New Jersey English Journal 2013

New Jersey English Journal 1
New Jersey English Journal
2013 Issue
4 Call for Manuscripts
5 From the Editor
Dana H. Maloney
TEACHING ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS IN AND FOR THE 21ST
CENTURY:
WHAT AND HOW?
6 From Literature to Literacy
Heather D. Rocco
11 Teaching English in the 21st Century: An Integrated Approach
Patricia Hans
16 Tweet This: Helping Students Transfer their Digital Media Skills to
Complex Reading Tasks
Jennifer Beach and Stacia Keel
23 The Creative Imagination and Its Impact on 21st Century Literacies
Jeffrey Pflaum
30 i-teaching in the 21st Century
Liz deBeer
33 Hip to Be Square
Liz deBeer
35 Literary Instagram: Shakespearean Imagery in Social Media
Gregory Vacca
37 From Sound Bites to Sound Learning: Engaging One-Click Kids in Long-
Term Study
Jessica Rosevear
39 Have You Been MOOCed?
Ken Ronkowitz
GENERAL INTEREST
42 The Young Adult in Literature -- Feeling It!
M. Jerry Weiss

2 2013 Issue
46 If You Could See What I See
Mary Ann St. Jacques
51 One Book, One College: Cumberland County College’s Approach
Walter H. Johnson
53 On Language and Rarity
Vanessa Rasmussen
59 A Lesson Dashed
Gary J. Whitehead
63 Is That It?
Dana H. Maloney
POETRY
10 Working/Mother
Anne Wessel Dwyer
29 High School in Reverse
Gary J. Whitehead
34 An Ode to the Timed Essay
Andy Hueller
38 On Repeatedly Rereading Shelley’s Frankenstein
Vanessa Rasmussen
62 Hurricane
Joe Pizzo
64 Public School in the Year 2031
Joe Pizzo
66 Writing Process
Dana H. Maloney
68 Shakespeare In the Park Washed Out: A Villanelle
Marcia Holtzman
Cover design by Jonathan Kielmanowicz for New Jersey English Journal

New Jersey English Journal
2013 Issue
New Jersey English Journal is a peer-reviewed publication of the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English
(NJCTE). This journal is intended to serve our members through the sharing and showcasing of research,
best practices and ideas related to K-12 English Language Arts education.
Dana H. Maloney, Editor
Editorial Board
Patricia Hans
James F. Nicosia, PhD
Laura M. Nicosia, PhD
Joseph Pizzo
Patricia Schall, PhD
Gregory Vacca, EdD
M. Jerry Weiss, EdD
Solange Resnik, Copy Editor
Jonathan Kielmanowicz, Graphic Designer
NJCTE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. NJCTE Executive Board: President: Laura M. Nicosia,
PhD, Montclair State U , Vice-President: Susan C. Reese, Ocean Twp. H.S. (emerita) , Past-president:
Patricia L. Schall, PhD, College of St. Elizabeth, Past-president: Joseph S. Pizzo, Black River M.S.,
Recording Secretary: Patricia Hans, Ridgewood H.S., Membership: Joyce Washington, Sojourner Truth
M.S. , Treasurer, Webmaster: James F. Nicosia, PhD, Parliamentarian: Maria Schantz, EdD, Montclair
State U (emerita), Chair, Writing Awards: Michele Marotta, Journal Editor: Dana Maloney, Tenafly H.S.,
Chair, Teacher of the Year Awards: Julius Gottilla, Union Catholic H.S., Past-president ex officio: M. Jerry
Weiss, EdD, N. J. City U (emeritus), Past-president ex officio: Marcia Holtzman, Metuchen Dst. (emerita)

4 2013 Issue
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: 2014 ISSUE OF NEW JERSEY ENGLISH JOURNAL
2014 Issue of New Jersey English Journal:
The Classroom and Beyond
We invite you to respond to the theme of “The Classroom and Beyond” by considering such
questions as:
 How does one define the classroom today?
 How are ideas of the classroom being redefined and reimagined?
 What is the value of the face-to-face classroom experience?
 What needs to happen, and what can happen, in the classroom?
 How can, and/or how must, we connect the classroom to the world and/or to
the future beyond the classroom?
 How does the idea of "college and career readiness" impact our classroom
practice?
 How can, and how do, teachers supplement classroom teaching?
 What is the experience and potential of a cyber classroom?
In addition to submissions that respond to the theme, we also welcome general submissions
and poetry. Submissions will be accepted between April 1 and December 1, 2013.
Submissions must use MLA formatting.
Send queries and submissions to dana.maloney@gmail.com.

Dana H. Maloney
From the Editor
o be an English Language Arts educator in the year 2013 is to feel the tectonic plates of
change shifting beneath one’s feet. At times one feels as if nothing is as it once was: New
teacher evaluation systems are changing the definition of “teacher effectiveness”; the Core
Standards are re-defining learning goals and even content; and the ever-changing possibilities
of technology are changing the ways students receive and send communication.
In many schools and districts, SMART Boards have replaced chalkboards, and iPads have
replaced books. Gone is the old-fashioned paper gradebook or even the idea of closing the
classroom door to the world; with the electronic gradebook and online content, the classroom has
become open to, and even interactive with, the world .
Of course, our students have changed too: These digital natives come from – and live in – a
world different from the one in which their teachers were raised. These students are fully
connected, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They live in a world of change, with new apps replacing
old ones by the day and with constant access to “trending” stories on Twitter. They receive never-
ending streams of new information in ever-changing forms; most recently, Snapchat and Instagram
seem to have replaced much of their texting; social media have largely replaced one-to-one and face-
to-face communication. With smartphone access to the world, these students never stop producing
and receiving information.
In the fully connected global society in which we all now live, our students face a difficult
economy. In this context, it is not surprising that “learning for the sake of learning” is questioned;
the new Standards and related assessments remind us that learning needs to be directed toward
“college and career readiness” (as defined by the Core Content State Standards and its related
assessments, including the soon-to-arrive-in-New-Jersey PARCC).
So how do we, as English Language Arts educators, define and redefine English Language
Arts teaching in the context of so much change? How do we maximize the opportunities presented
by this world, to empower our students as insightful readers, as critical thinkers, as skillful writers, as
impactful speakers, as careful listeners – and more?
According to the many voices captured in this issue, the answer is found in a combination of
old and new: The writers of the articles, essays and poems in this issue convey passion for literacy
development and for student development. The writers express many important thoughts on how
we can help students develop and deepen their abilities to communicate with others and with the
world. These writers express passion for literary texts, for the life-affirming and life-changing
experiences literature offers to students; they also offer new perspectives on how texts can be taught
and how skills can be developed. They also express many new ideas on teaching and learning.
As you read the many wonderful articles, essays and poems found in this issue of the New
Jersey English Journal, I hope you also notice and appreciate the passion of the writers. These writers
are problem-solvers; they answer the questions of “what” and “how” with a variety of wonderful
solutions. These are educators who truly care about the discipline of English Language Arts
education – and about the students impacted by such education.
Many thanks to all of the people who worked on this issue of the journal, including all
members of the editorial board and the two student interns who helped put the journal together.
Above all, thanks to the writers for sharing your words and ideas with us.
We hope you enjoy this issue. Please consider sharing your ideas with us. See page 3 for our
2014 Call for Submissions. We would love to publish your words and ideas in our next issue.
T

Heather D. Rocco
6 2013 Issue
From Literature to Literacy: Shifting
the English Classroom Focus
hen you ask an English teacher, “What
are you teaching?”, she will often reply
with the title of a book.
“I’m teaching The Stranger now.”
The response, though, should really
sound more like, “We’re studying why and how
authors use particular diction and syntax to
generate tone.” This answer reveals a focus on
literacy rather than on pieces of literature. While
whole-class novel study may play a role in English
classrooms, English teachers need to re-envision
their instructional units from studies of literature
to studies of literacy. English teachers need to give
students reading options so students can develop
their literacy skills.
Many secondary teachers teach one novel
at a time. We were taught this way when we were
in high school. We were trained to teach this way
when we were in college. In 1999, I remember
eagerly approaching my first teaching position
armed with binders of novel units and lesson
plans that required all students to read the same
books at the same pace all year. Chapter by
chapter, scene by scene, and stanza by stanza, my
students completed the readings I selected,
answered the questions I asked, completed the
activities I designed and wrote the essays I
assigned. While some students truly enjoyed the
work, most students simply allowed me to pull
them through the whole-class novel study with
little resistance and (even worse) with little
enthusiasm. I knew I was doing something
wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
After attending dozens of conferences
and reading hundreds of professional texts, I
realized the answer lies in the differentiated
instructional model that Carol Tomlinson
discusses in her many books. By requiring all
students to read the same text all the time, I
assumed “one student’s road map for learning is
identical to anyone else’s” (Tomlinson 2). I must
provide my students with authentic, respectful
learning experiences to improve their literacy, and
this includes allowing them to choose the books
they read.
Students need to read and discuss texts
that better fit their interests and/or their reading
levels so they can increase their ability to infer
meaning, study language, and evaluate literary
devices. I must also provide students with reading
experiences that allow them to build fluency and
stamina so they are prepared to be informed
citizens and successful college students (Kittle 20).
These goals cannot be accomplished if students
slug through a text that may be above their
reading level or is completely of no interest to
them. In their Phi Delta Kappan article, “Farewell
to Farewell to Arms: Deemphasizing the Whole
Class Novel,” Douglas Fisher and Gay Ivey argue
that whole-class novel study is “neither standard-
centered or student-centered,” as the standards
focus on literacy skills not particular texts and
students cannot meet these skills because the texts
often do not interest them or are too difficult to
read (495). In her book, The Book Whisperer,
Donalyn Miller argues that “Teaching whole-class
novels does not create a society of literate people”
(123). While I have not abandoned whole-class
novel studies (yet), I believe we must create
English classrooms that provide more balanced
literacy programs and give students respectful
options for reading that challenge them and
inspire them to keep reading.
Contemplating this shift of English
instruction can appear daunting. Yet, if teachers
start slowly, implementing one instructional
methodology at a time, it will not be so
overwhelming. The best strategies with which to
begin are literature circles and free reading. These
methodologies allow students choice, while they
also allow the teacher to build purposeful lessons
around literacy objectives.
Literature Circles
Literature Circles provide students a
guided choice of text to read. While many
iterations of literature circles have emerged over
the last fifteen years, I rely on Harvey Daniels’
book, Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book
Clubs and Reading Groups, as the seminal guide to
implement productive small group studies of texts.
W

