BCTELA

After 26 years at UBC, Joe Belanger's best-before date expired and he was off the shelf. Sidelined but not silenced, here he confesses his Achilles' Heel and dispenses avuncular advice.

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In 1965, the Commission on English concluded that the teaching of English was not a profession but a predicament. In many ways, particularly evaluating students' compositions, not much has changed in almost a half century. During my 40-year teaching career, ninety-five of every hundred problems have resulted from trying to quantify the performance of human beings. Usually even the students who received the top grades on an assignment felt somehow slighted. In composition evaluation - that most subjective realm - I think I did a reasonably good job of classifying students' papers into "good," "better," "best" - like the old Eaton's catalogue - but when it came to adding plusses and minuses to these grades (as Hazlitt might say, a refinement of malice), or worse, used numbers from 0 to 100, I was asking for trouble. Of course, there is a good deal more to teaching English than grading students' written work, most of it delightful, but this task can be overpowering both because it has an insatiable appetite for time and because it creates barriers between students and teachers.

Four decades of tinkering, researching, reading, consulting experts, observing students and martyrdom left me with memories of a lot of bright ideas that did not meet their promise and an extensive list of grading practices I would try to avoid in the future. That said, I think there are five general problems in assessment that that would benefit from our attention:

 

1. Time Management in a Black Hole
2. The [Al]mighty Grade
3. Teaching Standard English Usage: The Error Trap
4. Attending to Students' Feelings
5. Engaging Students in Reading and Discussing Our Comments

 

1. Time Management in a Black Hole

The major festering sore in the teaching of English is the amount of time English teachers devote to responding to students' written work. Oh, yes, it is tacitly acknowledged that the loads of English teachers are far above average, but the caveat is added that all teachers respond to students' work in one way or another and all come up with grades for report cards. Teachers who do not mark a lot of essays contribute to the school in other ways such as supervising sports, music or drama or sponsoring clubs or graduation. Still, insights into the English teacher's plight come from some odd quarters. In a recent play at the Jericho Arts Centre the teacher pointed out to the parent that it took her twenty minutes to respond to each grade twelve student's English paper. This is only ten hours for a class of thirty, but she had five classes, so she had to find 50 hours each time she assigned a paper, and that was on top of preparing and teaching and supervising the yearbook.

This is not news: We have a long history of trying to deal with the time problem. In the mid-60's, the Conant Report recommended that the maximum load for teachers of English be four classes, that each class be limited to 24 students, and that each teacher of English have one additional "marking" period in his or her timetable. An Edmonton school board which had three university professors from the humanities as members implemented many of these recommendations. Unfortunately, not long after these board members retired, a budget shortfall took away the English teachers' marking periods and increased class sizes. Some British Columbia school districts hired markers to support teachers of English, but budget crunches devoured these, too.

Unfortunately, what's lacking is strong evidence that (a) English teachers are devoting significantly more time to their jobs than other teachers are and (b) providing English teachers with additional time to respond to students' written work would result in better student writing. Perhaps the paucity of such studies results from the fact that they would be very difficult to design and implement; perhaps it's just that we don't want to risk finding out that we are not quite so exploited as we think we are.

Neil Béchervaise contends that this talk of equitable workloads is just a red herring which distracts us from our real task, devising ways to arrive at fair assessments of students' written work which help students to learn. I have not been able to convince myself that he is more than half right.

 

2. The [Al]mighty Grade

Friends tell me that putting a grade on a paper is easy: once they have read through a paper, the grade it warrants jumps right out. That has not been my experience, and indeed I challenge these friends to prove their prowess by conducting a couple of little experiments suggested by Diederich (1974). First, photocopy a set of student papers early in the year, replace the names with random numbers and regrade the papers after four or five months. If you carry out this experiment and discover you have assigned similar grades to eighty percent of the papers, don't grow hoarse singing your praises: that's about the percentage research would predict. Instead, try to figure out what went wrong on the twenty percent in which the two evaluations are a letter grade or more apart. Alternatively, trade stacks of photocopies with a trusted colleague and assign letter grades to the papers. If you assign exactly the same letter grade to each composition, you will have made history and should write books on the subject.

As part of a team of researchers (Belanger, Allingham, and Sloan, 2003, hereafter "think aloud"), I sat with individual secondary school English students and recorded their responses to papers their teachers had evaluated.2 As might have been predicted, all but one student flipped to the back of the paper to see the grade first, but the big surprise in the study was the way that the grade acted as a barrier to further reflection. Many students who received the grades they thought they deserved simply did not read any further. As one grade-twelve boy reported "Since I got it right, there is no point in reading the comments." Even the top grades did not lead the students to read anything more than the sentence or two of praise at the end. The grade-twelve girl who received the highest grade in her class (46 out of 50) lamented that "I would have liked 48 or 49 a lot better." On the other hand, students who received low or failing grades were generally agitated and did not read the comments either. Instead, they focused on ways to convince the teacher to let them rewrite the paper for a higher grade. When asked how she would handle her failing grade in the classroom, one student said "I would just sit and sulk."

As suggested above, assigning a fair and accurate grade to a piece of writing is no simple task. The first issue is reliability: What is the paper's true value? Would a colleague in your school give it a similar grade? Would someone in a different district give it a similar grade? It turns out that individual assessments of students' compositions are not very reliable. Research suggests that one grade in five may be in error one letter grade or more. Diederich, French, and Carlton's (1961) classic study asked 60 raters (30 professors, 10 lawyers, 10 journalists, 10 businessmen) to arrange 300 university-student essays in nine piles according to merit. (Imagine volunteering for this job!) The results were chaotic. Over one-third of the papers received all nine grades; no paper received fewer than five different grades. Work I did in 1978 with two trained and calibrated raters produced similar results. Diederich argues that team grading procedures - the types used on large scale evaluations - should be used at the ends of terms to establish reliable grades on students' written work. (See Belanger (1985) for a rationale, procedures, and examples.)

The second issue is validity. Are we measuring what we say we are? If the paper is written in response to literature, for example, which part of the grade is based on the subject matter - insights into the literature - and which is based on the writing itself? Can you separate the two? Researchers who have assigned separate marks for content and presentation generally report that raters establish in their minds an overall grade for the paper and then fiddle the categories so that the component numbers add up to the grade they think the paper merits. At their best, the Reference Sets encourage rater training and post-grading discussions and thus come up with more valid and reliable grades. However, teachers tell me that applying the Reference Sets simply adds another task to an already overcrowded schedule.

Of course, all of this technical discussion avoids the fundamental question: Are grades necessary? worthwhile? educational? Some argue that grades provide motivation for students; others say that motivation should be intrinsic to the task rather than the product of some fanciful system of ranking and ordering. Some hold to the "next level up" theory which claims that students need records of grades so that those downstream can make decisions about hiring or admission to more exalted schooling. Others argue that in this case English teachers are simply doing the work that others should be doing. Why should high schools classify students for post secondary institutions or corporations? If these groups want to know how well students can write, let them devise measures which show this. Our job is to teach students to write, not to make it easy for universities to pigeon-hole them - and then complain that we don't do a good job of it.

Some of the most revered fields of study have abandoned letter grades in foundations courses. For example, for the past ten years most of the Faculties of Medicine in Canada have graded pass/fail in basic coursework. In education, there was a collective sigh of relief when Marilyn Chapman spearheaded a pass/fail grading system for the teacher education program at UBC. This change had an extensive evaluation component which sought the opinions of all members of this academic community at regular intervals. Evidence collected from instructors and students and the professorate in general has largely been positive. The caveat seems to be that the program must be all one way or all the other. Having some pass/fail and some graded courses turns the pass/fail courses into second-class endeavours: students know where the money is and put their effort into the graded courses. It turns out that grades in the teacher education program are not very necessary after all. In an informal study I conducted, administrators told me that they were very interested in reports on student teaching experiences but that grades in methods and foundations courses didn't predict very well classroom performance. An argument in favor of grades contended that students could use education grades to bring up their averages to be admitted to graduate school. Unfortunately for those with this on their wish-list, faculties outside of education generally do not pay too much attention to grades in teacher education programs when assessing applicants for graduate school.

