Applied Learning

Do We Need to Take This Outside?

Teaching

Kristie Camp continues to answer this question as she expands on the benefits of outdoor learning an environmental literacy. Read more about Kristie at the end of her blog.

Amanda (names changed) was not happy that we had brought the turtle back into our classroom, despite most of the class being excited about the prospect of having a class pet. She wrote in her journal that day, “I felt that we should have put him back, because didn’t we talk about how humans are messing up the environment this week while reading the whale shark chapter in World of Wonders? I really do hope we don’t mess this turtle caring business up.” Our weekly walks in the woods and the book we were reading together must have made a lasting impact on how Amanda viewed her role as an environmental steward. The rest of the class conceded she was right, and within a few days, we all participated in a rehoming ceremony for our turtle.

Studies have shown that positive experiences in nature develop long-lasting affective associations with the natural world, which often times translate into activism and advocacy for environmental causes (Křepelková, et al., 2020; Soga & Gaston, 2024). As a veteran teacher of 26 years in high school English language arts (ELA), I have found that outdoor learning not only serves as a powerful conduit to creative thinking and cooperative action, but it also lays a solid foundation for environmental literacy, as Amanda and her classmates demonstrated with returning the turtle to his home.

When I use the term environmental literacy, I refer to an individual’s ability and willingness to make ethical and research-based decisions about their environmental choices, as well as their desire to conserve natural resources (California, 2015; MAEOE, 2024; NAAEE, 2024). Environmental literacy does not manifest itself only at the individual level; it is also a cooperative and collective move toward learning how to participate in civic life for the good of all living creatures (California, 2015; MAEOE, 2024; NAAEE, 2024). Teachers who provide opportunities for cooperative learning outdoors foster those affective connections that just might grow into cooperative action toward sustainability that benefits us all.

As children grow older, their time outside seems to diminish. Students today have spent less time playing outside than previous generations (Schilhab, et al., 2018; Selhub & Logan, 2012; Williams & Wainwright, 2016; Zeng, et al, 2021). The less time students spend outdoors corresponds with an increase of time spent behind screens (Barrette, 2022; Jackson, et al., 2020). The increased time behind screens instead of outside has implications for teens’ academic progress and their overall wellbeing (Hicks, et al., 2021; Kuo, et al., 2018). Increased screen time paired with fewer opportunities for spending time outside and with others has contributed to rising mental health challenges and physical ailments for teens (Abenes, 2022; Barrette, et al., 2022; Hedderson, 2023) as well as a reduced ability to concentrate and more difficulty communicating with peers socially (Abenes, 2022; Nadeem & Van Meter, 2023). In addition, digital immersion has often lured students into relying too heavily on artificial intelligence to the detriment of their own originality and creativity (Daniel, et al, 2023; Zhao & Watterson, 2021).

Engaging with the physical environment and interacting with nature through multiple senses offer ways to mitigate some of the detrimental effects of too much screen time, and outdoor learning can benefit teens’ health and academic progress. Outdoor spaces are conducive for sensory experiences and creative activities that incorporate artifacts within the setting (Asfeldt, et al., 2020; Beames, et al., 2012; Quay & Seaman, 0216; Selhub & Logan, 2012). Lessons that reconnect students with the physical world and its artifacts offer sensory experiences that employ both cognitive and kinesthetic processing, thereby providing a more memorable and meaningful learning experience. If the context of the classroom expands so that students interact in a tactile way with the physical world that surrounds them, then their attention turns outward, opening the way for creative and imaginative expression simply because they have new physical experiences from which to think and create (Beames et al., 2012; Carpenter & Harper, 2016; Quay & Seaman, 2016). It also opens the way for environmental stewardship as students first learn to love their local landscapes, and that love often spurs protection advocacy for broader ones.

During our outdoor adventures, Amanda reminded us that we needed to leave Gerald the turtle in his natural habitat, but Jake taught us about his early childhood in the Philippines and told us stories about how he and his cousins would put spiders on a stick to see if they would fight.

Several of us responded in disbelief: “You didn’t really pick up spiders and put them on a stick, did you?”.

“Yes, we did. Let me show you,” Jake replied.

Within a few minutes he had a spider on a stick and had us looking for a companion to place beside it. About three of us leaned in, not blinking, as Seth placed a smaller spider within inches of the larger one. We didn’t even have time to pull out our phones to start filming before the larger spider whipped out its web and wrapped the smaller one into its death blanket.

After our exhalations of astonishment and awe, we began to toss questions at Jake about his childhood. “We didn’t know you were born in the Philippines! When did you come to the US? Do you speak another language?” Jake kindly told us about his family in the Philippines and his move to the United States in elementary school. In his journal that day, he wrote about how that day’s experiences brought back memories he hadn’t realized he had forgotten. The rest of us walked away with a little more thorough understanding of each other. We were able to relate to the natural world in ways unique to our cultural experiences, which created a more democratic and cooperative learning environment for us all.

