essential question: how can i promote reading in my classroom without taking all of the pleasure out of it?
The decline in reading
As a parent, I have been dismayed by the fact that neither of my two children enjoy reading all that much. Along with the sheer enjoyment a good book can bring to a person, there is also the obvious benefit reading has on a person's vocabulary and ability to write. Over the years, I've noticed a decreasing numbers of students who read for pleasure, and I've found this very disheartening. Of course, this trend has also been followed by the National Endowment of the Arts who has been studying the decline in reading for pleasure among the general population since 2002. I ran across an article published by the NEA in 2007 discussing the social implications of this decline. Shocking to me were the findings concerning the deterioration of reading scores for our best-educated groups. Also important is the correlation between literary readers and a higher engagement in civic activities than those who do not read. As an educator, an English teacher, a mother, and an avid reader, I feel a responsibility to find ways to challenge these statistics in my family and in my classroom.
Teacher as researcher
ECI 523: Walking into ECI 523 I felt incredibly unsure of myself. Assuming I needed a background in statistics and formal research, I worried whether I would be able to understand the content of the course. At the heart of Teacher as Researcher is not the idea that we should be setting up experiments and analyzing statistical data, but rather, that we should spend time in our practice asking questions and setting out to answer these questions in a valid, intentional, and systematic fashion. I appreciated learning about the many ways we can validate our research through questionnaires, personal observation, and student reflection, which makes much more sense considering the dynamic nature of the classroom.
If you take a minute to peruse the contributions to Edutopia, or search teacher blogs and journals, you will find much information advocating student choice as a factor for increased motivation. ECI 523 enabled me to look at my ideas about motivation, creativity, and choice and pursue these ideas in my Research Interest paper. |
Teaching literature for young adults
ECI 521: Reading is important, and ECI 521 offered me a new perspective of the depth and breadth of young adult literature that is being produced today. As Marc Aronson highlights in his essay, “What is a YA Book Anyway?” he explains that “the heart of art is transforming something the artist experiences, through a medium he or she controls, into a new but perhaps also recognizable experience for someone else. Teenage is precisely the time when a person is having a whole set of new physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences, and is trying to make sense of them”(95). Enabling students to connect to that “recognizable experience” is essential in building attentive thinkers and learners and providing them with the connections that foster such emotions as empathy and sympathy which will, in turn, create better citizens. Aronson asserts that the teenage years are a time of transformation. It is neither a beginning or an end; however, the meaning that is derived from those years are enormously influential in the development of the adults those teens will eventually become.
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research_interest_paper_final.docx | |
File Size: | 58 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Product of Learning: I was fortunate this year to bring together what I learned about student choice in ECI 523 and the importance of literature to young adults in ECI 521. I developed a new 12th grade English semester elective titled ReMix:Literature and Culture. In this course each student determines his or her own reading list for the semester. It begins by having them choose a book they want to read. Moving from there, they then choose two other books that are connected to the first through genre, theme, subject, whatever it is about the first book that they found to be interesting or inspirational. After doing a bit of research, students are then asked to synthesize their information into a process essay and a creative representation that counts toward their final exam. I distributed a mid-semester survey to the class, and 100% of the class responded favorably to being given the freedom to choose their own reading list. Likewise, we used a blog to facilitate discussion between myself and my students so that I could stay abreast of the progress (or lack of) that was happening on individual students' projects outside of the classroom.
remix_capstone_project_students.docx | |
File Size: | 122 kb |
File Type: | docx |