It's tempting to suggest that if some university faculties can implement pass/fail grading, so can school systems, but I'm not quite that naïve.

 

3. Teaching Standard English Usage: The Error Trap

In responding to and grading student papers, we make a number of assumptions, many of them questionable at best. A major assumption is that students will learn correct usage if we point their errors out to them. Underlying this assumption is the belief that students will actually read our comments, that they will understand them, and that they will know how to avoid the errors in the next pieces of writing they do.

My favourite error quote is a bit of a mirror for me:

When I consider how many hours of my life I have spent trying to root out these errors by a method that clearly did not work, I want to kick myself. Any rat that persisted in pressing the wrong lever 10,000 times would be regarded as stupid. I must have gone on pressing it at least 20,000 times without visible effect.

(The panelist goes on to note that he gave many tests of usage which showed small improvement from year to year but that the drop-out rate more than accounted for this improvement.)

Panelist, Farrell (1970) Deciding the Future, p. 141

Alfred M. Hitchcock (the professor, not the director) advises teachers: "Don't be a ferret. Overlook many errors." He believes that many errors are just "the blunders of youth which will disappear in due time." Others argue that students assume that anything they have written which is not marked as an error is not an error. So, the logic goes, they will persist in using these erroneous constructions if they are not noted.

One of the major difficulties with noting errors on students' papers is maintaining consistency. In a study of grade-twelve papers marked by one teacher several years back, I found that the teacher would mark one example of a particular error, skip the next three or four examples of that error and then mark another. All of the papers had many notations per page, but there was no systematic effort to root out particular errors. The teacher, of course, was very conscientious - one of the leaders in the profession (Belanger 1986). Gary Sloan (1977) analyzed 2000 compositions he had inherited that had been marked by over 50 college instructors. He noted that inconsistencies in marking of individual papers were rife, especially for those who focused on mechanics. The most amusing observation, however, was that the instructors made the same errors in their comments that they were trying to root out of students' papers. It took me a long time to get into the habit of proofreading my comments.

I have also learned not to send home papers with errors which have not been noted because it gives industrious parents the opportunity to mark all of the errors I missed and send the papers to the principal or school board chair. A solution for this is a cover page for each paper which notes the editorial usage items which have been annotated. As a student teacher, Ernie Hall tried a variation of this: he bought a rubber stamp "Draft only; this paper has been marked for [fill in three or four points]" and used a green stamp pad. These items of usage students can be expected to know and use correctly on their papers. Daniels and Zemelman (1985) suggest developing a chart for each student's folder. Down the left side of this chart, items of English editorial usage are listed. Across the top is a list of the papers the student is to write during the term. Teacher and student can determine the focus for each paper and note the number of examples of each error marked on each paper.

Revising students' sentences to show them a better way of writing may not be as effective as I thought. Students in the "think aloud" study - when prompted to read their teacher's revisions - were at best lukewarm to the practice: "I suppose it's a better way of saying it," admitted one grade-twelve girl grudgingly. More often the response was resentful, "Well that's her style but it's not mine" (grade-eleven boy), or blatantly hostile: "It really picks me when someone rewrites my sentences, as if I can't write" (grade-twelve girl). When I think of the thousands of sentences I have rewritten, modeling what my teachers did but having no idea how my students might respond, I resolve to book an appointment with my psychiatrist immediately.

In the "think aloud" study, one of the most effective ways of teaching editorial usage was by a grade twelve teacher who divided editorial usage into ten categories and assigned three students to become experts in each category. Students offered their peers direct instruction and practice in these items and then became the class experts during peer editing sessions. When we examined these students' papers we found that they made fewer of the errors taught than we would generally expect and that in conversations with them they read the teacher's comments and could explain where they went wrong. Many said that as a result of this system they were much more comfortable with editorial usage.

Perhaps a key question in this is "how do we learn to grade papers?" Unfortunately, most of our models are college or university teachers who have a good deal of time, many more resources, and not a lot of students, so they are able to pounce on every error in a paper. Of course, if you have taught English long, you know the burden of responding and you have probably worked out your own system for handling the paper load. Your system works for you, at least marginally, and it gives you a good feeling having done your part. Addressing such questions as are your practices effective? and how could you make them better? It takes time and energy most teachers would rather devote to catching up.

A major barrier to change is overturning a system that works even if it does not work well. The profession is rife with systems, but the extreme cases are often either amusing or frightening. A grad student once shared her father-in-law's practice with the class. Every evening after supper he retired to his study and marked papers for three hours. He took Sundays off. It would be good to design research studies to document the effectiveness of such dedication. Other systems require more skill but less time. Herman Kirchmeier was ambidextrous and would write corrections in the left margin in red and comments on the substance in the right margin in green. When I taught his students the following year they encouraged me to use his system but I was unable to grapple with it, not having two right hands. On the other extreme, the story circulated in rural Alberta years back about a teacher who had his students write every week; he then locked the papers in his cupboard and had not returned one by the end of the year. On June 30 he piled the papers into the trunk of his car and moved on to his next school, somewhere across the province. Word was that he had done this for a decade before his antics became well-known and he had to move to another province.

 

4. Attending to Students' Feelings

Because students invest their personal beliefs and moral codes in their English papers, it is worth evaluating our comments from the point of view of how the student might feel reading such a comment. Unlike math, physics or chemistry where the answers are right or wrong and the student's investment is technical rather than personal, English essays are places where students can test their beliefs and values, hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, and expect a response from a sympathetic but more worldly-wise reader.

I think we are beyond the stupid or arrogant comments which elitist teaching assistants once wrote on student papers ("Is English really your native language?") or the back- handed compliments that well-meaning professors might make ("You do a reasonably competent job of a desultory task" [this was 1963; the professor had awarded me the highest grade in the class on an assignment but, apparently, didn't want it to go to my head]). The problem lies in comments written in good faith, not mean or bullying statements written as if they were Acts of Parliament. The major question, one which is too seldom a part of our discourse and [almost] never found in marking rubrics, must be: how might the student who reads this comment feel?

In a graduate class, Jean-Anne Stene provided students with two types of comments and asked them to answer a series of questions, one of which was

How do you feel after reading what the teacher has written about your work?

This question raised a good deal of discussion about class members' experiences receiving comments and ways to avoid writing comments which inadvertently injure students.

5. Engaging Students in Reading and Discussing Our Comments

As a teacher, one of my faultiest assumptions was that students would hunger for my written advice, read each comment carefully, and be sure to avoid the errors that I had pointed out in the future. It sounded like a reasonable trade-off: I'd spend time reading and commenting; students would spend time reading and benefiting from the annotations.

Of course, it did not take too long to disabuse myself of this delusion, but it took a teacher from Sardis to offer the proof that I really didn't want to hear. He said that his wife and children were off to the beach one Sunday while he stayed home and answered the call of duty. As he wrote comments on students' papers he wondered if they were reading them. He then wrote "one Big Mac" in the margins of twenty papers and went out and bought vouchers for hamburgers. Only three students asked him after class what "one Big Mac" meant. I suspect that for even the students who read his comments "one Big Mac" made about as much sense as the universal "awk" or "frag" or "pro agr."

This is not an argument for abandoning marking but one for engaging students in learning from our comments. One of the major disappointments in the "think aloud" study was the miniscule number of students who actually read their teachers' comments without being prodded by the interviewers. With prompting most read the final comment and some of the marginal annotations, but allowed that this was not their usual practice.

