Taking a cue from Amber, I've decided to copy and paste my original Literacy Journey into this post and comment/change/edit/revise it in bold throughout. Thanks for the knowledge and the memories.

Taking a cue from Amber, I've decided to copy and paste my original Literacy Journey into this post and comment/change/edit/revise it in bold throughout. Thanks for the knowledge and the memories. 

Literacy Journey

Hi, my name is Andrew Chilton and I am an alcoholic reader. (still true)I've been suffering from this disease now for almost ten years. Like most, I started when I went off to college, partying in the library, and hanging out with all the wrong people, like professors and aspiring scholars. 

I received B.As in English and Religion/Philosophy in college (very pragmatic choices I know) and went onto graduate school in Comparative Religions/Philosophy, with the plan of becoming a philosophy professor later in life.  I should have known that I was meant to be an English teacher however, when I started skipping my required graduate readings to continue voraciously devouring fiction. I just completed my first year as a lateral entry English teacher at Surry Early College High School—I taught British and American literature—and loved every moment of it. 

Reading for me was a way to both engage and separate myself. I was suddenly invited into a timeless and infinite room of ideas and people that I had never had access to before and I was also allowed creative and emotional space to surround myself with comforting resources to enlighten and nourish my inner self.

The first book I ever truly connected to was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment at the most unlikely place: Myrtle Beach, Spring Break 2003. My heart still races whenever I think of that first fateful read—I was the criminal and I read as if I would be sentenced to death if I didn’t finish it quick enough. I found both a personal connection (inner guilt, Christian existentialism) and a philosophical inquiry of ideas.  From Crime and Punishment, I delved into the world of fiction, devouring whole shelves of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Steinbeck, Saramago, Salinger, Kerouac, and Flannery O’Connor.  On one level I was being entertained, on another I was escaping reality, on a third I was joining an intellectual discourse with these authors and my peers, and finally I was exploring what it meant to live a full and meaningful existence.

As I’ve grown older and through the experiences I’ve had I found myself changing in my relationship to reading. Upper-level English courses took most of the fun out of reading fiction and now that I teach fiction, I find myself fighting not to “tie the [book] to a chair/to torture a confession out of it” as the poet Billy Collins warns us (Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”). My current reading habits are just as voracious as before but they are dictated by my schedule and my career. For years now I always have three books going at a time: a work of fiction (usually an unread classic), nonfiction (either philosophy, cultural criticism, history, or pedagogy), and a book of poetry.

The story of my journey as a writer has always been a little more of a up-hill battle. Granted, I find writing poetry and journal entries quite easy, but I have always had a difficulty in writing for others. I associate judgment and critique to writing—particularly academic writing. Hence, my procrastination on finishing my Master’s thesis and the constant checking of the Word Count (I’m at 526, just 224 to go). I simply had too many teachers tell me that what I was writing was just not good enough: “work on this” “fix this” “say it like this”. Perhaps it was encouragement, but to a fledgling young writer every single word matters. Luckily I had one young teacher, Miss Leslee Johnson, who always encouraged me to be the best writer I could be. If not for her, I would not have the courage to write this.

I've actually learned some great practices for writing from this class, both practically and philosophically. Much of what I write about above is about my own anxiety and fear in writing. Through this course, and the support of Dr. Crissman, I have actually found myself writing without the fear and dread I am used to. I realize that I have intelligent thoughts that are worth sharing and that the whole process of writing is actually to help shape my thoughts. The written word is not a final product but a tangible step on that journey. The whole philosophy of "Writing To Learn" as mentioned in VV&M blew my conceptions of writing out of the water. The way I can assign students writing assignments as merely a step (not always just the final crystallization of their thoughts) on the journey will powerfully empact my teaching. 

From this narrative history, I can now reflect on how traumatic the schooling process can be on the literacy of a student. The graded comments on essays, the tightly scheduled and segmented reading assignments, and the arbitrary reading comprehension quizzes can all create negative effects in young students. School has the immense ability to both inspire and expose students to wonderful sources of truth and beauty, but in many cases, including mine own, formal schooling can be a place of judgment, fear, and superfluous analysis. This is truly the first time I thought very critically over my past experiences with literacy, so I hope to be more mindful of this as I redesign my own classes. To reflect on my own practices, I hope to always design learning that will reduce anxiety and unease that revolves around reading and writing and I will encourage the nourishment of the inner child. I hope to learn in this course the appropriate methods and tools to develop this mission.

I think through this class I've come up with some great tools to add to my "teaching toolbox," including a useful Webquest, a researched proposal to present to my administration to receive funding for e-readers, and the general knowledge that literacy is an ever-changing, dynamic process of learning. Thank you for everything.
Sincerely,
Andrew

Position Paper

[Just to reiterate, this paper was written with a specific audience in mind--my principal and the school board--therefore I wrote it specifically to give to these people. This assignment had immense real world application for me and will be instanteously useful. Thank you for the opportunity to utilize the skills I learned in this class to change my own school.]

CCI 5: It is Finished.