From Literature to Literacy: Shifting the English Classroom Focus
Literature circles offer students guided reading
choices and allow them to direct their
conversations about text in small groups of peers.
The teacher must release his control of the
discussion. Instead, “the teacher is now available to
take a facilitative role, and if kids are struggling, to
give individual attention while the rest of the
students work along in their kid-led group”
(Daniels 37). Literature circles give teachers more
time to confer with students, assess student
progress and individualize instruction more
precisely than frequent whole-class novel studies
allow.
When considering utilizing literature
circles, a teacher must be clear on what literary
skills he wants students to develop and practice as
they read. I have used literature circles for many
different units that focus on a variety of literacy
skills. I have used literature circles to conduct
genre studies, allowing students to explore key
components of the genre in their literature circle
texts. I have utilized them for theme studies,
requiring students to examine how an author
crafts his/her message through story. I have also
used literature circles for author studies,
presenting many texts by the same author so
students can seek what they texts reveal about the
writer. No matter what common thread ties all of
the literature circle text options together, I am
clear as to which reading skills my students will
develop as they read.
Once a teacher is clear on what his
instructional objectives are for the literature
circles, he should select appropriate texts. I am
fortunate enough to work in a school district that
supports such purchases. If teachers do not,
though, there are several ways to get the right
books into the right students’ hands. The best way
is through the library. The interlibrary loan system
in my county is a great resource. With a little
advanced notice, your school or town librarian can
help you track down four copies of the books. If
books are not an option, teachers can use
literature circles to explore different short stories,
articles or poetry as well. When selecting texts,
teachers should consider students’ reading
proficiency levels, their interests and their reading
history. Literature circles will not be effective if a
teacher chooses six options, none of which the
students can, or want, to read.
I usually present the five or six book
options to my students, depending on my class
size. I want between four and five students in
each literature circle. I give a book talk for each
title and pass around copies of the books for
students to peruse. I also post links to professional
and reader book reviews on our class web page.
Usually for a homework assignment, I ask them to
rank their top three book choices and write a brief
explanation as to why they have chosen it.
Despite what some teachers claim will
happen, students do not choose a text simply
because it is the shortest option. After my pep talk
about how great it is that they can decide what
they want to closely study for the next three
weeks, students feel empowered to choose a book
that best suits them. I ask them to rank their top
three choices, so I have some flexibility in the
groupings. Most of the time students read their
first or second choice.
Harvey Daniels, of course, provides
teachers the best information on how to manage
the day-to-day progression of literature circles. I
find they work best when students have the
defined roles he suggests. Daniels offers many
variations of how to make good use of the roles
including group role sheets, individual role sheets,
and journals (100 - 105). No matter how teachers
implement lit circles, they must be student-
centered. Students drive the conversations.
Students set the reading assignments; they are
more accountable to their circle peers, really, than
they are to me. If students are unprepared, the
group suffers, and students do not want to let
down their peers.
However, teachers should not view
literature circle days as ones they spend at their
desks grading papers. They are “kid-watching with
care, balancing between challenging each child and
sustaining, above all, the love of reading, writing,
and talking about books” (Daniels 37).
Throughout the literature circles, teachers move
about the classroom, listening into the discussions,
assessing students’ comprehension, and offering
guidance to encourage careful contemplation of
the text.
Teachers also incorporate mini-lessons
into literature circle days. These lessons provide
students the instruction they need about particular
reading and analytical skills as well as give them
the opportunity to immediately apply their
learning to a text. Harvey Daniels and Nancy
Steinke have written an excellent book, Mini

Heather D. Rocco
8 2013 Issue
Lessons for Literature Circles, which outlines many
sample lessons.
Recently, my twelfth grade students
participated in literature circles in which they read
True Crime books. My goals for the unit included
examining how writers use research to craft a
narrative around true events, how writers build
tension with diction, syntax, and structure, and
how writers utilize foreshadowing to keep the
reader engaged. Whether my students were
reading In Cold Blood, Midnight in the Garden of Good
and Evil or The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, all
students participated in ten to fifteen minutes
whole-class sessions in which we examined
models of foreshadowing, for example, in various
texts. Within their literature circles, then, students
dedicated time to identify examples of
foreshadowing in their texts and evaluate whether
or not it is done effectively. As I visited with
groups, I inquired where they saw the device used
in their books and offered more support when
students did not demonstrate a thorough
understanding of this literary technique. (Daniels
37).
I have also utilized literature circles for
teaching poetry. I provide students several poets
from which they could select. After ranking their
preferences and getting assigned their groups,
students engage in a very focused, in depth study
of one poet’s work. Throughout the unit, I give
mini-lessons on poetic form, line breaks, imagery,
rhythm, and more. They search their poet’s works
to see how he or she utilized these techniques in
the poems.
Free Reading
Frequently I hear English teachers
proclaim, “These kids don’t read on their own
anymore.” They insist their students from the
good old days were readers, voracious ones at
that. But these kids these days, according to many
teachers, do not read. I do not know if they are
right. Perhaps they are. However, my response is
usually, “How much time do you give them to
read a book of their choosing in the class?” Often
I hear how they don’t have time to include such a
luxury as free reading time in their classrooms.
They have curriculum to cover. They have books
to teach. It should not surprise middle and high
school teachers that kids don’t read. In elementary
classrooms, most teachers incorporate some time
for free reading. Students get to choose a book
from buckets, curl up on a carpet or sit at their
desk, and read. Some might argue free reading is a
necessary component of elementary classrooms as
students are learning to read, but middle and high
school students have mastered reading
comprehension so free reading wastes time. Yet,
aren’t we always learning to read? As students
explore new subject areas and new interests, they
need to learn how to read increasingly
sophisticated texts that allow them to explore
these ideas. By not making time in daily lessons
for free reading, we show students their own
reading lives are not valuable to their school lives.
It is a dangerous message.
In her recent book, Book Love: Developing
Depth, Stamina and Passion in Adolescent Readers,
Penny Kittle states, “If students...enter college as
practiced non-readers, they will likely become part
of the large number of students who will not
finish. Something has to change in high school to
prepare kids better” (21). She is right. We do not
prepare students to build the reading muscles they
need to meet the demands of higher education. As
she explains, average college students read “200-
600 pages each week” (20). If they spend four
years of high school reading 25 to 30 pages a
week, they are woefully unprepared to meet this
expectation.
With only rare exceptions for school-
adjusted schedules or assessments, my class begins
every day with ten minutes of free reading. My
students cherish these ten minutes. I cherish
watching them read. Nine minutes and 30 seconds
into our reading time, I announce, “Start looking
for a place to put your bookmark.” Thirty seconds
later when I say, “Okay, it’s time,” I secretly smile
at those students who are still reading the pages
even as they ever-so-slowly close their book
covers.
When we discuss their reading lives, too
many of my students quietly confess they cannot
remember the last time they read a book. “Not
even for English class?” I inquire.
Their eyes drop to the floor. “Nope. Not
even for English class.”
However, ten minutes a day is all some of
them need to rediscover or create reading lives.
My students tell me they find themselves thinking
about their free reading books and can’t help but
pick it up at night or on the weekend to keep
reading. I encourage them to read 20 minutes or
so outside of class as well, and many do. After

From Literature to Literacy: Shifting the English Classroom Focus
reading Penny Kittle’s text Book Love, I recognized
the power in asking students to record how many
pages they read each day (28). As they review their
weekly data of how many pages they have read,
they gauge whether they are ready to tackle the
reading challenges that lie ahead of them in
college. They set reading goals, committing to read
100 pages in one week, quite a jump from the 17
pages they started the year reading in the same
amount of time. When they reach this goal, the
pride they feel lasts longer and inspires them more
than any A they receive on a test. Next week, they
want to read more than they did the week before.
Next month, they want to read a book that
challenges them a bit. They feel ready for it. They
are. Their reading muscles grow stronger every
day.
As we engage in other literacy studies, I
invite their free reading books into our work.
When we study point of view, for example, I’ll ask
students to think about the point of views used in
their books. They might write about how the
point of view in their English text compares with
that used in their free reading book. I’ll ask them
to think about which perspective they prefer and
why. I’ll ask them to think about how that
information can inform their future reading
choices. When we study inferences, I’ll inquire
how their authors reveal information in interesting
ways. They will search through their books and
find a passage that does this exact thing. They’ll
include these lines in the journal entry, maybe
using them later when composing an analytical
essay. In Book Love, Kittle also explains how she
uses their free reading texts to teach the qualities
of writing (65), analytical writing (107), and more.
She notes, “Jumping into analysis when students
are still trying to figure out plot can be frustrating”
(107). In an English classroom that only teaches
one novel at a time, then, many students spend
nearly every day feeling frustrated. When students
read and analyze texts they chose, they can apply
difficult analytical work to books that better match
their reading levels. Most students are amazed that
authors they enjoy use the same techniques as
Camus or Fitzgerald. In their astonishment,
though, I see validation. Their reading lives co-
exist with their school lives. Their reading lives,
they learn, are important.
Balanced Approach
In my classroom, I still teach whole-class
novels. This year we will read three whole texts
together. They will participate in three literature
circles. They will also read hundreds of pages
from books they select for free reading.
Additionally, they participate in an extensive
inquiry project where they choose what to study,
and therefore, read. Each writing assignment gives
them three or four choices from which to select,
and I always leave them the option to design their
own, as long as it meets the objectives I will
assess. I design my lessons with clear objectives
and an open mind to design a “student’s road map
for learning” (Tomlinson 2) to help them master
these skills.
A student in my class recently said, “Ms.
Rocco, I have never been given so many choices
about what and how to learn before.”
Slightly startled I asked, “Vin, how does it
make you feel to have options?”
His wide eyes and gaping mouth told me
I had asked him a really stupid question. “It’s
awesome.”
I no longer subscribe to the belief that
every student must read [insert book title here]. I
do believe every student, though, must read. If
English educators focus on literacy rather than
literature, we will build dynamic communities of
readers and writers. If we present students with
choices, including what they read, we will achieve
this goal.
Works Cited
Daniels, Harvey. Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups. Portland, Me.: Stenhouse,
2002. Print.
Daniels, Harvey, and Nancy Steineke. Mini-lessons for Literature Circles. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004.
Print.
Fisher, Douglas, and Gay Ivey. "Farewell to A Farewell to Arms: Deemphasizing the Whole Class Novel." Phi
Delta Kappa 88.7 (2007): 494-97. JSTOR. 1 June 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.
Kittle, Penny. Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 2013. Print.