What was worse, when we prodded the students to explain the teachers' annotations, more often than not they seriously misconstrued the substance of the comments. The transcripts are too long to reproduce here but can be found in the Technical Report, Appendix H: http://www.lerc.educ.ubc.ca/fac/belanger/technical.html

In my experience, whether they read the comments or not most students demand more than a letter grade on their papers. I asked a class once if they read the comments I wrote on their papers. "Of course, sir," was the response. However, when I asked the students why they were still making the same errors, most admitted that they didn't read the comments in more than a cursory way. "If you are not reading them," I said, "I won't write them." So I handed the next set of compositions back with mere grades. To save being assaulted, I needed to take the papers back and write comments on them. Another of life's little lessons.

In common with many other teachers of English, I have tried to devise ways to ensure that students read my comments with understanding and learn from them. As a graduate teaching assistant in English, I carefully annotated students' papers, put the grade on a separate sheet of paper, and returned the papers in class, keeping the sheet with the grade on it until students came to my office and discussed the annotations with me. A small number of students seemed to adapt well to this system, but most dragged their heels through our discussion of the annotations and then disappeared as quickly as they could once it was over. A small number didn't bother to come. One said that he would find out what his grade was when his transcript arrived in the mail. My wonderful system took a good deal of time; its major effect seemed to be alienating large numbers of students.

On the other hand, probably the most effective activity I used was to divide the class into groups of three, assigning each group to discuss each annotation, examine the underlying principle and discuss possible corrections. I circulated, asking and answering questions. I learned quickly that since the grades on the papers are personal, they had to be removed before the groups examined the papers. This had the disadvantage of having students wait until the end of the period for the thing that really interested them, the grade. It did, however, keep the grades, especially those lower than the students expected, from becoming a distraction. Unfortunately, I have no evidence that their writing improved as the result of these experiences.
Reflections

Where does all this leave us? I believe that there are steps we can take to address each of the five problem areas above. They are not quick fixes which will herald a new age, but they are steps we can take now to grapple with the massive problem of assessing and evaluating students' written work in English.

1. Gather evidence on the marking loads of English teachers and ways that teachers are coping. A series of graduate student investigations (graduating papers, theses, dissertations) which address various aspects of the problem could provide the evidence needed to begin to lobby our organizations to acknowledge the tremendous time commitment required to teach written communication and to respond effectively to students' written work.
2. Work with colleagues to improve the validity and reliability of grades on students' compositions. This will involve department or district work on scoring guides and rating procedures. Then share the findings through conference presentations, journal articles, and blogs.
3. Teach rules for editorial usage systematically, emphasizing selected rules at each grade level, reviewing the rules at subsequent grade levels, and insisting that students' papers be free of the errors studied. By the end of grade twelve, students should have mastered all of the rules in a college handbook.
4. Research the types of comments that students appreciate in both the affective and cognitive domains. How can constructive criticism be phrased so that it brings errors to the student's attention without offending the student's ego? Balance the comments on substance and presentation. In the "think aloud" study we discovered that students were very interested in comments which dealt with their insights and ideas but were not even mildly interested in those which pointed out errors in usage.
5. Articulate expectations and devise activities which engage students in reading and understanding each of our comments. Students should expect to have class time set aside each time papers are returned to read each comment, to discuss possible changes, and to write responses to the comments. If I had been able to do this, I believe I would have had a much more satisfying teaching career. Instead, during my time at UBC, I marked dutifully, handed papers back at the end of term, and saved in a file cabinet drawer the assignments I had marked but students had not picked up. As I was cleaning my office, I sent them off to the shredder in two cardboard boxes. How many novels or books of poetry could I have read? how many walks on the beach could I have taken? how many rounds of golf could I have played instead of writing advice on papers that went unread to the shredder? If all this advice fails to improve your life as a teacher of English, become a math teacher: marking is quite straight-forward and there isn't too much of it.

 

References

 

Belanger, J. (1978). Reading skill as an influence on writing skill. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Alberta.

Belanger, J. (1985). Conflict between mentor and judge: Being fair and being helpful in composition evaluation. English Quarterly, 18, 79-92.

Belanger, J. (1986). Student Written Errors and Teacher Marking: A Search for Patterns. A report presented to the Educational Research Institute of British Columbia (Project Grant 342).

Belanger, J. Allingham, P. V., & Bécheervaise, N. (2004). When will we ever learn?: The Case for Formative Assessment Supporting Writing Development. English in Australia, 141, 41-48.

Belanger, J. Allingham, P. V., & Sloan, A. (2003). Technical Report: Using think-aloud methods to investigate the processes secondary school students use to respond to their teachers' comments on their written work. http://www.lerc.educ.ubc.ca/fac/belanger/technical.html

Commission on English (1965), Freedom and Discipline in English. Princeton, NJ: College Entrance Examination Board.

Daniels, H. & Zemelman, S. (1985). A Writing Project: Training Teachers of Composition from Kindergarten to College. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Diederich, P. B. (1974). Measuring Growth in English. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Diederich, P. B., French J. W., & Carlton, S., T. (1961). Factors in judgments of writing ability (Research Bulletin RB 61-15) Princeton: Educational Testing Service.

Farrell, E. (1970). Deciding the Future: A forecast of responsibilities of secondary teachers of English, 1970-2000 AD. NCTE Research Report No. 12. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Sloan, G. (1977). The wacky world of theme marking. College Composition and Communication, 28(4), 370-73.

 

Footnotes

1. My teaching experience ranges from the junior high school through the post-secondary technical school to the university level. Therefore, my comments are directed to these levels. My observations of elementary classes and discussions with elementary teachers suggest that they have a different set of problems in responding to students' written work.
2. Eight teachers from five secondary schools provided the researchers with 57 compositions they had marked but not returned to their students. Individual students accompanied the researchers to a separate room where they were asked to "think aloud" as they read their teachers' grades and comments for the first time. The teachers were among the most experienced and dedicated in the province: five were current or previous English department heads; six had served on ministry examination assessment committees; five had served on the executives of specialist councils; two had taught as sessional university methods instructors. Who else might risk taking part in such a project?

 

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.

Marzena Michalowska is a Later Literacy Mentor and Teacher of English at John Oliver Secondary in Vancouver).

(Click here to download a PDF version of this article)

Teachers' reactions to their students' reading of manga, the Japanese graphic novels, typically range from extreme disappointment

"There is no reading there; they are just flipping through the pages and looking at the pictures. And it is all backward too: they are going from right to left, starting at the end. You cannot possibly call that reading!"

to a rather muted and restrained enthusiasm

"Well, at least they are reading something. There is some writing there. Probably not very good quality though; nothing that we would really like them to read. And the pictures are like sugar coating: they make it easier to understand the story, whatever it is."

A very quick discourse analysis of the above statements will likely reveal the following operating assumptions. In order to be considered valid, students' reading should consist of reading primarily a print-based text, preferably a model of beautiful language (a classic?) Since there is little value in decoding images in manga - their role is mostly to repeat what the simplistic text already says - manga graphic novels can hardly be considered effective reading tools. Reading is both unimodal (dealing with one type of text at a time) and linear in nature; and finally, in a Language Arts classroom, visual literacy is not as important as print-based text literacy.

I would like to propose that if we actually agree with the above inferences, there is definitely a lot we can talk about. Let us then begin with the idea that reading really is about reading a print-based text, preferably one that introduces students to models of a superb language use. Most of us will agree that traditional texts often address universal questions and offer insights that are relevant and inspiring to today's readers. Reading such texts gives our students skills, competence and confidence to face various academic demands that await them in the post-secondary world. However, what about students whose life experiences and cultures are not reflected in traditional literature? Are they not going to feel marginalized, perhaps even dehumanized? They might resist reading such texts not because they are "struggling readers," but rather because reading them makes them feel insecure, inadequate, and inferior. In the words of Herbert Kohl (1994), the author of I Won't Learn from You, students often engage in a "struggle of wills with authority" because "what [is] at stake for them [is] nothing less than their pride and integrity." (7) Resistance to assigned reading becomes then an act of self-preservation that is far more important than any attempt of finding oneself in the context of F. S. Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, for example.

