NCETA Journal

NCETNorth Carolina English Teachers
Volume 66, Number 1
Fall 2013
Journal

NCET • Volume 66 • Number 1• Fall 2013
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North Carolina English Teachers Journal
The North Carolina English Teachers Association,
an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Purpose:
The purpose of the organization is to promote effective teaching of English and the
language arts and integration of literacy instruction for Pre-K-college public, private, and
home schools of North Carolina by dissemination of research and sharing of exemplary
teaching methods. NCETA will also promote effective teaching by sponsoring classroom
grants and teacher recognition. In addition, NCETA will encourage excellence in student
expression through writing/multimedia competitions.
Julie Malcolm
Executive Director
NC Department of Public
Instruction
ncenglishteacherweb@gmail.com
Jennifer Sharpe
President
Rocky Mount High School
jennifer.lee.sharpe@gmail.com
Danielle Lewis
Vice-President
Wendell Middle School
danielleklewis75@gmail.com
Elaine Cox
Past President
Ashe County Middle School
elaine.cox@ashe.k12.nc.us
Karen Miller
Recording Secretary
South Rowan High School
millerkj@rss.k12.nc.us
Melissa Champion Hurst
NCETA Notes Editor
mchampionhurst@yahoo.com
Sally Griffin
NCET Journal Editor
sgsallyg@gmail.com
Sara English
Writing/Multimedia Awards
Director
NCDPI
sara.english78@gmail.com
Dr. Will Banks
National Writing Project
Liasion
East Carolina University
banksw@ecu.edu
Stephanie West-Puckett
Conference Director
East Carolina University
westpucketts@ecu.edu
Robert Puckett
Webmaster
JH Rose High School
puckettr@pitt.k12.nc.us
Anna Lea Frost
NCDPI Representative
Indefinite
NC Department of Public
Instruction
anna.frost@dpi.nc.gov
Lil Brannon
NCTE Liasion
UNC Charlotte
lil.brannon@uncc.edu
Kelly Morris Roberts, PhD
Colleges/Universities
Director - Central
Meredith College
robertsk@meredith.edu
Nancy C Posey
Colleges/Universities
Director West
Caldwell Community
College and Technical
Institute
nposey27@gmail.com;
nposey@cccti.edu
NCETA Board of Directors

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Table of Contents
Editor’s Notes:
Publication Resumes, Needs Reader Input ------------------------------------ 3
Sally Griffin
The Power of Photographs to Inspire Writing ------------------------------- 4
Hank Kellner
2012 OET Award speech------------------------------------------------------ 8
Steve Fulton
Drawing Your Own Conclusions--------------------------------------------- 11
Matthew Koval and Joe Milner, PhD
Writing in the cloud - student writing in a connected world. --------------- 16
Chris Goodson
Don’t miss out!Apply for grants and awards at:
http://ncenglishteacher.squarespace.com/grants-and-awards/

