real world (contrary to appearances, perhaps!), aficionados needed money, mobility, and some independence to attend (Knobel & Lankshear, 2005). In the contemporary literacy world, fans of any particular fiction need only an Internet connection, and they can access an online community to trade analyses and commentary on current episodes of favourite television shows, movies, or novels. More significantly, they can post original fan fiction: their own episodes, spin-offs, or cross-overs. The distinction between amateur and professional is now "obsolete" in online publishing (www.wikipedia.org/fanfiction)

For fans of a particular fiction-in any medium-fan fiction provides a generally supportive environment in which to read abundant offerings of variations on the fictional characters and themes, and, more importantly, to gain a sophisticated readership for one's own fiction. Recently, Raylene, a student in my graduate class, took up my challenge to write fan fiction. A middle-aged elementary school teacher who had not previously known about fan fiction, Raylene gamely wrote a CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) episode and posted it with great trepidation. Several weeks later, she reported being genuinely touched and encouraged by the feedback she had received from several readers. They praised her writing, cited specific aspects of the work that they appreciated, and encouraged her to post more episodes. The gentle critiques that accompanied the encouragement were indeed quite constructive, well taken, and given in a generous spirit; responders offered pointers on matters of forensic investigation that are germane to the world of CSI. I should acknowledge here that, as Raylene's writing teacher, I did not have the expertise to offer such in-depth pointers about forensic matters, nor did her classmates.

For young writers, this opportunity to relate to other fans of a particular fiction provides tangible evidence of belonging in this community; they can be accepted and respected for the power of their imagination and knowledge. On fan fiction sites, young writers interact on equal footing with adults who share their passions, giving and receiving detailed pointers for their development as writers of a given genre. The lack of distinction between adult and child audiences seems irrelevant when writers are focused on a shared appreciation of a particular fiction. Needless to say, it also makes such postings a risky business, as young writers are treated as equals and are not allowed much "slack" by other fan writers. Most fan fiction sites have clear rules about positive, constructive criticism, but there is no guarantee of gentle treatment.
Relationships in New Literacies Teaching

As I think about the ways in which new literacies environments offer possibilities for young people to make relationships, some clear implications for teaching arise. Adults sometimes feel inadequate in newer literacy environments and uncertain about the value of such environments; some continue to deny that there is much new or much of value. But one undeniable value is that these are the environments in which our young people are learning about literacy, and, to some degree, learning about relationships. Our place in this environment is vital-as teachers, parents, researchers, and literate citizens-and our experience gives us a role in helping young people navigate this terrain. So the first point about relationships in new literacies teaching is that we must enter into relationships as participants. To teach productively, our participation must also involve respect, attention to security, and broad perspective.

Participation: We need to be in the thick of it with our children and our students. The old traditional-vs.-contemporary debate is irrelevant, because contemporary literacy environments include both traditional and new ways of relating, ways that define literacy for the next generation. We can impose our older definitions of literacy if we choose-for the limited time that we will continue to hold power-as demonstrated by those external assessments that drive teachers' classroom practices. But soon enough the next generation's definitions will take over. It will be more productive for us all if adults have some dialogue with the next generation as they develop their ideas about literacy practices.

A great fuss was raised with the publication of the Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (2004). While charting a decline in the habits of literary reading in the US, the survey does not include engagements with online literature or other kinds of reading. John Lombardi (2005) recommends that teachers and professors should find out what young people actually do in the online world, noting the wild variety of material available online:

Then I go online. Here I find a complicated world filled with the good, the bad, and the ugly. Alive and constantly changing, engaged and engaging, requiring my constant decisions about what is worth reading or seeing and what is not. From the lowest pornography to tours of the treasures of the Library of Congress, from the stupidest blogs of the radical fringes, to the most sophisticated discussions of the decline of America's reading habits, everything is there.

