Thesis Sharing: Ready or Not, Here I Come!

Back in June, I published a brief post announcing the commencement of my graduate thesis research. Since then, I've periodically and vaguely mentioned my thesis work on this blog. Other than these brief blog postings, however, all of my research and writing has remained between myself and my infinitely patient advisor, Stephenie Young. It has been a delightfully private process. In an exciting new turn of events, I will be taking my thesis research for a test drive in a slightly more public arena on December 3rd during a research conversation hosted by Salem State's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. While it is intimidating to consider presenting my still-developing thesis ideas to colleagues and faculty, I am also very much looking forward to receiving feedback on my theories and research up to this point. I always benefit immensely from the guidance and perspectives of other scholars and educators.

Despite the fact that I feel somewhat unprepared to present my research, Salem State's marketing department has put this poster together. There's really no going back once a poster has been made.

Designed by Salem State University's Marketing Department.

Now the only thing left to do is ensure that there is actually some progress to present by December 3rd!

Using Cognates to Expand English Language Learners' Vocabulary

Screen Shot 2015-09-26 at 6.48.59 PM As part of my RETELL training (see more about this here), we have been discussing different ideas and techniques for making academic content more accessible for English language learners (ELLs). Recently, in response to an assignment, my friend and colleague, Megan from Breaking Grad(School), called attention to the idea of using cognates to help students connect new vocabulary words in English to familiar words in their native languages, which I think is a beautifully simple and genius idea. Whenever a pedagogical strategy honors and relies on students' prior knowledge, I'm always predispositioned to like it. So I decided to do some resource hunting on the topic and, as always, I learned a few things!

Just so we're all on the same page, I'll define cognates as words from two different languages that are derived from a common linguistic root or ancestor, causing them to share similar meanings, spellings, and/or pronunciations. Cognates almost always have the same meanings as one another, although not every time; however, they appear to be extremely similar on paper. The idea here is that, if we can teach ELLs to identify cognates or if we can give them lists of cognates in their primary language, they will more quickly and easily be able to acquire the corresponding cognates in English. For example, when teaching a Spanish-speaking ELL the word "abbreviation," a quick and easy shortcut is to point them to the Spanish cognate of that word, "abreviación," which has the same meaning.

Obviously this strategy is more helpful in some languages than in others. English shares very few cognates with languages like Chinese or Arabic. However, according to research by Colorin Colorado, 30-40% of all words in English have a Spanish cognate. That works out to around 10,000-15,000 English words that a Spanish-speaking ELL most likely has easy access to. This handy Massachusetts Association of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages (MATSOL) factsheet tells us that over 50% of ELLs in Massachusetts speak Spanish. So, when working with Spanish-speaking ELL students, which, statistically speaking, will be more often than not, the use of cognates to build vocabulary is a useful tool.

Like I mentioned earlier, I love this strategy because it takes advantage of knowledge that students already have in a language that is comfortable for them. It can also be a tool to boost ELL student confidence in an environment where they feel disadvantaged when compared to their English-speaking peers. In a webcast interview, researcher Diane August points out that the many Spanish-English cognate pairs are actually made up of what is a very commonly-known, basic word in Spanish and a fairly high-level, Tier 2 or 3 word in English. This means that a simple, commonly-used word in Spanish might actually have an SAT-level cognate in English, giving Spanish-speaking ELLs an advantage in vocabulary acquisition.

A small catch to this idea is the existence of false cognates, which are words that are spelled and pronounced very similarly to one another, but do not actually share a common meaning. An example of this would be the words "actually" and "actualmente." Relying on the cognate trick, an ELL student might assume these two words share a meaning; however, in Spanish, "actualmente" means "currently" and "actually" best translates into "en realidad." When using cognates to teach ELLs new vocabulary, it's a good idea to make sure they are aware of the possibility of false cognates so they aren't caught off-guard when they meet one. Fortunately, statistics from cognates.org show that only around 5% of cognates in the English language are false; so ELLs will benefit more often than not from assuming a familiar word is a cognate.

Another slightly larger catch to this idea is that the teacher of the class has to actually know which cognate to point to to help build vocabulary. Since my foreign language knowledge is definitely insufficient to meet the diverse needs of Massachusetts ELL students, I found a few great websites that identify some common and helpful cognates in a variety of languages.

Ultimately, as with most things, the usefulness of this strategy can only be determined on a case-by-case basis; however, it's definitely an idea I'll keep in my toolbox just in case.