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Editor’s Notes:
Publication Resumes, Needs Reader Input
After several years’ absence, NCET, the journal of the NC English Teachers Association,
resumes publication with this issue. As we try to digest the many changes coming to curricula
across our state—and the change to the actual makeup of schools—we feel that NCET has
a place in keeping our organization viable in this new education world.
As an encouragement to students, we will publish the winners of our student writing contests.
NCETA sponsors several contests each year. Look for the 2013 contest winners in the spring
2014 edition. Please encourage your students to enter their work so that they are eligible
for scholarships and/or cash prizes. Information about the contests is on the NCETA website.
Two articles appear in this issue that offer ideas in reading and/or writing. Both use creative
methods of looking at pictures or drawing pictures to help students grasp ideas. Columns in
this issue inspire us with a teacher’s story or challenge us to use the web for student learning.
In our changing world communication other than words on a page is becoming the norm.
And so these are the first of many chronicles of change that will appear on these pages.
It is our hope that the articles in this publication inform and inspire teachers at all grade
levels. We want you, our readers, to contribute articles and columns about your own
experiences and experiments in the classroom. Letters to the editor and suggestions are also
always welcome. This is your journal and we want to hear from you.
Sally Griffin, Editor
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The Power of Photographs to Inspire Writing
Hank Kellner
A veteran of the Korean War, Hank Kellner is a retired Associate Professor of English
currently based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of 125 Photos for English
Composition Classes (J. Weston Walch, 1978); How to Be a Better Photographer (J. Weston
Walch, 1980); Write What You See: 99 Photos to Inspire Writing (Prufrock Press, 2009);
and, with Elizabeth Guy, the co-author of Reflect and Write: 300 Poems and Photographs to
Inspire Writing (Prufrock Press, 2013) His other writings and photographs have appeared
in hundreds of publications nationwide.
“Words and pictures can work togeer to communicate more powerfully than either alone.”
-William Albert Allard: American Photographer
Show a photograph to a child, and the youngster will point to it, trace its image, and re-
spond with a variety of emotions. Show another to an adult, and you get a frown, a smile,
or a gesture—rarely will you draw a blank. Then show a photo, or a series of photos, to
people at any level, and you’ll have more responses than you can handle. Soon your stu-
dents will be scribbling poems and essays that will make you wonder why you hadn’t used
this simple and obvious technique years earlier for stimulating the creative process.
Why do students respond so enthusiastically to graphic images? Here’s one theory. Early
humans drew pictures on the walls of caves. That’s visual orientation, the kind of commu-
nication that doesn’t depend on the written word. Then along came paper and ink, and
with them, word orientation. Meticulously copying texts, monks labored for centuries with
this kind of mindset. True, they also embellished these works with colorful designs and im-
ages—the illuminated manuscript— but the text prevailed and the visual orientation of the
cave was slowly being edged out by attention to the written word.
Then came the printing press followed by machines that could set type and reproduce
images that would have astounded the medieval monks who labored in their cells. Later,
during the 19th Century, innovators discovered how to capture images on film, and still
photographs and motion pictures were born. During the 20th Century, children in schools
found themselves in groups called “Bluebirds” and “Robins,” where they were encour-
aged to master the printed word, whatever the cost. Frozen in time, little Johnny and Betty
roamed the pages of primary readers or scratched out weekly compositions on topics like
“My Vacation” or “My Favorite Pet.”
Today the pendulum of history is swinging back toward an emphasis on visual images. The
explosion that began with the invention of photography recalled our early attempts to
communicate by drawing on the walls of caves. From still photography came motion pic-
tures. Then came television, and what was a trickle burst into a torrent. It was, in a sense, a
return to the cave. Finally, the digital revolution has converted the torrent of images into a
tsunami that floods the senses and is virtually impossible to ignore.
Often maligned but never out of sight, these visual images captivate us. Show students a
simple photograph of waves beating against the shore and you’ll be amazed by their re-
sponses. Some will recall memories of seaside childhoods; others will visualize sea stories,
shipwrecks, mysteries of the deep, and more. Still others will venture into the abstract—the
world of simile, metaphor, and personification—perhaps transcribing a bit of themselves
into their writing.

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For teachers who recognize the power of photographic images to inspire writing, the
rewards are great. No longer will students complain, “I don’t know what to write about.”
Why is this so? Perhaps it is because there is something magical about photographs; some-
thing that causes students to respond spontaneously and creatively; something that reaches
into the subconscious and triggers responses.
One of the many good things about using photos to inspire writing in the classroom is that
you do not have to look very far to discover suitable images. Consider, for example, a sim-
ple photo of a light bulb and the ideas it triggered in the mind of Becky Brown, a student
at Peak To Peak Charter School, Lafayette, Colorado.
Inspiration
So cheerful
Yet so grim
The inspiration hits
And the pencil caresses the paper
Turning dreams into realities
The words flow freely
Unhindered by the conscious mind,
Simply written as thought,
As fragments pierced together
From disorganization to art
The pencil writes still
As if it has a mind of its own
The words just keep coming
And you sit, helpless to stem the flow
Like the mouse versus the mountain
You keep your head down
Oblivious to the world
Until the poem is done
And the inspiration trickles away
Like the stream in the desert
It could be that digging into students for personal responses, abstract notions, creative
concepts, and subconscious ideas is the real value of using photographs to inspire writing.
But that is not the end. Photographs can also be used to teach such writing skills as sense
impressions, cause and effect, and analysis.
No photograph is too simple or mundane to stimulate writing. Take, for example, a picture
of the exterior of a deserted house. Gloomy and low-keyed, it lends itself to many inter-
pretations. But it also makes possible the teaching of many skills. “What’s the difference,”
you might ask, “between the appearance of the structure shown in the photo and the way
it must have been when it was new? What do you think happened to the people who once
lived in this house?” Responses will vary, of course, but quite often a student will come
up with a gem like the following by Eve Milrod, a student at Baldwin Senior High School,
Baldwin, New York.

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Scarred and Pitted
The old house is scarred
And pitted. It once
was smooth and shiny.
Its windows are two eyes
Gazing out at nowhere
Devoid of glass.
Shadows lurk inside
Reminders, it would seem
Of long forgotten occupants.
Even a simple photo of a dog painted on a doorway can serve as inspiration for writing.
A student of psychology, astronomy, and philosophy at Massbay College in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, Rose Scherlis responded to this image with the following poem.
“The Dog With No Name.”
Your furry head peeked out from under the table
So I dropped some fried plantain for you to enjoy
You lived on a banana field in Costa Rica,
And it was beautiful, but the pesticides
For years underneath your delicate paws
Had twisted them until they grew like poison ivy
Bent in the wrong directions.
Your ear was tattered, a page in a book
With the corner folded down,
Signs of an ongoing war
With a world so menacing
When seen from way down there.
But still your tail wagged
Like a stick in the hand of a drummer,
And your fur shone
Mottled with brown splotches,
Just puddles of mud
Surrounding your two copper eyes.