And what about reading a print-based text as the only valid text? If we embrace the new and expanded definition of the 21st century literacy as multiliteracy, or communication of ideas through a multitude of modes (channels), we also accept the idea that text is no longer confined to the written word, but includes oral, aural, performative, and visual representations of meaning. Consequently, our literacy pedagogy becomes redefined to include a variety of text forms (modes of representation) associated with the above expanded theory of meaning making. In such context, reading is no longer just about decoding print-based text and good reading is no longer just about reading lots of print-based texts. Reading is about decoding and constructing meaning with various texts such as still and animated images, symbols, signs, sounds, movement, as well as numerous digital texts. And now that we have opened our teaching door to a variety of texts, why should we welcome manga, a multimodal (written and visual) text?

Manga graphic novels can hardly be considered effective reading tools because there is little value in decoding images that illustrate what the simplistic text already says. I think there are two issues here that call for a closer examination: firstly, our difficulty in recognizing manga as a valid semiotic domain, or area worthy of study, and secondly our own knowledge of manga. Let's look at the first issue. If we accept that texts come in different forms, why not then include in our teaching texts and literacies that our students are familiar with? This way, we can show them that their knowledge has currency in our classroom and that we value what they come with. After all, students read what they can read and what they like to read. If we have a chance to build on their interests in order to maximize their growth, should we hesitate to do so? Also, do we not teach our students that there are different roads to reach a goal? Surely, we are not intimidated to take the road less traveled, are we?

Speaking about intimidation. Personally, I did not particularly like admitting to my students that I knew nothing about manga. I skillfully avoided the subject. Appearing knowledgeable and having little desire to undermine myself have always been my guiding teaching principles. And yet with all my background in language and literature, I could neither understand nor explain the manga attraction until one day when one of my students left behind his manga book. I picked it up with suspicion and tossed it quickly into the lost and found box. I came back to it, however, being consumed by sheer curiosity. I wondered what it was all about and what made it so special to my student. I decided to give it a try and read it. How much would it cost me? I surprised myself. I was immediately drawn into the story, because it gave me a sense of being a participant in it. The feeling of walking into it and becoming a part of it was so satisfying that I finished my first manga that same evening. Then, like a true reader, I moved onto another and another and another. I have known all along that one day I would cross over to the other side and become my students. And when that day arrived, I finally understood why they were secretly reading their manga while I was busy teaching them ‘real literature.' The road less traveled has turned out to be full of pleasant surprises and discoveries. I am still walking it because learning new things takes time. However, here are some knowledge gems I have found along my way.

Manga, the most popular type of graphic novel in North America, as a genre sits somewhere between film and prose, creating a bridge from one to the other. A lot of manga are smart, well written and imaginative. There is manga for every subject because everything can be expressed in manga form. The cinematic quality of manga images shown from rather unusual camera angels turns reading into a viewing experience. Manga's iconic characters with their simply rendered faces can easily be filled with any emotion the reader is experiencing. Looking at such characters is almost like stepping inside the life of Charlie Brown and discovering the hidden mysteries behind his simple existence. Manga characters live in very rich environments that have been created with a lot of attention and sensibility. Real world anchors such as school desks, clocks on the wall, or park benches emphasize the unexpected beauty of everyday things. The backgrounds are usually delivered in fragments, and we experience them much like in real life, with our eyes moving around, up and down, and finally assembling the world from fragments.

Unlike our home grown comics and graphic novels that are often filled with sound effects and characters' chatter, manga are characterized by the presence of many silent panels that provide us with contemplative moments of unmediated experience. Such experience, just like the characters' faces, can be filled with our own values and emotions. As well, the silent panels sometimes function as transitions between story episodes.

Again in contrast to our North American productions that often present motion in a somewhat bombastic way, at times showing characters literally breaking out of panels in their attempts to run, fly, or jump, manga authors have found a very different and rather subjective and visceral way of rendering motion. In manga, we, the readers, participate in the motion by becoming the moving object. And because we now are the moving object, a motorbike, for example, we can feel the bike's sudden stops, unexpected turns, and periodic vibrations. It is precisely because of such unusual representation of motion that people who read manga often compare it to watching a movie.

And finally what completes the manga attraction is the presence of a diverse genre of images. While reading manga, we are likely to come across collages, free standing, or cascading images. Such diversity of image genre does not allow us to get bored, constantly stimulating our senses. Clearly then, reading manga requires us to redefine what reading is; and while we are busy reworking our definition, let's allow our students' reading to be in service of their interests rather than to be a rehearsal for living. They are discovering something new. Let's not deprive them of the joys of discovery.

What have we, on the other hand, discovered about teaching visual literacy in a Language Arts classroom? Teaching it is not nearly as important as the teaching of print-based text literacy. Interestingly enough, writing with pictures predates writing with words. In some languages (Chinese) words began as stylized pictures. Similarly, cave paintings and hieroglyphs were the earliest forms of communication. Why have we forgotten then that there is an important calligraphic quality to pictures? Why are we reluctant to fortify the printed word with a printed image? Others do not seem that hesitant.

Both the political and the corporate worlds, for example, understand the extraordinary power of images. Just imagine looking at a picture of fallen soldiers coming home: multiple coffins draped in Canadian flags being carried by some clearly emotional pallbearers, grieving relatives, among them mothers holding little children in their arms, a solemn looking preacher whose hand is raised in a sign of a blessing. Because an image like that communicates a powerful political message to a country and its people, it is of little wonder then that our politicians may not want to expose us to too many such visions. Similarly, imagine looking at an image of a delicious and mouth-watering multilayer chocolate cake adorned with opulent coral roses and emerald leaves dribbling gracefully along its edges. Would we not want to try it? But to try it, we need to buy it; and, let us remember that most of what we actually end up buying is first introduced to us through visual ads that entice, inspire, and cajole us to do things that we normally might not have done. It is clear then that pictures are an important form of communication: they convey meaningful and profound ideas and concepts; and, if we agree with that statement, we should also agree that visual literacy should not be left off the teaching table by being undertaught.

Will we then take up manga in addition to our classics? If we are interested in exploring the challenges of a multimodal text, we probably will. If we are interested in overcoming our own habitus and developing our own and our students' visual literacy, we probably will as well. Let us then experience the joy of learning a new social practice and in the process validate the home literacies our students come to us with.

Bibliography

http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/articles/manga/manga1.html : a website providing a comprehensive history of the manga genre

http://www.koyagi.com/Libguide.html: a librarians' guide to anime and manga

http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/manga/index.html: a publisher website advertising manga published by the largest manga publisher in Japan, Kodansha

http://www.tokyopop.com/: a website containing reviews of manga

Kohl, H. I Won't Learn from You. The New Press. 1994.

Joanne Panas was a teacher consultant for Richmond last year, with a focus on adolescent literacy. She is currently teaching English at McRoberts Secondary in Richmond and working on her first novel. 

( Click here for Joanne's full article, including graphic organizers.)

Leyton Schnellert and Nicole Widdess' excellent article in the Winter 2007 edition of Update detailed where the idea for Second Shot classes came from, the research behind it, and some of the amazing work that went on in Nicole's class. As a district consultant in Richmond this year, I have been the support person for our Second Shot teachers and classes; as such, I would like to take this opportunity to follow up and share what has been happening this year with Second Shot.  

Overview of the IRI and Second Shot

As you may recall from Leyton and Nicole's article, Richmond applied for and received literacy grants from the Ministry of Education for the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years; we have been approved for 2007-2008 as well. These grants are used to support the Intermediate Reading Initiative (IRI) in Richmond. The overall purpose of the IRI is to improve the literacy skills of all students, with a particular focus on grade 8 students transitioning into secondary schools and the additional literacy challenges that come along with that move. To that end, each secondary school in Richmond has a Literacy Leader, who has time in her or his schedule to support school teams and individual teachers as they work to improve their instruction in literacy skills across the curriculum.

