by Janine Schall, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX
I hope that through reading the previous four blog posts you became more aware of available technological resources for literacy classrooms. In this last blog post for November, I will briefly discuss some challenges facing teachers who want to use 21st century technological tools in their classrooms. I end with some online and print resources for those who want to explore these issues further.
by Janine Schall, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX
What happens after the book is read and the discussion is over? How do students share their current understandings of the literature? Presentations and reports have also moved into the 21st century with a number of technological tools available.
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by Janine Schall, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX
We know that collaboration can help students create more sophisticated responses to literature. As students think together through oral or written dialogue they hear multiple perspectives, challenge others’ thinking, and revise initial responses. While children have always talked with friends about the books they read, today reading is increasingly social in new ways. Informal talk on the playground is being supplemented with a variety of online resources. For example, a very quick Google search brought up multiple online sites for fans of the Harry Potter series, including a message board, wiki, and fanfiction site.
These sites are sometimes run by a publisher or author, but they are often started by children and adolescents who want to share a reading experience with others. These children are building, maintaining, and moderating the sites. In addition, they are contributing a tremendous amount of content through writing, artwork, and video.
It is clear that children love to talk about books with other children in these informal, out-of-school contexts. How can teachers harness some of that impulse towards social interaction to support thinking about literature in school as well? In this post I will briefly discuss three online possibilities that can help with this: social networking, wikis, and voicethread.
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by Janine Schall, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX
The world has changed. What it means to be literate has changed.
Ok, so that’s a little portentous and possibly even cliché. It’s still true. Yet, if you look into many of today’s K-12 literacy classrooms you will see lessons, engagements and room arrangements that look almost identical to what you would have seen 50 and even 100 years ago. This is a problem.
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by Marilyn Carpenter, Eastern Washington University
One of the benefits of attending the IBBY conference was discovering new friends. It was a special delight to meet authors from other countries. The conversations we had during breaks, at lunch, at evening receptions and at dinner offered enriching ideas to take back to share with my students and colleagues. Devika Rangachari is an author from India who became a new friend. Attending her session and learning about her research regarding the role of women in Indian history was informative. She gave me one of her books, Harsha Vardhana.
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by Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, University of Texas, Austin, TX
The IBBY Congress offered multiple opportunities for learning about the reading experiences offered to children in different parts of the world. One of those experiences that was the focus of lively discussions involved children reading wordless texts in the project, “Visual journeys: Understanding immigrant children’s responses to the visual image in contemporary picture books.” Dr. Evelyn Arizpe, from the University of Glasgow, coordinator of the project, Dr Cecilia Silva-Díaz and Brenda Bellorín, from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and myself from The University of Texas at Austin, shared the power of the visual image in the graphic novel The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2006) with linguistically different audiences in two workshops. We engaged the participants in reading and responding to the images of The Arrival and shared what we have learned about children’s responses to the text.
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by Janelle Mathis, University of North Texas, Denton, TX
The realization that other young citizens of the global community have messages of empowerment, or agency, to share with children of the western world is perhaps one of the most important roles of international literature. The literature, in which the main characters reveal agency through identity, voice, decision-making, and taking action according to their learned perceptions of a situation, is one way to accomplish that exchange of ideas. That was one of the outcomes for individuals who attended the IBBY Congress last month as active participants in IBBY’s role of building bridges across global cultures. Continue reading
by Prisca Martens, Towson University, Towson, MD
During September we have explored how learning to read mulitmodally by integrating the pictorial text with the written text in picturebooks relates to young children’s reading development. We’ve examined children’s responses to picturebooks when they learn to read multimodally and also discussed classroom experiences that support that learning/reading.
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by Prisca Martens, Towson University, Towson, MD
This week I’ll provide an example of the kinds of curricular experiences my co-researchers and I designed for the first graders to help them learn to read the pictorial text in picturebooks. As I shared last week, at the end of the school year most of the children were making sophisticated observations and reading meanings in the illustrations, in addition to the written text, which enhanced their understandings.
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by Prisca Martens, Towson University, Towson, MD
In last week’s blog we reflected on the various modes or semiotic systems through which our culture communicates meaning. These include visual (i.e., art, moving images), linguistic (i.e., language), auditory (i.e., sound, music), gestural (i.e., movement, dance), and spatial (i.e., layout, design). Picturebooks are multimodal, drawing on the linguistic, visual, spatial, and gestural systems. Schools and society, though, tend to emphasize the written text for constructing meaning at the expense of the others.
My colleagues and I are in the second year of a three year study exploring how, in picturebooks, learning to read meanings through a variety of modes relates to beginning readers’ reading development. We worked with 37 first graders in two classrooms last year. At the beginning and end of the year we asked the children to read a picturebook and retell it and then respond to questions about the illustrations without the book in front of them.
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