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Paired with such keywords as dogs, loyalty,
friend, and dedication, this photo—or one that
is similar—will trigger ideas leading to student
writing, either poetry or prose. What’s more
you can always add a quotation like this one by
Gilda Radner to encourage even more creative
thinking: “I think dogs are the most amazing
creatures; they give unconditional love. For me
they are the role models for being alive.”
And how about an exercise in point of view?
Using the photo of the protester shown here,
divide the class into groups of twos, and ask the
members of each group to respond in writing
from the point of view of either the woman
holding the sign or an observer who disagrees
with the sign’s message. Some students may
choose to do this in the form of a dialogue. If
you really like to organize things, arrange other
appropriate photographs into such opposing
themes as children and senior citizens, urban and
rural, handcrafting and mass production, leisure
and industry—whatever will elicit responses
from student writers.
Perhaps by now you are thinking of other ways in which you can inspire writing by using
photographs as stimuli. Here are just a few. (1) Use family photos to encourage writing
about parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, (2) Use photographs to trigger the
writing of haiku, (3) Create an anthology containing student photos and the written works
the photos inspired, (4) Use photographs to encourage students to act out what they see
in the photos before they write about them, (5) Simply project several photographs on a
screen without comment and let the students take it from there.
In the long run, what approach you take really doesn’t matter. When you use photographs
to inspire writing, the images speak for themselves. What’s more, the poetry or prose your
students will create will be more honest and meaningful than most other student writing
you have read.
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2012 OET Award speech
Steve Fulton
When I tell people I teach middle school English, I seem to get the same handful of
responses. People cringe, they pity me, they tell me that they hate grammar or joke about
not wanting me to judge them based on the way they speak. Interesting how the misery
of learning grammar or being made feeling inferior seems to stick with people. It’s what
stuck with me, too, when I think back to my own experiences as a student.
I remember bits and pieces of middle school English, likely my sub-conscious’ attempt to
protect any sense of self worth I had left intact after those years. I can still see the the
cringes of teachers and peers as they tried to read my handwriting. Red ink bleeding
from papers I worked so hard to write. Interpretations torn down while seeing others’
validated and built up. And of course there was the scarring grammar experience that
everyone seems to have: learning the parts of speech with Mrs. A in 7th grade.
I couldn’t learn the parts of speech to save my life, and there was this song, the
preposition song we were made to memorize, as well as the dance that went along with
it. I don’t remember the tune or any of the movements from the dance, except you had
to smack your butt when you got to the word “but,” but, I do remember how it made me
feel. I remember seeing that my classmates all caught on quickly and seemed to enjoy
the activity. I remember trying to fit in, acting like I enjoyed singing this ridiculous song and
understood it whenever we practiced. I remember hoping that I would be able to fake
it well enough to get by and that this hope was crushed the day when I was called on to
perform a solo in front of the class. Of course it was a huge failure. I didn’t even get to
“but.”
These aren’t the experiences of someone who goes on to later teach middle school English
and sticks with it for 10 years. I wish I could say that I initially took the position on out of
this deep desire to provide for students what I didn’t have the opportunity to receive. But
I can’t in all honestly make such a nobel claim. The truth is, when I interviewing for science
teaching jobs, the first job I was offered was one teaching English. I don’t know how that
happened or why, in the excitement of the moment, I agreed to accept it.
I remember not feeling any sense of identity as an English teacher and hoping that I could
just fake it, sort of like I did with the preposition song. All I really brought to that
classroom my first year was anxiety over what I was getting myself into, a handful of
ideas retained from my methods class, and a theory that my past experiences as a middle
school student of English would enable me to make the experience a little less miserable
for my students. I didn’t know how I would exactly make this last part happen. I just f
igured that I would be able to “keep it real” and get through to those of my students, who
like me, had been marginalized by English class.
I was wrong here too. It turns out that being a marginalized English student a middle
class, homogenous suburb, doesn’t necessarily equate to having the ability to “keep it real”
with students in a high-poverty, incredibly diverse city school. It didn’t take but a week for
my students to teach me that I didn’t know a thing about being marginalized. The margins
existed well beyond where I was situated. Places that I didn’t even know existed. Places
where my students had been pushed to well before they even entered my classroom.
Suffice to say that my experiences gave me no edge at “keeping it real.” But looking to
this area though, trying to connect the experience of my past to the reality of my present,

