Below find resources for helping middle school and early high school students read essays that are calls for action and to write about topics of interest from an argumentative viewpoint. Argumentative essays ask readers to take a stance and/or take an action.
1. Paired Essays:
The first text provides background and invites the reader/writer to begin thinking about the topic generally. The second essay is to be deconstructed to see how the writer constructs his/her argument.
You are about to read an Opinion essay by a college professor who doesn’t allow students to take notes or otherwise use laptops in his classes. Think about how you best take notes. Do you write them with a pen or pencil, type them or do you have a different system? What role, if any, does distraction play when you use a computer or other device?
Have you been following 7-year-old Bana’s tweets and her story from Aleppo, Syria? Have you seen images or videos of other people there on the news or social media? What is happening in Aleppo now?
Claim:
Counterclaim:
Have you ever vaped or smoked a hookah? Do you know people who do? Watch this short video and then discuss with a classmate what you know about e-cigarettes from a personal, scientific and social standpoint.
Claim:
Counterclaim:
The United States is among the world’s biggest per-student spenders on education, but its 15-year-olds still trail in math against peers in most developed countries.
Claim:
Counterclaim:
3. Revising an online essay
What might you do to make this article more persuasive? What call to action would you include? What counterclaim would be important to consider? We'll Never See These Animals Again (From Mother Jones, 12.31.16)
This is composing. Today.
This is what convincing essays look and sound like.
This is how they move.
Are you teaching multimodal composing at your school? Are your kids learning how to compose? Are they doing it despite school?
Below is a first grade horror film. It was created using Garageband, Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro. The story is based on Alvin Schwartz's "In a Dark, Dark Room."
An I-Chart, also known as an Inquiry Chart, is a tool learners can use to help them understand and compare information that comes from more than one source. By thinking about what is already know, answering specific questions while reading, generating new questions, and then summarizing all of the information learned while reading, an I-Chart is made. By generating and completing an I-Chart before, during, and after learners have read several different texts about—they develop a better understanding of a topic.
How Does It Work?
Step 1: Read the topic and the guiding questions on the I-Chart. Talk with a partner about the topic and the guiding questions. Work together to answer as many of the questions as you can. Place your answers in the box directly below each question (What I Know).
Step 2: Talk with your partner about any questions you might have about the topic. List your questions in the box directly beneath the heading “New Questions.”
Step 3: To help you learn more about the topic, there are multiple sources of information provided. Each source tells about the topic. Think about the guiding questions before you read the first text. As you read, underline any information that is related to the guiding questions. After you have finished reading the first text, write answers to the questions in the boxes on the chart. List any new questions. You are now ready to read the second text. Again, after reading each of these selections, write any answers you find to the guiding questions in the boxes provided, as well as any new questions you might have.
Step 4: After completing all of the categories on the chart, except the summaries, work with a partner and compare your charts. Add any new information or change information you might have as a result of talking with your partner and reading your partner’s chart.
Step 5: Work with you partner to reread each of the guiding questions and the information you found from each reading selection. Summarize the main points for each question and record you response in the boxes next to the word summary.
Step 6: Work with another pair of students who have completed an I-Chart or section of an I-Chart and compare what each team has found.
Step 7: Select one of the guiding questions as your essay topic.
Step 8: Use the information from the completed chart to help you respond to your essay topic. Be sure to include evidence from at least two of the texts that explains your stance on the topic of how identity is constructed and supports your assertions.
Adapted from Hoffman, James V. (1992). Critical Reading/thinking across the curriculum: Using I-Charts to support learning. Language Arts, Vol. 69, pp. 121-127.
Topic: Constructing Identity
How does physical environment shape identity?
What
identities, if any, are permanent and which have the power to change?
I've been thinking about composition and how it is often taught/assigned at school as a task to be mastered. Learning to write is reduced to a sharp alignment between what is being tested and the form to be taught. In such instances, we mistake learning to write with being assigned a passing score on a state-issued rubric. This is a costly error. At schools, I often hear teachers say and administrators insist that a test genre unit be included--as if the writing generated for high stakes test was an art in itself. I mean how many people do you know who want to read the compositions generated in response to test prompts? More recently, I am seeing complicated conversations that some may know as curriculum be muted and instead, test prepping units of study, affectionately retitled as genre studies, be mandated.
