Volume IV, Issue 8
January, 2014
WOW Stories: Connections from the Classroom is a regular on-line publication of WOW containing vignettes written by classroom educators about children’s experiences reading and responding to literature in the classroom setting.
Table of Contents
Introduction
by Kathy Short
Developing Empathy and Perspective through Global Literature and Persona Dolls
by Jennifer Carey
Creating Global Awareness through Collaboration between the Public School and the University
by Garden Hills Global Literacy Community
Legos in the Land of the Morning Calm
by Genny O’Herron
Expanding Our World through Global Inquiries
by Mary Ann Conrad
Considering Identity through the Lenses of Literature and Writing
by Amanda Villagomez
Making Connections Matter
by Lenny Sánchez, Dara Bradley, and Jessi Spinder Menold
Integrating Global Literature into the High School English Curriculum
by Lithia Springs Global Literacy Community
Creating a Window to the World
by Jennifer Crosthwaite and Tiffany Altman
WOW Stories, Volume IV, Issue 8 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at wowlit.org/on-line-publications/stories/iv8.
The journey with Genny and her students has been one of the most powerful experience I ever had with books about Korea. Childhood connections became a powerful tool for children to wake up their curiosity to Korean culture and kids in Korea. Eventually this whole experience let them to think about critical stance of reading. Even though language was not all in English, childhood connection helped them to jump over the huddle in language barrier yet helped them to study carefully other visual cues like illustrations in the Korean picture books in return. This particular story Genny O’Herron wrote is empowering for me as a member of ACLIP indeed.
I can honestly say that I truly enjoyed reading this article. When I search for information on reading within the classroom, the majority of the articles are based around the elementary and middle school aged students. I really appreciate this in-depth discussion of how the teacher helped her students make connections and allowed them to follow the path that the book took them on. I teach at the ninth grade level in all co-teaching classes. My students are mostly not very inquisitive. I believe they have been taught all along to simply read and do the questions. We have lost a lot of the fun in teaching reading and learning about the information in the book. I a very inspired by this classroom and the functionality of the processing of the actual information within the text. We need to teach our students how make those connection and inquire into why things are the way they are. I have always loved to read and have never understand the disdain that many students have for reading. However, I know that if I can get them even slightly interested in the subject matter at hand, then the process is so much smoother. Once again, this was a fantastic article that I will be passing along to my colleagues.
Thanks, I agree that there are few examples of using global literature in secondary school classrooms and there is so much potential at that age level. May kids, however, have learned not to think in schools because not much has been asked of them beyond basic literal level thinking. So while they are capable of so much thinking, they also have a long instructional history of not thinking which we have to get beyond. The potential is there, though, as you point out.