The Digital Divide Persists

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As educators we often believe we are living in an era post the digital divide. Everyone has access to the internet, right? If we see our students with Smartphones that must mean they are connected, right? Wrong. A distressing article from the New York Times reminds us the digital divide still persists. Although this article is written about the U.S. context,  I have to believe many claims are true for Canada as well. Cecelia Kang from the New York Times writes,

“With many educators pushing for students to use resources on the Internet with class work, the federal government is now grappling with a stark disparity in access to technology, between students who have high-speed Internet at home and an estimated five million families who are without it and who are struggling to keep up.” 

While trying to prepare students for the 21st century world, we as educators post homework and assignments online, ask students to post blog entries or participate in educational chat groups, and become active on social media in generative and meaningful ways. However, while we upgrade and innovate our pedagogies, we may inadvertently be leaving several pupils behind. How do we prepare our students for working and living in the 21st century, which is so digitally driven, while ensuring our most vulnerable students are not being left behind?

Read the full New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/technology/fcc-internet-access-school.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region%C2%AEion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1&referer=http:/m.facebook.com

International Literacy Association

celebrating teachers, communicating ideas and research, Conferences, education, literacy, research, Uncategorized

The International Literacy Association (ILA) has its annual Conference coming up in Boston in July. An inspiring organization that works to build global capacity in the area of literacy, pre-service and experienced teachers alike have much to gain from learning about ILA and attending the conference.

Check out the website for more information and be inspired!

http://www.literacyworldwide.org/why-literacy

I am inspired by the advocacy piece: http://www.literacyworldwide.org/our-community/educators

From local issues to global issues ILA provides resources for professional development.

Check it out!

 

 

Teacher Education for High Poverty Schools

critical literacy, culturally responsive teaching, education, educational reform, higher education, Social Justice, Teacher education, teacher educators, , ,

Jo Lampert and Bruce  Burnett have recently edited an amazing text,Teacher Education for High Poverty Schools. The text is available from Springer.

http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319220581Image_LampertBookcover

This volume captures the innovative, theory-based, and grounded work being done by established scholars who are interrogating how teacher education can prepare teachers to work in challenging and diverse high-poverty settings. It offers articles from the US, Australia, Canada, the UK and Chile by some of the most significant scholars in the field. Internationally, research suggests that effective teachers for high poverty schools require deep theoretical understanding as well as the capacity to function across three well-substantiated areas: deep content knowledge, well-tuned pedagogical skills, and demonstrated attributes that prove their understanding and commitment to social justice. Schools in low socioeconomic communities need quality teachers most, however, they are often staffed by the least experienced and least prepared teachers. The chapters in this volume examine how pre-service teachers are taught to understand the social contexts of education. Drawing on the individual expertise of the authors, the topics covered include unpacking poverty for pre-service teachers, issues related to urban schooling as well as remote and regional area schooling.

Our (Clare) research team contributed a chapter to the text which focused on six literacy teacher educators who purposefully prepare student teachers to work in high poverty schools. Here is the chapter: TchingforHighPovertySchools

Entering a new communication paradigm

education, literacy, , , , , ,

I (Cathy) have recently found myself in a new communication predicament. Diagnosed with vocal cord nodules, I have been instructed not to speak for 8 weeks. So here I am, and after only two weeks into my ‘treatment,’ I have observed some interesting things about peoples’ communication patterns.

  1. Since I can’t talk, people often whisper to me. I’m not sure why, but they do, or…
  2. They get MUCH LOUDER. I can hear just fine, but for some reason this is the reaction.
  3. People gesture wildly. Again, I can hear them, but they clearly need to emphasize what they are saying.

I could theorize about the reasons why they do this: a need overcompensate for my sake; empathy perhaps; or they are just plain uncomfortable with the situation. But wait, there is more…

I started carrying a note pad to write messages to communicate and discovered these patterns:

  1. If the message is longer than two sentences, people get restless. The common quip is “Are you writing a novel?”
  2. Once I start to write an answer, if they don’t want to wait, they answer their posed question for me! I am always fascinated by ‘my response.’
  3. Some people prefer me to print as opposed to write, so I have to rewrite/print the message. My son actually told me to “just text him” at the dinner table. (BTW, my handwriting has improved dramatically due to the necessity of being understood)

In an effort to be more current and efficient, I started using the “speak feature” on my iPad and iPhone, but this has its own set of complications:

  1. The response process: typing, highlighting the text, and then tapping the ‘speak’ feature, takes less time than it does for me to write a note in longhand, yet people are less patient with the electronic process. I suspect they feel it should be immediate.
  2. Most people have trouble understanding the electronic voice. They frequently say, “I didn’t get that.” I think it’s because the intonation is usually off. I often have to repeat the message. (I have totally given up on using a ‘cool’ voice app as people can’t understand the regular voice. I was hoping to use the Stephen Hawkings app).
  3. Instead of listening to the voice again, often people reach for my iPhone to read the message in print for themselves, but sometimes the print is too small for them to read, so I have to enlarge it- which takes even more time.
  4. Interestingly, people often want to type their response on my iPad instead of speaking back to me. They take the iPad right out of my hands to do this. I also tried using the chat feature on Skype so I could respond to the person on the screen, but the other person only wanted to type in chat too. Although they were right there in front of me, and were perfectly capable of talking- they didn’t! This leads me to believe that people are getting more comfortable communicating through print  than speaking.

Finally, I play a large role in this and am just a quirky:

  1. I often try to mouth the words which becomes a great game of “guess what Cathy is trying to say.”
  2. As I am familiar with rudimentary sign language, having taken several courses to communicate with my niece and having taught in a total language classroom, that is my default. I sign to people, which of course they don’t understand because it is another language! One friend told me “I have no idea what you are saying, but I love to watch.”

Sadly, my friends and colleagues who are ELL totally empathize with me, as they tell me this is all too familiar for them. I truly feel for them now.

All in all, this is a fascinating study in multimodal communications. Mostly, I just listen. I was told that people pay a great deal of money to attend ‘silent retreats,’ so I am trying to treat this like a gift in self-discovery. Apparently, I have a lot to learn.

 

Mary Kennedy on Engaging Student Teachers More Deeply

academics, curriculum; teachers, educational reform, teaching for understanding, , , , , ,

As I (Clive) have said before, I’m a great fan of Mary Kennedy of Michigan State University. In earlier postings I commented on her complex vision of teaching and her incremental yet radical approach to school reform. Having read a new article of hers in the latest issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (Jan/Feb 2016), I wish to recommend it.

Ever courageous, Kennedy in this piece takes on the currently popular movement for the teaching of “core practices” in teacher education. While an improvement on earlier practice-focused teacher education approaches – in that the practices in question are medium-grained rather than too specific or too general – she believes this approach is (a) too didactic and (b) neglects the purposes of teaching. She proposes instead helping student teachers see that a variety of complex strategies are needed to achieve the purposes of schooling, and constant adjustments on their part are required along the way.

Kennedy is careful to note this is “not an either/or decision. I am not proposing that we abandon specific practices in favor of problem solving strategies. Instead I argue here for (a) less attention to bodies of knowledge, (b) less attention to specific teaching behaviors, and (c) far more attention to the persistent challenges” of achieving the purposes teaching. Her position is that in pre-service (and in-service) education we should “not recite knowledge or dictate practices to teachers, but instead engage teachers in more analysis and exploration of alternatives.” This seems to me to embody the constructivist approach to teaching that – as Kennedy has said elsewhere – most teacher educators advocate.

For those who may see this as an overly idealistic approach that will undermine pupil performance on standardized tests, Kennedy cites the findings of a review that “programs using these alternative pedagogies were generally more effective at raising student achievement than were the didactic programs that focused on either bodies of knowledge or specific teaching practices.”

 

 

Teachers Spend Own Money for Supplies

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As a teacher I (Clare) was always on the look out for resources for my classroom and like many other teachers spent my own money to supplement when necessary. With education budgets getting even tighter I think that more and more teachers are dipping into their wallets to simply run their classrooms. Below is a graphic and an article that I thought you might find interesting (but discouraging). And since when did being a fund-raiser become part of a teacher’s job.

TeachersPayforSupplies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bruce Hogue is always looking for ways to make teaching science more interesting.

But the money he uses for the boxes of Cheerios, Bran Flakes and Total needed for one his experiments usually comes out of his pocket.

“As a science teacher, I have an official budget, but that is usually gone by the beginning of the year,” says Hogue, who works in suburban Denver. “When I want to do a science lab, I usually pay for it all on my own.”

Hogue is one of the millions of teachers across the country who are shelling out their own hard-earned cash to pay for books, pens, pencils and other basic supplies that schools have provided in the past.

According to a new survey, teachers spent an average of $448 of their own money on instructional materials and school supplies for the 1998-99 school year.

The survey conducted last summer by the National School Supply and Equipment Association — a trade group representing the school supply industry — found that teachers pay for 77 percent of the school supplies needed in their classrooms. The rest comes from the school, parent-teacher groups and other school funds.

Spending to Learn

This doesn’t surprise teachers and their advocates.

“What other profession do you know where professionals have to use their own money to do their job properly?” says Janet Fass, spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers. “Do engineers, do accountants spend their own money? Why should teachers when they are far lower paid than other professionals?”

