Podcasts, Storytelling and Some Things that Never Change

Podcasts

Yesterday, the Pigs and I worked on podcasts.  Turns out podcasts are like stories on CD, only you make them yourself, on your laptop.

We started with the Mayan folktales linked in the Digital Parking Lot.  I read them out loud straight off the website, and each Pig chose one.  We talked about what changes we thought would make them better as oral tales, then I rewrote them.

Then Guinea Pig #2 narrated the stories into GarageBand, a program which evidently came installed on my Mac (ya see, I am starting to avail of a fuller range of its capabilities) through the built-in microphone.  We added some jungle sounds straight off the Mac; and we're good to go:

[well, evidently I'm not good to go, when it comes to uploading the files.  They appear to be in m4a format, and that evidently is not the format that Blogger prefers.  I expect Jennifer has some sort of magic wand that can be waved...  

post script: well, no, having read Blogger's helpful Help article, it appears that I need a place on the web on which the podcasts sit -- Blogger doesn't itself hold audio files.  Well, believe me, if I could figure out how to put the %4#@! things up on my *&$75%1! WEB SITE I'd have gone there first.  Someday.  Soon.  But trust me, the podcasts themselves are... terrific]

I'm a big time believer in audio stories and audio books.  They enable kids to "own" stories years before they can read; and even once they can, they can listen to books at higher reading levels than they're at.  Audio books build vocabulary, visualization capabilities, aural comprehension, and attention span.  Listening together in the car is a shared pleasure (one year, my son and I listened to the entire unabridged Hobbit and Lord of the Rings on the way back and forth to his school.  Over a hundred hours all in.  It went a whole lot faster.)

Podcasts allow you to make your own audio stories, without much hassle.  The Pigs and I selected, rewrote, and recorded these three in one afternoon; once I worked out how to use GarageBand I did another one with my mother in less than an hour.  Guinea Pig #2 was particularly taken with the project; he has significant language related disabilities (and also, perhaps because of them, particularly loves to listen to stories on CD).  I was able to put the ones he recorded on his iPod, again without undue difficulty.

Two thumbs up.

Storytelling

Much of the reason that podcasting was such an easy sell for the whole extended family is that the technology is such a direct and natural fit with storytelling.  And storytelling is a pretty big deal around here.  We read stories, we listen to stories on CD (and more recently, on iPod), we talk about stories, we tell stories to each other, the kids tell stories to us.

In Pig #1's Quaker school, they do a storytelling unit every fall.  Each kid, from second grade on up, selects a story and memorizes its "bones."  They practice telling, shaping, pacing, emoting.  Lat year the redoubtable Jim Weiss came and did a day-long workshop with them.  The unit culminates with Storytelling Night, in which all the kids' families come and watch them.

It's extraordinary to see what they can do.

Some Things that Never Change

 

We happen to be at my parents' house for the weekend, and as I began my re-write of the Mayan stories above, Guinea Pig #1 disappeared for a moment, then came back bearing this book:

It's entitled How to Tell Stories to Children, by Sara Cone Bryant.  I didn't provide my usual link to Amazon, because it was published in... 

1905.  

Here's the flyleaf:

Mary Jane Stewart Bates, of the beautiful handwriting so typical of her day, is not a member of my family, on any side.

The dedication of the book is this:

... which actually made me tear up, a little bit.

And it got me onto an extended backstory-telling of my own, of who the author was, who the author's mother was, who Mary Jane Stewart Bates was, and how this book made its way to my mother's house.  

Where, it turns out, my own daughter spied it on the shelves, several years ago, and read it, cover to cover.  Because, you know, she tells stories herself, to her siblings at home and to the larger audience at Storytelling Night.

"It's worth reading, Mom," she said earnestly.  "There's a lot of good stuff in there."  (The apple clearly doesn't fall very far from the tree.)

And she's right.  (She usually is.)

Here's the Table of Contents:

As is clear from the table of contents, the fundamentals of storytelling haven't changed much in the last 103 years.  Or the last 1,003 either, for that matter.  

She says a lot about internalizing the story, knowing it in your bones, making it your own and telling it from your own soul.  She talks, too, about pacing and voice.  About choosing your story based on your audience.  A lot of the same stuff that Jim Weiss talked about, in my daughter's school.