(http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/23/lombardi)

We need to enter into new literacies practices with our students and our children, not only because it makes good pedagogical sense to do so. We are morally obligated to go there with them. The literacy world requires sophistication far surpassing the sophistication required to develop or delineate a poem's metaphor or to trace the foreshadowing in a novel. These are still valuable analyses and a source of great literary pleasure, but they are hardly sufficient. The very dangers that adults see in the relationships that are forged in new literacy environments make it imperative for adults to engage with young people in these environments. Adolescence is primarily about the making of relationships-with close friends and with the wider world, and it is a time when young people look with sharper, but still inexperienced, eyes at the adult world.

We need to consider how we enter into relationships with young people in these environments. It is imperative to go there with them as fellow explorers, not as authority figures. We certainly are not experts-adolescents and even younger children go faster than we do and are often more adventurous, more interested in exploration for its own sake, and less encumbered by our baggage. They travel lighter. But we can go there in dialogue, negotiating and sharing authority based on expertise. We can draw on their superior knowledge and experience in some aspects and contribute our superior knowledge and experience in others. We have greater perspective and experience in the real world; often, our young people have greater knowledge of the online world. Because they are making relationships in new literacies practices while young, they take these relationships as part of the given world; as the Media Awareness Network notes, for young people, "The Internet just is" (http://www.media-awareness.ca/). Furthermore, the Network notes that "Kids are ahead of their parents - and on their own - in their explorations of the Internet" (http://www.media-awareness.ca/). The disjuncture between what young people say and what their parents say in the Media Awareness Network surveys are all the evidence we need of the imperative to make relationships with our children while they make relationships online. Such relationships must be founded upon respect.

Respect: We need to take a more collegial stance in our literacy relationships with young people, negotiating authority with respect to their expertise. Respect is key, and we can earn it if we give it. In research involving a series of case studies of multiliteracies teaching and learning in classrooms, I have been struck in each of the case studies by one constant: when the teacher assumes a less authoritative stance, the students respond with respect (McClay, 2006). The multiliteracies work that the teachers established in their classrooms gave students many opportunities, as one teacher noted wryly, "to torpedo the project" (McClay & Weeks, 2004). But students did not take advantage of such opportunities; instead, they appreciated seeing their teachers as people who liked to learn new things and were eager to learn with them. Paradoxically, when the teachers assumed the less authoritative stance of "fellow learner," they actually enhanced their authority and credibility with their students.

Security and safety: We do need to help young people to attend consciously and realistically to security and safety issues. They won't see the same dangers that we do, but we can help them to be better attuned to danger in subtle forms. The inclination of too many adults who work with digital literacy environments with young people is to make the environments safe and unproblematic before we allow young people in, so as not to have untidy or inappropriate material barging into our classrooms. But some attention ought to be paid to the untidy, the inappropriate, the vulgar, even (perhaps especially) the downright fraudulent and immoral in order to teach our youth about these aspects. Our warnings and lists of safe and unsafe behaviours are not effective, as we have seen in the headlines and in the Media Awareness Network's surveys. But our discussions with young people when we enter online environments together can be more powerful, more effective, and more grounded in reality.

We also need to be clear in teaching young people about the real limits of their online power. We have had examples of hapless adolescents being arrested because of the content of their web sites and blogs. When children and adolescents enter the adult literacy world, they suffer adult consequences. They need to understand that their freedoms do not extend to posting hateful or libellous comments; the distinction between passing a note to a friend in class and posting the same comment online must be clear to them. These distinctions should become discussion topics of our classrooms.

