Guest Blog: Tina Hislop Using Art Conversations to Converse about a School's Mission

It is always a pleasure to have a guest blog.  Tina Hislop is an assistant principal in Connecticut who is in a doctoral program at Western State University. I was a guest in her course this past February and taught a lesson about transmediation by introducing Tina and her fellow students to art conversations.  It was a lovely surprise to receive this guest blog from Tina a few week later.   Tina took the lesson I taught and applied it to her work as an administrator.  Specifically Tina used art conversations with faculty.  An art conversation is a nonverbal discussion that a pair or trio have using finger paint as the mode of expression. You can read more about the technique below and here, here, and here.

Guest Blog: Tina Hislop

We’ve all experienced a meaningful lesson that we are compelled to share with others in hopes to inspire others.   The transmediation experience with Mary Ann in February 2012 was one of those meaningful lessons that I wanted to share with my school.  As assistant principal on my campus, I introduced transmediation to my school leadership team comprised of grade level, special area and pupil service staff.   In efforts to give back, this blog entry is an account of this first introduction. 

 

Background

Our school reconfigured two years ago, and has a new leadership team to represent our new campus.  This new leadership team’s charge is to examine the direction of the school, ideally with an open mind along the way.  To this end, I introduced the value of transmediation using art to the school leadership team.  To illustrate transmediation, I used our recently created mission statement.  I set the scene by asking the team to consider their students—do they all learn the same way? Have the same strengths? Of course, the answer was “no.”  With multiple ways to communicate —through gesture, picture, dance, we need to consider how to engage and reach all of our students.  The more connections we can offer students, the stronger understanding will be built.  Following the protocol of Mary Ann had shown us, I provided the following experience and at the conclusion the teachers participated and reflected.

Art Transmediation

I asked members of the school leadership team to build an art conversation in pairs using an active voice around our school mission statement.   The pairs and one triad were given finger paint: red, blue, green, yellow and black and one large sheet of art paper.  First I projected our school mission statement for all to read at their own rate as they made their own meaning and began their art conversation.  Next I created an iMovie with scrolling text with a man’s voice slowly reading the mission statement;  the teachers continued to communicate through their fingers.  The iMovie continued with student pictures and a voice over of an adult and child who slightly struggles reading the school mission statement and finally again, the mission statement read by a student with more pictures of recent school activities and students. 

Reflection

An art conversation

The teachers could have continued much longer or I could have used smaller paper for the busy team that I yearned to inspire.  I hoped that they would consider this work as they plan their lessons to reach others and we would soon debrief.  The bright lights of the office turned on and as the teachers wiped their fingers the conversations ranged from one saying that this was a difficult assignment and that it reminds her how her students everyday have tough first grade work to start and how not knowing what the right answer is feels.  Another teacher talked how she is so bad at drawing, but the finger paint gave her some permissions.   We displayed the art conversations around the table and all stood to admire each.  First, we quietly made our own noticings and next each group shared out a description of their art conversation.  The groups shared reflections of the process and product of our work.  

Transmediation—art gleamings:

1. Text meaning changes and grows as we internalize reading and hear the words. 
2. The experience nurtures creativity.
3. Sharing the communication process helps us value each others’ resources and talents.
4. The Gallery walk experience allowed us to discover and value common themes and differences while building respect and respecting others’ thoughts.
5. Art allows us to express thoughts in a healthy way.
6. Art conversations are a fun type of learning.
7. Art conversation are represent meaningful, hands-on work.  
8. Everything has a place.

The seeds have been planted.  We’re building our bag of tricks or repertoire of practices to meet the needs of our students in our classrooms. 

Loss is sound without word

Am I Blue? (Self Portrait, 2008.)

Acentered.
Adrift.

It's always later, well past beginning with grief--as if the topography has been changed and you have not been notified.

The familiar, less so.
The sounds from beyond the open window, a hallow tin.

May 11 is a difficult date and by extension, often a difficult day. 12 years ago my mom died. There is simply no way to soften that truth.

Loss is sound without word.

It's me driving unsure of how I have arrived at a place I don't recognize, for an interview I don't want and passing through it as if the room was a sea. The tiny table where we sit so beautifully round, like a geometric proof I can't quite solve. There are always limits and I hear myself uttering poorly what is expected to be said and I think even I don't believe me. 