Part of this larger picture, which is represented in the recently-updated IRI graphic (Figure 1), is the Second Shot class, which is part of the "Extend" portion of the triangle. This intensive instructional class focuses on students who "survive but don't thrive" in secondary school; often their reading challenges have been minor or masked in elementary school, but when they are faced with the increased amount and complexity of the reading they are required to do in secondary school, they tend to fall further and further behind. These students are offered, in addition to literacy-related instruction in their regular core classes, a "second shot" of literacy instruction and practice in grade 8 which increases the explicit instruction they need to improve.

It's important for me to emphasize here that Second Shot classes are intended to reinforce what is going on in the rest of the school, not fill in gaps of missing literacy instruction. Richmond schools are working to address shared goals set at the school level and across the curriculum in the regular classes; Second Shot classes are part of that school wide-effort. In Richmond, five of our secondary schools have offered a Second Shot class (as each school has its own name for the class, I will use the generic name "Second Shot" throughout this article). For some schools, this is their second year offering this class, and for some it has been their first year. We had new teachers in this role in three of our five schools this year, and the learning curve has been steep! In the next sections I describe some of our successes and struggles.

Sharing and Problem-Solving Together: October

In October 2007, the Second Shot teachers had a day together to discuss their progress, share ideas, and bring up issues of concern. The teachers shared a number of things that were working well for them, including: having one-to-one conferences with students; engaging students with each other through partner talk; incorporating a reading workshop classroom model; using lots of modeling and think-alouds; using graphic organizers; reading aloud to students; guiding students in their choices for independent reading; and using sticky notes to both hold thinking and communicate back and forth with students. Several teachers brought sample lessons and activities to share with the group.

One of the challenges that the teachers identified was that some of the students who had been recommended for the class (usually by their elementary school) were not actually the clientele for whom the class had been designed. For example, some students were reading quite well and did not need to be in the class; in some classes there were students who were reading at a level well below what the class is intended to address. A few students with significant challenges such as emotional or behavioural issues or severe learning disabilities were placed in Second Shot classes; teachers found that the learning needs of these students could be better met through different, more tailored supports in other settings. In essence, there was a lot of confusion-from elementary school resource teachers and grade 7 teachers, to secondary school counsellors and even whole secondary school staffs-about the purpose of the class and the students who would most benefit from the Second Shot experience.

Beginning in January, I solicited the input of all the Second Shot teachers to create a set of guidelines for student selection. Over several months, and with many revisions from the teachers themselves as well as from district staff, we developed a set of documents (see Figures 2-8). In April, I debriefed the documents with elementary principals, with elementary and secondary resource teachers, and with a team from each secondary school, including the Second Shot teacher, the Literacy Leader, and other interested staff. Secondary schools can adapt the documents as needed to their Second Shot program specifications; however, they are keeping the referral form the same for the sake of consistency across the district. The Second Shot teachers have used the documents in their transition meetings with elementary schools; feedback received from the group in June may result in further revisions of the documents for next year.

Second Shot Classroom Partnerships

Part of the role of district consultants in Richmond is not only to support initiatives and school teams, but also to work with individual teachers and classrooms; indeed, it is one of the most enjoyable parts of the job! From January to June I was privileged to be able to work in varying capacities with three of our five Second Shot teachers and classes. My roles included: co-planning lessons and units; helping teachers find suitable materials for their classes; co-teaching lessons; teaching lessons while the teacher observed; and working with individual students and small groups while the teacher worked with the rest of the class.

One classroom where I was able to have long-term involvement was Ian Felgar's Literacy Dynamics class at Cambie Secondary School. Ian and I co-planned a unit on Looking for X by Deborah Ellis, with the goal of teaching students inferring skills; this goal was chosen based on the results of a school-wide grade 8 performance-based assessment (PBA) in the fall, and the students' progress since that assessment. I was able to co-teach many classes with Ian and got to know the students well over several months. (See Figure 9 for an outline of our unit). This classroom partnership was very successful, and Ian and I will be co-presenting the unit and our experiences with this lovely group of students at the SFU Literacy Continuum Conference on August 23 and 24.

In another classroom partnership with Brenda Dewonck at McRoberts Secondary School, we adapted the basic outline of the unit Ian and I developed for use with another novel, Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen. Brenda's goal was to improve her students' inferring skills as well. As part of the assessment-to-instruction cycle, we created and administered a mini-PBA on inferring partway through the unit (see figure 10); using that, Brenda was able to determine what other instruction the students needed to improve their inferring skills.

At the end of the year, both Ian and Brenda were keen to know how their students perceived the Second Shot class, and very graciously allowed me to interview their students, asking questions about their affect, metacognition, independence, and application and transfer-four of the six goals of the Second Shot class (see Figure 11 for all the goals). This has yielded some rich qualitative and anecdotal data about the class; we will continue to collect both quantitative and qualitative data next year and will share it with all our secondary schools.

Looking Back, Looking Forward: June

This June, the Second Shot teachers met to review our year and think ahead to next year. Some Literacy Leaders, as well as new Second Shot teachers for the 2007-2008 school year, were also in attendance. Once again, teachers shared something they had done that worked well, and we celebrated our successes. We collected feedback on various structures associated with Second Shot, including: the student selection process; connections with elementary schools; connections with Literacy Leaders and the grade 8 team; the assessment-to-instruction cycle and the grade-wide PBA; instructional practices including modelling, scaffolding, and gradual release; and professional development. The feedback will be used to help us support Second Shot teachers in a variety of ways next year.

An important part of the meeting was a focus on the goals of Second Shot (see Figure 11). We had a chance to reflect on how well we had met those goals over the year, and what we might do differently next year. We emphasized that everyone had done some work on the goals, but that it was important to strive to reach all six goals in each unit, and ideally to focus on several of them in any given lesson. Using the work Ian and I had done in his class, I was able to show how we had worked on comprehension goals by teaching inferring; we also worked on goals around application and transfer (using a science-based text to teach fix-up strategies), affect (building their confidence with fun scaffolding activities) and metacognition ("Beliefs About Readers" activity and other reflections/discussions). I also noted how we might have worked on improving their fluency (by having them read aloud to us one-on-one), or their independence (by having them choose among several articles to read for background knowledge). The final piece of the reflection was thinking about the assessment-to-instruction cycle; most teachers used the PBA data to set their goals for the year, but saw the value in doing more frequent and specific formative assessments through the year to check in on students' progress, much like Brenda and I did with the mini-PBA on inferring (Figure 10).

Metacognition: How did we do?

As I mentioned earlier, I was able to do exit interviews with two of the Second Shot classes; a third class filled out the interview questionnaire on their own. I was able therefore to gather data from three of our five Second Shot classes this year (27 students) on affect, metacognition, independence, and application and transfer. Did students improve in these areas over the year? Although this was a pilot survey, the results speak for themselves:

• 63% of students report feeling more positive about reading than they did a year ago.
• 63% of students report that they would have missed learning something about reading or literacy if they had not had a Second Shot class.
• 81% of students report using literacy skills from Second Shot in their other classes.
• 74% of students report using new skills when faced with challenging texts.
• 70% of students report feeling at least somewhat confident that they can handle ("I can do it") and/or understand challenging texts.
• 56% of students report an increase in their enjoyment and amount of independent reading.

The words of the students say as much as or more than the numbers do about the effectiveness of this class in building confidence in the students and developing their enjoyment of reading:

• "I feel good about myself because I read a book." 
• "I feel better about reading because I learned new strategies."
• "I can read more challenging text."
• "I feel good about myself understanding it." 
• "I think I have improved in my reading." 
• "I know I can do this."
• "After I took this class it made me connect to the book even more than before because I understand what the author's trying to say."
• "I didn't read on my own before. [Now] I read a lot! Harry Potter, Bridge to Terabithia, Shiloh; I like mystery the most, [it's] more interesting."