Perspective: Adults can play a useful role by helping young people to see the old in the new literacies and the new in the old. Young people will decide what to preserve, and how to preserve it. Undoubtedly, they will do so in ways we would not, as in the case of my young friend who used the forum of her blog to complain about her friend. We old folks have the historical perspective, but they have the future. Ultimately, their decisions about standards and conventions will be upheld. Some of their conventions will seem raw or wrong to us, but many will be much cleverer and more useful than we would imagine. Marc Aronson (2003) discusses the need for adults to present young people with complex portrayals of human relationships in books. He considers various conceptions of "brotherhood" in fiction and nonfictions' books, arguing persuasively for a more complex, inclusive portrayal of the human family. He notes a distinction between children's and young adult literature, commenting that in children's books, the reader/child is part of a family. In adolescence, however, the challenge is for young people to become individuals and to leave their families. This challenge is difficult for adults:

"Inasmuch as we-authors, publishers, reviewers, parents, librarians, teachers-want our books for younger readers to pass on our ideals and values, we feel a kind of queasiness about YA books. After twelve years or so of trying to get kids to listen to us through books, we have three years of trying to help them think for themselves. We just don't know how to connect those two opposite agendas" (Aronson, 2003, p.132).

Young people do not only use television and books as references for their developing sensibilities. They also use online resources-at their fingertips they have the full wealth and poverty of the adult world, unfiltered through custodians of the public airwaves or of the publishing industry. As Aronson notes, we adults have a short period of time in which to influence young people as they develop their sensibilities and values. The very unfiltered view of the complete array of the adult world is part of the attraction of digital new literacy. In the environments of new literacy, young people are not mere viewers and readers, voyeurs of the presentations of adult life as we select and present it for their viewing, as they are when they watch television and movies. Online, young people have agency and the ability to act, to connect, to have impact.

There are no boundaries and no rehearsal period on the Internet-a web site posted is public, open to scrutiny and to comment from strangers of varying intentions. The adults who want to be influential in the lives of young people must engage with them in the literate landscapes in which they travel. We do not have many years in which to do so.

 

References

 

Aronson, M.(2003). Beyond the Pale: New Essays for a New Era. Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature, No. 9. Lanham, Maryland, & Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Collins, P. (2002). NewScientist, Dec. 21/22, 2002. pp. 40-41.

Jackson, M. (2005).
http://bostonworks.boston.com/globe/balance/archives/121904.shtml Accessed Oct. 4, 2005.

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2005). "New Literacies: Research and Social Practice In B. Maloch, J. V. Hoffman, D. Schallert, C. M. Fairbanks & J. Worthy (Eds.), 54th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 22-50). Oak Creek WI: National Reading Conference, Inc.

Lombardi, J. (2005). http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/23/lombardi Accessed Aug. 15, 2005.

McClay, J. K. (2006). Collaborating with Teachers and Students in Multiliteracies Research: "Se have camino al andar". Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 52(3), 182-195.

McClay, J. K., & Weeks, P. (2004). Ensemble Improvisation: Chats, Mystery, and Narrative in a Multiliteracy Classroom. The International Journal Learning, 10.

Nussbaum, E. (2004).
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/magazine/11BLOG.html?ei=1&en=36132f7693f2b Reading at risk: A survey of literary reading in America. (2004).). Washington DC: National Endowment for the Arts.

Smith, F. (1985). Reading Without Nonsense. New York: Teacher College Press.

Tobin, J. (1998). An American Otaku: (or, a Boy's Virtual Life on the Net). In J. Sefton-Green (Ed.), Digital Diversions: Youth Culture in the Age of Multimedia. London: UCL Press Ltd.

Warren, F. (2004-06).
http://www.postsecret.blogspot.com/; http://www.media-awareness.ca; www.wikipedia.org/fanfiction

Lynn Fels is Assistant Professor at SFU. Her research interests are performance and technology, performative inquiry, and teacher education. She and co-author George Belliveau recently published Exploring Curriculum: Performative Inquiry, Role Drama, and Learning.