But more fundamentally, she makes perfectly clear what stories are for.  On page 3 she states clearly that although stories are often vehicles for conveying moral messages, or life lessons, or information about one subject or another, "its part in the economy of life is to give joy... To give joy, in and through the joy to stir and feed the life of the spirit: is not this the legitimate function of the story in education?"  

Quite so.

UDL Revisited

Earlier tonight, we took the Guinea Pigs to a production at a local playhouse of James and the Giant Peach.

We go pretty regularly to various productions at this and several other local playhouses, and when I ordered the tickets several months ago, I didn't much focus on the details of the write-up.  I rather came late to the Roald Dahl party -- he wasn't very well known, back in the day when I was myself a tot.  I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I remember the Oompa-Loompas' song to Mike Teavee making an impression, even then.  That was about it.  But when Guinea Pig #1 was nine or so, she ripped through about ten Dahl books in straight succession; and shortly thereafter Guinea Pig #2's teacher read Peach aloud in class; and over the years I've read Matilda and Elevator to one or the other of the younger Pigs.  And everyone's a fan.  So when I saw the Peach production on the Playhouse schedule, I just clicked through cheerfully without much thinking.

I didn't really notice, for example, that this particular production was being put on by the Signstage Theatre, from Cleveland.  

In Signstage productions, about half of the actors are speaking and about half are deaf.  Each character has a voice -- sometimes the actor's own; sometimes another actor's piped in from offstage or even spoken by someone else onstage.  Any time there are any spoken words, somebody on stage -- not necessarily the character who's got the action -- is signing what's said.

It sounds a little complicated, but it worked.

The kids were riveted.  Not just mine; throughout the place.  Which was, by the way, packed.

And it was fascinating.  Before the play began, kids throughout the theatre were poring over the program and signing their names out by letter, using the sign alphabet that had helpfully been printed in it:

Once the show began, kids stared rapt at the signing actors; some of them, including my son, unconsciously moving their own fingers to mimic the actors' movements.

After it was over, we headed next door to Paul Newman's restaurant for dinner, where there were a handful of other families whose kids, like ours, were still clutching their programs and signing out "secret codes" to each other.

Pretty neat.

It reminded me of two other things, which combined with the Signstage experience morphed into a little Education of Pam unit on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles enacted for the deaf population yield benefits to the population at large:

The First Connection: On our trip to Florida last month, we took the Pigs to a Polynesian Luau at SeaWorld.  (You know... geography lesson.)  We were seated next to a delightful young woman who turned out to be a deaf interpreter ASL Interpreting Services.  She was scoping out the luau because she was going to be interpreting it a few days later, for a conference that planned to attend the show.

A conference of...

dentists.

One of whom, evidently, was deaf.

It turns out that she does a great deal of "show" work; that a lot of entertainment businesses  go out of their way to make their shows accessible to the hearing-impaired.  She spoke particularly highly of Disney, which evidently is known throughout the deaf community for having interpreters available for all its shows, for providing interpreters for the duration of any Disney cruise on which there is even one hearing-impaired passengers, and for training interpreters to be truly integrated into the song-and-dance revues, rather than merely standing to the side signing the language.  Which in turn brought to mind:

The Second Connection: More years ago than I care to recount, here, one of my college friends rounded me up to attend a concert by the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.  (If you're not familiar with their music, follow the links out to their recordings, or follow the message from founder Berenice Johnson Reagon to her site, to hear clips.)

Check out the woman dressed in black, second to left.  Shirley Childress Saxton.

She doesn't sing.

She signs.

She's been a member of the group for... well, that was more than twenty years ago.  It's a small group.  She doesn't sing.

Why, I wondered, as they first came on stage, regal, straight-backed, dressed in bright African robes and towering hats; and she took her position and started signing, would a deaf person come to a concert?