Let me say that I come to the topic of composition and schooling with two significant biases.
The national high stakes testing culture and the equally local school-based grading mania, as well as teacher evaluation systems that are being made public, each work to undermine student writing as they undermine the necessity of taking risks which is a requisite to deep thinking. The more attention we place on high stakes single measures or the assignment given in order to generate a grade for use on a report card, the more we will see learners being forced to practice a particular form and/or assignment repeatedly in lieu of more expansive and nomadic writing opportunities. The emphasis on mastering a single type of written expression, and oddly one I have not found to exist outside of high stakes tests, is myopic and dangerous. Learners leave school not as accomplished thinkers who use written language as a means to express thought, but rather as compliant recipe followers.
If an educator isn't an active and reflective composer, she or he cannot teach writing well or create the necessary classroom and school environments in which one might want to risk writing. Without inside knowledge about reading and writing, it is too easy to succumb to or mandate recipe teaching methods of writing, as well as to make learners do things that many writers simply wouldn't do. For example, I recently heard a administrator tell the teachers at the school that they must ensure that their students wrote 'the' topic sentence at the top of their composition page first before writing anything else and that they were not allowed to change this sentence. "Tell them to make it count," he told the staff. "They're stuck with it." Meaning emerges as I write and as such, I am often resituating myself inside the work. I rarely know what I am going to be writing when I begin. Nor does what I start with remain. Often I delete the opening and closing to a work. In another school, I heard a teacher respond to a student who interestingly enough asked if he could 'talk his essay out' first into his phone and the teacher told him: "No. No one writes that way and anyway you know you can't use your phone in class." As for authors dictating their work orally, one only has to think of Richard Powers to realize the folly of the teacher's words. In a Sunday Book Review, Powers writes: "Except for brief moments of duress, I haven’t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words — or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I’ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn’t even have keys.I write these words from bed, under the covers with my knees up, my head propped and my three-pound tablet PC — just a shade heavier than a hardcover — resting in my lap, almost forgettable. I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate’s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace. I hear every sentence as it’s made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind’s ear." As for cell phones being allowed at school, I am certain that in the not so distant future others will look back at this time and classify our reluctance to allow usable technology in places of learningascounterproductive.
Sovereignty
Writing is less about mastering a form and more about the evolution of thought. In many schools though, teaching the form has been privileged as a means to control the complexity of writing. Instead of thinking, a recipe to follow is offered, one I am learning that occasionally even takes its name from food, such as the hamburger method for essay writing. Even in the workshop model classrooms, I have seen an increasing emphasis on form and far less emphasis on the messiness and unpredictability of thought.
A few nights ago I was asking my son about what homework he had and he said with great nonchalance, " I have to write a short story." As it was already after 7 p.m., I asked with a bit of alarm, "You have to do what?" He looked up from his computer where he was playing an on-line game and said, "It's just a short story. It should take me less than an hour." "How's that possible?" "I already listed it." "What does that mean?" "I wrote down the setting, the characters, and the plot in school. Now I just have to put it together. No big deal. It'll be quick."
And sadly it was.
Understanding writing as an evolution of thought requires that learners engage with texts (read, view, listen, speak, write, draw) often and freely and have meaningful and timely response to these efforts. It asks that learners observe and experiment, make note of the world about them and the worlds within them. It asks learners to generate and abandon, to set aside and to look again at forgotten or abandoned work. It often requires them to revise and edit ideas, as well as written/spoken texts. Composing may be an individual matter and it may be collaborative. It may be done on and off screen. Writing as thought is very different than writing as compliance.
When students are caught in a cycle of test prepping and test taking, I wonder if there are enough occasions for them to make the critical errors needed in order to experiment, try on new ways of expressing, and to learn how to think expansively and critically through written text. In a test readiness environment, when do learners experience risk-free error making? When do errors not 'count' on some sort of practice assessment or for grades that get computed and represented on report cards?