Heather D. Rocco
10 2013 Issue
Miller, Donalyn. The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass,
2009. Print.
Tomlinson, Carol A. The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners. Alexandria, VA:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1999. Print.
Heather D. Rocco is the Supervisor of English Language Arts, Grades 6 - 12 in the School District of
the Chathams. She is an active member of the Conference on English Leadership (CEL), the
leadership constituent group for the National Council of Teachers of English, and serves as the 2013
Program Chair for CEL’s Annual Convention to be held in Boston this November.
Working/Mother
At the daycare you wait
in the chair by the front desk,
kicking your yellow rain boots,
your blonde hair, fine and feathery,
damp from the early morning downpour.
Your father had forgotten your shoes -
the ones I nearly drop
as I thrust them toward you.
“I need you to help me tie them,”
you murmur.
I glance desperately at the clock and the woman behind the desk;
Someone will help you, I say
before I dash back into the rain.
Here,
I say to my students that morning,
Here are my books of poetry.
Here are Yeats and Auden, Pastan and Plath.
Read them and find a poem that makes you feel your heart beat.
They stare at me as if I am an oddity
wandering in their adolescent world of lust
and longing.
That night before bed, I slide my fingers across your chest,
searching for the rhythm of your small heart.
You pull my hand
Closer, closer
As if to forgive me.
- Anne Wessel Dwyer
Anne Wessel Dwyer has been a teacher at Madison High School for eight years. She previously
taught at Columbia High School in Maplewood, Wallkill Valley Regional High School, and St. Vincent
Academy in Newark. Anne lives with her two sons, Aidan and Hogan, and her husband, Patrick, in
South Orange.

Patricia Hans
Teaching English in the 21st
Century: An
Integrated Approach
t was a cover that paid tribute to an era that
brought us back to 1943 when Newsweek first
appeared on the newsstands. The words “last
print issue” emblazoned across its page brought
back the same feeling I had when I saw the end of
Planet of the Apes that revealed a broken Statue of
Liberty lying on its side in the sand and realized
that this ape dominated land was America. On
December 31, 2012, Newsweek published its last
print issue. Gone are the afternoons curled on the
couch reading, devouring words, turning the pages
in anticipation. Today we scroll, not turn; today
the words on the cyber-page are secondary-
images, bearing the messages.
Over the years, faced with a shrinking
readership, newspapers and magazines have called
it a day—closed their doors and stopped printing
and publishing altogether; however Newsweek has
not stopped publishing; it has gone digital,
blogging away. On January 2nd, 2013, I stood
before my Literature and Media class, holding the
last issue of Newsweek, and stated, “This isn’t just
about the end of print journalism; it is about the
end of the way we communicate— about the way
we think.” The days of carrying folded books in
your back pocket—freeing them at the correct
hour to allow yourself to delve into inspired
moments spurred by the words of Faulkner,
Fitzgerald and Hemingway—are waning. In this
media laden world, images overshadow words,
exercising their powers of persuasion.
Over the course of 2012, particularly
throughout the election campaign, the influence of
the media over the electorate was considerable
causing people to believe in media messages and
vote against their own self-interest. The meta-
narrative in political speeches and in broadcast
news remains elusive to most viewers, as do those
underlying messages in films that reinforce
stereotypes, fueling a racially divided society
entrenched in fear of imminent violence. Our
students are these viewers; without education, they
are susceptible viewers.
As an adolescent, trying to find who you
are and what your role is in society, proves to be a
complicated, if not impossible, task because media
texts have proven to be “more powerful than our
own life experiences” (Hobbs, 2007, p. 6). In
this age of multiple literacies, we
need a broader definition of what
constitutes knowledge and literacy
to teach and empower our students
to become active thinkers, instead
of passive ones in dealing with this
explosion of media. This requires that
education, specifically how English is taught,
depart from the 19th century model of literacy to
an integrated approach of study, which defines a
text as one that imparts meaning expanding the
definition of literature to include multiple
literacies. Through an integrated approach of
study, students can be taught to critically analyze
“the constructed nature of media texts to [assess]
how media representations reinforce the
ideologies of dominant groups within society”
(Tobias, 2008, p. 9; Buckingham, 2003).
Integrating “media literacy pedagogy into English
classes is not just pragmatic,” suggests Tobias in
light of Buckingham, it “‘implies a far reaching,
philosophical and political challenge to English: it
is an argument for fundamentally rethinking what
the subject is about,” (Tobias, 2008). The written
text does not have a monopoly on narrative; all
forms of media representation contain a narrative
that needs to be broken down.
Today the texts that are
studied in the English classroom
should include all “forms of
symbolic representation” to allow
students to examine closely how
media messages are constructed in
a narrative form, how symbol
systems use codes and conventions
to shape messages, how media
messages have embedded values
and points of view, how different
I

Patricia Hans
12 2013 Issue
people interpret the same media
message differently, and how most
media messages are constructed to
gain profit and/or power (Hobbs,
2007, p. 41). Approaching each media text as
a narrative allows students to analyze and examine
a text closely and empowers them with the ability
to decode meaning to facilitate an understanding
of themselves, and their roles in society. This is
particularly important as television, film and news
media exploit stereotypes and misrepresent groups
of people whose “values and ideologies” are
inconsistent with the dominant culture.
In addition to misrepresentation, the
“portrayal of violence, sexuality, or anti-social
behaviors in television, film, and video games
justify the need for media education to help
students become more aware of the negative
influences” and mitigate them (Tobias, 2008, p. 7).
FCC studies in 2008 have shown that viewers who
are exposed to a steady stream of violence over a
period of time become desensitized to violent
acts. While calling for stricter restrictions to
protect the young viewer, showing our students
how the image is constructed to elicit its effect is
one way to get them to view the image as
synthetically constructed. There have been too
many shootings—too many deaths—to not begin
to discuss this in our classrooms.
From Pedagogy to Education: An Historical Overview
Because “media literacy pedagogy defies
definition,” one must look to media trends to
determine how media should be approached in a
course of study (Tobias, 2008, p. 2). Since the
1920’s, pedagogues have studied the media
carefully and have made “dire” predictions with
respect to its “potential power,” and its effect on
individuals. Until the 1940’s, the media was
perceived as “negative” stimuli impinging directly
and homogenously on all persons receiving them’”
(Buckingham, 2003, p. 6). The result was to
“discriminate and resist” the corrupting influence
of the media (Tobias, 2008, p. 3). In the 1950’s,
media education had emerged to counter what
was perceived as “a powerful and persuasive
influence” (Tobias, 2008, p. 3). This is what Ray
Bradbury believed and in 1953 Fahrenheit 451 was
penned to address the negative influences of
technology, specifically television, in providing a
passive activity that bombards the viewer with
negative stimuli that Bradbury deemed would lead
to the dumbing down of society and the loss of
the imagination.
In Fahrenheit 451, the reader presumes
that the world he has encountered is the world of
the future; however, it is not. The world in
Fahrenheit 451 that forbids the reading of books
and creative thinking, and numbs the mind
through the constant bombardment of endless
advertisements and slanted news broadcasts fed
through public speakers, personal “seashells,” I-
pods, and television walls is our world. How
frightening it is to think that Ray Bradbury had the
prescience of mind to see some 60 years into the
future. Bradbury did foresee the negative impact
that television would have on society particularly
with respect to education in that it would take
away time from reading, thinking and learning.
In 1985, Neil Postman in Amusing
Ourselves to Death echoed Bradbury’s claims and
argued for the need for “media literacy pedagogy
by pointing out television’s negative impact on
education, politics and religion” (Tobias, 2008, p.
6). According to Tobias, Postman promulgates
that our culture’s “principal mode of knowing
about itself” is television, and the medium’s
portrayal of “violence, sexuality and anti-social
behavior,” and the values embedded therein that
serve to create and enforce societal myths make
television dangerous.
In 1992, J. Francis Davis argued in the
Power of Images: Creating the Myths of Our Time for the
need for a critical approach to teaching media
literacy to learn how myths emerge and function
in a modern society. Every day, every hour, we are
bombarded with media messages. After “long
exposure to patterns of [media] images” we begin
to create and live in a world fashioned by our
perception of those images. When viewed in
multiple contexts, the message in the image
becomes a perceived reality, and then it becomes a
myth woven into our consciousness and our
cultural tapestry. Today, according to Davis, we
are being sold fear. With the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, with terrorist alerts plastered all over
the news, with mass shootings, and violence
pulsating in the media, the idea that “the world is
a dangerous place and we need guns, police and
military to protect it” is real. It is the heightened
awareness that the media creates in reporting a
story to generate interest, raise ratings and sell
newspapers that fuels this idea (Davis, 1992, p.
2). This is the myth of fear, which since 9/11 has