But after I'd seen about two songs, I got it.  You'd come to see this group.  Precisely because it is accessible.  Saxton is a wonder.  It's an a capella group.  The women aren't singing the same words at the same time.  Saxton has to pick out one line that she's going to follow, and it's fascinating to watch -- she doesn't necessarily pick out voice carry the melody, or the loudest voice, or the voice whose lyrics are moving the most.  She doesn't stay with the same voice throughout a whole song, either.  She signs phrases, following this singer for a bit, then moving over to the next, then coming back.  Occasionally she just opens and closes her fist, in time with one of the thrumming, wordless, vocalizing parts that are keeping the beat.

All the while, she's swaying, leaning in and away, sometimes watching the singers, often looking out at the audience.

Poetry in motion.

Literally.

I wish I could put up a video clip; sometimes words really don't do it justice.

P.S.  Check out Roald Dahl's own website for loads of book-related games, fun facts, biographical tidbits, and lesson plans on the books for middle school teachers.

Tableaux

The very first activity we did in Educational Technology was to make what Professor Langran called "tableaux."

The only time I'd ever come across this term before was in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth.  In the novel, the Gilded Age New York society ladies, always casting about for suitable diversion, briefly lit upon the idea of tableaux vivants, or selecting key moments in classical history or famous plays or great works of literature, and enacting the selected moment.  They would create elaborate costumes and erect complicated settings, and then ensconce themselves into specially-built platforms, surrounded by frames and covered by heavy velvet curtains.  Ladies of means would throw large Tableaux Balls, in which the entertainment highlight would be when the party-goers would assemble before these platforms and admire the women as the curtains opened, first on Cleopatra and her asp, here; then on the drowning of Ophelia, over here; then on Delilah cutting the hair of Samson, over there.  The assembled audiences would clap, and at one such party they actually rated the tableaux and the top performer got a prize.

Like so much else that Mrs. Wharton wrote about, this evidently was actually a fad, for a brief phase in Mrs. Astor's New York.

Tableaux vivants were only briefly in fashion, but the concept of selecting and illustrating a single pivotal moment of a longer text is very old indeed.  Artist have been doing it for millennia.  Note that the Delilah link above routes to an earlier painting by Rubens.  And here is Millais' Ophelia; and here is Artemesia Gentileschi's*  Cleopatra.  And, to link over to projects that I'm working on elsewhere, here is Gilgamesh slaying the Bull of Heaven; and here is Isis sheltering Horus from Seth's wrath.

Long before I ever came to Educational Technology, I've been interested in this.  Of the whole story of Narcissis, which moment did Caravaggio choose to paint?  Of all the Divine Comedy, which was the moment that Botticelli chose?  Out of the whole Genesis creation story, which is the specific moment that Michaelangelo chose for the Sistine Chapel?  Why that moment?  Given the moment these artists chose, and the illustrations they produced to give form to that moment, what can we infer about their understanding of the text?  How can looking at these works of art inform our own reading?

I've always been particularly interested in this approach as a means of giving focus to stories in the Bible, which have, of course, served as artistic inspiration for centuries.  The Guinea Pigs and I have often, therefore, looked at artists' renditions of Torah and Bible stories we read.  Over the years I've collected a number of books that make this linkage easy...

...by providing the text right alongside great works of art illustrating what I'll now call tableaux from the story.  But we also do it a number of other ways too; we've collected a great number of postcards which the Pigs pass around; I scoop up old editions of Janson's at our library's annual used book sale and (gasp!) cut up them up for the prints; and we also use regular art books propped up into cookbook holders.  One way or another, we look at what artists have done to select and illustrate a particular moment.

And then sometimes, if time and interest levels allow, we do our own illustrations: 

Susanna at the Well

by Guinea Pig #1

Moses Hears the Burning Bush

by Guinea Pig #1

Samson Pulling Down the Walls

by Guinea Pig #2

It's a really great activity, having kids choose what they consider to be the "critical moment" of a story and then doing something to demonstrate their understanding.  It forces them to listen to the story carefully and actively.  It keeps them focused on the text, and gets them to consider "what is important in the story?" as opposed to the much easier question (that far too many schools spend far too much time on) of "how do I feel about the story?"  It assesses their comprehension of the story.  It's fun to do.  And it creates a record (we put the drawings into a pretty leather binder, which they like to look back on) which in turn reinforces the stories and the learnings.