An Overview of the Sheltered English Immersion Program

If you plan on being a core academic teacher in Massachusetts, you either are or soon will be fairly familiar with sheltered instruction and the Sheltered English Immersion program. I do plan on teaching in Massachusetts and am in the "getting to know you" phase of my relationship with sheltered English instruction, so I thought it would be helpful for myself and for other teachers in similar positions to have a brief overview of what sheltered instruction is, where it comes from, and why Massachusetts is making us learn about it. Here are some facts to start off with:

  • English language learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing population in the U.S. school system, with the number of English learners tripling since 1998 (Echevarría 1).
  • In Massachusetts, ELL Enrollment has increased by 57% since 2000

Taken from the MA Department of Education's RETELL field slide show. http://www.doe.mass.edu/retell/2012-02-27bese.pdf

  • For the 2013-2014 academic year in Massachusetts, the annual ELL dropout rate was approximately 3 times higher than that of non-ELL students. See this Department of Education report.

The poor performance of increasing numbers of ELLs in Massachusetts is not a new thing; the numbers were actually significantly worse in 2011, when the U.S. Department of Justice notified the Mass. Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) that their ELL instruction was not adequate to meet the needs of their student populations. The Department of Justice actually qualified the low quality ELL education in Massachusetts as a violation of civil rights as well as the federal Equal Opportunities Act. In response to this pressure from the Department of Justice, in June 2012, Massachusetts approved the Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners (RETELL) initiative, which is a collection of reforms regulating ELL instruction in schools. One of the primary components of the RETELL initiative is the requirement that all core academic teachers earn a Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) Teacher Endorsement, which equips them to use sheltered English instruction in their classrooms.

Sheltered English instruction is a pedagogical approach to helping ELLs access and understand grade-level, content-area knowledge while also building their English language skills. The term sheltered suggests that "such instruction provides refuge from the linguistic demands of mainstream instruction, which, unless modified, are beyond the comprehension of many English learners" (Echevarría 50). In other words, sheltered instruction, also referred to as Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English in some places, is intended to protect ELLs from English language requirements that they are unable to meet while they are developing both language and content-area skills. This kind of instruction can be used in a mainstream classroom where ELL students are surrounded by fluent English-speakers, or in a class entirely made up of ELLs (from Brown University's SEI page). A core idea behind sheltered instruction is that it should benefit both ELLs and English-proficient students, making it appropriate for use in a mainstream class as well as an ELL class; all students should experience a richer, more rewarding educational experience when sheltered instruction is employed correctly.

And so, in response to generally inadequate educational opportunities for our ELL students here in Massachusetts, the state is requiring teachers to get some explicit instruction on how to work with students who do not have the necessary English language skills to complete their work independently. The most common way of attaining this newly required SEI endorsement is by completing an SEI endorsement class, which is what I will be doing. Because of this, you can expect to be seeing some ELL-themed blog posts over the next few months, which will make having this overview to refer back to even more useful!

Tales of a Blogging Faux Pas

I have a confession to make. This blog has been guilty of what I have recently learned is a fairly significant typographical faux pas. grimacing-face

I have been working on a very exciting collaborative webtext with a group of writers from Salem State (more on this later) and, as we worked out some of the design choices for that webtext, the ever-relevant and web-savvy Kate Artz brought up the question of spacing. She asked whether we would all be double or single-spacing between sentences. I had never really considered this question, being a die-hard, lifelong double-spacer myself.

Turns out that double spacing in between sentences is officially wrong! The double space is in fact an outdated holdover from the typewriter days in which all spaces were uniform. Currently, both the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style clearly dictate that the informed writer should place one, lone space after each period and before starting the following sentence. For a pretty great history and breakdown of the one v. two-space debate, tech writer and journalist Farhad Manjoo has a fantastically informative and funny post. Time spent reading that post is time well spent; trust me on this one.

Oddly enough, with myself as a prime example, teachers of all grade levels can still be seen instructing on and enforcing the erroneous two-space convention. For those of you who are in my boat and entirely missed the memo on this one, it looks like we'll have to adjust our ways.

On the topic of ways-adjusting, I am not planning on combing back through all this blog's archives and ripping out the offending, extra spaces; however, I will clean up my About and Get in Touch pages. I will also use my new knowledge from here on out to publish single-spaced blog posts. So have pity on my typographical ignorance in posts dated prior to this one.

You have my sincerest apologies, Internet, Modernity, and Professionalism. I will now go forth and try to break this lifelong habit of mine.

The Problem of Plagiarism: Where the Educators Come In - Part 4 of 5

In my prior post, I took a look at some of the research behind what kinds of factors and situations might give rise to inappropriate use of sources in student writing.  The list of possible motivations to commit plagiarism in all its forms is complex and, for me, a little daunting.  There is a multitude of pitfalls and potential issues that accompany responsible source use; as our student bodies grow more diverse and our technological and digital access to resources grows more intricate and comprehensive, these issues continue to multiply exponentially.  Acknowledging this, the essential question is, what do we as educators do about it? The effort from academic institutions and educators everywhere to fight what is commonly referred to as the "Plague of Plagiarism" is immense.  As Rebecca Moore Howard points out in her article, an entire industry based on retroactively catching instances of plagiarism has developed, with sites like Turnitin.com and Plagiarism.org regularly devising new strategies for catching the culprits.  Software is being developed, articles are being written, books are being purchased. Teachers everywhere are cracking down on plagiarism.