And one final, telling detail that dedicated childhood readers everywhere will appreciate, relayed to me with a sheepish grin by a young man who "used to read a little bit" before taking a Second Shot class: "One time I stayed up too late reading and my mom yelled at me."

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

(Click here to downlaod this article in PDF)

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

Joanne Panas is a Teacher Consultant (Adolescent Literacy), Richmond School District #38.

(Click here for a PDF version of this article)

There were so many choices of wonderful-sounding sessions to attend at the BCTELA conference, but one of my choices was a no-brainer. Dr. Jill McClay was my English Curriculum and Instruction professor way back when I was an Education student at the University of Alberta. We've kept in touch over the years, and of course I wanted to hear Jill's current thoughts on the issues of English and literacy. I settled into my seat with anticipation, knowing that whatever the topic, her presentation was sure to provoke lots of thinking!

Jill began by talking about the "new literacies" of technology, including blogs, instant messaging, sharing videos online, and many other kinds of literacy that go well beyond "print on paper." One of the most interesting and potentially alarming things Jill told us was the fact that eight- to ten-year-olds are the fastest-growing group of users on the internet. Two other statements struck me as related to that piece of information: "Relationship is the work of adolescents" (from Lev Vygotsky), and "Literacy is always about relationships" (Frank Smith). What we have then is a situation where young people are seeking relationships through online literacy, and as we all know, this can have positive and/or negative ramifications.

The core of Jill's presentation, however, was not to showcase cool new kinds of literacy, nor to inspire fear of the Internet, nor to invoke paranoia in parents and educators, but rather to ask a key question: "What is the ethos of this technological literacy?" In other words, a new culture is being created before our eyes, and we need to know what it's like, and what people are doing with it. What are the values of this community? What is its danger and its potential? How should we as a community of educators and parents respond to this new culture?

Jill gave us some examples of the ethos of the online literacy community. Fanfiction.net is one such community; in it, fans of many genres write their own versions of their favourite book, movie, comic, game, and so on, in the style of or in the spirit of the original. Others in the community read them and write reviews. In this way, relationships are created. In this particular online community, the ethos is that of good writing. There is no distinction between amateurs and professionals, young people and adults; all are welcome to write, read, and review. The people who run the site encourage constructive criticism and discourage bad writing, such as wish-fulfillment fantasy, and plot continuum errors.

Online literacy, Jill pointed out, tends to blur boundaries between speed and rhythm (emailmystery.com sends you a novel in installments), between public and private (read others' secrets at postsecret.blogspot.com), and between child and adult (fanfiction.net). Adults worry about these blurred boundaries, and with good reason. According to research done by media-awareness.ca, a non-profit organization that develops media literacy programs, kids can be exposed to inappropriate content and risky situations online, including bullying and sexual harassment. On the other hand, the same survey makes it clear that most young people have positive experiences online, and they use the Internet to foster existing social relationships and create new ones. How can we help keep kids' online literacy experiences positive?

Jill gave us some examples that made us realize that, regardless of the fears (and often, regardless of the rules) of parents and educators, kids are using the web and joining online communities; they are sharing their writing and secrets, reading those of others, and creating relationships. The Internet is not going away; in fact, access to the web is nearly universal in Canada, either at home, at school, or at public libraries and Internet cafes. Children are growing up with computers and they are far outpacing the adults in their lives in their use of the web, but not necessarily in their ability to assess and think critically about it. This is where we, the adults, come in. Jill's final point of the session was that we need to participate in web-based communities and literacy and respect, not dismiss, kids' online relationships. We need to learn the conventions of online literacy. Young people are not going to learn about online safety and security from us unless they see that we know what we're talking about, and that we are also part of that community.

At the end of the session, I had a lot of notes and a lot to think about. I am already part of one online community Jill mentioned, PostSecret, which I check weekly. However, I was unaware of most of the other kinds of technological/online literacies and communities she discussed. I had considered myself a competent user of the Internet; I know how to use search engines, I use email regularly, and have my favourite sites bookmarked. Jill's presentation made me realize how much more was out there, and that a lot of it could be very useful in the English classroom and beyond. But if I was so Internet savvy, and so were many other educators, what was keeping us from using the web in these ways? I realized that there are some practical barriers to that kind of knowledge base for many educators and parents. Time is a major barrier. Most of us don't have the time it takes to find these sites, figure out how to use them, and then actually join in at least semi-regularly. Access to hardware is another barrier for teachers; how can we teach Internet safety when many computer labs are too small for individual and sometimes even paired access, or have outdated computers with very slow connections, or are simply unavailable because other classes have priority? Finally, many teachers might use these sites on their own time, but when it comes to planning how to integrate Internet literacy into the curriculum, many teachers are simply at a loss. We need some guidance from those who understand both technology and curriculum.

So what can we do? One possible way to deal with the barrier of time is to connect with some interested colleagues (from anywhere-this is the Internet we're talking about!) and share your experiences with only one or two web communities in a kind of jigsaw. Teachers might get around limited access to computer labs by creating their own web-based community, so students can use the Internet on their own time, at home or in the library. For example, on-line literature circles could work; many school districts have their own intranet and can set up a conference with student access. Some districts have mobile laptop labs (and technical assistance), which can make computer-based projects a possibility for classroom teachers. Above all, teachers need training and support. Districts might consider giving workshops on the basics of Internet literacy communities. Most schools have at least one person who is Internet-savvy; that person may be able to get some release time to work with interested staff members. Regardless of our own concerns about technology, teachers are working with a generation that sees computers as part of daily life, and that includes literacy. We need to make the effort to get "with it" so we can ensure our students and children are navigating safely and effectively through this territory.

This list was started by Susan Ma and Celia Brownrigg.  It is meant to be open-ended and we hope it will enjoy many contributers.

 

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

- a great book to have.  McCloud acknowledges and tears down so many of our prejudices when approaching the graphic novel medium: comics.  The explanation of active readership (what goes on the our head when we read a graphic text) is easy to understand and integrate in to planning and instruction.  This is an excellent book for a novice in the graphic, or comics, form to start with.  It is written in the comics medium which facilitates McCloud's descriptions of the graphic form as well as subliminally reinforces the stance that "comics" is a medium suited to many types of content; don't mistake it as simply the message (sorry Marshall). This resource is a must-read for any teacher considering using graphic novels or other comics in class.

 

Panel Discussion: Design In Sequential Art Storytelling

Interviews with Masters of the Craft!  What's talking about graphic
novels without talking to the creators and storytellers?  The
interviews are very insightful.

 

 Graphic Novels in Your Media Library Center  by Allyson and Barry Lyga

This resource is notes from a teacher-librarian int he USA who uses graphic nevels in her classroom.   The Lygas' variety of grade coverage is good, covering grades two through ten, as well as their cultural coverage of both "eastern" and "western" graphic novels.  Check out their activity ideas too!

 

In Graphic Detail by David Booth and Kathy Gould Lundy

This resouce is exclusivly available to educators through Scholastic Education.  The approach in this book is particular to using comics in classroom activities.  While some of the examples used could be better, both authors are well-known educators and have great experience working with Canadian teachers and librarians.

Theresa Rogers  

Theresa is a professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her areas of interest include youth multiple literacy practices and critical
perspectives on young adult literature. See theresarogers.ca.