The story that follows was told to me by a colleague of a grade twelve English teacher who had taken his students outside into the playground of the elementary school next door. “Take time to explore the playground,” he tells them, “the swings, the climbing bars, the slide.” It was, as he tells my friend later, a curious sight, witnessing his grade twelve students, on the cusp of adulthood, playing, shouting, laughing, calling to each other, as they scrambled up ladders, swung into the blue sky, and slid down the slide. “Back to the classroom,” he yells, as the elementary school recess bell rings, and the playground is swarmed by wide-eyed children, who stutter to a stop at the sight of high school students occupying their playground.

Later, as the students bend to the task of writing poetry, the teacher spots one young woman, staring out the window, tears on her cheeks. “What is it?” he asks, coming to her side. She is one of his top students, an insightful debater, a conscientious learner who consistently writes A+ essays. As well as being the captain of the soccer team, she is president of the student council and an accomplished pianist. “I can’t remember,” she whispers, her eyes welling with tears, “the last time I played.”

Driven towards excellence, have we forgotten the value of play within teaching and learning environments? Has play been abandoned on the playground, our students and ourselves locked inside classrooms, staring wistfully out the window? As philosopher David Appelbaum calls such a moment, the action of a student’s tears is a “stop”—a moment of risk, a moment of opportunity. What are the moments that call us to attention, the stops that give us pause in the busyness of our lives, to tell us that something is wrong, that we must respond? This young woman’s tears in her secondary English classroom call us to action. How are we to respond to our children in new ways, if we are to realize the wellbeing of the present and future generations? As Hannah Arendt (1961) requires of educators, we must love children enough “to engage them in the world’s renewal.” The question is, how are we engaging our children, and are their voices, the tears they shed, the stories they yearn to tell, those to which we listen? What is lost when a child no longer has time for play?

And, now months later, I find myself asking, “When was the last time I played?” As an exhausted academic scrambling up the pre-tenure path, teaching in a pre-service teacher education program, working with graduate students, editing a journal, responding to endless emails, I ask myself, “When do I schedule time for play within my work day?” And more miserably, “Who has time for play?”

In an earlier article (Update, Vol. 49, 2, Fall 2007), I introduced performative inquiry as a way to engage students in collaborative explorations across the curriculum, with a focus on language arts. Performative inquiry invites a stance of inquiry, an embodied exploration of curricular concerns, issues, assigned texts, communal narratives, and lived experience. Performative inquiry involves students in performative activities (e.g. tableaux, visualizations, scene creation, writing-in-role, playbuilding, role drama, multi-media creations) as a means of learning about themselves in relationship to the world and each other. The ambition of performative inquiry, as I wrote, is not to simply “put on a play” or expose students to the arts, but to engage students within curricular spaces of learning through collaborative, critical and creative inquiry and reflection.

But when I invite teachers to consider bringing performative inquiry into their own classrooms with questions like, “Why don’t you do role drama with your students? Or create a play about an issue you are exploring in social studies?” I often meet with reluctance. The constant refrain is, “There’s not enough time.” And yet, I know the powerful curricular, communal, and personal learning that comes to educators who engage in performative inquiry with their students. How might we learn to give ourselves permission to set aside the curricular “shoulds” and trust in the learning that comes through the play that performative inquiry invites?

And so I give my M.Ed. students, teachers all, an assignment: Design and do a role drama with your students. Report back to me in three weeks.

 

 Sunnyvale: A Town Revisited

“I wonder if you could give me the name and address of the lawyer that you work with as I anticipate some legal technicalities that are beyond the limited capabilities of our town council. HealthCo promises to be a challenging but fruitful endeavor—but we need to have an iron-clad contract before I sign any final agreement.” — memo from Mayor of Sunnyvale to town councilor

I designed the role drama, Sunnyvale, with a group of student teachers several years ago. It was our vehicle into multiple teacher education classes to introduce the value of role drama as a way of engaging secondary and elementary students in a variety of language arts activities. As we developed the role drama and played it out multiple times that winter and spring, the benefits of role drama became obvious: promotion of critical and creative thinking, collaborative problem-solving, opportunities for oral speech, exploration of multiple perspectives and embodied decision-making through play.