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I did find something important. A truth that is arguably the most significant of those that
underlie and drive the field of teaching English.
As a student, I was introduced to how language could be used to humiliate and degrade.
How designations of what is important and valued served to force me out and bring
others in. I learned how closely language connected to self, and I felt how devaluing one
impacts the other.
And as a teacher that first year I saw these same functions at work in my classroom, of
course on a much greater scope. I realized that it was about much more than being able
to memorize the preposition song, underline dangling participles, and work through
publisher created worksheets that went along with the textbook. It was about the politics
of language and the circulation of power within the English classroom. About whose dia-
lects were valued enough to be called standard. It was about which texts were used, which
backgrounds were represented, and who got to tell the story that defined that particular
background. It was about whose writing was recognized for it’s content, and whose got
chastised for how that content was composed or delivered.
It seemed that much of what I had just assumed were the fundamental pieces and purpos-
es of English class contrasted quite sharply with the narrative traditionally told and
universally agreed upon about education; about education being the great equalizer
for all, the gateway for opportunity and prosperity. And it got me wondering, from that
first year, what an English classroom would look like that empowered, was inclusive, and
worked critically to examine and deconstruct the exclusionary structures that are in place.
I’m not ashamed to say that 10 years later, after what has been an ongoing professional
and personal inquiry, I still haven’t figured it out. It hasn’t been for lack of effort, and my
efforts haven’t been without discovery, without realizations that enable me to revise my
practice and identity as an English teacher every day.
I’ve realized, for example, that the role of literature in English is more than just content
to be taught and comprehended. Classic and contemporary texts, rather best serve as
spaces in which to inquire and question. Spaces to analyze depictions of power, the
effects such have on our society, and examine how these effects contrast with a vision of
equity and the conditions that support democracy. I’ve realized that writing is more than
a set of skills to be mastered and memorized. That teaching writing requires engaging
students in actually writing like writers do for purposes of importance. Purposes like using
the practice as a way to discover truth, situate oneself in position with, or in opposition to,
society, and to counter the narratives that serve to maintain inequality and constrain our
ability to define ourselves.
I’ve realized that the types of learning that ought to count most in an English classroom
cannot be measured by a multiple-choice reading test, even if we change it’s name from
the End of Grade Reading Test to the End of Grade English English Language Arts test,
even if we claim them to be an important step in being College and Career ready be-
cause they are aligned with the more rigorous Common Core Standards. It’s rhetoric that,
at best, distorts the significance of imprecisely measuring a slim slice of student ability.
And at worst, feeds into the greater “bad teacher” narrative that advocates the need
for top-down measures that will supposedly quantify student learning and determine the
effectiveness of our teaching. To hold us accountable, even at the expense of narrowing
our instruction, pitting us against each other, and preserving some of the gate-keeping
practices that prevent English from being the inclusive and transformative space that it

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potentially can be. It’s rhetoric that again highlights the power and politics of language as
it intersects with our field.
And, it has also got me wondering back to my middle school English teacher, Ms. A, who
I clearly cast as “the bad teacher” in my path-to-becoming-an-English teacher narra-
tive. From what I can remember, Ms. A wasn’t at all mean-spirited or out to get us. She
was clearly passionate about and invested in about what she did, and I’m now wondering
about the sorts of rhetoric and pressure, histories and values, that were working in and
around her as a teacher of English. It’s an interesting idea, one that I had not considered
until well after I had written this address, one that complicates Ms. A, my narrative, and
our profession.
It’s this sort of wondering, the looking closer at and questioning the small pieces of the
narratives we create and overhear, that has led me to appreciate the power and poten-
tial within our field, to embrace need for continuous inquiry, and to be mindful of that fact
that as a teacher we always will be negotiating how to work within, around, and against
(yes Ms. A, I know my prepositions) rhetoric and policies that affect English and education.
As we know, this can be a frustrating process, but it also cannot also overshadow another
truth that is particularly highlighted through the path of my career, of our careers. That
conditions DO exist, conditions we create, that cultivate and support our ongoing
professional journey. This is work that cannot be mandated, and that we cannot do on our
own. It’s work that happens in spaces as small as the teacher’s classroom down the hall or
as large as the global professional networks we connect with online. It’s what drives us to
be involved with professional organizations, like the National Writing Project and NCETA,
to write sub plans and pay out of pocket to attend conferences.
Truly, it is a humbling experience to be named this year’s NCETA Outstanding English
Teacher and to give this address to an audience of people who I look to as models of
teaching. I am honored to receive this award, and even more so, to be recognized as an
English teacher and have the opportunity to connect with and inquire alongside of you.
Thank you.
cd
Make Plans Now to Attend
LicenseAttribution Some rights reserved by NCDOTcommunications
NCETA’s 44th Annual Fall Conference
At North Carolina State University
October 9-11, 2014
Check our website for updates.