Century: An Integrated Approach
been perpetuated by some to maintain power;
however, real power in materialistic America lies
in the hands of corporations simply because we
buy into the myth that: “the good life consists of
buying possessions that cost lots of money, and
happiness, satisfaction and sex appeal are
imminent and available with every consumer
purchase” (Davis, 1992). And to some extent, we
all believe us; we are slaves to labels. Because our
students are today’s largest group of consumers
with fragile identities, it is imperative that we teach
our students to view the media through multiple
critical lenses.
A Twenty-First Century Approach to
Teaching Media Studies
Sister Souljah in the Coldest Winter
Ever states in her commentary that follows the
novel that Santiaga, the exceptional businessman
and drug ring entrepreneur, and father of Souljah’s
protagonist, Winter Santiaga, models himself after
Al Pacino’s character in Scarface like every other
young aspiring thug in the inner city. After seeing
the movie many times, Scarface becomes his reality
and how he sees himself in the world. According
to Tobias, studies link “violent and aggressive
behaviors in people to violent images in movies,
television and video games and have given rise to
what many call the cultivation effect” (p. 8).
Young men raised in an inner city environment
view Scarface as a hero figure, and after
repetitious viewings come to see the movie as
their world. Sister Souljah’s intent in writing the
novel was to debunk the myth of the thug that
Scarface, a product of hegemonic ideology, was
deliberately created to control cultural
perceptions. And this is what students need to
know in order to negotiate a multimodal world in
which identities are created and destroyed.
A critical thinking approach
to media studies requires that
students create their own counter
narratives that take the form of print
ads, public service announcements,
music videos, documentaries,
screenplays and film, and
“challenge ideologies and
stereotypical misrepresentations in
existing media texts” (Tobias, 2008,
p. 9). This would cause students to integrate
visual texts with print literature, yielding a unified
package for study that counters corporate
influences, and to study a visual text through an
ideological lens, as a literary text would be studied.
Both mediums are united by stories that contain
metaphor, symbolism, point of view, tone and
mood, characterizations, theme and an audience,
but not necessarily emphasized in the same
manner.
While it is important for students to
analyze the film to become aware of changing
perspectives and political commentary, it is more
important for students to know how such change
is effected through the medium. For this reason,
creating counter narratives would instruct students
in the deliberate synthesis of visual and print text,
and carrying out those counter narratives would
cause students to address injustices in society. This
critical approach to teaching the media asks
students to explore what they know, how they
know it, and how this knowledge is contextually
situated. From this perspective, students could
study how the media works to repress,
marginalize, and invalidate certain social, or
racially defined, groups.
From Theory to Classroom
In Reading the Media, Renee Hobbs
documents the integration of a print literature
based 11th grade English curriculum at Concord
High School in Concord, New Hampshire with a
visually based media studies curriculum. The year
that Hobbs began her research and
documentation was 1999. During that year,
English teachers constructed integrated units that
focused on enlarging their definition of the text to
include all forms of symbolic representations.
Today, in 2013, focused on empowering students
with skills to critically analyze media texts, all 50
states have set down new media literacy standards.
Renee Hobbs’s text is a necessary for any
teacher interested in integrating media education
into the English curriculum as it takes us through
the construction process, emphasizing how
teachers can forge their own units that embrace
guiding themes such as: gender, class, and race
representation in advertising; film and television;
propaganda and persuasion; reality and social
identity in film and television; meta narratives in
the news, journalism and political speeches;
changing perspectives and point of views that

Patricia Hans
14 2013 Issue
arise when a literary text is made into a film, and
how storytelling works in the media. While the
integration process was an inspiring revolutionary
endeavor, the teachers were concerned about the
effect such a curriculum would have on reading
and writing skills. In the end, Hobbs’s data
revealed that students “measurably strengthened
their comprehension skills as readers, listeners and
viewers in responding to print, audio, visual and
video texts” (Hobbs, 2007, p. 148). Furthermore,
Hobbs, in her final analysis, adds that “over all
students had a more sophisticated understanding
of how authors compose messages to convey
meaning through their use of language, image and
sound and how readers respond with their own
meaning making processes as they interpret
messages” (148). Based on Hobbs’s study, I
initiated the writing of a curriculum that could be
integrated into an English curriculum, or stand on
its own as a full-year course.
In the end, I developed a full-year upper
level course that closely examines the role that
popular culture plays in the development of
identity, and how literature and media
representations shape our understanding of reality,
the world in which we live and our roles in it. The
course was designed to develop student critical
literacy and writing, to promote critical thinking,
to challenge students’ existing beliefs and to
empower students with the tools needed to
negotiate a complex global environment by
examining the narrative structure and its
representative symbols and messages encoded in
film, television shows, news journalism,
advertising, and contemporary and classical
literature.
The year-long curriculum is divided into
four unit segments. Units can stand alone
facilitating their integration into any English
curriculum at the high school or middle school
levels. The first unit titled: “Journalism and the
News Media in the 21st Century” focuses on the
role of journalism and the news media in fostering
democracy in America. Consideration is paid to
para-journalism, why the news gravitates toward
entertainment and sensationalism, and the future
of news reporting. Particular attention is paid to
writing. Students learn how to write ledes, and
study the effect a particular lede will have on a
news article by writing various versions of the
same article. Students learn how to distinguish
between the academic essay and the news article,
which is more focused and streamlined preparing
them for writing in college and beyond. Current
reading selections from The New York Times, The
Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Atlantic and
Harpers are essential. Pete Hamill’s News is a Verb
is the required text. Hamill is indispensable as he
raises issue with the role of journalism,
distinguishes between the tabloid and the more
stellar publications as The New York Times and The
Washington Post, and defines the role of journalism
in our lives. Teaching our students to be involved
concerned citizens is the goal of this unit, but this
importance must not dwarf the need to help
students see how identities are constructed, and
how race and gender through media
representation give rise to false perceptions.
Teaching how propaganda in
a democratic society works through
the art of selling, and its effect on
individualism and freedom is crucial
to prepare our students to be critical
thinkers. We begin with Brave New World by
Aldous Huxley, and the accompanying articles that
are included with the novel. Then I allow the
novel to speak through student surveys and a PBS
Frontline production titled: The Merchant of Cool.
Being There by Jerzy Kosinski; One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest ; and Team Rodent by Carl Hiassen
contribute to concluding discussions on
manipulation and power. Unconscious Persuasion
is an essay written by Huxley that suggests we are
nothing more than the clones in his Brave New
World. This unit allows the student to step in
psychological and sociological areas as we
investigate the process of individuation proposed
by Sigmund Freud, which causes us to ask: how
does one become an individual in a consumer-
based culture?
Critics of integrating media
studies into the English curriculum
fail to understand how identities,
attitudes and philosophies are
manufactured. For example, today’s films
still work to reinforce power relationships
exploiting stereotypes that were forged in the
1930s. The image of the mammy and minstrel
antics were reinforced in the films of the 1930’s
and 1940’s, and continued into the television
programming of the 1950’s and 60’s. In 2013,

Century: An Integrated Approach
African Americans are still not portrayed in roles
that identify them as conflicted characters with
real life problems. How is race constructed in
America? A historical approach to studying race in
America through film, together with readings
“Mass, Media and Racism” by Stephen Balkaran,
and Stuart Hall’s “Race, The Floating Signifier,”
initiates the conversation. If our goal, as
educators, is to ensure a future freedom of racism
and exploitation, then our students need to
understand how film, television, and the news
create and perpetuate stereotypes by creating their
own written and visual narratives. It is imperative
that, as English educators, we redefine what
literacy is in order to address the negative effects
of a rapidly advancing technological world.
In the fall of 2012, both Time and Atlantic
devoted issues to the role of women in America
today, which became an interesting study in light
of congressional discussions on women’s rights,
violence, equal pay and abortion. Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale delves into all of
these issues, and together with Simone
deBeauvior’s The Second Sex and essays like
“Motherhood Who Needs It?” by Betty Friedan,
an enticing unit on gender construction can keep
any class intrigued. But what students want to
engage in is discussion on or about Twitter,
Facebook, and the myriad of apps that are
emerging daily. What role do these play in our
lives?
“Ghosts in the Machine,” was the title of
the magazine section of The New York Times, dated
January 9, 2011. Behind the white letters that
emerged off of the page, like the voices on the
internet that will last forever, were tiny pictures of
families. On the bottom of the cover page ran the
line: “It is possible to live forever on the internet,
whether you want to or not.” When I die, the
picture I placed on my Facebook page will still be
there, as will my comments. Perhaps my blog
pages will still be there, even the ones I wrote
years and years ago. I will still be alive; the thought
is frightening. People will still send me email
messages; I can live forever on the internet. The
internet gives us life, but it also
takes it away. What we have to
decide is how much.
Works Cited
Barthes, R., 1972, Mythologies, in J. Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, A Reader, Edinburgh:
Pearson Limited, (pp. 261-269).
Davis, J. Francis, 1992, Power of Images: Creating the Myths of Our Time, Media Values #57
www.medialiteracy.org/readyroom/article80.html
Hall, Stuart., 1982, The rediscovery of ideology: the return of the repressed in media studies, in J. Storey (ed.)
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, A Reader, Edinburgh : Pearson Limited (pp. 111-114).
Hobbs, Renee, 2007. Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English. New York : Teachers
College Press; Newark, DE: International Reading Association
Lipschultz, Jeremy, & Hilt, Michael. “Editors’ Note: Defining Media and Information Literacy Amid Change.
“Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education 9.1 (2009).
Sister Souljah, 1999. The Coldest Winter Ever. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Tobias, J.A. (2008). Culturally Relevant Media Studies: A Review of Approaches and Pedagogies.
(http:/www.utpress.utoronto.ca/journals/ejournals/simile (November 2008)
Snead, James, 1994. White Screen; Black Images. Routledge: New York.
A 2007 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Teacher of the Year and veteran teacher at
Ridgewood High School, Patricia Hans teaches American Studies as well as Literature, Identity and
the Media. The latter class grew out of her doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University,
and inspired this article, which Pat hopes will encourage all teachers to teach toward the future.