The problem with this mentality and one of the myriad of reasons it has been relatively unsuccessful is that this approach is fundamentally retrospective.  The instances of plagiarism are detected after they have happened, leading to a predominantly punitive set of responses that does not even attempt to address the reason the student plagiarized in the first place.  Keith Hjorthshoj and Katherine Gottscholk acknowledge that this problem has arisen from the overwhelming complexity of the plagiarism problem.  "Because it is impossible to prevent all forms and cases of plagiarism, teachers often devote their attention to detection and punishment, partly in the interests of deterrence" (Teaching English 119).

Another significant reason for the lack of success in recent efforts to combat plagiarism has to do with our modern understanding of what plagiarism is, which is something I get into in an earlier post in this series.  Howard touches on this when she says, "We like the word 'plagiarism' because it seems simple and straightforward: Plagiarism is representing the words of another as one's own, our college policies say, and we tell ourselves, 'There!  It's clear.  Students are responsible for reading those policies and observing their guidelines'."  This kind of simplistic, but well-intentioned thinking about plagiarism does indeed simplify our responsibilities as teachers, but at what would seem to be too high a cost.

It's not that simple! Courtesy of Creative Commons.

Given the ineffectiveness of retroactive responses to plagiarism as well as a general sense of confusion surrounding what plagiarism actually is, Hjortshoj and Gottschalk suggest a better way.  They believe that a proactive approach to writing education has the ability to counteract many of the reasons students have for relying on inappropriate source use.  "To a great extent... prevention is possible and coincides with the goals of education" (Hjortshoj and Gottschalk Teaching English 119). For starters, this approach requires that educators take a moment to deepen and stretch their definitions of what constitutes plagiarism (feel free to use this post as a launch point) and consider the humbling possibility that some of the instances of plagiarism in their classrooms may have stemmed from teaching practices as opposed to student dishonesty or laziness.  Hjortshoj and Gottschalk explain that, in order to successfully combat plagiarism in the classroom, "you need to understand what plagiarism is, in its diverse forms, why it occurs..., and what kinds of teaching practices make these violations of academic writing standards uninviting and unnecessary" (118).

The teaching practices that Hjortshoj and Gottschalk reference here as possible suggestions to head plagiarism off at the pass are not necessarily additional checklist items to squeeze into an already crowded curriculum.  Ideally, the kinds of practices that would help oppose plagiarism in the classroom would be the same ones that we would use to help students develop strong, flexible writing skills.  Hjortshoj and Gottschalk state that, "most of the strategies we have recommended for orchestrating the research paper are also strategies for preventing plagiarism of all kinds" (Teaching English 119).  The Council of Writing Program Administrator's statement on best practices concerning plagiarism supports this by encouraging classroom strategies that simultaneously support students "throughout their research process" and "make plagiarism both difficult and unnecessary."  If educators could find a way to implement positive and rigorous academic writing instruction strategies that also directly undermined student motivation to misuse sources before that opportunity for misuse presented itself, the problem of plagiarism would shrink to a much more surmountable issue.  Student writing skill would grow, teacher anxiety would decrease, and the student-teacher relationship as it pertains to the issue of source use in academic writing could work towards a much more positive and healthy condition.

Howard aptly summarizes the crisis surrounding the problem of plagiarism by saying, "In our stampede to fight...a 'plague' of plagiarism, we risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship."  Her statement concisely captures my motivation in posting this series on plagiarism.  Through this blog series, my goal is to propose that we fight plagiarism in a different way than we have been.  My goal is to encourage and explore proactive approaches that mentor and coach students into a flexible ability and skill level with source use, making plagiarism in the classroom obsolete. My hope would be to move away from the criminal-police relationship that governs the way we handle plagiarism in order to replace that relationship with one of mutual understanding, respect, and generative productivity.  As a teacher with limited experience, I am sure I have nothing more than a tenuous grasp on the staggering magnitude of this undertaking; however, in my next and final post in this series, I'll be calling on some much more experienced educators to help compile concrete ideas on how to practically bring this kind of an approach to plagiarism into the classroom.

The Problem of Plagiarism: Asking Why - Part 3 of 5

Courtesy of Creative Commons In my last post, I attempted to investigate and complicate the way in which we commonly define plagiarism.  It is impossible, however, to discuss a more multifaceted understanding of plagiarism without then going on to consider how that understanding complicates our assumptions as to why students plagiarize. When we perceive plagiarism to very simply be cases in which students "steal" the words or ideas of others in order to pass them off as their own, we reduce the list of potential motivations down to laziness and deceitfulness.  Either a student couldn't be bothered to complete her own work or she just wanted to cheat the system and get away with literary theft.  If, however, we are going to consider plagiarism as occurring over a spectrum, as we did in my prior post, then we must be willing to consider the corresponding spectrum of situations and rationales that might prompt students to engage in these different kinds of plagiarism.