And later on the drive home I'm stuck in traffic for thirty minutes knowing that the slowdown is a road repair with one lane access.  And I am oddly content to sit in the familiar where utterances and decisions aren't required.

When my mom died, a friend told me that the pain would subside and would resurface.  Too true, for grief is never a matter of subtraction, of balance. The tally of years means nothing.

When I get home, I do the laundry, placing each item from the washer to the drier--just so--as if concentration on the ordinary will resettle my breath, produce a badge that says, "I'm competent."

Later I read a bit from John McPhee about plate tectonics: "In the middle Mesozoic, as the Atlantic opens, the North American lithosphere, like a great rug, begins to slide west, abutting, for the most part, the Pacific Plate. A rug sliding across a room will crumple up against the far wall" (p.384).

On days like this I take slight solace in having been told that even the poles wander.  Nothing living holds still, even mythological centers, even grief. Sometime next week I will have tucked this grief up like a little ball so very very small that the unsettled balance I carry will hardly show.

Digital Identities as Composition: Thinking about School

I. Composing Digitally

It's late evening when my son asks me to listen to something on his iPad.  The something turns into six different versions of the Elder Scrolls v. Skyrim. He shows me the different versions commenting on what he likes about each and how each is different.  His comments are specific and he speaks with confidence about the use of vocals in one version, the beauty of string violins in another, the simplicity of the piano version and tells me that another is more Baroque in style and that he thinks of himself as being a bit Baroque.  He then shows me a synthesia version explaining that the colors have tonal quality and how this helped him to compose Skyrim in Minecraft.

"I could see the music as colors."

Last week, he played his version of Skyrim in Minecraft for his dad and me.  He had composed the song using note blocks (singles and doubles) powered by redstone circuits and is now editing a screencast of him playing the song. This is a complicated process as the note blocks are visually spaced to represent the time signature: the distance between blocks is equal to each note's duration. Each note block represents a sound and can be layered to represent multiple notes played simultaneously.

Hartmann's Hut of Baba Yaga

He next played the Promenade from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and told me that he planned to compose this as well in Minecraft and do so for me for Mother's Day.  He located a synthesia version and played it and explained that this would help him to compose. Delighted, I thought how the mother's day card evolves. 

II. Composing At School

My son is not a musician by the standard measure. He does not take music lessons although he did for a year (trumpet). He does not play in the school band. He does not have music this year at school.  He hears really well though and he knows how to teach himself by watching related YouTube videos, reading Minecraft wikis, and asking for help from those with whom he interacts with online on his server and in other gaming environments.  He also knows the power of pull (Hagel III, Brown & Davison, 2010).

Hagel III, Brown & Davison explain three levels of pull:

"At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to you that are relevant and valuable, even if you were not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull—the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential. We can use pull to learn faster and translate that learning into rapidly improving performance, not just for ourselves, but for the people we connect with—a virtuous cycle that we can participate in" (pp. 9-10).

How is 'pull' being allowed and leveraged at school?  How are we altering school definitions of composing to include aspects of pulling (access, attraction, and achievement) and digital work?   How are we investigating the cognitive and social processes our children are using when they compose these digital works inside gaming worlds, as screencasts, as code, as how-to videos, as art works, as photographic works, as remixes? How do we understand the back story that informs the work?   How are we reconciling the 19th century school with digital learners who show up at the school door having composed multiple digital identities? How are we addressing immense equity issues for our learners who cannot show up at the school door having accessed significant hours of online leaning?

III. Composing Identities

We are always composing versions of ourselves.  Research by Sénéchal and LeFevre (2002) indicates that home literacy experiences contribute substantially to children’s success in learning to read.  These home literacy experiences are formed by the frequency and quality of talk between children and parents and the consistent engagement with literacy habits that are privileged (playing word and song games; singing; reading to children; having books, magazines, newspapers, e-readers, computers in use in the home; having available and in use different types of writing materials; listening to nursery rhymes and so on) in the home and at school.  These experiences form identities that inform how children function at school and how they are recognized by teachers.  These children show up at the school door speaking and acting with the school Discourse quite in hand.

