Chapter 7 Class Activities
Your Earliest Memory
- Close your eyes
- Clear your mind
- Go back as far as you can to the earliest memory you have
- Describe what you remember
The Start of Your Literacy
- Frank Smith: Understanding Reading (1971; Smith was a graduate student at Harvard at the same time Janet Emig was there)
- Story: Click, Clack, Moo by Doreen Cronin
- Task: Early Literacy Memories
- Shirley Bryce Heath: Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (1983)
- The first composition ethnography
- Video on Heath’s Work
- Widely cited in composition literature
- Helped bring qualitative research methods to the field
- Gives us a picture on how literacy develops within social settings
- Maurice Sendak: Where the Wild Things Are
School Literacy
Narrative Theory
- We understand the world through stories (Jerome Bruner: Acts of Meaning)
- Our histories shape our teaching identities (D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly: Narrative Inquiry)
- How we understand our lives, and the challenges we face, is through story (Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried)
- We think and learn through stories (Harold Rosen, who was on James Britton’s team: Stories and Meanings, NCTE, 1985)
- All language has it’s own narrative history (Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays)
- All writing comes from the self (Donald Murray: The Essential Don Murry: Lessons from America’s Greatest Writing Teacher, 2009)
- If you want students to have meaningful writing experiences, ask them to write stories (Gian Pagnucci: Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making, 2004)
A Literacy Moment That Mattered
Chapter 7 Required Task
- Now that you’ve explored your literacy past, it’s time to explore how your past has shaped your ideas about teaching
- Your Teacher Story
Chapter 7 Optional Materials
Some Teacher Stories
- Reading Excerpt: from “Writing Stories in College” by Gian S. Pagnucci: In W. Bishop & J. Strickland (Eds.), The Subject Is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. Heinemann.
- Reading: p. 1, p. 2, pp. 3-4, p. 5, p. 6
- Song: Boston: “More Than a Feeling”
- Video: “Why I Almost Didn’t Become an English Teacher” by Cathy Fleischer
- “I Just Wanna Be Average” by Mike Rose: Lives on the Boundary, 1989
- “Between the Drafts” by Nancy Sommers: College Composition and Communication 43.1 (Feb. 1992): 23-31.
- “The Story of My Writing Life” by Oksana Moroz published in Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN)
More on Literacy
- Blog Entry: Freire
- Story: The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
- Wikipedia Entry: The Cat in the Hat
- Sample: Gian’s Early Literacy Story
- Story: Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
- Story: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Your Writing Life
- Small Group Discussion: What are the Rules for Writing?
- Make a list of rules people typically follow when writing papers
- The most common rule students have learned is that you can’t use ‘I’ in a paper
- Class Discussion: What are the Rules for Writing?
- Discuss: The Rules for Teaching Writing