Before I share more examples from our outdoor classroom, I must acknowledge the privilege that I enjoy. Our school has numerous places for outdoor lessons — courtyards, access to the track and practice fields, and a wooded area across the street from the school where the cross-country team runs — and my current and previous principals have encouraged my use of our green spaces. I understand that not all teachers have access to safe outdoor spaces and supportive administration, but just about any outdoor space can be made into an engaging classroom, and I hope researching the benefits of green spaces in schools will fuel the movement to provide outdoor learning space for all students.

Here are some ways I have found to take class outside for numerous benefits, including participating in memorable content lessons, building classroom community, and cultivating environmental literacy. Of course, the examples come from an ELA class, but the process is easily adaptable to just about any discipline. 

String Journals

I learned about string journals when I spent a week studying Thoreau at the Walden Woods Project in their summer program, Approaching Walden, in 2019. I took what I learned and adapted it for my class in the fall of 2020. I printed and laminated a name tag for each student and attached a waterproof twine.

Students found a place in the woods where they wanted to return throughout the semester, and they hung their tags there. Each time we went to the woods for an outdoor lesson, we began with a moment of observation and writing at our string journal spots. By the end of the semester, students had a time-lapsed set of descriptive writing that detailed changes in the spot from August to December. This lesson works for writing instruction as easily as it will for scientific notetaking or geological study. Students can practice sketching and documenting the environment as a professional naturalist, archeologist, or geographer might.

Photo Essays

            Students can create a photo essay (such as in the model of Humans from New York, for example) from images taken while outside around campus. Students learn to select images carefully for symbolic purposes while making the most of limited written text space. The content of photo essays is dependent on the content being taught (for example, artistic expression or documentation of natural change over time) and therefore adaptable for any discipline. Social studies classes might focus on natural resources or local history, whereas world language classes might center vocabulary acquisition.

Art Collections, Collages, and Memory Jars

            While outside, our class has collected interesting artifacts from the woods including a mysterious jawbone, persimmons, and unique leaves and wildflowers. Students have also brought back live creatures – caterpillars, unknown white creepers, and our pet turtle – even though we cannot keep those as part of a collection. The collections represent students’ adventures outdoors, and a story almost always accompanies the item selected, which forms the basis for original writing, full of sensory imagery and emotive language that I don’t often see in their traditional classroom assignments. We have also made art collages from artifacts gathered outside and students articulated reasons for the items they chose to include, again extending their understanding of symbolism and metaphor.

            Yet, a biology class might create a leaf collection to be labeled and categorized. A geology class might collect rocks and minerals for a similar display. A math class might collect examples of different shapes or different representations of the same angle or slope.

Using Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s (2020) example in her chapter, “Firefly Photinus Pyralis” in her nature memoir World of Wonders, In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, we collected items from the woods to store in memory jars for our class as a way to commemorate our outdoor adventures together. What physical representations do we want to keep as memories of our shared experiences outside? These collections can also provide materials for a multimodal art display in an art class or indicators of geographical descriptors for one’s local environment (for example, what do we find in the woods that demonstrate we live in a foothills region?) in geography class.

Blood Pressure Checks

            After reading an article about forest bathing and how spending time outside reduces people’s blood pressure, we decided to put the article to the test. Our school nurse graciously helped us by taking each student’s blood pressure before we went outside and again when we came in after our walk outside. We recorded the data anonymously and analyzed it; while our findings didn’t necessarily align with those in the article, the process of analyzing the data gave us a chance to critically analyze the article and consider reasons our results might not have aligned with those in the formal study. This activity fits just as well in a math, health, or science class as it does in an ELA class.

Nature Poetry

            Studying mentor texts from professional nature writers provides us with a model for poetic language and symbolic representation. I include picture books as mentor texts, as well, and then encourage students to create and illustrate as they are inspired to do. Modern nature poets such as J. Drew Lanham, Ada Limón, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil provide accessible and representative poetry that inspires students to see beyond their cursory look at their school environment. Yet, students might also model scientific writing from professional naturalists and even film moments in nature following models of nature documentaries. The point is to create as professionals in the field create — whether that professional is a poet, an ornithologist, filmmaker, or a historian.

            There are so many more opportunities for taking high schoolers outside for interactive learning, and the resource list I have provided here will spur many more new ideas. Regardless of the lesson, the magic of the outdoor classroom lies in students’ physical interaction with the natural environment coinciding with the shared experiences among classmates. Too often our classes seem almost virtual despite the number of bodies all sitting in a room together. Standardized curricula and mandated benchmarks tie us to screens, and the classroom itself comes with traditional expectations of what academic writing looks like and what acceptable school performance is defined as. By the time they reach their junior year in high school, many students have compartmentalized school behaviors and school literacies as quite different from their authentic lives and literacies. Too often this compartmentalizing results in stilted, perfunctory work within the classroom.

            The outdoor classroom does not hold those same expectations, and without these expectations, students are free to pursue joint adventures and open themselves up to conversations and experiences. These small lessons that still fulfill requirements of curriculum standards have the potential to provide positive experiences with nature that form the affective connections later leading to activism and advocacy.

Taking students outside brings interaction with the material world, such as trees, animals, and plants, and this material engagement prepares students for self-reflective questions, such as

  • How are humans connected to the natural world?
  • What is my personal relationship to the natural world?
  • Do others see the natural world the same way I do? Why or why not? 
  • What are my obligations to the natural world? 