The home literacy practices that Sénéchal and LeFevre discussed in 2002 were quite comfortable for our school worlds as they mimicked literacy values of the school.  As literacies are fluid and changing, the way we understand them at school must also continue to evolve.  And this is a conundrum worth thinking about.  There is an increasing gulf between what we value at school as learning and what the connected child experiences as valued learning outside of school.  Likewise there is a troubling gulf between the child who is connected and the one who is not.  The play and work inside digital networks (in)forms and is (in)formed by our emerging sense of identity.  To what end are we considering digital identities as compositions worthy of teaching at school?

Bon Stewart (@bonstewart) has a terrific post about digital identities, "Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of  Networked Publics" that I would recommend reading.  She outlines six key selves that emerge via participation in networked publics (Note: all quotes are taken from the Stewart's blog post):

1. The Performative, Public Self: "The networked self is linked in multiple, complex, individual node-to-node relationships with others as part of an ever-shifting public."
2. The Quantified – or Articulated – Self: "...our network contacts are visible and articulated, and our actions and contributions are quantified."
3. The Participatory Self: "within my networks I am both a creator of my own content but also a consumer of that which my peers produce and share. My relationships are groomed by the constant iterative work of participation, and my comfort with working in isolation towards a final product – as was the paper model of creative work – recedes in the rear-view mirror."
4. The Asynchronous Self: "Digital sociality practices and networked publics moved increasingly towards asynchronous mediated communications, rather than the interruptive, immediate demands of telephones."
5. The PolySocial – or Augmented Reality – Self:"...digital identities not as virtual selves, but as particular subjects brought into being by our relational, mobile interactions in the world of bits and extending into the world of atoms."
6. The Neo-Liberal, Branded Self: "Our social networking platforms are increasingly neo-liberal “Me, Inc” spaces where we are exhorted to monetize and to 'find our niche.'"

In thinking about Stewart's six key selves (also acts of composing and being composed, yes?), I wonder what are we doing locally, nationally and globally to guide children who are connected to understand the selves they compose and are composed by?  What are we doing locally, nationally and globally to address the enormous equity issues most felt by children who are not connected? I want to urge that we resist categorizing composing as simply a matter of ink to paper as is most commonly done at school.  This is simply no longer a sufficient definition.  I am not devaluing ink to paper, but do want us to consider that composing is much, much larger and via the Internet, the social aspects of composition along with the modes of composition become increasingly important, dynamic, risky, confusing, and collaborative.  The selves Stewart outlines is not limited to adults. Our children who participate in networked publics are composing and being composed. Should this not be essential school-based literacies as well?

So let me close with a challenge: Take a walk around the school where you work.  Notice how composing is being defined by the work children produce and the work that is displayed.  I tend to do these walks with my phone in hand. A picture says so much, yes?

I'd love to hear about what you find...


Works Cited:

Brown, John Seely; Davison, Lang; Hagel III, John (2010-02-23). The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children's reading
skill: A five-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73, 445–460.

Barefoot Knowledge and a Few Birds

Freedom (Mixed Media. 2009, M.A. Reilly)

As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. As a child when I was sent down to Joe Clarke's store, I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Introduction.

 I.

I like to be reminded that that there are all kinds of knowing and unknowing in the world.  

II. 

I have been immersed these last few weeks in studying the Common Core (ELA) and am deeply appreciative of its insistence that knowledge be an important outcome, especially in primary grade education.  We often have emphasized the code aspects of reading acquisition (not saying code isn't important) and in doing so inadvertently devalued factual knowledge.  Susan Neuman (2010) writes:

the true path to literacy is not the procedural skills that stand out in the crowd, but the knowledge of content and concept that underlie its foundation (p. 301).

It is in naming the knowledge and context, which under girds the development of procedural skills such as code-focus learning (alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid naming of letters, print concepts , and writing one’ own name) that is challenging and critical to do. Again Neuman (2010) concludes:

Code-related skills, the essential alphabetic principles that make up our language, are a critical component in learning to read. But while these skills are necessary, they are certainly not sufficient. At the same time, these skills must be accompanied by a massive and in-depth foundation of factual knowledge (p. 304).

 

I think that is an outcome that is sought via the explicit inclusion of informational text and the practice of text-dependent reading, alongside foundational reading skills.  What I want to caution about though is the means by which knowledge is composed and the confusion between information and knowledge. 