Teachers say they not only buy school supplies with their money, but many times they help out students who may not have cash for lunch or to get home.

In Philadelphia, where teachers are in intense contract negotiations with school administrators this week, one-fourth of teachers said they gave their own money to students for transportation, books and lunches, according to a survey conducted by the city’s teachers union. Furthermore, 47 percent said they lacked basic supplies such as paper, pens and pencils for their classrooms.

The contract proposal under consideration now would take away a $50 stipend that teachers get for school supplies, says Barbara Goodman, communications director for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

“We are talking about a school system that is not able to supply funding for what should be priorities — books, pens, paper,” says Goodman.

Suburbia Also Affected

And it is not just in urban neighborhoods that teachers often become charity workers.

Hogan, the suburban Denver science teacher, says he recently gave lunch money to one of his students whose disabled mother is in the process of applying to get her son in the school’s free lunch program.

“It’s the little stuff that falls through the cracks that we usually have to pick up,” said Hogue, who has been teaching science for 30 years.

But Hogue has found a creative way to solve his money problems.

He has turned to private funding for help. Groups like NASA, the U.S. Geological Society and private corporations like Lockheed-Martin have donated thousands for his classroom experiments.

Now, when other teachers panic, Hogue has good advice.

He takes out his list of where he gets his grant material and reminds them there are people willing to help out.

 

Testing and Assessment in Norway

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I (Clare) read this article on testing. We have had many posts about assessment on this blog and thought this one might be more “food for thought.”

internationalednews's avatarInternational Education News

In order to learn about what’s happened with testing and assessment in Norway in recent years, we had a conversation with Sverre Tveit. Tveit is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. He will join the University of Agder in southern Norway as University Lecturer in August. In addition to his comparative research related to assessment policy, Tveit has also worked on education and assessment issues at the municipal level (the equivalent of the district level in the US) and was a board member of the Norwegian School Student Union (which organized protests against the initial implementation of the national tests in 2005). He talked with us about how the national tests seem to have been integrated into the Norwegian education system but also pointed to the ways in which local and national politics reflect continuing debates over issues and tensions of testing, assessment…

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AERA Elections

AERA,

Hi Folks,
If you are a member of AERA you will have received an email asking you to vote for the new slate of officersLin Goodwin. Often I am not interested in these because I never know anyone who is running. And think that my vote will not make a difference. But this time is different. In many of our blogs we have talked about the work of Lin Goodwin who is amazing researcher. She has been nominated for President of AERA. What an honour. So be sure to vote!!!!!!!!
Clare

Ode to Children’s Writers

classroom teachers, education, literacy, , , , , ,

I (Cathy) finished my third Kate Morton novel yesterday, The Forgotten Garden. Intriguing style. Here is the synopsis shared on http://www.austcrimefiction.org

When thirty-eight year old Cassandra Ryan discovers her grandmother Nell’s secret – that she was not the biological child of her parents, but a foundling – she is intrigued. Inside the suitcase found with the abandoned child at the Port of Brisbane in 1913 Cassandra finds a package of letters, a children’s storybook, and a coded manuscript belonging to Eliza Makepeace Rutherford: the Victorian authoress of dark fairy-tales who disappeared mysteriously in the early twentieth century. And so begins the quest to solve a century-old literary mystery.

I found the story line more interesting than some of Morton’s other books, partly because it was about a woman- Eliza Makpeace (Authoress)- who wrote fairy tale stories for children. The stories were included in the novel as chapters: The Cuckoo’s Flight, The Crone’s Eyes, and The Golden Egg. I particularly enjoyed the Crones Eyes. Deliciously dark!

As a collector and teller of traditional folk lore (I love the collections of Lang, Grimm and particularly, Jacobs), I found her stories strikingly similar to the old folk tales of Europe- frightening and heroic. People often died in those, not like in the Disney versions of today (e.g., in the original Andersen version of The Little Mermaid, the mermaid dies). As I was mulling this over, I happened to come across Morton’s acknowledgements:

I would also like to pay tribute here to authors who write for children. To discover early that behind the black marks on white pages lurk worlds of incomparable terror, joy, and excitement is one of life’s great gifts. I am enormously grateful to those authors who’s works fired my childhood imagination and inspired in me a love of books and reading that has been a constant companion. The Forgotten Garden is in part an ode to them.                                               Kate Morton

I was warmed by this acknowledgement. I think the stories of our youth live in us forever. If you enjoy traditional lore as much as I, I highly recommend reading The Forgotten Garden. For my part, I plan to write to Kate Morton’s publisher to obtain permission to tell them. They would make a delightful set at a festival and would hopefully fire the imaginations of the children (and adults) who listen.

garden