16 2013 Issue
Tweet This: Helping Students Transfer
their Digital Media Skills to Complex
Reading Tasks
hey are the “digital natives”: They’re the
smart-phones-permanently-attached-to-
their-thumbs generation; they’re masters of
social media: tweeting, texting, and updating their
statuses on a minute-by-minute basis.
We are the English teachers, asking them
to read about characters from long ago, asking
them to analyze and think, rather than just “like”
or “comment” on things.
As a literacy specialist (Stacia), and as a
literacy teacher (Jenn), one issue that has
confronted us recently is how to engage these
students—these “digital natives”—and how to
help them build their reading, writing, and analysis
skills. We have experience using technology in our
classrooms; we know that the high school English
classroom is very different from when we both
began teaching. We didn’t have class websites or
online grading programs back then. Our students
didn’t email us at midnight for clarification on the
reading assignment due the next day. We didn’t
have to deal with requests from students to be
their “friend” on Facebook.
While embracing instructional technology
to enhance our teaching, we realized that we were
just using new tools to teach the same skills.
Technology served as a “gimmick,” rather than a
tool to help students gain a true metacognitive
awareness of how their social media skills can be
applied to their academic work.
We sat down to brainstorm how we could
help students make connections between the skills
they use in their everyday digital world and the
skills they need to succeed on their English
reading assignments. Students still read books, as
evidenced by the students, both male and female,
carrying around Twilight and The Hunger Games and
making comparisons between the films and texts,
but our observations of students texting,
discussing Facebook status updates and Twitter
tweets, and using phones to find information on
Google in mere seconds helped us see that there is
a real need for English teachers to understand and
embrace the tools of the “digital native.”
The first thing we needed to do was
decide which types of social media to focus on.
To do this, we needed to understand what exactly
the students were doing online. Should we focus
on Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? Google
searches? Wikipedia? Texting? Should we consider
texting a type of “digital media”? What about
Tumblr? Pinterest? Is there a website that students
use that we adults don’t even know about?
Realizing we didn’t know enough about
the digital lives of our own students to know what
to focus on in our planning, we designed a simple
paper survey asking about internet and social
media usage that we could give to Jenn’s classes.
And yes, we see the irony in a survey for the
teenage digital native that is on paper. Many of the
students pointed this irony out to us, a teachable
moment about the concept of irony. We were
already connecting digital skills and reading
analysis skills, and we hadn’t even started planning
our lessons yet!
Our survey opened our eyes and humbled
us. Teenagers and their forty-something English
teachers might both be using social media, but
there are distinct differences in our uses. We were
fascinated when a student commented that
Pintrest is “for moms to look at recipes and
crafts” and shocked to find out that Twitter is “so
easy to hack” and used for bullying other students.
We were surprised that students didn’t show
much knowledge of web resources that could help
them academically, such as Reddit or Google
Scholar, and amazed that they saw Instagram as
something similar to Tumblr, while we think of it
as a cute way to share retro-looking photos of kids
and pets.
We were also surprised that social media
usage differed greatly among our students based
on cultural background, school success, and
personal taste. Our students were open, analytical,
and interested in discussing how they use social
T

Tweet This: Helping Students Transfer their Digital Media Skills to Complex
Reading Tasks
media and what skills they have already honed. A quick survey turned into spirited discussions with the roles
of teacher and student often reversed.
Our survey helped us focus on three modes of digital media that all of the students in Jenn’s classes
were very familiar with: Facebook, Twitter, and texting. Feeling certain that these three areas would have
great potential for crossover with reading skills, our next task was to examine these social media forms and
isolate the skills students use daily as they interact online. We then selected skills that seemed most ripe for
connections with reading lessons. We developed a chart for each media type to help us brainstorm skills and
make connections (see tables 1, 2, and 3).
Facebook
We spent the most time developing ways to incorporate Facebook into different lessons because it is
the social media form through which the students interact most. Whether or not they post on Facebook,
students reported that they check their newsfeeds frequently throughout the day.
Table 1-Connecting Facebook skills and reading skills
Facebook Skill Literature Analysis/Reading Skill
Identifying the tone of the writer Identifying the tone of the narrator
Understanding sarcasm, irony, understatement and
parody
Understanding sarcasm, irony, understatement and
parody
Identifying characteristics of the writer’s voice Identifying characteristics of the writer’s voice
Importance of specific word choice Impact of specific word choice
Importance of allusions to the poster’s point Importance of allusions
Audience for the writer Audience for the novel
Symbolism in the post Symbolism in a piece of literature
Recognizing point of view and bias in the post Recognizing point of view and bias of a writer
Examining credibility of the poster Examining credibility of a writer or character
Making predictions about future statue updates,
pages liked, types of memes posted
Making predictions about plot, character motivations,
themes, etc.
Understanding universal characters, roles of people Understanding universal characters
Making judgments based on stereotypes and
prejudices
Identifying the stereotypes held by characters,
prejudices in the writing
Importance of the word and visual images as seen in
memes, Facebook pages liked, and photographs and
captions
Importance of the word and the visual images as seen
in functional texts, graphic novels, and media images
Examining the Status Update for Characterization
In the past, Stacia has had students examine the character Daisy in The Great Gatsby by specifically
focusing on passages featuring her voice—what she says, how Nick describes her saying it, and how Gatsby
describes Daisy’s voice. To prepare the students for this lesson, Stacia added a new component involving
social media: having students first analyze and discuss the four status updates from one of Stacia’s Facebook
friends (used with the author’s permission and name removed) in the following:
 Jesus has saved me and it would take years to count all the ways God has blessed me on top of that! I am
thankful for my salvation and for the 38 years God has given me.
 Just feeling really worn out from my activities of today. Don't know why this reminded me of a favorite
movie of mine, but I'm hearing the six-fingered man's voice in my head right now, "I've just sucked one
year of your life away." :)

18 2013 Issue
 Sometimes being a mom means protecting your children from harm.....like fishing all the peanut-
containing candy from the bucket of your peanut intolerant child so that she doesn't accidentally eat it.
And just to be extra safe, dispose of it by eating it.
 Heard my 9 year old telling the 7 year old how great it will be when they grow up and get their own place
because they can do whatever they want and never do chores again. So I turned on an episode of
"Hoarders" and showed them what a house looks like when chores are never done. "Ok, Mom. I will do
chores! I promise!"
The skills students use in discussing the characteristics of Stacia’s friend are the same skills they use when,
coupled with analyzing what Daisy says and the way that she says it, examining the following excerpt from
The Great Gatsby:
“’Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm
that rose and fell in it, the cymbals’ song of it…”(Fitzgerald 120).
By first examining the status updates from Stacia’s friend, the students debate the importance of the
allusion to The Princess Bride and the television show Hoarders. They look at how she creates humor in her
posts, discuss what kind of a mother they think she is and why, and even look at her sentence structure. They
make predictions, based on these posts, about what kind of posts she might make in the future. Just as all of
these skills are used when examining a character in a piece of literature, they’re also used when reading
Facebook posts. Thus, reading these posts may make it easier for students to transfer their analysis skills to
their academic reading of characterization.
Using the Status Update to Practice Second Person and Apostrophe
To help students in Jenn’s remedial reading class master point-of-view, we planned a lesson using sample
status updates written in second person. We had noticed many of our hipper, young “friends” on Facebook
posting things like, “Hello Friday! I can’t wait to see you!” We decided that this skill could help students
practice figuring out point of view when reading a text (a necessary skill on our Virginia state reading test),
while also serving as a way to help students review books they were being assessed on in English class. We
shared the following status update with the students (used with the permission of the author):
Hello Nap,
We were so close this summer but I haven’t seen you for a while. I’m really glad we’re getting back
together this weekend. I’ve missed you. You have always been one of my favorites to hang out
with.Love,Katie
We had students determine what point of view this was written in (following a review of point of view a
few classes prior to this); then, we asked the students to log onto their Facebook pages to examine their
friends’ status updates (or their own) to find first-person and third-person point-of-view examples to share
with the class. The students were very engaged in sharing and analyzing Facebook status updates, but it
quickly became clear that we should have set ground rules first, such as prohibiting the students from sharing
other people’s names in order to preserve their privacy, as well as reading inappropriate things for school
aloud.
The next stage of the lesson asked students to use the second person status update as a mentor text for
writing their own mock updates. This activity helped them prepare for a diagnostic writing on their summer
reading selections by asking them to address an inanimate object or even idea found in the book, from the
point of view of the author or a character.
Even the weakest students engaged in this activity with excitement. They all grasped the tongue-in-cheek
use of second person to write to an inanimate object and took the assignment farther than we expected by
choosing objects from their books that had symbolic or thematic value. We shared them aloud in class and
one student commented, before Jenn could make the point, that their choices of objects were “really