Genre Play, Positioning and Critical Interpretation

For the past several years I have been work- ing with colleagues in various school and non-school settings involving youth in a range of arts and media activities.1 One aspect of this work of potential interest to English educators is the way film (video) production can be seen as a new literary form. With more emphasis on multimedia in schools, it seems timely to consider filmmaking, in particular, as a valid and endlessly imaginative form of literary interpretation among students.2

The youth whose work I will share here range in ages from 15 through 19 and have attended or are attending alternative secondary schools and/or are participating in a community anti-violence program. In various ways they have all been alienated from structures and contexts of traditional secondary schools. These alternative school and community sites provide environments that are a better fit for the youth and more open to video work as an impor- tant multimodal or “new” literacy practice.

I like to think of video production as a new form of reading and interpreting literature that is more engaging for a wider range of youth. Video produc- tion breaks down some boundaries between in- school and out-of-school lives. Indeed, some would say multiple literacy practices “travel” across our institutional boundaries (Leander, 2003) as is evi- dent in our work. We are mindful that youth are already very often critical consumers and producers of new media—showing us over and over again that they have things to say and the tools to say it, and their films are created in the intersections of these available resources and perspectives (see also: Burn and Parker, 2003; Goodman, 2003; Sefton-Green, 1998 and 2006; Soep, 2006).

Yet most classrooms continue to privilege print literacy practices (Moje, 2000; O’Brien, 2005), which are historically entrenched in schools and are seen to carry power as a path to higher education. It may also be fair to say, and I would include myself here, that English teachers are more comfortable with print literacy. We love to hold books, to carry them, devour them, talk about them, review them, and store them safely and forever in our hearts and book- shelves. Not all of our students are so enamored.

 

Four Films: “The Blue Bouquet,” “The Making of Othello,” “Hills like White Elephants,” and “Billie Holiday”

Four films described below illustrate the ways youth used film to interpret literature. As part of this process, they played with genre and positioned themselves in new ways in relation to their work, their peers and teachers, while critically interpret- ing literature.

The Blue Bouquet

The first film is a very short version of the story “The Blue Bouquet” by Octavio Paz (1976). In this haunting and dreamlike short story, Henry wakes from a nightmare and hastily dresses to face the reality of remote Mexico. A lost soul from the American middle-class, a stranger to a wife he left at home, and now alone in a squalid hotel, Henry is warned to stay put for his own safety. However, on a brief walk through the area he is threatened by a peasant bearing a knife, which (he tells the incred- ulous American) he will use to cut the eyes from Henry’s head in order to present this macabre offer- ing of “a bouquet of blue eyes” to his bewitching girlfriend Consuela.

The student, Jake, who directed this film re-interpreted it as a kind of morality play by identifying the hotel owner as the bystander, Henry as the victim, and the “peasant” as persecutor (actually labeling them that way in the credits). The film is initially set at the school (borrowing the principal as the hotel owner/bystander) and moves to a nearby abandoned and graffiti-saturated parking lot where Henry is accosted by the peasant in a reenacted mugging scene. “Henry” pleads for mercy, saying “I have brown eyes.” Jake used hip hop music as a soundtrack (“Multiply” by Xzibit), and exaggerated the fighting by employing quickly repetitive views of the interaction during editing.

In this interpretation, the story becomes less a stylized and lyrical short story and more an action-oriented and messaged film. By incorporating the school principal into the action as a character, Jake repositioned himself and his cast members as having at least momentarily reversed the power structures of schools. They also embodied the story with their own contemporary understanding of violence by recreating the mugging scene and using contemporary rap music. And finally, by placing the film in a space that represented their identities (street-oriented, tough, masculinist) they created a contemporary re-interpretation that traveled across traditional, institutional and spatial boundaries, providing a rich opportunity for talking about literary interpretation. That is, they effectively re-interpreted the story by shifting to a contemporary setting that reflects aspects of their own experience, and providing a kind of moral commentary on engaging in and witnessing violence.

 The Making of Othello

This film by a student named Scotty is introduced with a filmed discussion between himself and a friend in which he explains that he ran into a “casting problem” while filming the play “Othello” by Shakespeare. He decided to do a documentary about the problems of casting in filmmaking, noting that it would be “a different kind of film.” Clips from the documentary itself can be viewed at this website: web.mac.com/theresa.rogers/iWeb/Site/Othello.html

The documentary focuses on issues related to using a cat to portray Desdemona and a dog to portray Othello, resulting in a very humorous transformation of the story. Bits of a script rewritten from a contemporary perspective are overlaid with a serious discussion of lighting, voiceovers, and quality of the technology available:

Actress speaking to Desdemona (a cat): You two make a very good couple and Othello is very hot… but rumour in the dog pound is that he’s been sneaking out late at night.

Narrative voiceover: Here the cat would have an overlapping voice, which is a voice-over.

Actress to cat: Oh, and where is the marriage chew toy you gave him and how long has it been since he’s chewed it?

Narrative voice-over: In this part of the film I would put a voice-over to make it sound like she [Desdemona] is talking.

In this film, Scott has fully positioned himself as a filmmaker who quite seriously comments on the familiar problems a director might face even in the absurd case of using animals as the main characters. At the same time he has rewritten the script for the animals, so the result is a quite sophisticated and layered parody.

Hills Like White Elephants

“Hills Like White Elephants”by Ernest Hemingway (1927) is mainly a dialogue between a young woman and a man waiting for a train in Spain. As they talk, it becomes clear that the young woman is pregnant and that the man wants her to have an abortion. Through their tight, brittle conversation, much is revealed about their personalities. At the same time, much about their relationship remains hidden. At the end of the story it is still unclear as to what decision has or has not been made, or what will happen to these two characters waiting for a train on a platform in Spain.

Two students, Nikki and Scott, decided to film this story with Nikki as the director and the two of them as the main characters. They realized it would be difficult to film in a train station so their setting is more pastoral, shifting the mood. The film employs fairly sophisticated filming techniques; for instance, the film begins with a shot from above that slowly moves down toward the couple speaking “to bring the audience right into the set with you.” The rest of the film includes some of the dialogue and some voice-overs of shots of the couple in a field.

What is most striking about this film is that in the middle of the film a sonogram image of a fetus dissolves in and off the screen, and at the end are pregnancy help lines. According to Nikki she didn’t realize when she first read the story that it was about abortion, but after she storyboarded the voice-over line, “Once they take it way, we can never get it back,” she realized she needed to put in help lines at the end.

In this way the film becomes a hybrid genre combining storytelling and public service announcement (PSA) ele- ments. The choice of music—Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”—contributes to what they referred to as the “seri- ous” and “sorrowful” tone of the film. Hip hop, they felt, would be “too youth” for their purposes. Nikki and Scott updated the story and its themes and repositioned themselves to speak about serious issues with peers (unwanted pregnancy) through their re-interpretation of the film.

Billie Holiday

This film was made by a young woman (“Kim”) who par- ticipates in an after school anti-violence program. This was one of the first films she made and while it is quite simple in its approach, the result is powerful. Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit” is well known and available for viewing on the web. The song is based on a poem by the same name written in by Abel Meeropol (pen name Lewis Allen)in 1937. He wrote it after seeing a photograph of the lynch- ing of two African American men in Indiana. The lyrics begin: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

In Kim’s film, the song begins and the images shift between stock photographs of Billie Holiday at work and thvideo of her singing, using a "grainy" editing effect. As the film progresses, Holiday appears to become older and more despairing, both in the photos and the video. At one point the screen goes dark, and in the last scene there is no sound, creating an eerie and foreboding feeling.

While the film is made entirely from Internet images, the overall effect of the short film is quite a moving statement about Billie Holiday and her embodiment of the poem's sorrow, as well as the tragedy of its content. As Kim says, she wanted to capture the melancholy and show how Holiday was interpreting the words and her reaction to them-"to tell the story of her essence," which she thought people might not otherwise see. For her, the important element was how Billie Holiday interpreted the poem and how she (Kim) could impose another layer of interpretation to shed light on Bilie Holiday, who is a compelling figure to Kim. Here again, there is evidence of sophisticated re-interpretation across genres and media (poem to song to film) in order to create a unique critical reading.