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Drawing Your Own Conclusions
Matthew Koval and Joe Milner, PhD
Matthew Koval is currently a graduate student in the Master’s of Education program at
Wake Forest University. He earned his English master’s degree at WFU from 2009-2011,
during which time he took an English Methods course with Dr. Milner and taught Joyce’s
“The Dead” for our “Drawing Conclusions” study.
Joe Milner, PhD, is professor of education at Wake Forest University. He was honored at
the 2012 NCTE convention in Las Vegas for his career contributions and service to the field
of English education.
Students’ comprehension of texts is the English teacher’s perennial challenge. When
students struggle to grasp ideas communicated in poems, short stories, and novels, what
can a teacher do to promote understanding other than reiterate, paraphrase, or explain
the text? What activities can be used to actively engage students in furthering
comprehension? Smith (1971) offers an unusual approach to difficulties in understanding
texts by suggesting that if a reader is not comprehending fully as she reads a text the
prescription for deeper understanding is to read faster. Smith argues that the context
will begin to give the reader more clues to enlarge the understanding of the text at hand.
Beers (2006) more recently suggests that the best remedy for readers who are having
difficulty with comprehension is to read the text again. There is merit in both cases.
However, there are some compelling though indirect approaches to comprehension through
eliciting students’ tacit understanding that are well supported by rich concepts of leaders
in the field.

John Dixon who helped redefine English education at the Dartmouth Conference, explores
with Leslie Stratta (Dixon and Stratta,1989) the benefits of creative responses to
literature as a powerful path to comprehension. They found that when students assumed
the role of author and wrote new vignettes for a story, their unexpected insights captured
the essence of the narrative (31-33). They believe that this tacit, indirect route unearthed
students’ intuitive understanding, whereas verbal analysis of the text often did not. Adams
(1989) argues for similar means of evoking students’ deeper, unstated, and more intensely
felt responses to literature and offers some helpful examples of his students’ collaborative
authoring as they responded to the novel A High Wind in Jamaica. Adams’ insights draw
on Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” (1990): a creative and indirect approach to texts
allows students to relax into “optimal psychological conditions” (4-5) and thus into tacit
understandings of a text.
In the Wake Forest University Education Department, we have explored a different route
to achieving students’ tacit understandings of texts. We offer an even less verbal or
analytical approach to similar depths of involvement and unexpected clarity of insight.
We ask students to draw or sketch simple pictures or representations at critical junctures
or niches in a text. These simple drawings first advance and then clarify their unspoken
understanding. Michael Polanyi initially explored this kind of knowing in The Tacit
Dimension (1967), and Malcolm Gladwell more recently celebrated this tacit dimension
in Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005). Polanyi famously observed: “We
can know more than we can tell” (4). Langer (1995) similarly argues that students need to
create a picture of the author’s story or “envisionment” (7-8) as they read a text; we ask
them to draw that image.

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The benefits of tapping into students’ tacit knowledge have been extoled by diverse
leaders in the field. Wilhelm (2011), for example, makes a compelling case that struggling
readers who all too often merely pass over the text without truly understanding it, need to
form a visual image in their minds of the action. We affirm the power of inviting
students to draw their own conclusions by the example of a few fine teachers who
witnessed the power of such visual renderings in an English methods class and put them
into action in their own classrooms.
Drawing Model
When, our methods students first explored Frost’s “Lockless Door” in small groups, even
the most capable students had difficulty getting a clear picture of the mysterious dwelling
at the heart of the poem. Before offering their individual responses to the Frost poem,
each student was asked to draw a picture of the dwelling as they visualized it. After they
worked at their drawings, students in small groups discussed which sketch most
accurately captured the group’s understanding of the poem. Then each group sketched its
preferred drawing on the board for the class to consider. The students studied the
drawings carefully and then began to argue about which sketch best captured Frost’s
seeming intent. It was an illuminating conversation in which they discussed the position of
the door, the speaker, and the windows, as well as the speaker’s movements in the
dwelling. Other concerns arose but these four were the most revelatory. So the rendering
opened up understandings of the text that were untapped by more analytical discussion
of the verbal nuances of Frost’s poem.
Putting the Model in Play
This method was so enticing that it became a favorite of the students when they began
their teaching internships. They had witnessed the power of students’ drawing to unlock
a text’s multiple meanings, so it became a staple of their literature instruction. Evidence
of this approach’s power abounds in the diverse, effective ways they used this strategy in
their own classrooms.
Drawing conclusions was evident in the way two teachers used their students’ renderings
to teach very different poems, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Brooks’ “Kitchenette Building”.
Because they both taught a unit on irony to very different secondary students, variants
emerged in teaching this complex literary concept. Thomas used his students’ drawings to
help them recognize the irony in Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” to grasp the arrogance of the
ancient ruler. He helped his initially confounded students see the irony (the contrast of the
ancient ruler’s grandiose hopes and what eventually happened to his statue over time) by
asking them to draw a simple before-and-after sketch of the monument. When they drew
the gigantic original replica of Ozymandias and then the contrasting toppled and
weathered remains with its ridiculous quotation, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and
despair,” the irony became apparent. Drawing the two very different statues helped a
wide range of students readily recognize the poet’s irony: the contrast between the ruler’s
hubris and his own mutability.
In much the same fashion, Carmen opened up Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem about the stark
reality of tenement living. She asked students to draw a strong black line down the center
of their paper and on the left side write Brooks’ positive words like “aria” and “flutter”
alongside a sketch of the major features of a dream apartment. Then on the right side
they were asked to pencil in four to six negative words from Brooks’ poem such as “fumes,”
“ripening,” “garbage” and a second drawing of the apartment to illustrate in somber
tones the bleak surroundings of her tiny dreamless kitchenette dwelling. When they
became aware of the dominating drab colors of the poem and the detached “we” of her
narrator, they were able to draw some thoughtful conclusions about Brooks’ poem