Reading Tasks
analytical.” This was the metacognitive “a-ha” moment we had been hoping for: students were seeing that
their skills and knowledge from social media could make them stronger English students! Here is an example
of the complexity a student was able to show in his analysis of his chosen text, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way
Gone (the student’s punctuation remains intact):
Dear AK-47-
I love you but I hate you. I wish I never met you. You made me feel safe but also made me who I am
now a killer. Ishmael
After this lesson, the students were much more comfortable with second person, easily identifying it in
writing, both in their own and in mentor texts. They asked to use the status update model again to review To
Kill a Mockingbird; together, we decided to have different characters in the novel write to “racism” as a concept
to show their views on it. This assignment wasn’t long or fancy, but students clearly saw the connection
between their skill with reading, writing, and analyzing status updates and the skills they are asked to use in
English class. Thus, it made an excellent introduction to our class focus on connecting social media skills with
reading skills.
Twitter
Discussing our survey questions with our students, we were surprised to learn that Twitter is starting
to take the place of Facebook for many students. As the students talked about why they like Twitter, we
realized that it had great potential for building reading skills.
Table 2-Connecting Twitter skills and reading skills
Twitter Skills Literature Analysis/Reading Skill
Understanding Voice Understanding voice
Identifying Tone Identifying tone
Identifying common themes in a series of Tweets Identifying themes commonly explored by an author;
identifying theme throughout a piece of literature
Identifying the main idea of the Tweet Identifying the main idea of a piece of writing
Making Inferences about the author’s intent in a
Tweet
Making inferences about the author’s intent in a text
Identifying the Point of View and Bias in the Tweet Identifying the Point of View and Bias of an author
Understanding the methods of persuasion employed
in a Tweet
Understanding the methods of persuasion employed
in an argument
Communicating in a concise manner Understanding the importance of word choice in
communication
Live Tweeting to Practice Tovani’s “Inner Voice” and Annotation
In Jenn’s remedial literacy class, the students were preparing for an annotation unit, in which they would
annotate an entire text (Lord of the Flies) as they read. To help students understand how to annotate a literary
work, especially one that she knew they would find challenging, Jenn began by introducing the concept of the
reader’s “inner voice” via worksheets modeled on Tovani’s own inner voice (50). Jenn modeled a think-aloud
to help students understand the idea of hearing their inner voice while reading, using high interest articles
from Scholastic’s UpFront Magazine, and then had students practice using an inner voice chart while reading
another article.
An assessment of students’ completed “inner voice” sheets showed that they were attempting to
summarize sections of the article, rather than truly revealing their own thoughts, ideas, and questions about
the reading, which was the grade level team’s goal with the annotation book assignment. The students’
difficulty with annotation and “inner voice” presented a chance to help the students relate a more challenging
English skill to a digital skill they use frequently by connecting annotation to tweeting.

20 2013 Issue
First, Jenn started class by asking the students to do a quick-write, in which they answered the question:
Why do people tweet? An informative discussion began as students shared their quick-writes. Jenn next led
the class in generating a list of types of tweets. Here is the students’ list:
 Give your opinion (to get feedback)
 Share news/Information
 Re-tweet to share something interesting
 Show your interests and personal style
 Bully/Make fun of people
 Call people out
 Have a tweet battle (showing off your verbal insult-creating skills)
 Ask a question
Next, to help students make connections between the thinking patterns of tweeting and annotating a
text, Jenn found examples of “live tweeting” of events that would appeal to students. She took screenshots,
to recreate the chain of tweets, and put them on PowerPoint slides.
Jenn was able to find engaging examples of tweets that popped up on Twitter while her school’s
dance team was competing on national television. To further engage students, she also used a series of live
tweets during a Redskins game—we are in Northern Virginia and root for DC!—in which our region’s
beloved new quarterback, Robert Griffin III, suffered a frightening knee injury. She showed short video clips
of the two events while reading aloud the tweets that were being generated during the events. These two
examples helped students see how tweeting while watching an event is like annotating; you share your
opinions, ideas, connections, jokes, and questions as the “story” of the event unfolds, making your thinking
visible.
Jenn gave students the chance to practice transferring their twitter skills to a literary work by first
having them “live tweet” a scene from the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird, which they had just read.
Because Jenn’s school system has regulations that prohibit her from actually having students tweet as a class
activity, she created a mock version using the chat function in Blackboard Collaborate. Students
simultaneously watched the video clip while posting their “mock tweets” in real time on the shared chat
space. After the scene, the class went back and looked at their comments. Jenn asked them to do a quick-
write in which they attempted to describe how tweeting while watching the video clip helped them process it
better.
Finally, it was time for students to practice their tweeting skills with a literary passage. To scaffold the
students, Jenn created an inner voice sheet that showed the text of a passage from Of Mice and Men on one
side, with inner voice boxes next to each paragraph. Because the students had already read Of Mice and Men,
they were knowledgeable about the characters and the plot and could focus on practicing their
annotation/tweeting skills with a familiar reading. After reading and annotating the passage, students shared
their comments and questions with the class and discussed the similarities between annotating the passage
and live tweeting an event or scene in a movie. One student summed up their learning beautifully by stating
that tweets are the inner voice that you show the public and your inner voice is what you write down when
you annotate.
The next stage was to help students carry their new skill to Lord of the Flies. Jenn set up their practice
by putting the first few paragraphs of chapter one onto a handout, with boxes next to each paragraph for
students’ annotations. Students were able to use their inner voice sheets in a discussion of chapter one. At
this point, students were ready to annotate on their own in the margins of the novel, using the concept of
tweeting to help them focus on their inner voice as they read.
Texting
Texting is one mode of communication that has changed phone plans for families across America.
We all know that our students text frequently and with ease. Of course, texting is appropriate for study in
both student’s writing and reading, but we decided to focus on reading skills
Table 3-Connecting texting skills and reading skills

Reading Tasks
Texting Skills Literature Analysis/Reading Skills
Understanding the importance of word choice Understanding the importance of word choice
Precision in word choice and syntax Analyzing how syntax and word choice work
together
Editing Skills Understanding how attention to detail in editing
affects a message
Understanding sentence variety Understanding how sentence variety/syntax affect
the tone, message, and audience
Importance of identifying main details Identifying main details in a message
Interpreting the tone of a text message Analyzing how the word choice and syntax create the
tone
Interpreting the connotation of words and the hash
tags in a text message
Understanding the nuances in connotation of a
words in a text
Shorthand/note taking Using shorthand/note taking to help one’s self
summarize and make sense of a piece of literature
Texting and tone
Texting provided a quick entry into thinking about tone and evidence for Jenn’s AP Literature
students. First, students were asked to take out their own phones and examine some of their past text
conversations to see if they noticed anything about their own texting “voices.” They were asked to look for
tone, sentence patterns and word choice they use frequently, and other aspects of their own voices and the
voices of their texting partners. They all found that they frequently use emoticons to get across tone rather
than word choice.
The class discussed why emoticons are easy shorthand to use in the brief form of the text message.
Take this exchange of text messages Jenn shared with her students (see fig. 1). She sent the same text on three
separate occasions to her husband; he responded in three different ways:
Figure 1: Text and three responses
Students quickly identify the third text as the one they would most want to receive and found it easy
to discuss the tone of each of the messages, responding to questions like: Why didn’t he include any
emoticons? What are the slight differences in his tone in each one? Is it possible he didn’t get across the tone
he wanted to in the first one?
Examining the relationship between word choice and tone in these texts made it easier for students
to examine the relationship between word choice and tone in literature. Students often try to read between
the lines a little too much when analyzing literature, making an analysis of emotional reason they wish to be
true rather than the evidence in the plot they see on the page. Examining this series of texts helped students
focus on evidence rather than the back story they created as to why the first text has a harsher tone than the
third: “Maybe he was just having a bad day.” “Maybe he was just in a hurry and wanted to send a reply and
didn’t want to ignore her.” “Maybe he got cut off and had to answer the phone at work and only had time to
type ‘no.’”
Jenn’s AP Literature students practiced transferring their analysis of evidence to find tone by looking
at a passage from Crime and Punishment: Luzhin’s letter to Pulcheria in Part 3, a passage dripping with a
condescending, pretentious, self-important tone. They identified the tone of the passage, circling words and
Going to
Trader
Joe’s. Need
anything?
no No Thx That’s ok.

22 2013 Issue
phrases that they believed revealed the tone. Finally, students played with humor and irony by adding
emoticons to a typed version of the passage that completely changed the tone.
Reflection
Our survey taught us that students use social media differently than adults do, and that they are skilled at
analyzing and explaining the thought processes that occur when they use social media. By building on their
expertise with social media skills, we were able to help them think metacognitively about how they use similar
skills when reading and analyzing complicated tasks. The lessons we developed to help the students make
connections and transfer their skills were popular in the classroom; even struggling readers felt confident
about the social media portions of the lessons, and this confidence helped them take risks as they tackled the
reading practice in each lesson.
One delightful result of our semester of focusing on how social media skills connect to reading skills was
that our students took ownership of making the connections, often suggesting that “live tweeting” a chapter
we are reading would help them deal with their confusion, or making other suggestions for how a reading skill
we are practicing in class is similar to a social media skill. Allowing our students to teach us about social
media through the survey and discussion helped this series of lessons become more than a set of gimmicky
class activities; instead, the students became active participants in creating their own metacognitive awareness
of how they use reading and analysis skills daily in their personal, digital lives and how these are the same
skills they can call on to be successful readers.
As we reflect on this experience using social media skills to connect reading skills, we leave with some
positive and negative take-aways for future lessons.
 The downside: negative ways social media influences our students in class:
◦ Students are less skilled in intently focusing on one thing.
◦ Students often rely on emoticons and abbreviations to show tone, so they need more practice
creating tone in their own writing and identifying it in the writing of others.
◦ Students are less likely to take time for slow reflection when social media asks for a quick
response.
 On the upside: positive ways social media helps our students in class:
◦ Students think on more than one level at a time.
◦ Students form and share rapidly in response to media.
◦ Students make their thoughts visible (maybe not to us…).
◦ Students can interpret sarcasm, satire, and verbal humor.
We are only at the beginning stages of using social media skills to enhance learning in the English
classroom. Using social media does not have to be viewed as just a cutesy gimmick. Directly involving
students in their own learning by engaging them in conversations about how they use social media helps
students build metacognitive awareness of their own thought processes and the ways their own skills and
strengths can translate to classroom success.
Jennifer Beach is a National Board Certified Teacher who has been with Fairfax County Public
Schools in Virginia for 17 years, after four years as a parochial school teacher. She is the English
Department Chair at West Springfield High School, where she teaches AP Literature and Expanding
Literacies, a literacy support course for at-risk students.
Stacia Keel is a National Board Certified Teacher who has been with Fairfax County Public Schools in
Virginia for 15 years. She taught in the IB and IBMY programs at Mount Vernon High School and
served as English department chair. Currently she is a resource teacher working with teachers of
Developing Literacies and Expanding Literacies, literacy support courses for at-risk students.

