Drawing to Review

During the Slice of Life Story Challenge, my friend, Erin, blogged about using visual images as a means to reflection, I've been thinking about how the arts affect thinking and learning.  You can read her post here. One strategy we've practiced each day during the writing institute at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) is drawing in literacy quadrants to brainstorm, connect or review.

Lara Zielinsky, a workshop participant last year, reflects on her own experience at ACA using the quadrants to visually process during last year's writing institute here. At first the literacy quadrant strategy work Dr. Elsie Olan and Dr. Jeffrey Kaplan reminded me of a strategy I used to use with readers I called four square. I used the tool to rehearse reading strategies that proficient reader research revealed: visualizing, connecting, predicting, etc. (Pearson). I used it assess readers and to review shared text before moving on.

One of the differences in the two strategies is visual. We draw in each square on the literacy quadrant. Earlier in the week Jeff said, "we draw in this class because I want you to remember what it's like to be a kid...if you remember them [students] as kids, you won't get lost." Our kids come to many things for the first time in our classes, even in high school. There is something about drawing that brings us back to those first times and our own approximations.

Drawing, like writing, is thinking made visual. Our quadrants become  nonlinguistic representations of our ideas and much like young writers--or as Steve Moline would say, "visual thinking." Thinkers become composers when they use their visualizations to tell the stories. 

Today we used our visualizations to reflect on our assignment. Our assignment--submitted digitally--for the ten-day writing institute includes: 

1. a memorable writing moment (narrative)
2. a procedure (how to, technical writing)
3. a lesson or unit plan that addresses a problem of practice
4. an argument that connects to our chosen problem of practice
5. an informative piece (the argument topic recast in different genre)
6. an experiential piece of writing based on our observations of art students at work
7. a 6-10 minute showcase presentation (done in person, not digital)

To review and plan for the writing, we drew four of our ideas on today's quadrants. After we drew, volunteers shared out with the whole group. I've noticed, in my own classroom that if I maintain the pattern of share with a partner and then share out, students say more.  We did share with partners first today and I noticed I missed that additional rehearsal.   Here are my drawings: 

I am focusing on the Art of Analysis project I did with students this past year. In students' final letters to me many students wrote about missing the connection between our curriculum and the project. My intent was to teach students about art movements and grow their background knowledge and continue to work on writing analysis of poetry. Both would prepare students for further work in IB as they will learn about literary movements and be expected to compose commentaries--oral and written-- about poetic texts. But, and that's a big one, the project won't prepare (or engage them) if they do not understand the goals and the purpose. So, I'm working on clarifying both in ways I hope students will better understand.

The six pieces of writing do not have to be connected. In fact, the personal narrative I planned isn't. It also isn't the narrative I now know I need to write. The narrative that connects is a piece I blog briefly about two students who visited my classroom on a day that we were discussion Pop Art in preparation for our next pieces in our altered art books. I wrote "Art Engagements" a couple of months ago; find it here. 

The procedural piece I've completed; it's a screencast on how to use Google Scholar. I posted it to Screencast-o-matic here. 

The lesson plan, analyzing word choice, with all of it's pieces is in revision. 

The argument idea, the lower-right quadrant on my drawing,  came from something my friend, Donalyn Miller, wrote about this fall on her blog. Her post "No More Language Arts and Crafts" articulates in a real and authentic way the frustration of a teacher-parent who sees instructional practice gone awry. It is a piece of writing that has resonated with me all year. It will inspire my argument piece, but my argument is not Miller's. 

I want to write the case for infusing the visual arts in language arts. I want to write about how arts integration, purposeful arts integration--not crafting kleenex boxes in a incomplete and misguided attempt to build community-- builds cognitive capacity and achievement. I want to take a walk with Eliot Eisner and have a cup of coffee with Ruth Hubbard and Karen Ernst. 

Works Cited

Eisner, Elliot. "Art and knowledge." Handbook of the arts in qualitative research(2008): 3-12.

Eisner, Elliot W. The arts and the creation of mind. Yale University Press, 2002.

Hubbard, Ruth Shagoury, and Karen Ernst. New Entries: Learning by Writing and Drawing. Heinemann, 361 Hanover St., Portsmouth, NH 03801-3912, 1996.

G.R.R. at A.C.A.

My  P.Y.P.s are on a journey to T.A.G. problems on practice that plague them. Some of M.Y.P.eeps speak the language of water. A.T.L.ases of knowledge, they are afloat on a R.A.F.T. in a "sea of talk" (Britton). As we pass the Policy Cruise bedecked with slogans and snappy music we see a shadow behind the D.R.A.P.E.S. in the control room. G.R.R., if only they would come out from behind the shade and see us, rescue us, reel us in...