Essay is not a Hamburger: Thinking about Form
I love to read essays. One might say I am a bit addicted to the well-written essay. I just finished rereading Walker Percy's "The Loss of the Creature." It's a complicated work in which Percy discusses the differences between having a sovereign experience and having an experience that has been mediated by another. Percy writes: "A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented." I think Percy's insight is important here. It makes me wonder about the agency learners need in order to claim the necessary time, opportunity, resources, and expectation to write actual essays, not five paragraph pseudo-letters. For example, I recently was reading several student compositions. Along with the student work I also had the corresponding rubric and the assignment. The assignment specified the task students would be responding to which mimicked a high stakes state assessment. The assignment also specified what students should include in each of the five paragraphs and how many sentences each paragraph should be. The rubric outlined how the product the student made would be graded as the rubric had a score point value attached to its descriptors. Where is the freedom to experiment? Where is the struggle to compose something you want to say? Where is the space necessary to think? Where is the time to abandon and (re)find a work? Why must an attempt be graded? Now imagine that this scene is repeated across six years from third through eighth grade and comprises what it means to write. The child in production of these recipe-based essays comes to mistake the products s/he produces with that of an essay.
Percy writes about the need to exercise one's sovereign rights. He says that there are two traits that are present in exercising such rights:
"( I) an openness of the thing before one instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode...; (2) a sovereignty of the knower-instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer..." *
Learning requires both the openness of the thing and the sovereignty of being the knower. This is the center of fine learning and conditions for writing. The absence of such agency leads to mimicry, at best. Instead of the elegant essay, we get the tired five paragraph text in which every child tries to convince his/her teacher (really there is no other audience) why cell phones should or should not be allowed at school...or why school dances should or should not be allowed and so on.
*If ever I was looking for a philosophical basis upon which to compose a school, Percy's statement would be an excellent start.
Before the printing press existed, those training for scholarly roles wrote down word for word what a master or teacher read from his text. This text, of course, was most importantly the Bible; and one might suggest from an anthropological perspective that this may explain the inherent belief among those of the SAE world view the validity of the printed page regardless of what one's senses may tell one. An individual's own experience becomes secondary to what the accepted point of view may be, which is of course, precisely what the "Book" says. - Terry Tafoya. (1989). Coyote's Eyes: Native Cognition Styles. Journal of American Indian Education.
Copying isn't composing. Much of what I see my son doing at middle school resembles the pre-printing press times. For example he recently had to access a teacher's notes from an online site and copy these into his physical (paper) notebook. In this post I want to take a look at the important literacies that young boys are participating in that are done outside of school.
As many of you know, I have been taking an extended look at my 12-year-old son and several of his friend's Minecraft play this last year. In part, I have been trying to understand the boys' literate behaviors that emerge during their game playing and making multimodal texts, such as: screencasts, livestreams, and videos. By observing the artifacts the boys compose, I have begun to note some similarities and important differences between adolescents' literacies developed during play, and those privileged via school-based essayist assignments*.
Additionally of interest to me are the literacies these young boys engage in, specifically I am wondering about how they:
connect with others across the globe through Skype and multiplayer game sites
collaborate to build/rebuild/remix, maintain, and refine fictional worlds; make and upload multimodal texts to the Internet; write code; develop and maintain a Minecraft server; attract, support, and ban server clients; and develop and enact a business plan
compose written code and multimodal texts (such as: screencasts, trailers, livestreams, videos)
contextualize environments in which play occurs
participate in on-line play
This post represents some tentative thoughts and I welcome your insights.
Screencasts, Essayist Prose and the Problem of Authorship and Audience
One important difference between the literacies these adolescents develop as a result of out-of-school play and essayist prose style privileged inside school relates to the authenticity of author and audience. In thinking about essayist authorship and audience, James Gee (1990) writes:
A further significant aspect of essayist prose style is the fictionalization of both the audience and the author. The 'reader' of an essayist text is not an ordinary human being but an idealization, a rational mind formed by the rational body of knowledge of which the essay is a part. By the same token the author is a fiction, since the process of writing and editing essayist texts leads to an effacement of individual and idiosyncratic identity (pp. 60-61).