III.

Reading informational text is certainly one way to nudge open a door to learning about the world.  But we should not mistake that for dwelling in a world of ideas. George Siemens (2006) states it nicely: "All knowledge is information, but NOT all information is knowledge" (vi). If we think that adding informational texts to the classroom, so that they represent 50% of the library and taught texts, will lead to knowledge--we are surely mistaken. I want to believe that the intent of the Common Core is much larger than the percentage of books that are taught. We have before us an opportunity to reclaim the arts, literature, natural sciences, history, geography, anthropology--many of which have ceased to be potential lines of inquiry as school time has been doled out to studying for tests in mathematics and reading. We have before us the occasion to privilege embodied ways of knowing.

The Weight of Living (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A Reilly)

IV.

Beneath the window where I am writing this I have been stopping, called away you might say, and am listening to and watching birds.  So insistent are some as they use their beaks to move the very leaves that my family and I have neglected to rake from last fall.  They are I suspect in search of worms, insects, food that rests beneath.  They work with an intensity few would not appreciate. There is a kind of knowing, an indwelling here that needs to be learned, embodied, surrendered to.  

V. 

In Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge he explains the need to surrender to what you study.  How possible is that in school when there's so much declared stuff to know?

Polanyi writes:

A true understanding of science and mathematics includes the capacity for a contemplative experience of them, and the teaching of these sciences must aim for imparting this capacity to the pupil. The task of inducing an intelligent contemplation of music and dramatic art aims likewise at enabling a person to surrender himself to works of art. This is neither to observe nor to handle them, but to live them. This the satisfaction of gaining intellectual control over the external world is linked to a satisfaction of gaining control over ourselves (pp. 195-196).

We create environments by the decisions we make--be it in a schoolroom, a boardroom, or a bedroom.  Hauling in a different collection of books will hardly matter if language has been stripped from meaning, replaced with the pre-made 'thought'.  

Contemplative experiences require agency and error.  

Room and breath.

VI.

The birds are insistent. I wish I understood what their varied cries and calls meant. It's a sound-alphabet I cannot decipher, cannot hear well to mimic. I can't seem to ease the birds from my mind. It's like that moment in Hitchcock's masterpiece when you begin to really see the birds because they block the sunlight.

The world cools.

VII.

This morning I am thinking how the birds are always before me so often in fact that I hardly stop to notice.  This indwelling, perhaps, comes with a cost and so I try to distract myself from the ways the birds seem to part the air by turning to Annie Dillard. I read a bit and it worries me that even as I write this someone else somewhere is penning a quiz or a test based on Dillard's "Living Like  a Weasel," as it is now a Common Core exemplar.  I hope they will resist the urge to test.  As Dillard says in The Writing Life, I hope the birds eat your crumbs.

I have lived a half-century and have read and reread "Living Like a Weasel" and perhaps the greatest thing I can say is that meaning still is slippery. With each age, I read it differently, understand aspects less. 

Is there a quiz in which knowing less is an A?

I Found Words (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

VIII.

A task we might try on is one that invites children to name their world--through embodied experiences and text-based experiences.  I know that is hardly the stuff we think about when think about curriculum, but it gives me pause--especially when I think of my own child.  Using what we know to name the world opens us to recast what we first know as simple with increasing complexity, with increasing simplicity.   

This is a kind of knowing we cannot codify for another.

IX.

In 'Total Eclipse' Dillard first mentions a child's bucket and shovel as noticed when passing through a hotel lobby: 

On the broad lobby desk, lighted and bubbling, was a ten-gallon aquarium containing one large fish; the fish tilted up and down in its water. Against the long opposite wall sang a live canary in its cage. Beneath the cage, among spilled millet seeds on the carpet, were a decorated child’s sand bucket and matching sand shovel (pp. 11-12).

Later in the essay, when she and her husband have gone to witness a full eclipse, she tugs on that simple mention of the bucket and shovel.

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives (p.24).

She will return to the bucket and shovel again in this and other essays. It is not that she is tossing facts at us, as much as it is that she understands common objects in multiple and contrasting ways. It is in the space between the mentioning and my recognizing the mentioning that I reach to make sense--there, beneath the codification, is a restlessness that suggests a way of knowing that cannot be taught.