13
unavailable to them before using this kind of visual scaffolding. The contrasted images
they created underscored the newfound understanding they derived.

Working with the even more complex short-fiction in Joyce’s Dubliners, Matt helped honors
students excavate deep understanding of the subtle but powerful short story, “The Dead”
(1914). After these able students read Joyce’s dense text, Matt asked them in small
groups to re-read aloud the story’s final page and pick out a crucial, poignant sentence
to copy on a sheet of drawing paper accompanied by a clarifying drawing. One group
chose: “He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived as man
and wife” (235). To this sad closing line they appended a revealing drawing of Michael
and Gretta lying a-bed with sweet notions of their relationship in Gretta’s head and a
sleepless, disturbed Michael beside her reflecting on their very separate lives (Figure 1).
Another group selected a longer passage focused on loss: “Soon, perhaps, he would be
sitting in the drawing room dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be
drawn and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and tell-
ing him how Julia had died. He cast about in his mind for some words that might console
her and could find only lame and useless ones (235).” This time the mourning scene was
the focal point of the simple drawing with Michael trying without success to bring forth any
consoling words for the despondent Aunt Kate (Figure 2). The final depiction was most art-
fully drawn, but not one single word was offered by his students. Instead a wordless cross
standing alone in a cemetery next to an inscriptionless headstone covered in briars was set
against an ominous black iron fence (Figure 3). Those images say everything about Matt’s
students’ tacit understandings of Joyce’s fine story. They recognized Joyce’s quiet, pen-
etrating sense of the widespread death-like chill that settles like snow over Ireland.
Other Variations
Lindsay employed a large scale visual task to encourage pairs of ninth grade students
to work together to fashion a visual representation of the defining scene they chose from
Their Eyes Were Watching God. Each pair then added a central, illuminating quote from
the book and from these drawings and words, the whole class created a class quilt
(Figure 4). Whether the drawings were of Janie and Tea Cake playing checkers, the
lovely green pear tree they sat beneath, the vibrant town store, or the slowly draining
kidneys, tacit knowledge of the text was apparent in the chosen scenes, the visual images,
and the selected quotes. Hung in the classroom, the quilt became a touchtone for the
students’ deepening understanding of Hurston’s moving novel.
Ernest H. Shepard’s famous inside cover maps for both Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in
the Willows serve as a way of encouraging young readers to visualize the worlds of these
two iconic children’s books. Sarah used maps a bit differently. She asked her ninth grade
students to use their tacit understanding of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird to imagine a
map of Maycomb that featured the most important characters and events that appear on
that town’s scattered streets. Sarah cleverly inverted Shepard’s pattern by having her
students use their tacit knowledge to visualize Harper Lee’s world and then to create their
own Maycomb. Similarly, students in an American literature class charted critical points on
a map of Huck’s and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi that revealed students’
understanding of Huck’s physical journey downstream and his interior journey to maturity.
Multi-Grade Drawing
Two final examples from books for younger students offer a clear example of the power
of students drawing their own conclusions. In the first, Gardner’s multiple intelligences were
used to explore Rumpelstiltskin in a variety of classrooms. The lesson focused on a number
of drawing acts that evoked students’ tacit knowledge to yield deep character insight and