Participants were largely enthusiastic, often remaining in role through the fifteen-minute break we built into the role drama, arguing with each other, trying to find solutions. My experience is that many of those who initially resist find their way into role drama at various levels of engagement, whether through observing others, or reflecting on the decisions taken or getting caught up in an interview when approached by a reporter. Those reluctant to speak in a large group often enjoy the one-on-one or small group conversations that the role drama invites; others find their voice during the writing-inrole activity. As one participant during a recent Sunnyvale role drama described, first, she felt uncomfortable taking on a role, feeling as if she was only acting as the role of an environmentalist, but by the end of the role drama, she was an environmentalist arguing passionately for her vision of Sunnyvale.

The Sunnyvale role drama involves a variety of community interest groups: arts committee, entrepreneurs, residential developers, playground architects, town council members, environmentalists, seniors and neighbours who live in the area, and reporters. All are invited to a town hall meeting by the mayor to discuss Site #39, an undeveloped plot of land in the middle of town. The mayor, having won a recent election on a platform of “communication, collaboration, consensus,” encourages everyone to create a community plan for Site #39 that will address everyone’s needs. The groups of students-in-role are encouraged to consult with each other, discuss various solutions, and try to persuade others to their point of view, or as often happens, find a compromise that suits everyone. Sunnyvale is financially suffering due to the shutdown of the local Kraft Dinner factory and so the mayor tells them to come up with a plan that will “put Sunnyvale on the map” and (as an aside) money in the town coffers.1

This meeting is followed by a news broadcast during which Sunnyvale citizens are interviewed, with reporters highlighting key areas of agreement and conflict, (this activity often leads to prolonged discussion about the role of the media and its representation of issues). Then three participants are invited to take on new roles, this time as the CEO, accountant, and scientist of a pharmaceutical company. Inevitably, their reception at the press announcement is unfavourable; there is a flurry of questions fielded by the three along with the mayor who is accused of not consulting with the people of Sunnyvale (this activity is known as the “hot seat”). Participants are then invited to write-in-role in response to the turn of events in the format of their choice: a job application to the pharmaceutical company (there are few), a letter to the editor or editorial, (often someone begins a petition), a note in a diary, a memo to a town council member, or a scathing letter to the mayor himself. I have watched in amazement as participants write for ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes, the majority focused and willing to share their writing, as we read aloud to find out “what the citizens of Sunnyvale are thinking.”

My understanding of the value of this particular role drama as a site of inquiry has multiplied over time, as I have played the role of the mayor of Sunnyvale many times through the years. Inevitably I find myself in a variety of discussions, faced with new issues and concerns, as individual participants bring their own experience and interests and knowledge to the role drama. Each time, the Sunnyvale we create together is unique; sometimes, for example, the environmentalists find their way to a compromise, such as the building of a park and a community centre, other times they call on legislative action because a rare species has been discovered in the stream running through the property. Most recently, I remember the odd feeling of shame and embarrassment, as the CEO of the pharmaceutical company presents himself as self-interested, taking phone calls on his cell. I remember thinking, “I’ve made a mistake with this guy, and yet, here I am publicly supporting his proposal. How do I deal with this?” It is then that I determine that there will be no deal without a contract that secures our town’s interests and safety, a decision supported by the citizens of Sunnyvale when we move to a vote. And so, during the writing-in-role segment of the role drama, I write a memo to one of my town councilors requesting the name of her lawyer.