Doing it Digitally

Recently, we tried digital tableaux at home.  The festival of Purim is coming up, so we dusted off our favorite retelling of the Esther story:

After we reread the story, the younger Pigs each chose what they considered to be the most important moment from the story.  (Guinea Pig #1 considers herself too old, these days, to engage in dress-up and re-enactment.  Sigh.  Perhaps I'll leave a copy of House of Mirth on her pillow...)

This is the moment that Guinea Pig #3 chose:

The Pig Speaks:  "I chose the moment when King Ahasuerus chose Esther to be the new queen and he put the crown on her. I chose it because it was really good for the Jews that he chose Esther, and so that feels good for me."

This is the moment in the story that Guinea Pig #2 chose:

The Pig Speaks:  "I chose the moment after Esther walked through the seven gates and the King lowered his scepter to allow Esther to speak.  The palace rules were, if he hadn't lowered his scepter, then Esther would be killed.  I chose this moment because I remember the first time I read this story, I was scared that she would die."

It may not be theology, but it's enough to be getting on with.

Anyway, I'm not throwing the art books or the Prismacolor pencils away, but I can see some real advantages to doing tableaux digitally:  

• It's really quick (better, maybe, for a classroom).  
• It generates no mess (better, maybe, for a classroom).  
• By middle school, many kids have worked themselves into a belief that they are not "artistic" (a whole 'nuther subject), which can serve as a barrier to drawing and illustrating.
• It's really, really easy to pop those tableaux pics onto a class blog, if you happen to have a class blog.  Which then serves as a built-in record and a means of reinforcement (not to mention, communication to parents).

And... I just discovered this benefit today, as I put the pictures up: 

• It's very easy to search on line for great works by other artists, to provide a comparison tableaux that illustrates the same text.    (I recommend this site).   Much easier than the post-it note, accordian file, and a-whole-lot-in-my-head system that we use around here.

And  finally...

• Pulling up an Internet file and looking at a painting projected onto a screen (to view aforementioned great works of art serving as tableaux for the same text) may be better for a full classroom than the passing around of a 4x6 postcard, or peering at the book propped up into a cookbook holder, that the Pigs and I do here at home.
  

Resources:

Esther's Story, by Diane Wolkstein, illustrated by Juan Wijngaard.  The best of several retellings of the Esther story, narrated in Esther's voice in the form of a journal.  It appears, sigh, to be out of print.  I hate that.

Queen Esther the Morning Star, by Mordecai Gerstein, is probably the best substitute, though it's for slightly younger children and doesn't have the wistfulness or the undercurrent of fear that makes Wolkstein's version so appealing.

The Illustrated Hebrew Bible, edited and adapted by Ellen Frankel.  I have given this beautiful book to countless bar and bat mitzvah kids over the years.  It keeps wandering out of then back into print, in apparently ever-declining-quality bindings, so buying used is probably a good idea.

Stories from the Old Testament: With Masterwork Paintings Inspired by the Stories.  Out of print, though there are a couple of copies available used through this link.

Women of the Bible, edited by Carole Armstrong.  Also out of print (what can I say), though well worth the $2 for which it's currently available used on Amazon.

Listen to Her Voice, edited by Miki Raver.  This one's still in print.  Both it and the prior one focus only on the stories in which women appear.

*  Mostly-unrelated sidebar:  Please wander around this quite terrific site devoted to the life and art of Artemesia Gentileschi, an extraordinary artist whose name would without doubt be far better known had she happened to have been born a more-favored gender.  Guinea Pig#1 and I did a unit on her a few years ago, and I wish we'd had a resource like this at the time.  It took us weeks to get one art book from interlibrary loan.

Evolution of an Educational Philosopher

I'm struggling a bit this week, trying to respond to the assignment about Digital Divide, the notion that there are significant and widening differences between the way that more privileged kids in wealthier schools utilize technology versus the way that poorer kids in more troubled school districts do.

I care about equity issues, and when I read through the syllabus prior to starting the course, I was very glad to see the issue on our agenda.  Now that I've read through the articles, though, I've realized that before I can tackle them frontally, on the class blog as per the assignment specifications, I have first to do a little sidebar analysis on where I see technology as supporting educational aims.  My hope is that this effort will provide a structure for the Digital Divide discussion and also a framework for the Educational Philosophy assignment downstream; I am, therefore, going to use this blog as my venue for hashing it out.

