Think about the why as much as the what

Even though I had a lot on my mind today (my mom had surgery and I have my demo tomorrow) and I may have lost my mind a little bit in the end with my webcam pictures (you can check them out in my "Documenting the Day"), I still thought that today was a great day for finding our stories and all things digital. The day started out with a particularly moving TED Video by Chimamanda Adichie in which she explores the danger of believing the single story. 

I think of this single story as the persisting stereotype or some sort of fixed cultural lens and it got me thinking about how we do think about Africa. Recently, President Obama has been in Africa where he saw that over 70% of the population lives without electricity (according to NPR) and that there is an incongruous combination of rampant hunger and an increase in the population. He has suggested that America move from an “aid” standpoint with Africa to more of a trade andpartnership relationship. This story and the TED video made me wonder if part of that “aid dynamic” where the wealthier, predominantly white nation is throwing money at a problem rather than working in different countries with different populations to make progress for the future. Could this power dynamic that has been set up for so many years actually be doing more harm (in the theoretical/cultural capital sense) than good?

If my generation has grown up learning to pity people in Africa (I can’t tell you how many times I heard as I was growing up…You better finish your food, there are starving kids in Africa), then are we devaluing those people? And isn’t devaluing someone at the human level the greater evil?  Yikes! I don’t want you to think that I don’t believe in helping someone else or charity or do-gooding in general (although I do question the existence of pure altruism), but what I do believe is that it’s important for all of us to think about how the way we think and talk about people or things  go much deeper than we typically consider and that it’s so important for us to think about the why as much as the what.

I can’t wait to use this video (and subsequent teacher models) with my students. I think that it’s so important for them to consider not only what they think, but to complicate why they think so. And what better way to articulate that thinking and explore the dynamic than through writing?

Sorry if I kinda went on a tangent, but this was on my mind...

Writing Through the Looking Glass

I’m still trying to process all that we did today—improvisation, literacy timelines, digital histories, Murray cards, inquiry work, covert dealing, and a whole lot of writing. I can’t believe that we accomplished so much in one day…I almost feel as if it never happened at all or happened in some sort of bizarro-world.  And now I’m starting to wonder if this is how my students feel after one of my classes because I am a huge proponent of keeping things moving in the classroom. I don’t like us to work on something for more than fifteen or twenty minutes before we move on to something different albeit related. (I think that I heard somewhere that people can maintain their attention span in direct relation to their age…or maybe it’s that you’re not supposed to keep a kid in time out for longer than his age before it becomes ineffective…regardless, I have always kept things moving as part of my pedagogy.) And today, I felt that we had that same movement in the institute, which was both exhilarating and exhausting. We really did go through the process of writing and the possibilities in a writing class just as a student would, which is why I felt like I was seeing myself through the looking glass today. I was able to see much of what I do in the classroom through the eyes of a participant or a student…it’s the same image, but from a different perspective. It made me think of Lewis Carroll’s ideas in Alice through the Looking Glass where an alternate universe/perspective exists in exact relation to the original perspective (it couldn’t exist without it). Let’s just hope there isn’t a jabberwocky around the corner…

In case you want a visual of what I’m talking about, check out this clip from one of my favorite versions of Alice in Wonderland. It’s the 1985 “Made for TV” version that has people from Ringo Starr to Scott Baio to Sammy Davis Jr. to Carol Channing—soooo good!

Through the Looking Glass/Scary Jabberwocky Clip:

My Blog Theme Music

Every time that I try to start a blog, I can’t help but hear this music inside my head…

Documenting the First Day of Summer Orientation 2013

Even after seven hours, Tonya and I are all smiles!

Working with my Inquiry

My Literacy Timeline

Improvisation and Conversation

Learning, Writing, and Thinking at SI Orientation

It’s a pretty funny thing that I have been requiring my students to keep a blog this past semester, but I have been putting off starting my own because I am terrified. I don’t know if it’s because I am a writing teacher, so it feels like I have to produce some perfect piece of prose or I will be outed as a fraud. Maybe it’s because I have a hard time putting myself out there in general for fear of being weighed in the balance and found wanting. Whatever the reason is, the result is the same: I have been putting this off for way too long (including this circumlocutory introduction). Okay, so on to the writing…

I have been hearing about the NWP and the Summer Institute for years now—how it changed the perspectives, attitudes, and pedagogy of my colleagues and how it even spurred people to make drastic life decisions from career changes to relocation. Needless to say, I have been curious over the years as to what all the fuss is about. However, after attending the orientation, I can really see what the Summer Institute is really about—getting teachers together to think, to write, to learn, and to grow. We get to learn how to become better teachers and better writers as we shift our identities a bit in order to create a space for us to experience writing through the eyes of writers. It’s easy to become used to seeing writing only through the eyes of the teacher (especially when it’s your job), but I think it’s worth the struggle to be able to experience writing in the way that our students do. 

In my experience, one of the most moving moments of the orientation was the collective recitation of "Hotel Nights with My Mother." I found the Image Explosion so moving because I liked the poem when I read it to myself, I saw value in the poem when I chose a favorite phrase, I connected to the poem as I free-wrote on my phrase, but it wasn’t until we all recited it together that I was moved by the poem. Once we had finished, there was this unbelievable buzzing energy in the room even though everyone was too moved to speak. I see that collective recitation as tantamount to the way the NWP works—we could appreciate teaching and writing on our own, but by appreciating and discussing it together, we can create a powerful initiative with endless possibilities. 

Teetering and tottering into Twitter at SI Orientation