Each time I am the mayor of Sunnyvale, I gain a new insight into what matters, how my engagement with others influences the outcome (or not), insights that spill into our post role drama discussions as we reflect about the choices we made in role, and in turn, talk about how we engage within our communities outside the classroom (the role drama was based on a land development project in my neighbourhood). While we can only draw upon our prior knowledge, our experiences, and what we imagine, these role dramas inevitably, uncannily touch the truth of our being in action, if only for a moment, a stop that calls our attention to what matters, what is absent, what is present.2 As Appelbaum writes,

Between closing and beginning lives a gap, a caesura, a discontinuity. The betweenness is a hinge that belongs to neither one nor the other. It is neither poised nor unpoised, yet moves both ways...It is the stop.3

So it is. Our Sunnyvale role drama reminds us that seniors have stories to tell, that they have contributed and continue to contribute to the narrative and work of the town; yet in our role drama, they are often unheard, not consulted, ignored. We have at times voiced condemnation of the mayor’s proposal of the pharmaceutical company and then felt shame, when we realize that we have judged him too quickly as he announces his resignation, “I have tried to do what is best for this town; I’ve stayed awake hours at night trying to think of a solution; it hurts me to think that the townspeople believe I deliberately tried to cheat them.” As one participant commented in reflection after all the townspeople in Sunnyvale ganged up against the mayor, “We immediately judged him as acting in his own interests. Instead of trying to work things out together, we just blamed the mayor. It was only when he announced his resignation that I understood how much he cared for Sunnyvale.” During our debriefing, we have talked about the important role of conflict resolution, and how we often judge others without knowing how they truly feel, or what motivations lay behind actions we so quickly reject.

We have learned to listen for hidden agendas, interpret motivations behind words, understand issues from multiple perspectives, and ask questions of what we had taken for granted. Curiously, the pharmaceutical company has only twice been accepted into the community, the most recent time, upon assurance that any contract between the town and the pharmaceutical company would be “iron-clad.” Interestingly, the participant in role-as-scientist had actually worked for a pharmaceutical company prior to becoming a teacher and so could bring strong arguments to the benefits of such a company as HealthCo in Sunnyvale. We have learned to question the dichotomies and judgments we make; and to see what may become possible through compromise.

 

Performative Inquiry Revisited:The Teachers Report

I have to confess to the occasional bout of nail-biting while I waited the three weeks for my M.Ed. students to return and report on their experiences of doing role drama with their students. What was happening in their classrooms? The morning of our class, my students arrived with excitement, with individual reports of renewed vigour for teaching, with tales of the unexpected enthusiasm and engagement of their students, of the collaborative learning that had taken place, of the willingness of students to write-in-role, of the thoughtfulness of their students’ decision-making, of the absorption of their students in their work while in role.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Patrick Verriour and Carol Tarlington were proponents of role drama long before I arrived on the scene; in fact, I first learned of role drama, through Dr. Verriour, who was my thesis supervisor, and who, with Ms. Tarlington had traveled the province in the 80’s promoting role drama among teachers.4 What interested me, however, was less the learning of the students (although important), but the spirit of the teachers who, as one told me, had found themselves engaged and learning along side their students. The joy of role drama is that no matter what you choose to explore, the learning happens not in the telling what is expected and known, but in the doing, engaging in that which has not yet been imagined, a playful engagement of inquiry. Not knowing what would happen each day as the teachers and their students re-entered the worlds they were co-creating through role play added to the excitement and curiosity and pleasure that becomes possible in teaching beyond the curricular scripts that so often are our habits of engagement. I had, through my assignment, given my M.Ed. students, teachers all, permission to play.

And in writing this article, I am reminded again, that I do play, joyfully, with curiosity, when I engage in performative activities with my students. What will happen? What stops will we encounter? And I celebrate the learning that surfaces as I ask questions of inquiry and engage the students in reflection. Why did we decide to do what we did? Why did you say what you said? What surprised us? What, I ask my students and myself, does our experience within our performative inquiry tell us about how we engage in the world, what issues emerged that matter, what questions yet remain? If we understand play as an action of inquiry, as an action of exploration, embodied engagement, curiosity and reflection that leads to learning, then it is critical that we look again to ways of incorporating play into our classrooms.

