Stressin'

This isn’t the image I had in mind, but the one I wanted to use is a comic strip from a newspaper in the 90s and I don’t really have access to that right now so this’ll do. But! I’m going to explain to you the comic from the 90s because it’s really important to my thought process.  My dad posted it on my brother’s door when it was first in the paper.  It’s a drawing of these parents looking into their kid’s room and he’s got lines of cocaine and jars of weed and all of these other drugs overtaking his room.  His dad’s speech bubble simply says, “At least he’s not downloading music”.  This is how I view most adults’ stances on technology, which is why I suppose I chose the current visual. 

So why is this important?  I’m going to be honest.  I’ve been having a lot of trouble synthesizing all of the ideas from these various articles into one blog post.  It would be simple for me to write on just Atwell’s piece, but that’s not the assignment, is it? No. It is not.  The thing that drew all of these texts together for me was 1) the emphasis on organization and 2) the emphasis on new literacies as an ethos.  In Digital Writing Workshop, Hicks points out that “teachers could invite students to use a blog to post comments on a teacher-initiated discussion. Yet this would not be new, as it is simply using a traditional pedagogy (teacher-led discussion) with a new technology” (page 16).  So back to my thought process.  I chose the visuals because it seems to me that even when teachers understand how to work technology, they are still not understanding the culture of a new literacies stance; they are still not understanding how such a stance could benefit their kids.  All of these texts did a good job of including examples of a new literacies curriculum. 

Atwell describes the purposes of her writing workshop and goes into detail about the criteria.  She mentions one very important criterion in my mind:

Publication in a writing workshop must be a given: student writers need access to readers beyond the teacher if they're to understand what writing is good for, and if they're to write with care and conviction.

Smagorinsky chimes in:

When possible, teachers provide additional readerships for students’ writing, such as having students send their arguments about local policy issues to key stakeholders, enter their writing in competitions, send letters and other writing to newspapers, post their writing on the Internet, and otherwise use their writing for authentic communicative purposes (page 23).

I know that we have already discussed this qualification of a new literacies stance, but it has recently become much more important to me.  You see, as I’ve been researching this stance for this course, I’ve become paranoid that I’m not doing it correctly.  Technically, I haven’t done anything yet, but our discussion in Michelle’s class about the difference between a traditional classroom and a non-traditional classroom and how some of us have plans for our November Units that resemble a traditional classroom got me all worried.  This qualification of a new literacies stance makes me think that at least my students can get something out of the experience even if the feedback is not from me. Is this making any sense? I feel like this is the most disconnected blog post I’ve done.  Oh well…

Another of my concerns is the organization. When Atwell went into detail about the organization of her classroom, I’m quite sure I had approximately 40 heart attacks.  Her organization was so meticulous that it made me nervous.  I know that the reason she included such detail is so that other teachers could model her example, but dear lord! I am not an organized person…not like that, anyway.  Is it possible to have a successful writing workshop without that much organization? Is a writing workshop even something I would consider with my class?  I’m not sure.  Time will tell.