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final reflection

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WHO I WAS Student teaching was probably the most stressful event of my life. Not moving from Rhode Island, a state with a population of 1 million-plus, to South Dakota, where cows outnumber people . Not navigating my way through college courses AGAIN, after a five-year gap of unfulfilled, stale dreams at the family business. Teaching.  This past spring, when I entered the classroom in the Providence school where I would be teaching a senior section of British literature, I did not know what I was getting into. Sure, I knew the bones of teaching -- the stuff gleaned from classes over the past two years in RIC’s MAT program. I had read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before, and I had almost-kind of finished 1984 when I was a senior in high school. I knew that social justice would have to be “factored in” when it came to designing my lessons, units, questions… I had the formula, right? But what I didn’t know, is how physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted ...
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turkle and wesch

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"When students recognize their own importance in helping to shape the future of this increasingly global, interconnected society, the significance problem fades away," writes Michael Wesch in his article "Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance." When we step away from the retelling of a narrative (but adding new pieces here and there, as time will permit), and invite students -- and by extension, people -- into the "conversation," (to borrow a word from Sherry Turkle )... that's when, and where, dialogue and change, begin.  After reading both the perspectives of Wesch and Turkle, I do not find they are at odds with each other, but rather, addressing the same issue with different terminology and phrasing. When Turkle says we "have sacrificed conversation for mere connection," Wesch says the need for significance is driving students to that very connection -- a connection that he sees falling flat in his classroom enviro...
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storytelling as resistance

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An image from Coffey's intro lesson with 12th graders "I wanted [students] to understand that everything we read, watch, or hear is a construct with underlying power dynamics [...] I wanted them to think about what happens when you are a people who do not control your own story, and how that changes when you take up the responsibility, as writers, to honor the legacies of struggle and resistance in your community" (Coffey 301). The article I chose to review and read from Rethinking Popular Culture and Media was Jerica Coffey's "Storytelling as Resistance." In it, Coffey describes how she encouraged her students through a unit on "writing the untold histories of our community" (300) to unpack and combat the myths surrounding their neighborhood of Watts, CA by inviting community members 30+ years of age to share their histories. Combining their study of a nonfiction text, Random Family , and their practice of nonfiction narrative writing,...
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