In her article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rebecca Moore Howard captures the danger in a simplistic rationale for why students plagiarize, saying, "by thinking of plagiarism as a unitary act rather than a collection of disparate activities, we risk categorizing all of our students as criminals." It is not only demoralizing and harmful to minimize all our students in this way; it is also inaccurate according to the often-quoted-in-this-blog Keith Hjortshoj and his co-author Katherine Gottschalk.  In their own classroom experiences, Hjortshoj and Gottschalk found that instances of plagiarism did not "correspond with integrity among the students" (Teaching Writing 118).  Drawing from their time teaching, they recount many instances in which an ethical and motivated student committed some form of plagiarism.  When reflecting on the numerous occasions in which they had to respond to plagiarism in their classrooms, Hjortshoj and Gottschalk say, "while all of these cases involve misrepresentation, their motivations and implications can be entirely different" (Teaching Writing 118).

Several recent scholars and organizations have begun theorizing on what exactly some of these different motivations might be.  Based on their research, I have compiled a list of just a few alternative reasons students could have for committing some degree of plagiarism.

  • A General Lack of Ability: Jennifer Rabold has said, "I see plagiarism as an issue of students trying to enter the academic conversation unskillfully."  For a motivated student who wants very much to succeed in an assignment, but who does not have the skills to do so, it may be easy to either intentionally or unintentionally rely too heavily or incorrectly on outside sources.  As part of the process of further investigating this idea, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), Hjortshoj, and The Citation Project have identified a few specific skills-based pitfalls that students may fall into when attempting to incorporate outside information and voices into their writing.
    • Inability to Critically Read and Summarize Complex Sources: Work done by The Citation Project shows that, when citing sources in their papers, students summarized an outside work only 6% of the time, "indicating that they either could not or would not engage with extended passages of text."  The Citation Project's position on this is that plagiarism is unavoidable in situations where students are not able to critically read and interact with complex sources.
    • Lack of Established Personal Voice: When writing within the different academic disciplines, students are developing and exercising the ability to write using different voices and lenses required by the individual disciplines.  Students are being asked to write as experts in particular fields on particular topics, even though writing from that perspective and in that manner is very unfamiliar for them.  (I discuss this in more depth in my post on disciplinary literacy.) This lack of familiarity can cause students to lose track of where their ideas and words are original and where they borrow from outside sources.  Hjortshoj and Gottschalk explain this by saying, "The difficulties novice writers face in establishing an authoritative voice and position can make the task of quoting and citing real authorities very confusing.  Many students therefore drift into minor forms of plagiarism because the approach they have used does not give them a sense of position from which they can easily distinguish their ideas and voices from those of other writers" (Teaching Writing 119).
    • Confusion Surrounding the Technical Mechanics of Citation: It doesn't take much more than a casual thumbing through the most current MLA or APA handbook to establish that the list of rules governing correct documentation of the ideas of others is overwhelming for developing writers.  The WPA's Statement on Best Practices for Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism acknowledges that "students may not know how to integrate the ideas of others and document the sources of those ideas appropriately in their texts."  A student writer may be genuinely overwhelmed or confused when trying to understand the guidelines and, as the WPA reminds us, "error is a natural part of learning."
  • Cultural or Language Difference: American school systems and academics have a very specific understanding of what is appropriate and necessary when attributing credit for ideas and words.  This understanding is not objective and it is not shared equally on a global basis.  Hjortshoj and Gottschalk point out that "in some cultures... repeating what authorities say is almost a definition of learning."  It is understandably difficult for students coming from an international or multilingual background to understand what it means or why they would be asked to "take an independent or original perspective, especially when they truly have learned from others everything they know about the subject, including the language required to discuss it" (Teaching Writing 119).
  • Time Constraints:  The modern American student has more demands on their time and attention than ever before.  A 2008 New York Times article reported that a high-performing high school had to enforce a lunch period after their students became so entrenched in extra-curricular activities, AP classes, and part-time jobs that they were skipping their midday meals.  The expectations on students to build resumes and accumulate accomplishments at an overwhelming rate have only grown since this article.  The WPA points out that students may make time-management or planning errors and "believe they have no choice but to plagiarize" in order to meet important deadlines.

This list is in no way meant to be comprehensive.  My only goal is to offer some different options to consider when thinking about why students fall into plagiarism.  While I emphatically acknowledge that blatant and intentional literary theft does indeed occur and demands response, I am attempting to advocate for the increasing number of student writers who authentically struggle with the ethics and complexities of citing sources.

