What I Learned

With my background being Language Arts and ESL, I was already familiar with a large part of the content taught in this course.  I do not mean to say this mean that I didn't learn anything from our class.  On the contrary, I think that this was one of my favorite and more practical courses that I have taken.  Perhaps it was because learning about the content was secondary to discussing and applying the content (at least in my case).  I also liked discussing specific terms or models of instruction.  For example, when discussing reading comprehension we were introduced to before, during, and after reading activities.  This is a model that I plan to use quite a lot as a Language Arts teacher and I appreciated the time spent to draw our own applications through the development of lesson plans.

One aspect of literacy that I had not touched on so extensively in my previous classes what that of vocabulary instruction.  While I knew the importance of word selection (7-10 thematically connected words) I had not developed a firm understanding of how to deliver this instruction to students.  Having participated in discussions with my peers and through listening to the lessons given, I understand that contextualization is necessary for a student's understanding of the vocabulary.  In my own discipline, I hope to additionally teach students reading skills that will strengthen their ability to use context clues to determine word meaning.  I also now know that one instructional asset that I have while helping students to improve their personal lexicon is educating them on morphemes and root words.   An acquaintance with these will allow students to predict and interpret the possible meanings of unfamiliar words.  For ESL students, teaching cognates might help them to interpret meanings of words that look and sound similar between English and their native language.

I thought that going over critical literacy was beneficial to everyone in the class.  In my ESL classes, there is a large stress to teach critical literacy to our students and to be critical learners/teachers ourselves.  To many that I have talked to outside of my program, critical literacy is unfamiliar territory.  Personally, I plan to teach critical literacy by presenting my students with a number of perspectives on various issues.  This may be done assignment to assignment or by providing students access to texts from many perspectives, such as Text Sets in the classroom .  I might also incorporate digital literacy during critical literacy instruction by asking students to critically analyze the sources that they might be using in a paper.  What biases do the sources display?  How reliable is the source and how do we know?

Overall, this course further convinced me that in order to help our students develop literacy in our content areas, we cannot simply expect that bringing student to the content will be enough.  We need to bring content to our students.  We need to draw from their experiences and their background knowledge if we expect them to actively interact with the academic material that is given to them.

Discipline-Specific Reading

My grandma was the one who taught me how to read.  She had been a first grade teacher for more than twenty-five years and was committed to ingraining reading skills into our brains.  As a result, I tested above grade level in reading for many years.  I loved books and I still do.  My husband will often laugh at me when we go to the library or book store, expressing thrill as my fingers trace the spines delicately placed on dozens of shelves.  With the development of eBooks  kindles, and other digital forms of literature, I have always preferred a physical text.

Classical literature has always been my go-to genre. This is largely because I can count on these texts containing complex themes, characters, etc.  For the most part, these are also the "typical texts" of the language arts classroom.  However, the language arts curriculum is enhanced by a variety of texts.  

Selection from The New England Primer

Informational texts are an excellent source for front-loading and contextualizing literature for students.  

For example, we read The Scarlet Letter my junior year of high school.  As a pre-reading activity, we discussed selections of The New England Primer, a puritan reader.  Doing this was an excellent introduction to Puritan values and traditions.  Moreover, it is also an introduction to themes that are paralleled in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story, such as community or the influence of religion over government/school.  

The Medieval Cosmos 

One of my favorite reading experiences in the classroom was reading Hamlet my senior year of high school.  During this unit, we did similar pre-reading activities with informational texts, such as discussing the Medieval Cosmos.  Our teacher also had us read the script as a readers theater with costumes and everything.  We also watched several film versions of Shakespeare's play, act by act, comparing each rendition with the original text.  

On the other hand, I have also had some pretty unpleasant experiences with reading in the language arts classroom.  One of my least favorite experiences was reading A Tale of Two Cities in sophomore English.  Our teacher failed to provide us with proper context and pre-reading activities.  Moreover, with a text as complicated as one written by Dickens, I am surprised that I can not remember doing any during-reading activities such as graphic organizers: character, plot, symbolism, etc.  I am disappointed to say that my first reading of the book wasn't good.  I hated the book.  I fell asleep multiple times trying to read it.  It was the worst!  And it was so confusing!  Even though my attitude probably played a large part in this horrible experience, I think that the structure of my teacher's unit could have helped me to have a much better one.  

For my own students, I want to be able to design lessons and units that excite students and that provide proper scaffolding toward comprehension.  Because students come from a variety of locations, experiences and levels of skills, it is naive to think that all of your students will properly comprehend a text given to them if they are asked to simply read it.  This is why front-loading and activities (pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading) are all vital to the construction of curriculum.  

Writing=Student Expression

Let's face it; writing is hard! There are so many aspects to consider: correct grammar, sentence fluency, word choice, audience, not to mention the overall ideas expressed!  The question is, how do we keep our students motivated to write when the task often appears to be so daunting?
However, writing is so important to the process of education.  The written word is a medium through which ideas, cultures and people are expressed and represented.  I would like to turn to one of television's most inspiring educators, as he explains what education is.  (Mr. Feeny is the bomb!)
He mentions that education is more than just facts, it is about the absorption of thoughts, ideas and philosophies.  Writing is a vital asset to the expression of a student's overall education.