Conclusion 

These four examples are just a few of the many films youth have made in these classroom and community centers. I believe these more literary films illustrate the playfulness and creativity the youth bring to their work and the ways they use filmmaking as a mode of literary (re)interpretation. In these films, they use image, sound, and text in sophisticated ways to express their understanding. They juxtapose genres, reposition themselves in relation to literary works and to others, and create new sites of interpretation. For these youth in particular, filmmaking provided a way to engage in the reading of literature in unique ways and afforded alternative modes of expressing critical interpretations.

What is also apparent in their work is that they have a sense of the literary elements of voice, perspective, tone, symbolism and mood that can be exploited as they move across written text and multimedia. That is, filmmaking helps students, especially those who are less engaged in the curriculum, to become more sophisticated "readers" of literary works.

Notes

1 A three-year (2001-2004) youth literacy project with teacher (Andrew Schofield) and university colleagues (Kari Winters, Anne-Marie LaMonde) that integrated arts and media into all areas of the curriculum, and a current project that includes a community anti-violence program in which students created videos. In these settings, I have been most interested in the way youth engage in genre play, identity positioning, and critical expression through arts and media production (e.g. Rogers and Schofield, 2005).

2 While there appear to be more opportunities for students to engage in filmmaking in special courses and after school programs, it is less often that film is integrated directly into course work. Meanwhile the technology is becoming more accessible and, indeed, many students already have access to digital video cameras and computer software. For our projects we used iMovie software and Apple computers. With as few as one or two digital cameras and two editing stations (Mac computers) we found we could fully integrate media production into the classroom curriculum. 

Resources

Inpoint at Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver (www.inpoint.org) offers workshops and downloadable worksheets on studying and producing films (e.g. the language of film, storyboarding, filming, editing, permissions, etc).

References 

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas.

Burn, A. and Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. London: Continuum.

Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching Youth Media: A critical guide to literacy, video production and social change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hemingway, E. (1927)"Hills Like White Elephants." In Men Without Women. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons.

Holland, D., et al. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press.

Leander, K. M. (2003). Writing travelers' tales on New Literacyscapes. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(3), 392-397.

Moje, E. (2000). "To be part of the story": The literacy practices of gangsta adolescents. Teachers College Record, 102(3), 651-691.

O'Brien, D. (2005). "At-risk" adolescents: Redefining competence through the multiliteracies of intermediality, visual arts, and representation. Reading online www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/obrien/ (Retrieved 3/20/05).

Paz, Octavio. (1976). "The Blue Bouquet" from Eagle or Sun? New York: New Directions Publishing.

Rogers, T. & Schofield, A. (2005). "Things thicker than words: Portraits of youth multiple literacies an alternative secondary program". In Anderson, J., Kendrick, M., Rogers, T. and Smythe, S (Eds). Portraits of Literacy across families, schools and communities. Lawrence Erlbaum Pubishers, pp 205-220.

Sefton-Green, J. (1998). Digital diversions. Youth culture in the age of multimedia. London: UCL Press.

Sefton-Green, J. (2006). "Youth, technology and media cultures". In Green, J. and Luke, A. (Eds) Rethinking learning: What counts as learning and what learning counts. Review of Research in Education. Washington, D.C. American Educational Research Association.

Soep, E. (2006). Beyond literacy and voice in youth media production. McGill Journal ofEducation, 41(3).

 

 

GRADE 6 - POETRY

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Red	Mandy Wong	John Norquay Elementary, Vancouver	Kim Perry
Break Your Bindings	Russell Owen Copley	John Norquay Elementary, Vancouver	Kim Perry

 

GRADE 6 - PROSE

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Tomoe Gozen & the Great Battle	Alice Huang	John Norquay Elementary, Vancouver	Mr. Wrinch

 

 

GRADE 8 - POETRY

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Odd One Out	Grayeme Ritchie	Ecole Au coeur de l'ile, Comox	Monica Ashwell
Alternate Worlds	Roderick Gravoueille	Ecole Au coeur de l'ile, Comox	Monica Ashwell
The Potter	Damian Spence	Alpha Secondary, Burnaby	Mara Brkich
Sunrise	David Ivanov	Ecole Au coeur de l'ile, Comox	Monica Ashwell
Christmas Morning	David Ivanov	Ecole Au coeur de l'ile, Comox	Monica Ashwell
I AM FROM...	Alison Legge	St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary, North Vancouver	Ms. Dawn Goh Bugarin

 

GRADE 8 - PROSE

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Bloody Mess	Danel Teagai	Ecole Au coeur de l'ile, Comox	Monica Ashwell

GRADE 9 - POETRY

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Math  Homework	Elise Sarty Peterson	Ecole Au coeur de l'ile, Comox	Monica Ashwell

 

 

GRADE 9 - PROSE

Title	Student	School	Teacher
A day in the life of Peyton Stanley	Hilary Jahelka	Ladysmith Secondary, Ladysmith	Ms. Walker
Around the World in Two Months	Alexandra Dibnah	Maple Ridge Secondary, Maple Ridge	Cindy Thompson
Must Break Free	Tessa Leyland	Maple Ridge Secondary, Maple Ridge	Cindy Thompson
Stones	Mallory Wyant	Maple Ridge Secondary, Maple Ridge	Cindy Thompson

GRADE 10 - POETRY

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Mining Sorrows	Maciej Siwocha	Saint Thomas Aquinas Secondary, North Vancouver	Mr. Mendoza
Middle Ground	Claire Mackay	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
The Wooden Goat	Eric Xu	Burnaby North Secondary, Burnaby	Dan Roberts

 

GRADE 10 - PROSE

Title	Student	School	Teacher
What the Night Hides	Claire O'Brien	Shawnigan Lake Secondary, Shawnigan Lake	Stephanie Owen
Bent	Erin Murray	Shawnigan Lake Secondary, Shawnigan Lake	Stephanie Owen
Bittersweet	Maddie Burlin	Shawnigan Lake Secondary, Shawnigan Lake	Stephanie Owen

 

 

GRADE 11 - POETRY

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Addiction	Amanda Cribdon	Parkland Secondary, Sidney	Joan Saunders
Scarecrow	Stephen Glossop	Parkland Secondary, Saanich	Joan Saunders
Letter to a Dead Grandfather	Ian Kopp	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Mommy	Sammy Leung	Langley Fine Arts School, Langley	Silvia Knittel
Fetish	Emma Kirkpatrick	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
The Veil of Kabul	Nicki Grewal	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
244 GPJ	Kendra Stone	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Uninhibited	Becky Treieaven	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Window	Emily Lankhorst	Sardis Secondary, Chilliwack	Mrs. Wieler

 

GRADE 11 - PROSE

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Unitard	Kristina Knappett	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Field
Dancing Lessons	Ian Kopp	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Hands	Gloria Loi	Sir Winston Churchill Secondary, Vancouver	Mr. Buium

 

GRADE 12 - POETRY

Title	Student	School	Teacher
Happily Ever After	Sara Shayan	Point Grey Secondary, Vancouver	B. Lloyd
Thanksgiving Trenches	Matthew Hering	Parkland Secondary, Sidney	Mrs. Saunders
Someone Else's Grandmother	Cat Christison	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Merry Christmas from ICU Six	R.L. Saunders	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Iranian Football	Rachel Orfani	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Elephant Tree	Chelsea Leadbetter	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Word Choice	Kyle Lalonde	Sardis Secondary, Chilliwack	Mrs. Wieler
For Allen Whitman	Evelyn Gendron	Langley Fine Arts School, Langley	Silvia Knittel
Tall, decaf, extra hot	Ashleigh Toby	Claremont Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson
Susan Stenson	Ashleigh Toby	Claremont, Secondary, Victoria	Susan Stenson

 

 

 

 

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.