inklings of thought

(Since I accidentally skipped ahead last week and wrote about chapter three, this week I'll be backtracking and writing about chapter one. My bad.) **** Poetry levels the writing playing field (14). That Christensen chooses to open her chapter, "The Role of Poetry," with such a bold statement caught me off guard. Even though I'm somebody who writes and reads poetry regularly (poems often speaker louder than prose, working their way into the crevices in our lives, digging up emotion once displaced mistakenly or intentionally... try it, it's fun), I've never heard that poetry can build confident writers in ways that the "other areas of literacy education" Christensen references do not. Rather, I've always heard a mixture of too much pretty language , or it's all smart talk -- flies over my head , and of course the this is way too confusing. Why are the lines like this? What the heck is that word doing there? In many cases, poetry has ...

When I lived out west, there was a night where, about seventy miles north of town, a fire had gotten out of control and was storming through the wide open prairie. The people I was staying with thought if we drove far enough we could see the light from the flames on the horizon. "Your first fire," they told me, like it was a coming-of-age ceremony. So of course, we drove. We never saw the fire (it was farther away than we truly wanted to go so late at night), but we stopped on a side road and took in the stars for a few solemn moments. Fires out of hand were hardly a good thing, and last we knew, it was heading straight toward a town. One of us remarked that before people populated the west -- as it is, it's scarcely populated compared to the east and west coasts -- fires must have blazed on and on for years. "Can you imagine a thousand year fire, just going in this dry climate without anyone or anything to stop it? Can you imagine what that would have been like...

I recently (as in, moments ago) retweeted Shay Stewart Bouley , executive director of Community Change Inc., Boston, saying, "Shutting up is actually a skill that is worth practicing. If the topic isn't your lane, it's ok to be quiet." In the second half of thread, she elaborates: "The world is larger than your views." Now, this may seem totally random -- but I think in light of this week's readings, from "Coteaching" and the narrative writing section in Teaching for Joy and Justice , it's incredibly relevant.  The teachers in each of these readings seem to agree that allowing students to shape their learning is integral to their growth not only as students but as people. For example, the process of a read-around, where students share their own personal narrative writing, is in itself a student-centered activity where the teacher sits back and listens. And by encouraging students to tell their own stories, Linda Christensen found that ...

"It's about the people, as with all good things in life."       +  Troy Hicks Attending my first RI Writing Project conference was a whirlwind. I didn't expect the six hours to fly by like they did, but when you're actively engaging in new perspectives on digital learning and literacy in the classroom, I suppose that's what happens!  The number one question I came away with in mind from Troy Hicks' keynote address was: How do we help our students become not only consumers but creators of knowledge?  Hicks discussed the necessity of teaching students to not just mindlessly consume the information presented to them on a daily basis, but to become critically engaged with with, to the ends of questioning, reclaiming, and recreating. That he also challenged us, the educators and teacher candidates, to question what we knew and believed about what we consider credible evidence, what passes for "good" knowledge, and then how we exist with these a...