In my admittedly limited experience and untested opinion, students are generally trying to learn, create good work, and live up to the expectations that are placed on them. The increasing levels of plagiarism in the academic system are much less an indication of decreasing interest levels and morality among students than they are of a sharp incline in the complexity of navigating outside sources.  The internet's limitless access to an impossible range of sources makes choosing, interacting with, and incorporating those sources a very challenging task.  This challenge is layered onto the already-difficult undertaking of composing a piece of academic writing.  Hjortshoj and Gottschalk identify that this process is, for almost all novice writers, characterized by "helplessness and confusion" (Teaching Writing 120).  Based on some of the research summarized in this post, it appears to be the case that this helplessness and confusion can fairly easily lapse into an incorrect use of the works of others.  I believe it is up to modern educators to remain sensitive to the variety of reasons students engage in different types of plagiarism.  This sensitivity is what leads to effective responses to plagiarism when it does occur, which is what I plan to address in my next post!

The Problem of Plagiarism: A Definition - Part 2 of 5

As I suggested in my post introducing this series, one of the primary sources of our trouble with plagiarism in the classroom centers around the way we define it.  Our impulse is to resort to the standard dictionary definition, which simplistically holds that plagiarism takes place when writers try to "use the words or ideas of another person as if they were your [their] own words or ideas."  Unfortunately the concept of assigning credit for or ownership of words or ideas is much more complex than this concise definition suggests. The general inadequacy of our reductionist understanding of plagiarism has recently prompted several different organizations and groups of scholars to work towards developing a much more nuanced and flexible characterization of what plagiarism really is. One of these groups, the Citation Project, compiles and analyzes empirical data drawn from real-life student papers in order to characterize and quantify how students use sources in their writing.  Based on their research, they point out that plagiarism as we define it is really only ever practically used as a legal term in order to enforce penalties in cases of blatant dishonesty. However, according to Citation Project findings, if we focus too heavily on the legalistic and punitive definitions for plagiarism, we "are forced to ignore the more nuanced-and much more frequent- misuse of sources that may be the product of ignorance, carelessness, or a failure to understand the source."  Unless we are going to focus our teaching efforts with regards to plagiarism entirely on retroactive and punitive approaches, the definition we currently rely on is not, in most cases, tangibly helpful or applicable for use with our students. Keith Hjortshoj and Katherine Gottschalk reflect on the struggle to characterize and define source misuse by saying that, "the offenses most colleges [and schools] include in the loose category of 'plagiarism' vary from deliberate theft and fraud to minor cases of close paraphrase and faulty reference" (Teaching Writing 118).  When it comes to practically responding to the wide array of incorrect source use seen in the classroom, our definition of plagiarism becomes inadequate and is of no real use at all.

In response to this dilemma, several attempts have been made to counteract the common black-and-white definition of "literary theft."  The Council of Writing Program Administrators has released a statement on best practices which urges educators to see plagiarism as "a multifacted and ethically complex problem." The Citation Project has developed a definition of "patchwriting" that reflects "more nuanced definitions of misuse of sources that exist side-by-side with but separate from definitions of plagiarism."  Among this work, what I have found to be the most effective alternative to our common understanding of plagiarism has come from the plagiarism prevention company, Turnitin.

Turnitin has released a study in which they define different types and degrees of plagiarism along a spectrum of severity based on student intent.  The image below is taken from the Turnitin study and captures the types of plagiarism as they fall on the spectrum of student intent; the types of plagiarism are ordered from the most to the least severe.

Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 4.04.54 PM

The most problematic form of plagiarism, representing the most severe end of the spectrum, is called "cloning" and occurs when a student submits "another's work, word-for-word" as their own.  The least problematic form of plagiarism, representing the least severe end of the spectrum, is called "re-tweeting" and takes place when a student "includes proper citation, but relies to closely on the text's original wording and/or structure."  The Turnitin study goes on to define 8 other types of plagiarism that fall in between cloning and re-tweeting, offering the frequency with which these types of plagiarism were seen along with examples of what this type of plagiarism would look like in student work.  This fairly detailed overview of student source misuse covers a wide range of student intents, misunderstandings, and ethical choices, effectively undermining the depiction of plagiarism as a straightforward, objective offense.

In studies like the ones discussed in this post, we see plagiarism being described as a much more complex and multifaceted obstacle to education than it has been in the past.  As more organizations like Turnitin, The Citation Project, and The Council of Writing Program Administrators work to collectively define the problem of plagiarism, a more complete and comprehensive picture of how and why students misuse sources in their writing emerges.  This increasingly meaningful and practical understanding carries a wealth of implications for educators in the way we communicate responsible source-use and idea-generation to our students.  In the following installments of this series, I am going to be exploring some of these implications and how we as educators can employ a more nuanced and personalized understanding of plagiarism in our own classrooms.