As I mentioned in my last post, I considered myself a writer at quite a young age.  In elementary school my friends and I would sit together on the playground with our journals and read each other's stories.  My sisters and I would write play scripts together and perform them in front of our parents.  In short, my interest in writing is grounded, largely, in the experiences that I had as young child.  Now, in the crazy life of a full time college student and a full time employee, my writing has taken a backseat. Occasionally I get the chance to update my personal blog, write in a journal or even write a poem, but not much more than that-aside from composing emails, texts and letters.  
The honest truth is that my students' lives may be just as busy.  The truth is that writing may not be the priority that it was for me at that age.  Personally, writing is how I prefer to express myself and my ideas.  My favorite writing assignments were argumentative papers that expressed my own analysis of literature.  Looking back, I liked these the most because I liked feeling like I had a voice that could eloquently express something I was passionate about.
I have never been a master of oral language.  I stumble over my words and become frustrated because I cannot express myself the way that I want to.  However, writing has always been a good way of communicating exactly what I want to.  I cannot count on the level of interest, similar to that which I had for the subject, to drive my students the same way that it did for me.  Chances are, many of them may prefer to express and communicate orally or through some other medium-such as art or music.  However, I believe that each student should display comprehension and understanding of basic writing skills.  Moreover, their interests and the things which they are passionate about, may not be literature; they may prefer to talk about cars, science, politics, sports, etc.  For this reason, I believe that having a feel for my students' interests and learning styles is important in structuring writing opportunities for them.

I also believe that students can get too caught up in the "correctness" of writing to the point where the ideas, content and expression become secondary.  For this reason, I think that providing students with opportunities to produce multiple drafts is vitally important.  Instead of having them focus on all the aspects of their writing all at once, which often only adds to the "daunting" feeling, they must first get their ideas on paper.  Once that is done, students should be invited to revisit their writing and critically analyze the way that they use language.

Connecting School to Home Experiences

As a child, my mother told me the story of Jane Eyre as a bedtime story.  Granted, she dumbed down it down quite a bit, but nonetheless, I enjoyed the story.  She did the same thing with many other classical novels.  What is more, I had seen film versions of many of these stories with my mother.    By the time that I encountered these stories later in my education, I knew and recognized them.   My acquaintance with classical literature early in my life sparked a personal interest in reading challenging books.  I wrote a lot too.  When we were younger, my sisters and I had our own newspaper.  We had the idea to do so after Mom told us the story of Little Women.  We wrote stories, articles and drew pictures for our newspaper.  I considered myself a writer at a young age and found writing as an effective outlet of expression. 

Experiences like these had a large part in shaping my personal approach to language arts.   In many ways, reading is listening and writing is speaking.  All language domains are the means of conversation and discussion.   One example of this two sided conversation is the newspaper that my sisters and I made, being inspired by the March sisters of Little Women.  We listen to the ideas expressed and responded by using writing to speak for ourselves. 

Chances are, my students will not have the same experiences that I did with my discipline.  However, I think that it would be fair to say that all students come to the classroom with unique funds of knowledge.  In the language arts classroom, part of this knowledge comes from the books that they have read or that they are most interested in.  For instance, I had a teacher in ninth grade who found out that I enjoyed reading classical novels.  She would ask me questions about what I was reading, if I liked it or not, and even gave me a few reading suggestions.  The fact that she took an interest in my reading habits encouraged and motivated me within the discipline of language arts.  She insisted that I had intellect to contribute and encouraged me to do so.

The best part about language arts is that student’s interests can be activated by theme, especially when that theme is connected to issues directly related to their lives.  For example, if I were to study Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron with my students, I might instigate a discussion of equality.  From there, students may be given the opportunity to fill in the discussion with their own thoughts, impressions and experiences with equality.  Overall, I believe that the most important thing that we can do as teachers to connect school with home experiences, despite our discipline, is allowing students the opportunity to express themselves in a risk free environment.   Students can do this in small group discussions, responding to journal prompts, writing personal narratives, etc.  Language Arts is, ultimately, the science of discussion and conversation over a variety of domains.  

A Little Introduction

My name is Courtney Carpenter.  I am in love with Batman, my husband and long car rides through the canyon.  Currently, I am working at a local treatment facility for adjudicated youth.  Although this job has provided numerous educational and eye-opening experiences, I very much look forward to the day that I am able to be a Language Arts teacher in a middle school or high school setting.  When I mention my desire to teach English to those who are not going into education themselves, I often get asked/told "How depressing.  Why are killing yourself getting through school, just to get back into school?" or "Ugh! I couldn't do that.  I hated English class."  As a result, I have asked myself very frequently, "Why do you want to do this?"  We all know that it's not for the pay, so why do you want to do it?  That's when I remember Mrs. Hunter's eleventh grade Language Arts class.  I was hooked by the very first day.  I loved coming into her class every 8th period! She introduced me to some of the greatest American novels and taught us to examine a text critically.  My eyes opened!  Reading was more than just simply reading the words! It was interpreting, evaluating information and analyzing circumstance.  And writing!   To be completely honest, I did not see myself as a strong writer.  Actually, to be completely, COMPLETELY honest, I hated writing.  I felt uncomfortable and unskilled putting words together.  A month into Mrs. Hunter's class, I was handed an AP writing prompt and assigned to write a critical essay in response.  Although doing this was aggravating at first, I was very grateful for the experience.  I gained confidence as a writer and I felt that I had begun to at least comprehend the craft.  This is just one glimpse of how central the concept of literacy is to my subject area.  Granted, literacy is being able to read the instructions on your medications or a recipe, but functional literacy is just the beginning!  Above all, the development of critical literacy creates something more than knowledge- something of analysis, synthesis and evaluation!  It insists the idea that "the facts" are not enough; that knowledge is not finite.