Evolution of an Educational Philosopher: A True and (Not-yet) Digital Story

Scene I: Thesis  

I started out as progressive as they come.  I swallowed John Holt hook line and sinker.  I gave the Guinea Pigs unfettered access to dress-up clothes and art supplies and magnified bug-boxes.  I surrounded them with books of all sorts, and read to them extensively every night: fairytales and myths and Lord of the Rings; but also biographies and Childcraft encyclopedias and The Way Things Work.  Alone amongst my fellow Fairfield County moms, I was ruthless in defending their downtime, fiercely protective of their right to be left alone.  When they got old enough, I sent them to marvelous schools dedicated to child-led, inquiry-based, collaborative project-oriented pedagogies.  For quite some time, this all seemed to work.  They all were creative, imaginative, engaged and delightful.  My eldest learned to read, early and effortlessly, exactly as John Holt and the Whole Language proponents said kids should, as naturally and organically as she'd earlier mastered walking and talking.

Scene II: Antithesis

A few years later, though, my middle child didn't learn to read, even after his Montessori school provided substantially more explicit and more structured instruction than my eldest, or other students in his class, ever needed.  As well, I noticed that my eldest, by then ensconced in a similarly progressive Quaker school, was not making progress in certain areas.  On the creative stuff, she was positively blossoming: she wrote poetry, she wrote and acted in plays, she assembled decahedrons out of straws to study engineering principles; she was grappling with conflict resolution strategies and learning lots of international affairs; and she was very, very happy.  But she wasn't learning discrete skills: math facts, computational sequencing, spelling rules, mechanics of paragraph writing.  I wrote earlier about the limits of the child-led, inquiry-based model: this is the point at which I began to realize that, left to their own devices, many kids won't choose to practice their penmanship, or memorize their multiplication tables, or master the difference between its and it's.  Nonetheless, these things are still worth learning.

As is my habit when confronted with any kind of problem, I hit the library ("just like Hermione," groans the eldest, now).  Two very different sets of educational philosophers ultimately helped me make sense of where we were.  The first were practitioners in various facets of learning disability research, notably Sally Shavitz and Louisa Moats.  Their research was quite persuasive: struggling readers could succeed, but they required certain, well-documented, interventions: direct instruction, highly structured and carefully sequenced skills instruction, many more rounds of practice than kids without disabilities generally need, and frequent review of material already mastered.  

Not a lot of scope for child-led choices or lounging-on-the-rug or inductive learning, here.

The second set of educational philosophers who served as my Virgil at this stage of my journey were, somewhat implausibly given my attitudes and circumstances at the time, advocates for a return to what they call "classical" education, notably Dorothy Sayers and her most avid intellectual heir,  Susan Wise Bauer.  The classical education movement, which currently seems to have its greatest traction within the homeschooling community, views education in terms of developmental stages: in the first stage, from about grades one through four, students should focus on amassing facts, mastering discrete skills, and absorbing stories and poetry.  In the second stage, from about grades five through eight, students should increasingly learn how to organize and analyze what they know, through increased focus on skills like outlining, learning the mechanics of good writing, and studying logic itself.  In the third stage, from about ninth to twelfth grade, students should increasingly take on higher-order tasks of evaluating and synthesizing their learning and presenting their conclusions forcefully.

I hadn't, then, come across the model of Bloom's taxonomy that we discussed in class several weeks ago.  But it's presenting the same idea; and also linking Bloom's construct of lower-order cognitive processes based on recall up through higher-level cognitive processes based on evaluating and creating to stages in human development, much along the lines of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  The idea is that before kids can write symphonies, they need first to learn their fingering and scales; then move to reading notation fluently; then learn to transpose keys; then learn the mechanics of theory and the structure of the symphonic form.  Then they can write symphonies.  

We spent over a year wandering in this particular circle of hell, but ultimately my guides led us out of it: based on the research of Shavitz and Moats, we sent Guinea Pig #2 to the Windward School, which, just as the research indicated, enabled him to become fully literate in about two years.  And we supplemented Guinea Pig #1's skills in math and spelling with specific, highly structured, sequenced work at home.  