The Problem of Plagiarism - Post 1 of 5

At the recent and previously blogged about Disciplinary Literacy UnConference I attended, one of the day's events was to break into teams of educators and work together to generate ideas on how to go about solving a literacy dilemma.  I opted to work on a dilemma put forth by Masconomet Regional High School's Jennifer Rabold which dealt with plagiarism in the English Department of a high-performing school.  Her dilemma featured a highly qualified staff of teachers working with a motivated and capable group of students who were increasingly struggling with instances of plagiarism.  The department had yet to harmonize on an approach to dealing with and working against these instances, which was the starting point for our group's brainstorming.  The conversation and analysis that followed Ms. Rabold's presentation of the dilemma was extremely thought-provoking and challenging, prompting a fair amount of research and reading on my part in the days following the conference.  In my next series of blog posts, I hope to share some of that research exploring what plagiarism is, why it happens, and what skilled educators can do to help equip students to avoid the pitfalls surrounding it. At both the start of our dilemma brainstorming and of my independent research, it was clear that plagiarism as it is generally understood is fairly straightforward.  A quick dictionary.com definition essentially tells us that plagiarism happens when a writer uses someone else's "language and thoughts" without their permission or without giving appropriate credit.

Screen Shot 2015-07-09 at 8.18.12 AM

Screen Shot 2015-07-09 at 8.17.57 AM

At first glance, this seems reasonable.  Both professional and student writers should be able to adhere to this definition.  If it isn't your work, it deserves a citation.  Simple, right?

However, as New York filmmaker Kirby Ferguson asserts in his four-part video series, "everything is a remix."  He defines the act of remixing as "combining or editing existing materials to produce something new." Ferguson makes the point that, in today's digital, collaborative age, essentially everything we do builds on something that has been done before.  This idea echoes what C. Jan Swearingen points out to be a longstanding idea dating back to Plato which held that "individual ownership of truth was impossible because truth and, to a certain extent, meaning, existed full apart from any individual author" ("Originality, Authenticity, Imitation" 23).  Ultimately everything we use in our idea-generation, composition, and invention can be traced back to the work of someone else.  We build on what has been done before.  So exactly how thorough does our material-using and credit-giving have to be? What is the role of citation and are there objective standards for what needs to be cited and what does not?  How do we account for the collaborative invention upon which our own work relies? Is anything we create or invent really uniquely ours?

I don't have the answers to those questions and my goal with this blog series is in no way to go mining for those answers.  My point is simply to explore the complexity and confusion that we ask students to engage in when compiling research and compositions of their own.  The idea of citing the work of others in our own work is often much more convoluted than we as educators make it out to be and I look forward to investigating some of these complications in my next few blog posts.

Disciplinary Literacy: An UnConference

My aforementioned love for conferences grows with every conference I am able to attend.  Fortunately, just yesterday, I had the opportunity to further convince myself of the importance of conferences in my own personal growth as an educator by attending the truly unique Massachusetts Disciplinary Literacy UnConference held at Brookline High School. This unconference was organized by Salem State University'sScreen Shot 2015-06-30 at 9.07.46 AM illustrious Jacy Ippolito and focused, as the title promises, on disciplinary literacy. As an unconference, yesterday's events were designed in order to shift the locus of expertise from the keynote speakers and presenters, as with a traditional conference, to the attendees, making this an unconference.  Working with our collective expertise, the unconference attendees made for a fantastic collaborative and generative environment in which educators, administrators, and even MA state officials were able to share their knowledge, experience, and concerns on how to effectively implement disciplinary literacy in the MA school systems.  We were encouraged to focus on learning from teachers who work in disciplines different than our own in order to broaden and challenge our understandings of literacy education. As you can imagine, the day was a whirlpool of networking, collaboration, creative problem-solving, idea-generation, and sharing of resources.

In addition to the list of contacts, resources, and ideas I left the unconference with, I also left with a new conviction of the critical importance of disciplinary literacy education in the modern classroom.  My goal for this post is to share some of that conviction and explain my own understanding of how teaching reading and writing within the difference academic disciplines can shape and guide our pedagogy.

Traditionally, reading and writing has been understood, according to Timothy Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan as "a basic set of skills, widely adaptable and applicable to all kinds of texts and reading situations" (40).  This essentially means that, if you learn to read, summarize, paraphrase, and identify main topics in a piece of writing, you should be able to apply those skills generally across any discipline.  The basic skills you learn in middle school need only to be honed and applied across the academic disciplines in order to achieve successful learning. So why are secondary and higher education literacy skills so poor?  Why do universities and colleges from the entire array of academic disciplines bemoan the atrocious literacy skills their scholars bring to the classroom?

What Shanahan and Shanahan propose is that a student's literacy skills need to develop as the literacy-related tasks become more difficult and more specialized throughout a student's coursework.  Figure 1 below shows the pyramid diagram from Shanahan and Shanahan's article, "Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy."

