Reading this article made me feel slightly frustrated. I am not one to leave problems or issues unresolved and while reading this article it seemed to bring up many "age old unresolved questions" about the proper and best way to teach English to secondary students. I was particularly having trouble with the section entitled "Talking and Writing". I think that using a method such as reading, discussion and writing can be helpful and beneficial in teaching a specific piece of literature but I don't believe it should the primary or "standard, age old" method being used. Being a SPED major I found this frustrating because their was no movement for our kinesthetic learners and their were no graphs, clips or pictures for our visual learners. I felt as though this method was very dry and used and to get students more engaged we need to steer from solely using this method of teaching literature and branch out into something more exciting and engaging.
However in the section entitled "Teaching Differently", I was comforted by the professor who was teaching reading short stories. She took a very similar approach to a class that I had last semester and tied in teaching cultural studies with the literature her students were studying. As a student myself under that type of teaching I can say that it was 100% beneficial to my overall learning. I was more excited about the text more than ever and looked forward to how each text we read was related to current and relate able issues. This method provides one more way for educators to find connectors to their students. One point to make is to always be cautious when approaching some of this topics because students may have been victim to some current issues or cultural issues such as poverty and racism.The goal is to turn students on to thinking critically about solutions to these issues and how they relate to them.
Sarah, I can see where this article might be frustrating, and, unfortunately, there aren't always clear answers for the best way to teach. The importance of bringing up these "age old unresolved questions" is to, hopefully, bring to light that continuing to teach in standard methods isn't always the best solution. This is especially the case when we consider the engagement of diverse populations of students. I think the authors wanted to draw attention to the fact that university classes seem to rely on methods of read/discuss, and these methods are not necessarily effective for all students. The authors worry that people learning to teach will copy these methods (teaching as they were taught in college) and find that they aren't effective for diverse groups of younger students. Of course, the idea is to think critically about the way you are being taught and how you want to teach your own students, which is exactly what you have done in your post.
ReplyDeleteReading these articles have definitely made me think about how I want to teach my students and how I want to avoid teaching my students. It has also helped me to see how to take what is being taught within them and modify it to my liking.
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