14
clear story definition. A powerful part of these activities came when the story was read
from a big book that let the whole class experience the lavishly illustrated story’s
oversized images. After the big book was read aloud to the class, students were
selected to assume the roles of the main characters: overbearing father, exploited
daughter, greedy king, intervening elf, and faithful messenger. They then “performed”
the action of the tale with vivid contemporary language and gestures that helped the
students comprehend the words and deeds of this timeless story.
After this performance, groups of four or five students worked with crayons to create a
triptych of the beginning, middle, and end of the story using crucial icons, images, and
splashes of color to fill out the three panels on a large rectangular sheet of butcher paper
(Figure 5). Like Lindsay’s quilt, the triptychs crystalized the students’ grasp of essential
insights that a mere verbal reading and discussion alone might have missed. Individuals
then stepped back from the group and silently considered the story’s four major
characters and ranked them from worst to best. Individuals then rejoined their groups
to compare their moral ladders. After a few minutes of amicable discussion and some
serious disagreements they arranged the four characters on their ladder with the bottom
rung reserved for the worst character and the other three rungs for the characters who
were deemed successively more virtuous. These visual character evaluations along with
the three-panel renderings were used in a whole class finale when leaders of each group
explained their group drawing and then defended their choices for best and worst char-
acters (Figure 6). Comprehension through many avenues of tacit knowledge abounded.
Inverse Elementary Application
The final example of drawing your own conclusions came from a superb kindergarten
teacher who used students’ artistic activity as a template for her children writing stories,
not reading them. This masterful teacher created a carefully planned writing workshop
for her five and six-year-old kindergarten students that started with drawing. She began
the workshop with children sitting, four at a table. She then pulled her chair up to the end
of one of the tables and quietly asked all of the children to close their eyes and imagine a
story. The children all seemed to enjoy this way of plunging into their own magical story
world; she merely asked them to open their eyes when they finished planning their story.
We all know that Donald Graves famously said, “Everybody has a story to tell,” so after a
little less than a minute all of the children opened their eyes with a fresh plan for a special
story to write. She asked each child to write her/his name on the top part of the drawing
paper and then used a familiar routine to begin drawing on the first page. As they began
to draw their story in four steps she slowly counted, “One, two, three…” up to twenty
and then called, “Stop.” The children did not seem discouraged by her counting pace; its
structure seemed to move them forward with purpose. They completed their four sketches
which provided them with a linear sense of the sequence in their stories. She reminded the
young authors to use the word bank on the wall and their best inventive spelling to write
a story that told what their pictures described. Some were quick to start the verbal part
of their stories; some lagged behind for a bit. Some developed drawings that were well
detailed with specific features of their people and their objects while others were more
sparse. Some were splashed with an array of colors while others stuck to one or two basic
colors. Like their art, some stories were full of words; others were lean. Some contained
rich detail; others were bare. Some possessed movement, others were static. But all of
the artist-scribes seemed happy with their work and many proudly raised a hand to read
their magic tales.

All of these classroom examples, ranging from elementary to secondary grade levels,
exploited drawing to clarify texts. They demonstrate how the sophisticated use of space,

15
line, and color – or the most rudimentary rendering of stick figures and roughly lined
sketches – possess the power to elicit, clarify, and articulate tacit knowledge of a range
of texts. Whether students were trying to replicate the interior dwelling they saw in Frost’s
“Lockless Door,” or create controversial representations of the ancient artifice of
Ozymandias, or to offer pictorial representation of poignant passages from Joyce’s
lamentation on Irish life, we find here a powerful non-verbal vehicle for clarifying,
amplifying, and articulating meaning in texts. We offer it to you as an engaging way to
prompt all students to more thoroughly penetrate the wonder of literature.
References
Adams, Peter. “Imaginative Investigations: Some Nondiscursive Ways of Writing in Response to
Novels.” In Joseph Milner and Lucy Milner (Eds.), Passages to Literature.
Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989.
Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can’t Read – What Teachers Can Do. New York: Heinemann, 2002.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Row,
1990.
Dixon, John and Stratta, Leslie. “Developing Responses to Character in Literature.” In Joseph Milner
and Lucy Milner (Eds.), Passages to Literature. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown. 2005.
Joyce, Joyce. “The Dead.” Dubliners. York: Grant Richards, Ltd., 1914.
Langer, Janet. Envisioning Literature: Literary Understanding and Literature Instruction. New York:
Teachers College Press, 1995.
Milner, Joseph, Milner, Lucy, and Mitchell, Joan. Bridging English (5th edition). Boston:
Allyn & Bacon, 2012.

Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Anchor Books, 1967.
Smith, Michael and Wilhelm, Jeffrey. Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What
Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme. Urbana: NCTE,
2010, 62-63.
Wilhelm, Jeffrey. “Knowing and Becoming.” In Joseph Milner and Carol Pope (Eds.), Engaging
American Novels. Urbana: NCTE, 2011.
Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962.
cd