Taken from Timothy Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan's “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy.” Harvard Educational Review 78.1 (2008): 40-59. NYC Schools.gov. Web. 30 June 2015.

Shanahan and Shanahan are making the point that the skills we nebulously think of as "reading and writing skills" actually work very differently within the different disciplines.  A chemist will read differently than a mathematician who will read differently than a historian.  The writing skills that a literary critic uses will be of very little use for someone who is writing a technical report or an article for a scientific journal.  If we are not explicitly teaching students how to read within the respective disciplines they are studying, we are not adequately equipping them to have success with the content we are trying to teach them.

The next step in solving this equation is equipping all teachers to be aware of and teach literacy skills within their discipline.  This means helping math, science, history, and world language teachers to become aware of specific strategies and expectations that characterize reading and writing within their disciplines so that they can model and share those skills with their students.  Students need to learn to read like a historian  when reading a history textbook or to write like a biologist when writing a research paper for biology class in order to successfully access the disciplinary content.

Sometimes problems with implementing this kind of disciplinary literacy education occur when we run up against the common misconception that literacy is an ELA teacher's responsibility.  Traditionally, ELA teachers are supposed to educate students on how to read and write so that they can apply those skills in their other disciplinary classes.  In theory, this means that, if a student hands in a horrifically written lab report to her science teacher, the ELA teacher has failed his job in preparing the student to write in that genre.  If a student is unable to comprehend the word problem in his geometry textbook, the ELA teacher has failed to adequately teach reading comprehension.  The absurdity of this becomes apparent when we realize that many ELA teachers are not equipped with the disciplinary knowledge to teach scientific writing or mathematic reading comprehension.  The literacy skills required in each of these disciplinary tasks are vastly different from the skills required to write analytical essays or read and analyze novels. Doug Buehl says it best by saying, "In other words, students need to be mentored to read, write, and think in ways that are characteristic of discrete academic disciplines" (10).

All these ideas and more were the foundation for much of the discussion in yesterday's unconference.  It was truly inspiring to see educators from all disciplines and districts coming together to work towards a better plan for helping students achieve the literacy skills they need to succeed academically.  Science teachers were learning how to teach reading skills and reading teachers were learning how to help their students prepare for their discipline-specific literacy tasks.  My notes from our time together are fairly extensive and I hope this post is just the starting place for future thoughts and research on interdisciplinary literacy as a part of this blog.

And So It Begins

The time has come.  I am starting my graduate thesis, which is required to complete my MA in English from Salem State.  The expected tension, anxiety, excitement, and sense of impending discovery and possible doom is officially upon me as I begin compiling reading lists and brainstorming avenues of analysis.  IMG_5031I am finding this whole process so helpful in remembering and examining the experiences students undergo when we ask them to navigate new and uncharted academic territory.  The lack of direction, sense of disorientation, and feeling of potential inadequacy that I feel when approaching my thesis is not the least bit different from high school students' as they attempt their first research paper or a particularly challenging piece of literature.  The act of engaging in any real intellectual work requires courage, even at the high school level.  I hope to keep this in mind throughout the process of composing my thesis in order to better understand and guide my future students through their own intellectual undertakings.

Keith Hjortshoj on the Physicality of Writing

Not too long ago, I published a post about a conference I was able to attend in which Cornell Professor Keith Hjortshoj spoke on writing blocks and how to address them.  Following this conference, I was able to take home copies of a few of Hjortshoj's books and I am currently making my way through his work, Understanding Writing Blocks. Screen Shot 2015-06-06 at 10.08.30 AM

This slender volume is a 150-page treasure trove with enough insight and complexity for an entire blog post on each and every page.  I am only around halfway through the book currently and I am already overwhelmed by the amount of truly profound and perspective-altering wisdom that Hjortshoj has to share.  I would venture to predict at least a few blog posts based on information gleaned from these pages.  For now, however, there has been one thing in particular that has struck me in particular while reading Hjortshoj's writing that I wanted to spend some time reflecting on.

I have always considered composing of any kind, but particularly alphabetic writing, to be a very mental exercise.  Writing is a form of communication in which the crux of the whole activity is to capture and share thoughts and ideas; the thinking portion of this process seemed to be the real heart of the matter.  This view has shaped much of my thought on composition pedagogy and on my own composition process.  As an unexpected alternative to this view, Hjortshoj holds a much more holistic understanding of writing as something that is supremely physical as well as mental and intellectual.  In fact, he says "writing cannot be purely mental because thinking, in itself, does not produce writing" (9).  For Hjortshoj, the physical elements such as the writing instrument, the paper, the environment in which the writing is taking place, the use of the human body to produce the writing, and a host of other entirely material factors are all necessary and important components of the composition process.