Barefoot (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

X.

Dennis Sumara observes: "Curriculum is a normalizing experience...Teachers become tour guides, showing students which sites must be noticed...As a daily performance, teaching becomes a pointing ritual that seldom pierces underneath the skin of the everyday" (p. 233).

Paying attention to the everyday is a call to the sensual. See how Luis Moll and his colleagues frame this:

The primary purpose of the work is to develop innovations in teaching that draw on the knowledge and skills found in local households...We use the term funds of knowledge  to refer to these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual function and well-being.   Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Norma González, 2005. "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to connects Homes and Classrooms"

For Dillard, like Moll and his colleagues, funds of knowledge are in everyday objects.

XI.

There are all kinds of things purported as knowledge. I wonder if knowledge can exist outside a body?

The birds have quit their rooting with the onslaught of Saturday lawn mowers and blowers.  But they remain.  In trees, between trees, on the deck railing across the street, on the wires that cross, I spot them. Their tweets and calls rise above from time to time the insistent motoring of mowers. I wish I knew more about birds, their songs and such.

Pages (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

There is much to learn in simply being present.

 

XII.

In a few weeks a friend and I will be presenting at a conference.  At that time we will  engage participants in the closest of readings: the kind you embody.  Through choral reading and dramatic tableaux we will step in and out of text.  

I hope they leave unsettled.

XIII.

As I am not beholden to a system of  learning, I daily grant myself permission to blindly follow 

    lines of flight 

that may     and      may 

                               not lead                          to 

  

                                                 ideas

  insights

  

                                                            blind alleys

                                      buckets          shovels   

       

                    bits of sand

Bloomed Ink and Birds (Mixed Media. 2009, M.A. Reilly)

                                                                                       

 and 

                                birds

Works Cited

Dillard, A. (2009). Teaching a stone to talk. NY: HarperCollins - Kindle Edition.

Neuman, S.B. (2010).  Lessons from my mother:  Response to the National Early Literacy Panel.  Educational Researcher, 39, 301-305.

Polanyi, M. 19581962. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Siemens, G. (2006). Knowing Knowledge.

Sumara, D. (1996).  Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York: Peter Lang.

Complexity and Constructing Community Knowledge in Class

Middle School Student's Concrete Poem

The Context

Earlier in the week I was talking with a middle school teacher who shared the poetry writing of one of her students during a PLC.  The half dozen poems had voice, deliberate word choice, and each poem was complete. What interested me and still does are the teacher's comments. She said she brought this work to share as the student is not typical of her other students.  She explained that this young woman enjoys reading and language and writing.  "How do I help my other students to do what she does?" asked the teacher. I think her question is important and is connected to the teachers' tacit knowledge.

At this inner city school, there is a reliance on formulas by this teacher and her colleagues to teach thinking, writing, and reading. Originally when their coach had indicated that a way to understand poetry would also be to write poetry-- the idea was met with quick dismissal.  The teachers explained that students do not need to write poems on the state test, they only need to read poems. The totality of official learning was in many ways narrowed to what the teachers perceived as ways to pass the test--although I doubt the teachers would call it that.  Rather, it seems that the teachers have codified test taking and that this knowledge has (in)formed what comprises the taught curriculum. 

It doesn't matter that their interpretation of what constitutes literacies is flawed.  It is nonetheless deeply believed and acted upon and I imagine for compelling and felt reasons. In interestingly similar ways, the coach, external to the school functions like the poet in the class in that each offer external norms about what it means to be literate. The challenge though is how to we adjust our own beliefs to hear them?

Community Knowledge

Constructing community knowledge is very much connected to individual agency.  Brent Davis and Elaine Simmt (2003) suggest that five conditions are present in complex learning systems: internal diversity, redundancy, decentralized control, organized randomness, and neighbor interactions. These conditions are the basis upon which a team, such as PLC, or a classroom of students and a teacher build community knowledge that is rich and larger than any one individual. We can understand these co-specifying conditions in the following way.

Internal diversity, represents the ways in which PLC members are different from one another. It is important to have teams in which perspectives and experiences are different. Such diversity allows us the opportunity to consider things from alternative points of view.  Alongside rich diversity, a team also demonstrates redundancy which Davis and Simmt explain, “is essential in triggering a transition from a collection of me’s to a collective of us” (150, emphasis in original).  Redundancy may occur in shared Discourse (Gee, 2008), ideology, and core beliefs.  

