It Takes a Village... Or, At Least, a Teacher's Lounge

This topic might not be earth-shattering or life changing, but I'd like to bring the topic of collaboration to the forefront for a moment. By reading through all of these blogs and listening to the many brilliant things by classmates say in and out of class, I've realized just how much you can learn with and from your colleagues. The collective English department, the teacher's for a certain grade, or even just the teachers that all have lunch at the same time can be a huge help to one another. I simply hope to be able to lean on my colleagues for help, ideas, and to learn from as well as, hopefully, to be able to provide the same for them. In the meantime, I'm aiming to recreate that type of atmosphere here at school. This group mentality, I fervently believe, will help each of us become better teachers and, in turn, help each of our students.

Drawing is Scary

Broz's article on graphic representations of literature brought out my skeptical side. I began reading through all of Broz's high praise of graphic representations and how he still cherishes his crayon drawing of Gawain the Green Knight. That seemed great for him, but I couldn't help but think, "Hey, what about the kids who cringe at the idea of drawing for an assignment?". Those would be the students like me. I know that at the heart of all the explorations into multimodality the idea is to help kids who do not learn via oral and written word as well as through other means. Though this is not the only intent of multimodality, it still seems to push the subject of English a bit farther out of the hands of those geared towards traditional means of learning the subject. I never want to isolate any student and I fear that things like graphic representations, which would instantly turn me off of an assignment, might do that for some students.
Now, this is not to say that I dislike the idea of graphic representations or multimodality. Graphic representations, when given such a strong structure, such as Broz describes, that aims students towards higher level thinking and towards better critical thinking and writing skills, are great tools. Also, multimodality has opened my eyes to a whole new and exciting world of teaching as well as confirmed many of my own aspirations. My lurking fear though still exists. I feel that the solution, though not the easy or quick one, is to offer multiple options for students or to leave room for personalization and interpretation with assignments of this nature. Multimodal assignments such as graphic representations can be great for some students, I just never want it to be the kryptonite for other students. The bottom line is well-planned teaching is very important in order to design assignments that persuade students to think and work hard rather than dissuade them.

Hand Wavers Anonymous

Prior to shooting our 20 shot video, I was skeptical. I could come up with a good 2 million places I'd rather be than on the recording end of a camera. My group members Tim and Sami were kind enough to step up and be our actors (a role that they both excelled at despite what they'd tell you) leaving me to be on the other side of the camera. Though I claim to have no tangible skills with a camera, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The project opened by eyes to another medium I was waving my hands at. It made me really visually dissect the mental pictures the short story made in my head. In order to do this, I had to read and fully comprehend the story. This is always step one of any reading project. Moving on from that, a project should make you think about and better understand the message and tone of a piece. This project did this particularly well. We weren't going to simply capture the plot of the piece when we had be armed with the knowledge of different types of shots, angles, and camera motions. This information is what made the project. I have participated in other video projects where all we did, more or less, was set the camera up on a tripod, hit record, acted the scene out, hit end, and turned the thing in. This barely even grazes the surface potential of a short story. If I can give my students these basic ideas on cinematography, a video project can actually teach interpretation skills rather than simply allowing students to act.
Besides this benefit, I've noticed through talking to others who have completed similar projects that these projects are memorable. You don't put hours into a five minute video and just forget about. I think if I can assign a project that will instill knowledge in my students that they won't forget, I may just be convinced to stop waving my hands at projects that move away from simply paper, pencil, and a marker or two.

Big Kid Picture Books

According to every movie about a teenager I've ever seen, I should have had a sizeable stack of comic books hidden under my bed at some point during my life. Apparently, I don't live in a movie, though. My first and only exposure to the medium of graphic novels and comic books came during my World Literature course last year. I must admit that when I first ordered the graphic novels, I scoffed at the fact that I would be reading books with pictures and getting college credits for it. When I got off my literary high horse and finally dove into them, though, I found out these were much more than the big kid picture books that I thought they were.
These graphic novels were challenging. It wasn't as if someone had written a short story, sprinkled some cartoony pictures on top, and spread it out to a full length novel. They had long, detailed, symbolically-rich, plots and messages. I thought that they'd be watered down novels that used pictures to help those with weak imaginations and grasps on the language, but, wow, was I wrong. I actually had a lot more trouble working out the symbolism and messages of a graphic novel than I've had with print-based novels.
With this experience in mind, when I read the section of Jacquelyn McTaggart's "Graphic Novels: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" entitled "I Understand the Value of Using Graphic Novels With Reluctant and Struggling Readers. Do They Offer Any Benefit for Proficient Readers Who Already Like to Read?," I agreed completely with the author. She says that "[a]dvanced and proficient readers profit [from] ... [t]his multi-sensory activity [which] stirs the imaginations of more advanced readers and challenges them to use their higher-level thinking, reading, and writing skills (McTaggart 34). The visuals aren't things that detract from the novel and simply the reading for advanced and proficient readers. They add more to them. The visuals can be engaging and imagination stirring, but they can also be an added level for interpretation. That is what I think we so often miss when we think about graphic novels. They make the reader engage on so many different levels in order to truly take them all in. This is were the value for them comes in for the classroom.
So, let's step down from our literary high horses and give these big kid picture books a chance.