In saying this, Hjortshoj is suggesting that, as teachers helping students develop complex and personal writing skills, we cannot focus strictly on their mental processes.  If we neglect the physical aspect of writing, we leave holes in students' ability to understand and develop their own systems for making meaning through their writing.  Hjortshoj discusses the incorporation of the physical nature of writing into our teaching specifically in relation to helping students overcome blocks in their writing.  He notes that students who are suffering from writing block often demonstrate a somewhat innate understanding of the physical aspects of writing by expressing their struggles "in the language of movement and physical sensation"  and saying "that they feel immobilized, motionless, stuck, stranded, mired, derailed, disengaged, disembodied, paralyzed, or numb" (9).  In situations like these, the traditional teacher assists are generally entirely psychological or mental, focusing very little on the potential physical or material hindrances to the students' concerns.  While Hjortshoj's discussion refers specifically to helping students overcome writing blocks, his perspective is a necessary one for any teacher looking to strengthen her ability to insightfully and holistically guide students through their personal writing processes.

Throughout his work, Hjortshoj provides ample opportunity to consider how incorporating the physical nature along with the mental nature of writing into our composition pedagogy creates a much more integrated and comprehensive educational experience for our students.  He discusses helping students discover their writing processes by considering the physical aspects of their composing.  Hjortshoj offers the idea that "taking a walk or making a cup of tea can be a form of prewriting if you use these activities to collect your thoughts" (25). He also proposes free-writing as a way to help students tangibly connect the physical and mental components of writing.  In free-writing, "thinking and writing become a single, uninterrupted activity, both mental and physical" (29).  In one particular anecdote, a student with a strong emotional or psychological drive for perfection found that he was able to write more freely on a piece of paper that was somehow marred or imperfect; the physical imperfection gave him the emotional freedom to experiment (16).  All of these are just examples of ways in which being open to the consideration of the physical in our view of the writing process can potentially benefit our students in their journeys to becoming skilled and independent writers.

Hjortshoj plainly acknowledges that the physicality of writing is meaningless without the intellectual abilities of the human composer.  However, he posits that the thoughts and ideas of a writer hold very little capacity to shape and impact if they are not communicated through some physical means.  "Like almost everything else that we do, writing is both mental and physical.  And if these dimensions of self in the world are not coordinated, writing will not happen" (10).  As someone who is concerned with making writing happen, this is a statement that carries great weight and that I will have to think on for some time.

Back in a Jiffy

I'll be taking a small hiatus that will last around 7 days, give or take, because my wonderful family and I will be in the Bahamas, where we will have gloriously limited access to the Internet and all its capacities. 769744cc60d71b31489ca1b6b0d5a725

The Danger of a Single Story: Why ELA Classrooms Matter

I have wanted to write this post for awhile, as I've loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie since the moment I learned about her and her work.  Adichie is an incredible author who was born and raised in Nigeria and has written several novels and short stories that have been published in over 30 languages.  She is an articulate and talented individual; she uses her identity and skillsets to create beautiful work, but also to actively promote values and ideals she holds important.  I could spend an overwhelming number of words describing her books, talks, and life accomplishments and I'd actually be happy to do that, but, I wanted to dedicate this particular blog post to a TED talk that Adichie gave in July of 2009. [embed]http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en[/embed]

In her talk, Adichie reflects on the danger of only knowing one story, one narrative, or one perspective.  She shares how growing up with a "single story" depicted in the literature she read hindered her own ability to express her culture and life as a child in Nigeria.  As an adult, the "single story" myth caused her to accidentally develop one-dimensional and inaccurate images of peoples foreign to her.  Coming out of those experiences, Adichie poses the questions: How can we really know anyone through a single story?  How can a single story ever capture the complexity of a culture, a people, or a nation?

Adichie goes on to push this one step further by analyzing how the myth of the single story not only puts the hearer or reader in the position of having an incomplete or simplistic impression of people or places; it also heavily represses and misrepresents the individuals depicted.

'Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.' - Adichie

This TED talk captures, in essence, what I believe to be the most important role of the ELA classroom: to teach students to demand multiple stories, to question suspiciously unified narratives, and to embrace the duality and complexity that comes with gathering information about the unfamiliar.  Developing students who insist on more stories and refuse to accept any single story as representative of a people or a place not only respects and honors our increasingly diverse classrooms and societies; it also creates the kinds of citizens our increasingly complex world needs.  I want my classroom to produce individuals who have meaningfully read white, Western literature, but who have also wrestled with female, multicultural authors and who have considered the multitude of perceptions that exist in any given topic.  These are the students who will be able to operate meaningfully, intelligently, and justly throughout our globalized society.  These are the students who will hear, respect, and respond to voices speaking for and from all classes, races, and genders.  These are the students that I make it my goal to cultivate.

"I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise." -Adichie