Scene III: Angst

At a tactical level, we'd solved the specific needs of our specific Guinea Pigs at a specific moment in time.  At a theoretical level, though, my head was still reeling.  Which was better, inquiry-led or direct instruction?  Which was right, whole language or multisensory Orton-Gillingham-based?  Which is a better use of a second grader's language arts period, creating original books in writers' workshops or, as Susan Wise Bauer recommends, memorizing poetry and doing dictation?

As well, a still small voice kept nagging at me: so kids whose parents can afford it, get to go to inquiry-based Quaker schools with tiny classes and long blocks of time, where they can follow their bliss and build decahedrons out of straws... but the public school kids have to drill and kill to show improvement on CMTs?  What's up with that?

And then, even within our own family: the kids without learning disabilities get to put on full scale Shakespeare productions and fly off to Florida to do Original Play with the manatees... but the one with disabilities sits in a traditional desk facing forward reciting the letters of common but non-phonetic works in unison with his classmates?  What's up with that?

As usually happens, it was the Guinea Pigs themselves who pulled me out of analysis and back into the real world.  After a year or so, I realized that my daughter, who had grown to hate math because (however good her grasp on the underlying concepts) she kept getting wrong answers (due to computational errors), was vastly more contented once she got the basics down cold.  On the flip side, I realized that my son was vastly more contented sitting straight up in a traditional desk before an extremely directive teacher and actually learning to read than he ever had been lying on cushions on the rug and declining invitations to create Little Books in the absence of skills.

I realized that both of our kids, who were in schools as far apart on the pedagogical spectrum as was possible, were in a school that was "reasonably right" for them.  That there's no best model; just better and less good fit between model and particular child.

I also realized that neither school was perfect, even for the specific kid for which it was pretty good.  Every choice has attendant trade-offs.  My daughter's school, which is marvelous at deep delves into content areas, necessarily trades off breadth -- there's only so much time -- and is hit-or-miss on skills.  My son's school, which is all about skills and also is absolutely ruthless about time management around clearly defined priorities, is not particularly good at fostering creativity and wonder.

I realized that as parents, we were in charge of ensuring that the holistic needs of our Pigs were met.  It was our job to supplement our daughter's inquiry-based, child-led school experience with structured, sequenced skills; and to supplement our son's highly structured, skills-focused school experience with experiences that fed his heart and soul.

Scene IV: Synthesis

I end up here:

Any school that has made a strong commitment to any defined pedagogy, even out-there pedagogies like Waldorf, has something precious that most schools lack: clarity of purpose.  This is extremely valuable: to administrators and teachers, in making the inevitable tradeoffs; and to parents, in communicating a vision to determine the appropriateness of fit.  My daughter's school ultimately is about matters of heart and soul (and they are very good at it); my son's is ultimately about imparting skills (and they are very good at it).   There really is a difference, and what is really right for one kid can be really wrong for another.

That said, there actually are quite a few things that both schools, radically different though they are, do; things that have come to characterize, for me, the elements of schools that are happy places where kids can flourish.  In both schools, every single adult-- from the head of school to the office secretary to the bus driver -- makes eye contact and greets every kid by name.  In both schools, kids of all ages have time, every day, to run around and get some air.  In both schools, the kids are dismissed early on Fridays so the teachers have a block of time for development and preparation.  In both schools, the teachers communicate early, often, formally and informally with parents, about small triumphs and everyday matters as well as about Problems.  In both schools, kids and teachers alike laugh a lot.  Well, that stuff matters too, doesn't it.

I see a lot of value in the child development model proposed by Piaget: the notion that kids move through a cognitive progression, starting with very sensory-based and egocentric experiences and progressing, over time, to increasingly abstract and symbol-based reasoning.  

I therefore end up, in the preschool years, very attracted to Montessori methods of education: a carefully defined environment filled carefully limited, sensory based materials; within which children make their own choices of what they want to work on.  Teacher-led definition of space; child-led autonomy on how, within those parameters, they'll spend their time. 