Decentralized control, the third condition emerges as a team begins to compose new understandings of the work they are doing through discussion. It is critical that individual agency be present.  For example, in this way a team moves from being a PLC that is simply reading and discussing a text to one that is engaging with a heightened sense of praxis (Grundy, 1987).  Through conversation and hearing one another, the text is no longer an assignment, but rather a key to transforming the work at hand. This cannot occur if the individuals don't risk exchanging perspectives, beliefs, and ideas freely while all the time risking that their thoughts might be naive, immature, or wrong. 

In understanding the fourth condition, organized randomness, Davis and Simmt explain how structures for complexity incorporate both “sufficient organization to orient agents’ actions and sufficient randomness to allow for flexible and varied responses” (p. 155).  In this manner, one might understand the requirements of a course (like the poetry assignments) or the goals of a PLC as a means that help to organize the learners’ work. Although assignments are often externally structured, within that structure there also exists possibility for the unseen and the unimagined to occur.  Whereas “[c]omplex systems are rule-bound…those rules determine only the boundaries of activity, not the limits of possibility” (Davis & Simmt, p. 154). Scripts and formulas--be it in a writing class--or in a school limit possibility.  In complexity, assignments operate as an organizing forces, not determined conclusions.   

The final condition Davis and Simmt include is neighbor interactions. They indicate that the “neighbors” that interact “are not physical bodies or social groupings…Rather…these neighbors that must ‘bump’ against one another are ideas” (p. 156). Neighbor interactions are group members’ ideas that are blended and juxtaposed through discussion, resulting at times in novel ideas that do not belong to any one individual.  I have written about this previously as collisions. 

In returning to the teacher’s initial question about how might the other students emulate the thinking, reading, and writing habits of the class poet—complexity within the classroom is an important indicator. To what end do students have the right and practice to function as a complex collective? It isn’t just the assignments that are given, although well structured and informed assignments do matter—but it is also the way in which the group moves from a collection of me’s to a collective of us, and how the assignments offer structure and possibilities that are informed by the students' interactions with one another.

Works Cited

Davis, B. & Simmt E. (2003). Understanding learning systems: Mathematics teaching and complexity science. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 34(2), 137-167.

Gee, J.P. (1990/1996/2008).  Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in Discourses, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.

Grundy, S. (1987). Curriculum: Product or praxis. New York: Falmer.

Improving Vocabulary: A Few Things To Do Today

from here.

In some of the schools where I work, teachers are on about improving their students' vocabulary and that is very good news.  In this post I am outlining a few ways you can do that at school or at home.  First, let's consider what it means to know a word.

Knowing a word means knowing not only the meaning, but knowing the contexts in which that word is used; it means knowing related words and ideas; it means knowing when and where to use the word.  (Harmon, Hedrick, Soares, & Gress, 2007, p. 138).

Vocabulary knowledge is not binary (you know it or you don't know it). Understanding the contexts in which a word is used is critical.  Additionally, it is not just the word we need to know, but also the words that surround it.

For example what does the word sofa mean?

How does our understanding of the word, sofa, shift when we consider it alongside: couch, settee, davenport, futon, or chaise?  Knowing a word also means knowing the word alongside other words.

How does the word sofa, take on different meaning when you think about it after viewing this:



The term, sofa is larger than a single understanding of the word, yes?  Bakhtin said:

...no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate (Kindle Locations 3902-3903)

Helping young people to acquire deep semantic knowledge of words and the sophistication and power that comes with understanding that words exists within an elastic environment is important work.  Here are a few ways to get you started and/or to look critically at the work you have been doing already.

1. Query how much time students actually read.  How many minutes a day are students putting eyes on text (paper and/or screen) and reading?  Go ahead and clock this for a day.  It helps to consider the range of readers you have at school or at home when thinking about the amount of time spent reading.  Please note that this accounting should NOT include any other reading activities apart from writing alongside the text (in the margins, etc.) while reading.  Everything else is not reading.