Jeffrey Pflaum
The Creative Imagination and Its Impact
on 21st
Century Literacies
n television I saw a radical new program
in education called “Massage Therapy”
which is used as a technique to build
new pathways for learning in children. On the
screen was a close-up of a boy lying down while a
woman rubbed his temples. The child seemed
content. Afterwards, I said to myself: “Yabba,
dabba, do! Dat’s what I wanna do. You know,
soothe them into 21st century learning and
literacy.”
--Author’s imaginary self-dialogue following a
television promo for a report on “Massage
Therapy” for kids, March 31, 1998
As an inner-city elementary school
teacher for thirty-four years (NYCDOE) in
Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
New York, I have had great interest in teaching
the prerequisite fundamental skills for learning
how to learn, and also, teacher training, or what
makes a “good” teacher. With a limited
background in education, twelve credits in the
Intensive Teacher Training Program at Queens
College (NYC) in the late sixties, I came to the
classroom with little knowledge of what and how
to teach my fourth grade kids, so I listened and
observed carefully at the school workshops on
reading, language arts, social studies, and phonics.
I used these experiences during my early years and
found them helpful because they gave me enough
confidence to stand in front of a class and teach.
After my insecurities passed, and I became aware
that there were students in front of me, I realized
that they were not present mentally, emotionally,
and psychologically.
Questions came to mind: How would the
kids find the inspiration to learn? Where would
the passion to learn come from if not from the
teacher? How could I get my students into present
time so they could be-with-me during the lessons?
How could they develop self-awareness, self-
knowledge, and self-understanding to create their
own desire to read, write, and search for
knowledge? How could I teach self-reflection,
self-discovery, and self-education where
responsibility shifts to the children and they create
or re-create motivation from the inside?
I embarked on a 21st century skills
journey into education, teaching, learning,
knowledge, imagination, and creativity from 1968
to 2002. I made up curricula in reading, writing,
thinking, poetry, creativity, vocabulary, and
communication skills (emotional intelligence,
character education, and values clarification). It
became an experiment of progressive ideas
initiated by my brief teaching experiences,
negligible education background, in addition to
psychology, English, creative writing, film, and
photography undergraduate/graduate courses.
The 21st century skills movement wants
children to: think critically, be creative, problem-
solve, communicate, and innovate; however, many
past education reform movements have failed. For
example, in my school district, during the
seventies, we had the More Effective Schools
Program (MES) that reduced class size to twenty-
two students max. After several years, even with
the smaller class sizes, test scores in reading and
math went down and it was subsequently
dropped.
The skills movement will not sink like
MES if we teach kids about the creative
imagination. A key first step before instructing
about the content areas, especially on an
elementary school level, is practicing the
fundamentals needed for learning and learning
how to learn; ask any inner-city school teacher and
I believe they will agree without too much
hesitation.
The preliminary fundamentals, as I have
empirically researched, tested, and discovered in
my classrooms, are concentration, reflection,
contemplation, meditation, visualization,
observation, listening, speaking, critical thinking
(analysis/synthesis), creative-thinking, creative
writing, poetry reading and writing, emotional
intelligence (intra- and interpersonal
communication), character formation, values
clarification, and vocabulary expansion and
appreciation.
O

Jeffrey Pflaum
24 2013 Issue
But when, where, and how can the skills
be taught? There are times and places in the
schedule: for instance, they can be presented in
mini-lessons during the school day, in
before/after-school programs, summer school
classes, or, in extended school days.
Concentration Exercises: Focusing the Mind
My project, called “Concentration
Exercises,” helps adolescents become students,
keeping them involved, centered, and focused,
without asking them to “pay attention.” A
fundamental skill like concentration is a tool for
learning, and should not be taken for granted as it
is in today’s educational system and national
standards.
Some sample concentration exercises
students practiced are the following: saying their
name silently for two minutes and focusing only
on the “name,” walking around the school block
concentrating on everything they see, playing a
game called “hit-the-penny,” where their
concentration targets hitting a penny with a rubber
ball (and nothing else) from six feet away, and
eating a peppermint candy and concentrating on it
for three minutes or until it’s consumed.
It was important for them to find their
concentration within themselves, and once they
did, and understood and appreciated it for what it
is, they would jumpstart fresh self-motivation. I
wanted students to know concentration through
their own capabilities and to empower their lives.
Doing so is a beginning step to the creative
imagination, and also, to focus on that part of the
inside world. A dedicated teacher may get
students’ attention, but what happens when they
leave that classroom? Will they still be attentive
and motivated if the next teacher is not as
effective?
Before teaching any subject, kids have to
be present—they must be entirely focused—and
that can be done, first, through the power of
concentration. To do that, one must employ
learning through fun, novel, and challenging ways.
If these efforts are made, there will be changes in
the kids and in the classroom environment; at
least, that has been my experience after years of
teaching prerequisite fundamental skills for
learning, and learning how to learn.
Contemplation Music Writing: Introducing
Inner Experience
Taking a step further into the mind and
creative imagination, I made up “Contemplation
Music Writing,” an original form of writing, which
leads students on peaceful journeys of self-
reflection and self-discovery via music,
contemplation, writing, discussion, and
assessment. Typically, kids listen to ten minutes
of music from pop to classical and write whatever
thoughts, ideas, feelings, experiences, images, and
memories come to mind (no themes or prompts
are given). After listening, reflecting,
contemplating, and writing, the responses are read
orally (and anonymously) to the class, and
discussed via basic questions on mind-pictures
visualized, feelings and thoughts triggered by the
images, and main ideas or messages conveyed by
the writer.
A plethora of combined 21st century
academic, social, and emotional learning skills
came as a result of Contemplation Music Writing:
reflection, meditation, visualization, feeling, critical
and creative thinking, creativity, contemplation,
listening, observation, perception, communication,
writing, as well as self-expression, -awareness, -
knowledge, -understanding, -motivation, -efficacy,
and -empowerment.
The project became a foundation for
other types of innovative writing formats, from
non-fiction to fiction writing: “Here-and-Now
Contemplation Writing”—kids are given an
activity, in which they contemplate what
happened, and write about it; “Experimental
Contemplation Writing”—quirky experimental
activities done at home (similar to “Here-and-
Now” lessons); “Reflections”—prompted activity
where students write non-fiction narratives using
contemplation themes from past writings;
“Portraits”—same procedure as “Reflections,”
except kids use old contemplation themes for
fiction or creative writing.
Themes from the student contemplations
demonstrate the effectiveness of a non-prompt
style of writing, which, in my opinion, works well
with the independent natures of preteens and
teens. Sample themes describe how children build
their own pathways to the creative imagination:
Drifting Away into a Peaceful World; Dream of
Speeding Out of Control; Fantasy: The Double
Reflection; Nobody Wants Me! Or Becoming a
Snicker’s Bar; Songs and Remembrance; Letting

The Creative Imagination and Its Impact on 21st
Century Literacies
Go; Life is Short; Neglected Child; Fantasy: Drain
Pipes and Rice Krispies; Bad Vibes; Flutes,
Whales, and Peace; Schoolmates, Vampires, and
Ghosts; Dream: Frozen, Can’t Talk; Future Shock:
BMW or Tin Cup; End of the Family; Bright
Lights, No Exit; Depression; Reflections: I Hate
Therefore I Am; Prejudice; Memories: Death of a
Friend; Fighting and Blame; All Alone; Streams of
Thought: Modern Mind-Pictures; Boredom versus
Spontaneity; Mother Nature; “The Heart is a
Lonely Hunter”; Conflict Resolution: Father and
Daughter; and, School Fantasy.
Reading-and-Imagining: Language as Art
Take another step into 21st century, and
literacy skills and the creative imagination
overcome the ability to visualize—an important
ingredient in the art and science of reading that
leads to greater understanding and pleasure in this
magical process. In “Reading-and-Imagining,”
students practiced changing words into images.
The lessons began with single words,
mostly nouns, like apple, dog, room, sky, rainbow,
clouds, parrot, pencil, and rose—and progressed
to two-word, real and absurd sentences: from
Children play, Frogs hop, and Birds fly to
Children float, Trees jump, and Ducks skip. From
there we went to four-, six-, eight-, and ten-word
sentences, and onto paragraphs, whole page
passages, short stories, and poems. I added the
absurd sentences for visualization effects because
it shows kids what their imaginations are capable
of creating. They visualized, described, and drew
exactly what they saw in their own minds. The
unit ended with “charting” or “mapping”
passages—finding all the triggered images,
feelings, thoughts, and ideas.
Visualization is a fundamental
prerequisite skill that grows the creative
imagination, but is not given enough attention in
the national standards. Readers, from remedial to
gifted, have to get this skill down to an advanced
science in order to see what they read, which is a
lot of fun, especially when the images are rich with
detail and can, potentially, become three-
dimensional, holographic, virtual realities with
kids-as-avatars.
It’s funny, but initially in primary grades,
we teach words (reading) via pictures. Students
“translate” the pictures into words. The pictures,
of course, are on the outside. Yet, when children
move to intermediate, and upper, elementary
grades, or from picture to chapter books, they are
not given enough practice on how to reverse the
process—to change words into mind-pictures.
Students don’t get past the lavish illustrations of
primary books and fail to understand that, because
of their maturity, they must now make up the
beautiful pictures in their imagination. The
curriculum pays only cursory attention to the vital
process of image making and the creative
imagination. The situation becomes problematic if
you look at current standardized reading tests,
where numerous passages require strong
visualization skills.
Word-Bridges: Words to Live By
Children need rejuvenation in reading and
writing because they don’t have that inside feel, or
an understanding and enjoyment for the building
blocks of these subjects: words. Words are just
black print on a white page; they mean more
testing, stress, pain, and less pleasure and passion.
“Word-Bridges” demonstrated that words don’t
live alone in the mind and imagination, but in
clusters, and have lives of their own. My students
realize they are one enormous human dictionary
and thesaurus with thousands of words creating
meanings, ideas, thoughts, emotions, images,
dreams, experiences, memories, and worlds.
Words have purpose, significance, and intention.
Words became catalysts for other words in these
creative, critical thinking activities.
For example: “What happens to the word
‘hurt’ if you read or say it to yourself? Does the
word vanish after you read it? What happens to
‘hurt’ if you put it inside your head? Does the
word make you think of something else? Do you
picture or visualize anything in your mind? Or, is
‘hurt’ just hurt and nothing else? What other
words come to mind if you hear or imagine the
word ‘hurt’?”
The Word-Bridges Project started with
this simple procedure. After the introductory
lessons, it was understood that words trigger other
words and associations, as well as accompanying
feelings and thoughts. Words don’t live alone but
in clusters, with unknown paths, until we explore
them. Word-Bridges are motivational exercises for
reading, writing, and thinking. What surprised me
was that it stimulated vocabulary expansion.
Eventually, students sat at their desks and
constructed bridges with a thesaurus and
dictionary in hand.