In contrast to essayist prose, the mulitmodal texts developed by the boys are imbued with voice (often literally) and they are created with specific audiences in mind. For example, when I ask my son who he imagines the audience to be when he makes a Minecraft screencast, he says that the viewers will likely be gamers interested in the specific topic, but who don't know how to do what he is explaining. The author, like the audience are ordinary and may well become participatory in some aspect of the play. Many of the texts the boys compose are how-to screencasts related to games. To give a sense of audience, one of the boys, James (pseudonym) routinely has between 5,000 and 15,000 viewers for each of his 300+ video uploads on YouTube. This represents a sizable audience.
In the comments section of one video, a viewer wrote:
dude this lets play is gold i watched this and bought mysims agents/thanks to you man/i like these lets plays very cool!
James responded, "Never thought that I would influence someone/thats great and am glad you like it so much."
There are significant philosophical differences between essayist prose and the literacies the boys compose. When "literacy" is understood as being a transferable commodity not influenced by any social context and considered an independent variable, an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984) is being embraced. An autonomous model of literacy is based on the belief that any student learns skill x and who the learner is, is not, the context of where the learning is occurring and when is meaningless. The skill is understood as being independent from actual human context. Stripped of gendered, social, racial, historical, technological, and economic overtones--literacy learning exists as a cognitive task to be mastered.
In contrast to an autonomous model, a group of theorist, the New London Group**, published an influential paper, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures in the Harvard Educational Review (1996) that asked us to understand that "literacy" learning is multi-dimensional and socially situated. Skills do no exist outside of a given context and how we learn and even come to name something as a "literacy skill" is culturally determined and bound. Literacies are not isolated events.
An autonomous belief about literacy (note the singularity) informs the pedagogical decisions one might make. For example, if you believe that 'literacy skills' are transferable commodities, then having students complete practice worksheets in order to develop correctness and to attend to surface structures of writing would make sense. Similarly, one who held this belief would likely believe in the production of a single correct product.
In contrast, the boys' literate behaviors are steeped in multi-literacies as social practice.
The Essay as Multimodal Text
In education we make much of essayist prose style and certainly here in the States with the Common Core, the focus on essay is even more pronounced. Methods to help students learn to compose essay often range from simply assigning the task to engaging learners in a process approach. It is not unusual for students to be provided with professional and student models of essays. What I believe is less usual is for teachers or learners to map essayist composing skills on to other types of texts that students want to compose, such as videos when possible.
As the school year progressed—hyperlearning occurred. For example, I watched as Tony’s command of writing responses to EWT-like writing prompts improved, even though he was not spending much time actually doing this specific activity. Rather, Tony spent a lot of time creating Hyperstudio™ projects by working with story boards. To do this he had to begin to organize information and locate pieces of the information on different Hyperstudio™ cards. He also had to create transitions and did so by using musical cues that served to join his cards into a coherent whole.
“I need a button, here,” Tony tells me one morning, pointing to a written
essay he had been working on.
“A button?” I ask, unsure.
“Yeah, you know, like when you move to the next card.”
“Oh, like a transition,” I say, beginning to see that Tony understands that the essay is like a Hyperstudio™ composition.
“Yeah.”
I suspect Tony drew upon that deeper structure of thinking he frequently
used to create his Hyperstudio™ projects when writing responses to EWT
prompts. Tony had indirectly learned how to elaborate and better organize
his written responses by creating and using story boards when composing
through hypermedia (p. 39).
Thinking about Tony makes me wonder if we have we begun to map our students' multimodal work in order to ascertain what similarities there might be between these works and the essay they are often assigned at school? Are there associational bridges we might build between work students choose to compose and the types of composing, such as analytic essay that are frequently assigned at school?
For example, if we look at this trailer produced by a 12-year old--are there entry points we might leverage to make sense of the work and relate it to school-text types? This represents this boy's first attempt at creating a trailer to advertise a Minecraft server. The text is meant to be persuasive.
Would it be possible to make use of this text as an entry point into a discussion about persuasion? Might this be a bit more compelling for the learner than the countless 'practice essays' he has been or will be assigned at school in preparation for state assessments? Might there be better transfer of learning if the studied text was one the child had composed?
What does this young boy know about point of view? About narrative? About linkages between story and persuasion? Community and persuasion? Citing sources? What does he still need to learn? What confusions are present in his text?
I can't help but think how different learning might be, if we began with the important products students are composing out of school and worked from there.