Increasing reading time as little as ten-minutes more in the classroom/home for sustained reading will increase vocabulary knowledge. For intermediate grade children and older, reading daily for 30 sustained minutes can be a good goal as well.  It is important that students have choice and texts they can manage at their fingertips.  Please note that 'leveled' text may fail as a way to help you fit books with children as prior knowledge plays a big role in how well one reads. As such, we are never a single level.

I found that using book boxes in the younger grades helps students have on hand materials they can and want to read.  Where I have worked, young children brought in cereal boxes and these were cut down to form sleeves where each child kept a supply of reading materials. Both the child and the teacher added/removed materials to the boxes.  For digital readers, learning how to curate text for personal/professional use (i.e., google reader, instapaper, diigo, scoop-it, blog roll, homepage) can greatly assist.

The sure way to develop vocabulary is to develop a reading life.  As an educator or a parent, take a look at what is on your reading shelf.  How often are you reading? What are you reading?

from my bookshelf inside my kindle/ebook reader

from Reading/Oregon

from here.

2. Check the reading materials in your classroom/home and ask yourself: How many rare word opportunities are there for the children to learn? Rare words can be defined as words that would not likely be part of a child's vocabulary in a given grade range or as the frequency with which a word appears in written language. The less frequent words are considered rare as opposed to high frequency words.

Next ask: How many opportunities, given the reading materials students access, do they have to read and learn academic vocabulary? Academic vocabulary are those words which are particular to a discipline. Both rare words and academic vocabulary are important sources for vocabulary.

from Reading/Oregon

In an earlier post I wrote about collage journals based on newspapers as a vocabulary method.  Here's a link.  What types of text do students routinely have access to read during independent reading, shared reading, or hear during a read aloud? Read a sample of these texts and see if rare words and academic vocabulary are sufficiently present in the works.

from here

3.  Think about what you read aloud in classrooms or at home.  Again, thinking about rare words and academic vocabulary--how rich an experience are you providing? Increase the quality of text by ensuring that the works you have selected have sufficient rare words and academic vocabulary.  For younger children the main source of rare words will NOT be texts the children actually read on their own, but rather will be the texts that are read to them and the quality of speech they hear in engagements with adults, older children, and at times peers.  I like Isabel Beck's Text Talk as a way to manage the discussion of rare words (or what she calls Tier 2 words) during read aloud.  Here is a link to a one-page description of Text Talk. 

Dictionary feature inside an e-reader

4. What access to dictionaries and other resources to learners have? This is a good time to reconsider acceptable use policies and ensure that learners can use smartphones and other handheld devices in order to access text, dictionaries, and other on-line resources.  Also, the use of e-readers/iPads/iPod touches greatly enhances the ease with which one might define or search a term or seek additional information about a topic.  Electronic texts usually offer a linked dictionary and access to the Internet.  In addition to professional resources, learners also can benefit from keeping a personal dictionary of terms they are learning across disciplines.

In the next post, I'll discuss explicit ways to teach vocabulary.


Works Cited

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Dialogic imagination. Austin, TX; University of Texas/Kindle Edition.
Harmon, J. M., Hedrick, W. B., Soares, L., & Gress, M. (2007). Assessing vocabulary: Examining knowledge about words and about word learning. In J. R. Paratore & R. L. McCorack (Eds.), Classroom literacy assessment: Making sense of what students know and do (pp. 135-153). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Composing Across Time

Last night, Chris Berthlsen (a_small_lab) tweeted the following:

The link led me to the  W. Ross Ashby digital archive which contain 25 volumes of Ashby's journals.  They are most fascinating. I spent a few hours looking through different volumes and was moved to begin to collage bits of what I was reading. Making alongside the reading helped me to understand.

Collage: W. Ross Ashby (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

We live in wondrous times when a man in Japan can tweet a link to journals that an Englishman kept for 40 years during the last century and pages from these can serve as seeds for a collage that a woman in New Jersey makes. 

The intersections among our lives offer a rich source of learning, of wonder, of notice.

It is this that some of us have been going on about for some time when we conceive of schools as community-based,  open beyond walls and borders, where curriculum is complicated conversations that learners generate.  How we occasion learning matters.

The random, happenstance that may occur--the juxtaposition of one thing alongside another: these are the ways in which we learn.  How welcome is the random, the distant neighbor you've yet to meet, the collision with other in your life? In your workplace? In your classroom?