Jeffrey Pflaum
26 2013 Issue
Squares, pyramids, diamonds, word-
wheels, free-bridges, and free-wording are
different forms of bridges that became
compelling, thought-provoking puzzles,
labyrinths, and entanglements for students to
solve by finding connecting words to a given
“spark word” using their vocabulary and a
dictionary/thesaurus to discover new words.
Experiencing words is a fundamental skill
that should be taught on the elementary level.
Don’t we want kids to enjoy the feast and deluge
of words coming their way from morning until
night? In the 21st century, making kids experience
words themselves helps them see the connections,
associations, and families of words in the mind
and imagination. This is a true skill—taking
students to creative, three-dimensional word
worlds, and letting them be touched by their
infinite nuances is an experience they’ll never
forget.
Word-Bridges energized the imagination via
structured and unstructured word unions.
Students learned and increased their knowledge of
prerequisite fundamental skills—visualization,
creative thinking, and creativity—that made
reading, writing, and thinking organic, creative,
and fun. Words exploded into other words,
forming groups from the “debris.” At the onset,
kids were unaware of the myriad of internal word
labyrinths. Words now left trails to new words,
meanings, and imaginings, generating resonances
that rang true for everyone. The words, images,
thoughts, ideas, associations, and feelings triggered
by the Word-Bridge exercises breathed a new
vitality and creativity into words.
The Creative-Thinking-Picture-Series: A
Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
To get to the crucial skills of critical
thinking, problem solving, and innovation, what
young people of the 21st century will need is the
tool of creativity: creative thinking. If we want
students to learn about cerebration, deliberation,
reflection, and meta-cognition, we need to guide
them to having fun-in-thought, and to enjoy the
self-amusement park called the creative
imagination. The “Creative-Thinking-Picture-
Series” is a collection of photographs, pictures,
and advertisements from newspapers and
magazines, along with absurd questions that have
no right or wrong answers. This strategy really
took the pressure off the kids “to be correct.”
To introduce creative thinking, I used an
opaque projector to show 6” x 6” photographs
and pictures that turned into 6’ x 6’ images on a
screen. Sometimes I projected a photograph
entirely over the front wall of the classroom and
we were suddenly at the still movies. The class
brainstormed a stream of responses—thoughts,
ideas, associations, and feelings—to the given
question. Ideas became stimuli for other ideas,
starting phenomenal creative interchanges during
our discussions. Children became aware of, and
got in touch with, their creative thought and
feeling processes.
In the series, students created something
from nothing—isn’t this the function of the
creative imagination?—after looking at a
photograph/advertisement of, for example, two
cups of tomato soup with a square of melting
butter in each with these possible questions: What
are the butters thinking? Imagining? Saying to
each other? Where do the butters want to go and
why? List the words going through the butters’
minds.
Any object came to life in creative
thinking. “You gotta make things up!” I told the
kids. So they became-the-object and identified
with the butters, and let their creativity take them
deeper inside their imaginations—How would you
feel if you were a piece of butter melting in hot
tomato soup? What would you be thinking and
feeling? Would your thoughts be serious,
humorous, or something else? When students
removed the “think-like” quality of the butter and
personified its nature, they extracted themselves
from reality into fantasy and a surreal world—a
common one we see in many television
commercials, only now they made up their own
“shows.” Brainstorming augmented creative
thinking and enabled them to see the mind as
theater where a play of thoughts, associations,
meanings, and feelings could entertain and educate
them. Traveling inside became an exhilarating
cruise to an expansive life in the mind. Regular
weekly practice with the series allowed children to
establish a permanent link to their creativity, and a
new, potential 21st century skill that comes from
the pictures: a sense of humor.
The Inner Cities Poetry Project: Journey’s
End into 21st Century Literacies
Keeping in mind the previous skills-
building projects, it is not a coincidence that

The Creative Imagination and Its Impact on 21st
Century Literacies
poetry became the end of my journey into the
world of 21st century learning and literacy. After
my curricula in creativity and imagination, this
subject came naturally. Key to experiencing poetry
is the perception of imagery, feelings, thoughts,
and language. Poems can spin readers into a
variety of inner adventures if they have practiced
the fundamental skills leading the way.
The subject of poetry challenged students
to work harder to discover the magic and solve
the mystery of words, language, feelings, thoughts,
and ideas, as well as real and imagined experience.
All the skills essential for learning, and learning
how to learn, came together in poetry: reading,
writing, critical and creative thinking, visualizing,
concentrating, contemplating, meditating, feeling,
listening, experiencing, analyzing, synthesizing,
brainstorming, reflecting, observing, perceiving,
and communicating.
Using what I called “The Poetry Reading
Sheet,” children either (a) visualized images in a
poem; (b) connected feelings to the images; (c)
brainstormed thoughts, ideas, meanings, and
connected real-life experiences; (d) found the
poet’s message or main idea; (e) selected favorite
words, phrases, and lines and explained why they
enjoyed them; or (f) created new, possible titles
for the poem by brainstorming and preparing for
future poetry lessons.
A variety of poets and poetry were read
orally to the class: Gary Soto, Shel Silverstein,
Langston Hughes, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost,
and Edward Lear’s Limericks. I also read to my
classes Japanese and Western Haiku,
Chinese/Japanese poetry, and Native American
poetry.
After several weeks of poetry reading, I switched
to poetry writing by taping pictures and 20” x 30”
posters on the board. Students described what
they saw and brainstormed potential titles for
poems they would eventually write. I filled the
board with dozens of the kids’ titles and they
selected their favorites and wrote poems. Most
wrote several during the period and completed
more poems at home on their own. I reviewed,
critiqued, read aloud, and discussed their original
poetry with the class. Poetry reading and writing
lessons were mixed in with our regular reading
and writing assignments throughout the school
year.
To create readers, thinkers, problem-
solvers, communicators, and innovators out of
our students, the education establishment should
invite kids to the self-amusement parks of mind,
imagination, and creativity. The source of
motivation lies within: It is not enough to talk
about 21st century skills and objectives; we must
demonstrate the processes of the imagination.
Adolescent inner space has an excess of psychic,
visual, and visceral baggage, which clutters, blocks
and causes a lack of imagination. The chaos,
confusion, and opaqueness, resulting from the
overabundance of media-driven imagery, force us
to work hard to clear the mind and imagination so
children can see their originality, their mind-
pictures, and their inner lives. My creative-skill
building projects remove the debris and get to the
source—the tabula rasa of their inside worlds.
When I worked on concentration,
contemplation, visualization, creative thinking,
and brainstorming with my classes, my purpose
was to develop a supplementary approach to the
traditional curriculum in reading and writing that
would lead to activating the adolescent mind. A
long-range goal was to show that reading, like
writing, is an art—a creative, imaginative process
by which they are born into the story. Whether it
was reading or writing fiction or non-fiction, they
should find themselves in the middle of their
creative imaginations.
“Concentration Exercises” built up
attention spans, while “Contemplation Music
Writing” introduced inner experience and
visualization skills, increased self-awareness, and
improved self-expression. “Reading-and-
Imagining” also advanced the ability to visualize,
in this case, the words they read, connected
feelings and thoughts triggered by the imagery.
“Word-Bridges” took words and bridged them to
other words, finding associative paths that led us
deeper into the mind’s dictionary and thesaurus.
Words not only created images through
visualization, but also created a pulse, feeling, and
vibe that came from the beat of other connected
words. “The Creative-Thinking-Picture-Series”
helped kids find more new connections with
words, sentences, ideas, thoughts, feelings,
experiences, and meanings. This evolved into an
exercise to rejuvenate and motivate imagination
and creativity. The series gave students a purpose
for digging inside their minds and having a good
time doing it. By introducing complementary
projects to a standard curriculum, children learned
the prerequisite fundamental skills for reading and

New Jersey English Journal 2013

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