Layer 1

There is clearly something rotten in the state of our assessments. Perhaps teachers are too far removed from the anxiety and pressure that a high-stakes test puts on a student, but it only takes one role reversal to fix that little problem. Recently, as a participant in a county wide technology conference, was asked to "be the student" for roughly an hour and a half while some exemplar teachers in our county put on a technological and pedagogical show. We were quiz, quiz, trading, we were collaborating with our shoulder and face partners, we were frantically filling out graphic organizers, all the while the hourglass (literally, there was a digital hourglass on the board) slowly seeped away. Don't misunderstand me, all effective strategies, and by all means I love time efficiency in the classroom, but when asked to identify certain "figurative language" in a given poem,  I was so nervous I'd be wrong in front of my senior English colleagues, I almost forgot my own name (that would be correctly identified as "hyperbole"). Did these questions placed on me on the spot truly "test" my cumulative knowledge? Did they measure my worth as a thinker, learner, or most importantly a human being?  I'm reminded of Bill Cerbin's point that traditional testing is like taking someone's temperature--it simply tells us their current temperature, it makes no evident claims on past medical conditions, their holistic symptoms, or predictive prescriptions, hence it it measures what we ask temporarily, but lacks the efficiency of long-term diagnoses. Our formative and summative assessment of students needs to be relational, transformative, and holistic. 

The theorists this week have focused on portfolio assessments as the cure for the common assessment. Portfolio assessment is defined  as "a purposeful, multidimensional process of collecting evidence that illustrates a student's accomplishments, efforts, and progress (utilizing a variety of authentic evidence) over time" (Gillespie, et. al., 487). Sublime definition. They go even further to recommend that the materials included in the portfolio,  the criteria to evaluate them, and the types of reflections be a collaborative effort between students and teacher--truly empowering the student, giving them an autonomous voice in their own learning process. This particular section of Gillespie's article is where I would like to sink my teaching teeth into (isn't that where the best writing usually? By the end, the writer is thinking deep and has stopped trying to put so much fluff in...but I digress). 

Their recommendation to allow students to have more valuable input into the material and the criteria for the portfolio is certainly something I can work on. I attempted a online portfolio website last year with one of my classes and it went as I should have expected: terribly. I blame myself, because essentially I neglected it. Here's an example of one of my students' work: click here. (https://sites.google.com/site/maggiecraddockscameo/). As you can see, I asked each student to create their own website, as an ongoing review and a place to digitally post their work, including Google PowerPoint Presentations, embed Google Documents, and to blog about short writing prompts that I gave them. I simply neglected to continue the work on the site, because it took conscious effort to have students post, as well as the usual problems with internet availability and laptops. With the recommendations I now have in mind, I will make a conscious effort to set aside time to work on the sites, make the work on the site the original location of the work (instead of a secondary resource to review/post after completion), and I will allow students more say in what is included and collaboratively designed rubrics to evaluate their work. 

As a side note, I did not find Bond's article particularly helpful. Their ideas on having students write "I Learned" statements or filling out a "Clear/Unclear" two column notes, while good-intentioned, seemed a bit contrived to me. I think we could achieve much the same intent by having students discuss with their shoulder partners what they learned and then after that discussion (which would feature a time for their partner to attempt an answer!) students would be asked to write down at least one question they still had--written because of the embarrassed nature of ignorance--the teacher could look over these questions for rethinking their review tomorrow or to utilize in an Q&A session the next day. 

Layer 2

I was thoroughly impressed with the Podcast and the work Bill Ferriter is doing in his integrated Social Studies/Language Arts class. Students were clearly demonstrating their effective navigation of new literacies from creating their own podcasts, critically analyzing breaking news in video and digital formats, script writing, and HTML source coding. Did I mention these are middle schoolers? Henry Jenkins, in his podcast on Participatory Learning, had some powerful things to say about how schools can sometimes be detrimental to a child's growth by actually "de-tooling" and "de-skilling" the students by limiting their access to rich resources such as YouTube. (My school system does not allow YouTube, but our principal has luckily given us permission to by-pass those restrictions, because she trusts our abilities to use content-rich resources and we take full educational responsibility and opportunity with this). Some new literacies that forward thinking teachers must consider are our shift towards digital communication. Whether that be through text, twitter, email, podcast, blogs, wikis, or skype, the way we communicate the written and spoken language are changing. Many traditionalists bemoan this, but the ancient Greeks bemoaned the arrival of written language, crying that people would soon lose their ability to think and remember without the aid of the written word.  

My only concern with emerging technologies, and perhaps I did not understand the lesson completely, is our seeming blanket acceptance of their usefulness in the classroom without asking if we truly need to include them. Before you label me a philistine or a luddite, hear me out: for the sake of critically evaluating the current event, why were students asked to create a podcast, transcribe the audio into a written format, and post on the blogosphere, to await comments? Could this not be achieved more efficiently by simply having students prepare remarks to be given to a fellow student as the beginning of a conversation they would then have? I fear we're preparing our students to be shallow ranters, hiding behind the anonymity of pseudonyms and faceless blogs. I don't pretend to know where are new literacies are taking us, but I am open to change and I willing to at least try out all new forms of literacy. There are certainly strengths and weaknesses in all cases--with blogs for example, I found that students were more than eager to share their thoughts and opinions (when journaling was like pulling teeth), but I did find the thoroughness of their thinking and the soundness of their grammar to be a bit weaker. Emerging technologies and the ubiquitous use of new literacies is however the way things will always be for the rest of my lifetime and I must do my best to prepare students to meet those challenges with preparation, resourcefulness, and thoughtfulness.