*Essayist examples from CCSS: Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence; Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts, and information through the selection, organization, and analysis of relevant content
**Theorist included: Courtney Cazden, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, USA; Bill Cope, National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia, Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture, University of Technology, Sydney, and James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia; Norman Fairclough, Centre for Language in Social Life, Lancaster University, UK; Jim Gee, Hiatt Center for Urban Education, Clark University, USA; Mary Kalantzis, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia; Gunther Kress, Institute of Education, University of London, UK; Allan Luke, Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia; Carmen Luke, Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia; Sarah Michaels, Hiatt Center for Urban Education, Clark University, USA; Martin Nakata, School of Education, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia.
Work Cited Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
After being in South Dakota with all its open, open space and shooting a lot, I simply can't bring myself to lift my camera and make any new photographs now that I am back in New Jersey. The images I shot recently of the moon are still in the camera. Even the the idea of a quick trip across the bridge to Manhattan, a normal haunt for me, has me uninspired and unmoving.
2.
Has not having the desire to make photographs happened to anyone? And if so, is there a cure? I post that on Facebook and Gail from Vegas, a friend I have never met, but have shared art with for 2 years online, tells me that there's something here I need to learn. Okay, but what?
3.
I wait all day for God or something to show up and explain. I'm big on explanation. Nothing happens that I can see but I know there is a story here. Is God a story? Is South Dakota a story? Or perhaps the man in Winner, the one who cut through the alley, is a story. I can't seem to forget him.
4.
What felled you is important, I think as I watch him cut through that alley. The hard sun. The hard ground. The long shadows, the bleached white walls, and the absolute certainty that he will not live long follows him like a dog at his heels.
What Felled You Is Important. Winner, South Dakota, July 2010
5.
The day I see him. The day I point my camera and really see him, Rob and Dev and I are traveling west and we stop late-day at a gas station in Winner, South Dakota: 98 degrees, full sun, and long shadows. There's a hardness here that wealth and privilege back home in the East seems to camouflage with its fancy cars and gourmet shops and busy busy busy. Like the Native American man who stops in at the Gus Stop II where we are gassing up, the one I see through the lens of my camera and shoot. He walks into the shop through to the 10' x 12' room with slot machines hanging on the walls. Goes in for a quick one and comes out empty handed. Even the ground is hard, I think, kicking a stone as I watch him slip out and up the alley.
6.
"All photographs are memento mori," writes Susan Sontag. "To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability" (1977,p.15). What responsibility runs alongside participation, I wonder.
7.
Calvary. South Dakota, July 2010.
"I'm going to call it grasshopper genocide," Rob says aloud, thinking about a possible book as we drive out of town back to a route that winds through Indian reservations. The grasshoppers are no longer flying as they had been back by the Missouri River. Now they are dying and dead. Literally thousands of them on the road. Not moving. On the hill out of Winner, a man stands alone, bottle in hand. There alongside, three crosses. Calvary again. I raise my camera and shoot. The noise of the shutter opening and closing is loud. We are nearing the Badlands.
8.
Shadow and Light. Badlands, South Dakota. July 2010.
I hear that the Badlands look like some type of moonscape and have not dulled my sight by trying to see images before going. When I get there, I don't think, as it is simply so dramatic. Later, I try to categorize it and think: No not a moonscape. It's the absence that is most profound, that I want to capture. All that was there that is now gone: the volcanic rock, the sea, the wind, the ghosts.
9.
Later the car breaks down, we get a jump, and just make it to Rapid City before it dies a certain death, where Amber, the waitress at the Holiday Inn, the one who easily asks me for help spelling Pinot Grigio so she can write it just right on her pad, tell us, "Someday, I want to leave South Dakota. You know, go somewhere else and maybe find a job and stuff."
10.
Rising. South Dakota. July 2010.
Like the phoenix, the car rises once again and we head East, cutting across South Dakota. The distance between New Jersey and South Dakota is longer than I imagine.
11.
Back home I realize I am so tired from all the seeing I have done. Non-stop seeing for four weeks and I want to rest. I worry though if I stop making photographs does that mean I am no longer a photographer?
12.
Dorothea Lange remarked: It's no accident a photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
13.
On the road to work I think how I am always watching. Even without a camera in my hand, I am sighting, but am I seeing?