To engage in play within our classrooms is to trouble the expected, to sidestep the status quo, to perform a reciprocal dance of learning and teaching, to rewrite our curricular scripts. To play is to encourage laughter, to explore the underbelly of the unsaid, to inspire new understandings, to engage in “wide-awakeness” (Greene, 1971) with our own learning as educators, to create anew our educational relationships, and to invite the unexpected into our presence, thus “enlarging the space of the possible” (Sumara & Davis, 1997, p. 299). To play, in today’s classroom, is a radical act.

Joyce Carol Oates writes, “Time is but the changing of light.” I think of the many different role dramas that I have engaged in with my students, and of the learning that came through moments of recognition—unexpected encounters that opened up new horizons, that no amount of lesson planning could have anticipated. A lesson plan survives (barely) a 75 minute class; it is often in the unraveling of our lesson plans, in the releasing of expectations, in the escape of the tyranny of time, that open us to unanticipated learning and possibilities of renewed engagement. The learning that comes to us through performative inquiry, a reciprocal exploration embarked upon by students and teacher, if we come to our play with “mindful awareness” (Varela Thompson & Rosch, 1993) may last a lifetime.

Jan Milloy (2007) writes of a moment as being a “child of duration,”—a moment of learning, that, as I have experienced, may continue to haunt, educate, guide and remind us, of what is possible. Through the lens and interplay of performative inquiry, an unexpected moment of encounter between two students in role, or within a sentence written-in-role that pulls us into the realm of metaphor, or an image within a tableau that startles, new perspectives may emerge to become portals into compassion and meaningful comprehension.

Performative inquiry in the classroom brings to curriculum a spirit and practice of inquiry, critical and creative engagement, and collaborative reflection. The benefits of engaging in persuasive oral speech, writing in role, exploring multiple perspectives, collaborative problem-solving, experiencing leadership in role, developing a reflective practice with students, cover a variety PLOs within and across curricular engagements. Within the practice of performative inquiry in the classroom, however, is a commitment between students and teacher to play, a willingness to engage each other in new ways. Whether you are in role as the mayor of a financially troubled town or as CEO of a pharmaceutical company or as a citizen who wants a community centre in Sunnyvale, performative inquiry, through active engagement and reflection reminds us, again, of the value and possibility of play within our classrooms.

Consider this text, then, an invitation for you and your students to play.

 

 Notes

1 The Sunnyvale role drama is described in Exploring Curriculum: Performative Inquiry, Role Drama and Learning, along with other role dramas. See Fels & Belliveau, 2008 in Resources.

2 See Fels, L. (2002) for a discussion on the learning that happens within a “moment of recognition” in which the author understands, for a performative moment, what the words, “a prison without walls” truly means.

3 Applebaum, 1995: pp. 15, 16.

4 See Verriour & Tarlington, 1991. Their co-authored book, Role Play, provides a wonderful entry point into the design and delivery of role drama. See also Fels & Belliveau, 2008.

 

References

Appelbaum, D. (1995). The stop. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Arendt, H. (1961). The Crisis in Education. In Between past and future: Six exercises of political thought. New York: Viking.

Fels, L. & Belliveau, G. (2008). Exploring curriculum: Performative inquiry, role drama and learning. Vancouver, B.C.: Pacific Educational Press.

Fels, L. (2002). Spinning Straw into Gold: Curriculum, Performative Literacy and Student Empowerment. English Quarterly, 34 (1, 2), 3-9.

Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York, N.Y.: Teachers College Press.

Milloy, Jana. (2007). Persuasions of the wild: Writing the moment, a phenomenology. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Burnaby, B.C.: Simon Fraser University.

Sumara, D.J. & Davis, B. (1997). Enlarging The Space Of The Possible: Complexity, Complicity, And Action Research Practices. In T. Carson and D.J. Sumara (Eds.), Action research as a living practice (pp. 299-312). New York, Peter Lang.

Tarlington, C., & Verriour, P., (1991). Role drama. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1993). The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.