As children reach elementary school age, Piaget's model suggests they progress to more concrete and logical operations.  At this point, the educational philosophy laid out by the proponents of classical education appeals to me.  Work diligently on mastering symbol systems (reading and numeracy); teach facts and simple classification tools in content areas; take them on nature walks armed with field guides and sketchbooks and teach them to look.  And feed their souls by flooding their environment with quality literature, music, and art.

As they get to middle school age, both Piaget and the classical educators say they are ready to shift to more abstract skills: outlining, expository writing, comparing, and discussing.  They're ready for logic as a subject and ready for multi-step operations in math.

By high school, they'll have both skills and background knowledge.  They'll be ready to take on higher-order tasks of evaluating and synthesizing their learning and presenting their conclusions forcefully.  They'll be able to speak with discipline and order, out of knowledge beyond their own immediate experience.

There ya go.

The Guinea Pigs and I were away on vacation...

... over President's Day.

We missed our annual reading of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

This is the finest speech ever made in the English-speaking world.

The kids and I usually use this marvelous little book, for children.  Its only words are the address itself, which are, famously, few.  Its images are powerfully, sorrowfully drawn, and invite us to go through slowly.  Reflectively.

Several years ago, I also read this marvelous little book, for adults.  The author, Ronald C. White Jr, is dean and professor of religious history at San Francisco Theological Seminary.  The book is a line-by-line reading of the address, as if it were Torah commentary.  It puts the speech in the context of the day, but also draws out how unique it was in that time, for its very brevity as well as for its calm but firm insistence upon reconciliation at a moment that lesser mortals would have seized as triumphant.

"With malice towards none, charity towards all... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

May you rest in peace, Mr. President. 

ps. Another wonderfully illustrated picture book, this one depicting the Gettysburg Address, is this one, illustrated by Michael McCurdy.

2/19 Assignment: Mid-Course Reflections

This course has me out of my comfort zone.

I'm a text type at heart, a reader and writer and evaluator of words.  On all the various "learning styles" instruments that I've ever used, I consistently rate as relentlessly (some who know me well might say, "ceaselessly") verbal.  So it's not just the technology itself that is throwing me, but also, more broadly, the emphasis on image-based rather than language-based content.

It's not a bad thing, to be out of my comfort zone.

Nor is it a bad thing, to be confronted (some who know me well might say, "bonked over the head with a baseball bat") with my own learning style and how it informs my own selection, evaluation, and presentation of content.  

As well, I have some pretty deep-rooted ideas about ways in which both image-based content and rapid-fire presentation can cause more harm than good.  This is a long story, and not necessarily appropriate for this venue; but suffice it to say that due to these ideas and the values arising out of them, we do not have cable in our home, nor any sort of video games; nor any beeping handheld devices.  Truly, I am not a Luddite.  But I have purposely designed a life with considerably fewer technology-based interruptions than most modern Americans'; a life that is intentionally language-rich and which intentionally favors literature, art and music that have stood the test of time.

This course hasn't changed that, nor would I expect it to.  What it has done, in a big picture sense, is challenge me to consider whether, and if so how, I might draw lines differently in a classroom than in our home.  

Having read ahead on the syllabus (as my eldest would groan, "just like Hermione,") I have also been challenged to try and sort out how technology "fits in" with my emerging educational philosophy.  Because even though that isn't exactly how the syllabus question is posed, that's the order in which I have to do it: first, articulate an overall educational philosophy; only then consider where and how technology might (I groan myself) "add value."

Finally, at the most obvious level, I have been challenged to learn the technologies covered in class, though with the notable exception of the WEB SITE, this hasn't thus far been as bad as I feared.  I've been particularly thrilled to develop rudimentary blogging skills, so much so that I launched a new one to chronicle our recent family vacation.  It was great fun to do, and my father-in-law, at least, enjoyed reading it.  

I hope, in the remainder of the semester, that I can effect my vision of drawing upon the narratives and art of several different ancient civilizations to complete each of the remaining assignments, so that I end up with a portfolio of stories that I've always loved, brought to new life by technologies I never really considered.

