Week 8: The Power of Literature

Literature is language charged with meaning.
-Ezra Pound

The DTRA reading exercise this week showed me again the power of literature to transport me to see the world through the eyes of another. Literature allow students to take students to access other world, realities, and points of view. In the mainstream society we have lost our connection to the oral tradition of stories to teach, discipline and inspire so we need to turn to books. Many untold stories of history that have not been available are now being published. Students can read literature and also construct their own reality by writing their own stories. I truly believe in the trans formative power of literature and we don't challenge our students enough to read powerful literature. The DTRA exercise also got me thinking why do we not ask questions to "assist students as they learn" (Buehl)? Most questions are asked at the end of reading and not while the student is reading. We give little scaffolding to students as they read.

put in Sticky Lightning technique from Rad


The ESL teacher in my school is new to the position this year and she just finished doing a novel study of Copper Canyon with her ESL class. She integrated language and content learning and was not content to "just do work sheets" with her students. By doing the novel study, she modeled to the students what they will do when they are in mainstream English classes. The teacher read the whole novel with the students with her and the students reading out loud. This allowed the students to stop and ask for clarification be it with vocabulary or comprehension questions. The novel study was challenging to the students but they finally finished and some of them proudly showed me their final projects.

I particularly like to encourage English teachers to do Literature Circles with their classes as a strategy to inspire their students. Many students just read and don’t “ink their thinking” or don’t think at all! While students read, they need a process to own their reading and to create meaning as they don’t know they have to be aware of their thinking in order to create meaning.

I like to take the strategies from Reading Power by Adrienne Gear and get students to use stickies while reading to “Connect, Question, Visualize, Infer and Transform” what they are reading. The teacher introduces the concepts and models the strategy by reading the first couple of pages of a novel with the students to show how it works. The teacher stops each time in the reading to put a sticky on the page with C(=connect) and speaks her “thinking voice” out loud that she writes on the sticky “oh I have a bratty sister like this sister in the story”. The teachers models each step of Reading Power and asks students to ink out their thinking with sticky notes. Eventually this thinking becomes automatic for students and they make notes in their journals for their discussions in their literature circle. By using the stickies, students create a wealth of comments and ideas about what they are reading and their reading “in to” the text becomes more natural.

Often asking high school students for their reactions to a text is like pulling teeth as we hear “I don’t know” so many times. I heard about this useful sticky technique from a BC teacher during aUBC course and I have forgotten her name! This sticky strategy allows students to learn the complexities of learning both language and content. I find that we need to teach students how to think and this strategy forces students to "ink their thinking" until it becomes automatic. Students take the stickies and transform all the material into incredibly rich journal entries and other projects.

Some of my UBC colleagues this summer integrated web2.0 technology into the traditional Literature Circle in the blog that they completed for the Library 2.o course: http://litcircles20.blogspot.com/
Students love to video themselves and post their videos for others to see (can we say youtube?). I have been using my small video camera called a Flip that allows me to film and post video right away. Teachers can set up closed learning communities where students can safely post videos and only the class can view them. I especially like the web 2.0 application VoiceThreads also.

Web 2.O Application VoiceThread:
VoiceThread (http://voicethread.com/#home) is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world
Source: VoiceThread 4 Educators Wiki
http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/

VoiceThread is free for teachers but if they want to add on their students to a secure K-12 network then they have to pay either 10 dollars to be on the network or $60 dollars to have a whole class on the network.
More info at Ed.VoiceThread: http://voicethread.com/pricing/k12/

Browse through some examples of educational VoiceThreads
( http://ed.voicethread.com/#q ) and see how students are using it to create stories, build understanding, and post their artwork. This site is like doing a gallery walk of students' projects but students can use a variety of ways to comment on another student's work and then they can have a dialogue about it. The VoiceThread “Many Voices on Darfur” made by a teacher consists of political cartoons about Darfur and it is amazing what students are inspired to write about this genocide happening in our time. http://ed.voicethread.com/#q+darfur

What is Reading Power: Teaching Students to Think by Adrienne Gear? Check out this excerpt!
www.stenhouse.com/pdfs/8203-ch1.pdf

What is a Literature Circle?
Check out this excerpt from the book Student Diversity: Classroom Strategies to Meet the Learning Needs of all Students by Faith Brownlie, Catherine Feniak, Leyton Schellert(2006)
Chapter 7: Literature Circles: The Basics, the Big Ideas, and Beyond
www.stenhouse.com/pdfs/8198ch07.pdf