16
Writing in the cloud - student writing in a connected world.
Chris Goodson
Most students don’t like to write. Figuring out why is one of the toughest parts of teaching
writing. I don’t pretend to know all of the reasons why students don’t enjoy writing, but my
experience with cloud-based writing tools has shown me that technology and collaboration
can overcome some of those reasons.
“The Cloud” is shorthand for a system in which files are stored not on your local computer,
but on the Internet. The most commonly known cloud tool is Google Drive (previously called
“Docs”). Drive isn’t the only cloud writing tool, but it will work for this example.
Google Drive allows users to create a word processing document that is stored in the
“cloud.” Users access their documents using a web browser. They navigate to Google, enter
a username and password, and the document opens in what looks very much like a stan-
dard word processor. The only difference is that it is running on the web in your browser
instead of in a program on your computer like Microsoft Word.
This system offers several advantages for writing. First, you don’t have to worry about
special word processing software or different versions of files. All you need is a web
browser and an Internet connection. Any writing teacher who has dealt with students who
bring in writing in a wide array of unreadable digital formats should appreciate this. You
can access your documents from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer
and a way to connect to the Internet. Students don’t have to worry about saving their work
to a particular computer in the lab. Their work follows them around.
The most interesting part of writing in the cloud is that since the documents are stored
online, users can let other people access them as well. This is very different from making a
copy of a document and mailing it to someone. This is giving them real-time access to read
or edit the living document. Two users can even access and edit the same document at the
same time.
This allows a writing teacher a great deal of flexibility during the writing process. When I
used Google Drive in the classroom, I began collaboration as soon as the students started
an assignment. I had them name their document and then immediately share it with me.
Having students “turn in” the document at the beginning allowed me to “drop in” and read
the piece at any time. I was able to assess the students’ writing during the process and not
after it.
Immediately, I found that this profoundly changed the writing process, the way I assessed
it, and the products that my students were creating. Every writing teacher encounters bad
writing. Sometimes stories go nowhere, characters seem flat, and essays are incoherent. But
until I was able to watch my students write their stories from the beginning, I didn’t
really realize how important it was to find the source of those problems and stamp them
out early.
What I found was that a brief intervention early on (noticing that a student had an un-
clear main idea for example) prevented the rest of the assignment from going horribly off
track. This seems like an obvious revelation looking back on it, especially since we stress
the importance of drafting to our students all the time. But this was very different from a
rough draft. In a draft, if the mistake occurs early, it can lead to a great deal of errant
writing. Students often feel attached to that writing because they invested time and effort

17
in in. This makes them unwilling to change or delete it. With the constant editing allowed by
a cloud writing tool, students don’t become invested in their bad writing and are more will-
ing to correct it. They don’t go down those dark alleys of wasted writing and small prob-
lems don’t turn into big problems.
Writing in the cloud does require some different approaches for teachers though. Here
are a few:
•New procedures - If you want to keep track of student work, make sure they always
begin by naming their file according to a procedure you set. They should also immediately
share the file with you, allowing you to start collaborating
•Don’t be big brother - Don’t watch your students secretly. Make sure to show student
how to tell when a collaborator is looking at a document. Google Drive shows this in the
top right hand corner. It’s a common courtesy to let someone know you are reading over
their shoulder.
•Let them collaborate - Use the cloud-based tools to enhance peer editing. I found that
my students would share works with one another and then periodically take a break from
their own writing to review their friends’ stories. This both gives them a break and exposes
them to the writing of others.
Many Tools
While Google Drive is by far the most popular cloud writing tool, it’s not the only one out there.
There are a number of other tools, some designed to help with the revision process, and some
that are either simpler word processing tools or tools designed for specific writing formats.
•Rawscripts - Rawscripts is designed specifically to write screenplay scripts. It automates
the complicated formatting in scripts making it very easy for students to write plays, movies
and tv shows. It’s also free! http://www.rawscripts.com/
•Writer - Writer is one of a new trend of super-simple, stripped-down word processors.
It’s very basic and lets the writer focus on writing, and not formatting. It saves and stores
your work automatically and you can turn your work into a .pdf file for saving or printing.
It works best as an extension for the Google Chrome browser. http://writer.bighugelabs.com/
•MixedInk - This cloud based writing tool allows multiple writers to work as a group to
collaborate on a text by weaving together the best selections of multiple writers. Basic
features are free. More advanced features come with a monthly subscription.
http://www.mixedink.com/
•Lino - This free online mind mapping software allows multiple users to contribute “sticky”
notes to a shared project board. Great for planning and pre-writing. http://www.linoit.com
Embracing change
Teaching writing in the cloud is different, both for the teacher and the student. Take small
steps and plan for setbacks and paradigm shifts. You don’t have to move to the cloud
completely in one step. Above all, embrace the change. Think about how the writing pro-
cess is supposed to work versus how we teach writing now. You may find that the changes
in students’ writing habits seem to fit that ideal writing process better when your class
writes in the cloud.
cd

18
Dont Forget!
Nominate
your students
for the
NCETA student
writing awards!
Entry forms and deadlines are available at:
http://ncenglishteacher.squarespace.com/writing-contests

NCET is published twice a year by the
NC English Teachers Association
Editor: Sally Wyatt Griffin
Gastonia, NC
sgsallyg@gmail.com
Editorial Board
Lucy Steele, UNC-Charlotte
Kerry Flinchbaugh, ECU
Printed by: J.H Rose Printing and Graphics Dept.
Designed and Layout by Robert Puckett

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