2/12 Assignment: "Value Added" of Technology Uses Discussed Thus Far

I'm taking three courses this semester: this one; Psychological Issues in Special Education; and Multicultural Issues in Counseling. All three, it turns out, speak to differences between learning styles and capabilities; and alternative means of working effectively with a diverse student population. I'd like to claim that I carefully planned the timing of my coursework so that I could take full advantage of these synergies, but I'd be lying. Sometimes, synchronicity just occurs.

But as it happens, I have referred to UDL explicitly in one of my other courses (using it to frame the idea that classroom modifications made to benefit special education students can also have the unintended effect of benefiting other students without disabilities as well); and spoken of the potential value of technology in reaching certain students from multicultural backgrounds (who may, for example, not be comfortable speaking in front of groups but may be quite comfortable presenting information electronically).

So I'm getting... somewhere.

The term "value added," which once held a specific technical meaning with respect to production processes, has now entered the popular lexicon and is bandied about freely, with radically different meanings to different people. In Sara Dexter's eTIPS article, she defines technological "value added" to be technology that "makes possible something that otherwise would be impossible or less viable to do" (Dexter article, p. 3). 

Some of the uses of technology that we've touched on in our class readings and discussions have met this standard more obviously than others. In class two weeks ago, we briefly touched on a tiny smattering of the primary documents available through the Internet: this is probably the most clear example of what Dexter calls "value added... in accessing information" (p. 5) that simply was not available to schoolchildren even a decade ago. The Webquest examples we looked at demonstrated ways that younger children might taste some of these primary sources within reasonable parameters, to ensure against the perennial Internet risk of Too Much Information.  By providing a guided, "scaffolding" structure, the Webquest framework may serve to provide "value added... in organizing information," as Dexter defines the term.  The Peace Corps blogs in the Resource list are a neat, very personal window into another world; and both they and the class blog featured in the Teddy Bears Go Blogging example served as what Dexter calls "value added... in communicating knowledge." Even the tableaux we worked with the very first class demonstrated a very quick, very accessible means of demonstrating understanding of the "key moment" in a text -- another example of "value added... in communicating findings and understanding to others."

At the same time, I see limits. In the Teddy Bears Go Blogging example, the most obviously terrific, inquiry-based, multisensory activities that the obviously terrific teachers were doing, were independent of the blog. The role of the blog was limited to communicating after the fact -- which does indeed meet Dexter's definition (and rightly so), but is not itself the main instructional event; nor is it the salient, impressive part of the Teddy Bears story. In the You Gotta BE the Book example, the role of technology is (again, rightly) subordinate to the larger idea of using drama to engage and motivate reluctant readers. Motivation per se actually does not meet Dexter's criteria for "value added" -- she is, perhaps, trying to steer away from the idea of "computer time" as a reward. In any event, as I blogged earlier, using drama (and technology) as motivational tools can be powerful, but ought not be confused with the still-necessary long slow slog of actually learning to read.

Even the wealth of wondrous primary sources: there's room for skepticism about the "value added," particularly in the younger levels of schooling. The Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive model that we discussed in class is a succinct model for the stages of learning; and the types of primary sources we looked in the Valley of the Shadow site were compelling examples of using primary documents to support higher-order Historical Thinking skills such as Applying, Analyzing and Evaluating.

But I would argue that there is a reason why Bloom put the lower order, recall-based skills at the bottom of the pyramid. And a reason that the bottom levels of the pyramid are bigger.  The model is meant to be hierarchical; with higher-order cognitive processes building on the foundational base of knowledge.

The implication of this for the question of "value added" as defined by Dexter is that before the "instructional goal" can turn to analysis and evaluation, students need to acquire significant background knowledge. Before they can plunge in and analyze that astonishing news clip about the adolescent youngster waiting for a bus, to take him to a school that had been closed for four years, they need basic background: about Jim Crow, and Brown v. Board of Ed, and the response of selected school districts, and how the courts were used to effect social change, and a host of other issues.   Otherwise, the clip -- marvelous though it is -- cannot make any sense. Otherwise, there is not, really, any value added.

Otherwise, they're just watching TV.

And that is, over and over, the question that Dexter posed, that we have keep coming back to, with relentless honesty: what is the "instructional intent"? Does technology actually support it?