English that matters presentation

2010 Global Education Conference Session
By Terry Heick

English that Matters:
Increasing ELA Authenticity
throughMedia

Agenda
What’s wrong with the ELA that we’ve got?
What underlying assumptions support these ideas?
What exactly are “media” and “authenticity,” and what do they have to do with ELA?
What is schema, and how does it fit in here?
What does a “reformed,” media-driven ELA unit look like?
Questions

Thesis
While we focus on the minutiae of education, we're
forgetting the inseparable social components—or
social arena--of authentic learning.
The process of innovating an increasingly
irrelevant ELA curriculum can be initiated
through a focus on the art and science of media
design.

Current Challenges
1. Increasingly awkward, dated, and irrelevant
standards.
Common Core, Grade 8: “Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate
general academic and domain-specific words and phrases; gather
vocabulary knowledge when considering a word or phrase important to
comprehension or expression.”

Current Challenges
2. Accordingly numb curriculum and curricular resources.

Current Challenges
3. “Professional Learning Communities” that
“unpack” said uneven standards to ensure
“proficiency” on end-of-the-year exam.
This renders institutionally-centered learning, not
authentic, student-centered learning.

Current Challenges
4. Intervention models to “support” students to
“master” a model of school that remains sterile and
non-authentic.

Conclusion
Educators must be fluent users of complex and
modern media, and seamlessly merge those media
forms into rigorous, student-centered,
differentiated instruction.

Moby Dick is Dead.

Fortunately….
Modern media can also effortlessly bring “classic” (read: culturally detached) media into focus.

“Intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct.“
Sir Ken Robinson
Are our schools?
Is our Curriculum? Our instruction?
Our methods of measuring success in schools?

Defining Authenticity
Broadly, Authenticityrefers to differentiated work that meets the needs of learners. This can be in regards to curriculum, curricular resources, instructional strategies, or social and physical environment.
More specifically, let’s consider a framework.

Ten Underlying Assumptions of a 21st Century ELA Curriculum
Authentic learning should result in personal and/or social change.
2. Our current system of education is inadequate.
3. ELA—roughly put as “reading and writing”—provide foundational skills and concepts within any system of learning.
4. ELA should therefore provide leadership in innovating curriculum.
5. The legacy of ELA is tied to works and thinkers that have been dead for centuries, and/or that is written in single-media forms not commonly or “seamlessly” consumed by modern learners.

6. While new forms are undoubtedly necessary, it will likely require reform to get there.
7. Rich ELA curriculum is media-centered.
8. Changing forms of media are a byproduct of rapid technology progression and innovative user adoption.
9. Media now has significant social dynamics.
10. Merging classic and modern media forms to mine their considerable potential can not only improve learning, but provide scaffolding for ELA educators as we seek out new forms of learning are sought.
Ten Underlying Assumptions of a 21st Century ELA Curriculum

Existing Forms
R e f o r m
New Forms

Examples of Merging Classic and Modern Media

Sample Prompt
Robert Frost was very clear about the need For spaces in
life—both physical and emotional. In some works, he
explored the grandness of solitude, while in others
emphasizing the interdependence of the human
experience. If he were alive today, Robert Frost
would not “like” facebook.

Sample Prompt
As a modern pop star, one could say that Lady
Gaga symbolizes the intellectual superficiality
and bankrupt morality of our culture. If she
were alive today, Emily Dickinson would not
haveLady Gaga on any of her iTunes playlists.

Sample Prompt
Wendell Berry, perhaps our nation’s greatest living
writer, was known to criticize what he called
“dispossessed living.” With this in mind, Wendell
Berry would have no problem shopping at his local
Wal-Mart.

English That Matters
Media: A vehicle enabling the intentional communication of a thought or idea; a showcase for a message.

Thinking about Media Patterns

Complex Thinking about Complex Media
Complex Thinking about Simple Media
Simple Thinking about Complex Media
Simple Thinking about Simple Media

Media: Static and Dynamic

The current trend of media is one of convergence and interactivity. This makes modern media a gold mine for extracting and showcasing current national standards and tangent initiatives (ACT, SAT, Common Core, P21, NCTE)

Convergence of Media

from the Appendix: Selected NCTE/IRA Standards for English Language Arts Pertaining to 21st Century Literacies:

1.Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an understanding of texts, themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world.

Why does Media matter?
Schema.

Schema
Schema refers to a cognitively native framework for
making sense of ideas.
Roughly put, existing old stuff we already know
helps us to make sense of new stuff we don’t.
By using native media, we’re using “stuff” they’ve seen before so that they might master skills and concepts they haven’t via transfer.

Media leverages existing learner schema.

Schema

Integrating Authenticity
How?

“Integrating these skills when deep into the curriculum mapping process is a natural way to ensure their genuine development in the classroom.”
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
Upgrading the Curriculum,
Curriculum21’s “Essential Education for a Changing World”

Standards

Forcing authenticity
Curriculum
Instruction

Conclusions
ELA is, fundamentally and perhaps unwittingly, the art and science of media design.
Media is diverse, dynamic, and social.
Media leverages schema, encourages transfer, and supports meaningful differentiation.
Technology constantly evolves media. ELA, therefore, must evolve in parallel.
This is not an either-or proposition of technology-based media versus novels and poems. Because of the schema, media can endorse and otherwise bring into focus seemingly irrelevant, dated single-media texts as we seek out new forms of learning.

12 Next Steps
Close examination of media forms
Deconstructing the “21st Century ELA Framework”
“Personal & Social Change”: A Closer Look
Common Core standards in a 21st Century Classroom
Media-Culture relationships
Technology and Self-Directed Learning Models
“Education Reform” vs. New Forms of learning
The Media-Supports-Assessment Model
Project, Problem and Inquiry-based learning
Media Best Practices
Barriers to Media Adoption
Rethinking Differentiation

Questions?

English that matters presentation

by TeachThought on Nov 16, 2010

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