During the writing institute today we talk about acronyms. We talked speaking up and looking down. We talked instruction and assignments. We talked about following "our artists" -- observing them work, documenting their process and writing about the experience. Art graduate students are also here at the Atlantic Center for the Arts working to create pieces over the ten day institute.

The specifics of our assignment was revealed today and we talked about strategies we could use to accomplish the work of writing. Two strategies took center stage today: Carol Santa's R.A.F.T. and P. David Pearson's Gradual Release of Responsibility (G.R.R.).

I love using R.A.F.T. for writing, but you know what I love most about Dr. Carol Santa? She has wilderness experiences (including horses and a barn and kids and mountains) every day. When she spoke there might have been mention of llamas too. She co-founded a school in the wilderness! She and Dr. John Santa founded the Montana Academy, a therapeutic school with an integration of services and curriculum, in 1997. The campus addresses the needs of whole children, whole teenagers. These needs including fitness, friendships, academics, therapeutic and medical. After listening to her talk about the academy at NCTE one year, I put it on my bucket list. What a gift, the spark that brought be back to that teaching dream today.

Another back in time moment came during the discussion around the gradual release model. This one sent me back to my classroom, to the day my district came out to video tape me teaching. I wrote about the model and the video taping here.

For all learners, initiate and veteran, kid and adult, apprentice and master, learning is a process. It is a moving forward and a moving back. It is remembering and constructing.  What we bring to the table sustains us. It nourishes us and engages us. What we bring to the table, our attitudes, our experiences, our hopes, our expectations, our dreams, our supplies-- the ephemera of process and product--matters.

I've been taking pictures of tables for a few months now--still exploring the idea, but here are a few of the artists' tables from our time spent hovering on the edges of creation today.

Glossary

P.Y.P. - Primary Years Program of the International Baccalaureate
T.A.G.- talented and gifted
M.Y.P - Middle Years Program of the International Baccalaureate
A.T.L.- approaches to learning
R.A.F.T.- role, audience, format and topic, a writing strategy developed by Carol Santa
D.R.A.P.E.S.- dialogue, rhetorical questions, analogies, personal experience, examples and statistics,             a writing strategy developed by Barry Lane

Works Cited

Barnes, D., Britton, J., & Rosen, H. (1971). Lan-guage, the learner, and the school (rev. ed). Har-mondsworth, England: Penguin.

Lane, Barry, and Gretchen S. Bernabei. Why We Must Run with Scissors: Voice Lessons in Persuasive Writing 3-12. Discover Writing Press, 2001.

Santa, Carol Minnick. Content Reading Including Study Systems: Reading, Writing and Studying across the Curriculum. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 4050 Westmark Drive, Dubuque, IA 52002., 1988.

Of Scavenger Hunts and Metphors

Today during our writing institute at the Atlantic Center for the Arts we were asked to work in teams to create clues that would lead a group to an ah ha. We were designing a ten step scavenger hunt, a quest for a grand prize. We were direct to think about:  topic, audience, purpose, planning and procedures. we had roughly thirty minutes to construct our hunt for the other team.

Alexis, Mariel, Jacquie, Jeff and I brainstormed topics. We talked about leading the team through places that could inspire in order to guide them to the loft space in the library cottage and to quote bookmarks we made. We  decided to plan out places first and then the group worked on a pattern for the clues. I went to cut card stock into book mark strips while the team began clue writing.

We are the language arts team and it so happens that the other team is predominantly math and science teachers. Our clues were largely metaphorical.

We led them from the main museum building to several of the studio spaces in hopes they would end in the library loft.

One clue , Moby Dick, pointed them to a  whale sculpture on the path to the studios. Banana Split Republic arachnid style should have sent them to the large Banana Spider web along the studio walk way. "Can you smell-la-la-la what the rock has got cookin'!" was supposed to lead them to the communal kitchen.

Their clues. were cat themed and specifically directional. Clue 1: Head to the gallery and follow your feline instincts.

Immediately we knew where to go and the clue made me think: ledges. I headed to a ledge and found the second clue on a photograph of Paul Morrissey, Warhol filmographer with studio cat, Nik.

The team we sent out is still wandering the property. Our clues were largely metaphorical. And direction-ly challenged. We did not tell the other team where to go, "like to the gallery." 

What did we learn? We learned about process and planning. We talked about the importance of the end goal and making the end clear to students from the beginning. The other team realized they were afraid of failure. They did not want to return to home base without completing the course. They also thought, "They changed the game on us!" Ivet said that the experience puts educators in students' shoes. Elsie said "we wanted to prove to the other team that their clues helped us succeed."

My team talked about the big difference between literal and figurative language. For some, figurative language is great fun, for others the figurative can frustrate.  As a final note to my future teacher self: details matter and directions are not improved by metaphor.

The Slice of Life Story Challenge is hosted by the talented team at Two Writing Teachers.
Link up your slice on Two Writing Teachers on Tuesdays. Thanks, Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna and Beth.