Strong memories developed through physical interaction with nature and shared experiences among classmates can be the starting point for meaningful place-based learning and environmental literacy, as Amanda taught us all when she urged us to leave our turtle in his natural habitat.

Ms. Camp is a PhD candidate in Language
and Literacy at the University of South
Carolina (USC). A National Board Certified
Instructor, she has taught English
Language Arts at Gaffney High School in
Gaffney, SC, for 26 years. She has served
as an AP English Assesser, a National
Writing Project teacher consultant, and an
adjunct instructor with Spartanburg
Community College, Limestone University,
and USC. She shared her experiences with
outdoor learning in an article published in
English Journal in 2023, and she was
awarded a Teacher Researcher Grant
from National Council of Teachers of
English in 2024 to help fund her
dissertation study that investigates the
influence of an outdoor setting on high
school students’ writing practices.

Financial Literacy is Financial Behavior

Collaboration, Teaching

Flashback to our theme on Financial Literacy! Due to publisher error, Derrick Shepard’s blog was delayed. So, it is now time to hear how Dr. Shepard supports this quote by Jane Bryant Quinn: “No one is born with a mind for personal finances.” Read more about our author at the end of his blog.

Sit with the above quote for a second before moving on. What comes to your mind after you read it? What feelings are elicited? Does the quote speak to you, to the students you are trying to instill a sense of understanding of financial literacy?

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2019) defines “Financial literacy as knowledge and understanding of financial concepts and risks, as well as the skills and attitudes to apply such knowledge and understanding in order to make effective decisions across a range of financial contexts to improve the financial wellbeing of individuals and society, and to enable participation in economic life.”

The definition is holistic, but it is important to remember that a person’s understanding of financial literacy rests in their knowledge, understanding, attitudes toward financial literacy, and skills to implement a plan that incorporates all three. Now, revisit your thoughts and feelings about the above quote. Did anything change?

There is no denying that individuals need a basic understanding of financial literacy to navigate this capitalist society. Understanding how one’s credit score can impact everything from mortgage rates to credit card rates to the amount you pay for automobile insurance can help save money for the future. As educators, it is incumbent upon us to teach the 3 Rs and relay life skills, including financial literacy, to our students to help them grow into productive and responsible citizens. But how do we do it?

Our students live in a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year social media cycle that never ends. They are bombarded with messages every time they pick up their smartphones, and financial messages (e.g., how to make money) are prominent in the messaging. What I call “salespeople” (and I am being kind) promise riches with little to no effect. Ya, right. Other messages are more “old school” in that they speak to one’s athletic, musical, or artistic abilities to achieve the American Dream. Have you seen some commercials or music videos lately? An example of this is one of Toyota’s commercials for its Tundra Capstone. The actors promote the truck, which is nice and comes in at around $75000 as if it’s a status symbol to achieve to be accepted in the group. As educators, we know group interaction and acceptance are important for one’s development, especially during the pre-adolescent and adolescent years.

So, what messages are students receiving outside of the classroom regarding money?

Reflecting stopping point.

As educators vested in their students’ success, what do you know about them? I bet it’s a lot. You know their likes and dislikes. You know what their home lives are like to a degree. You know them, not as an aggregate reflection of a class roster. No, you know them as individuals with strengths and areas of growth. In knowing and considering this, remember this:

Financial Literacy IS NOT one size fits all.

To the best of your ability, you must consider individual demographics (e.g., racial identity, social class, ethnicity) when constructing an Individual Financial Education Plan (not be confused with an IEP, pun attended). Why is it so important that students’ financial education be individualized as possible? As Frederick Nietzche put it, “‘This-now my way: where is yours?” Thus, I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way-does not exist.!” As with an IEP, one’s Individual Financial Education Plan (IFEP) needs to be individualized because we all have different backgrounds, values, hopes, and aspirations.

I am not going to leave without some recommendations and resources.

            The Psychology of Money (2021) by Morgan Housel is a terrific resource for taking a deeper dive into why we make the decisions we make regarding money. I tweaked his recommendations from the book to fit your students’ age demographics.

  1. Have students not be too hard on themselves when things go wrong financially.

Setting financial goals is the first step, but as with any goal, things can, and most likely will, go wrong, and mistakes will be made. It is our responsibility to instill a sense of forgiveness in them.

  1. Focus on wealth and not the ego.

Students are bombarded with messages to spend money. You have to have that new phone. Making saving cool can be (is) hard while living in an instant gratification society. Media does not make it any easier. However, we still need to figure out what makes our students tick and how to circumvent those messages to the best of our ability. Again, we know our students better than some algorithms. 😊

  1. Time is their friend.

Saving $10 a month does not seem like a lot; however, compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. Use a time horizon calculator to show them what savings look like today and in the future. There are tons of time horizon calculators out there. Here’s one: https://smartasset.com/investing/investment-calculator

  • You can replace money, but you cannot replace time.

Time is as precious as money. You can always get back money, but time is gone. We must impress upon our students to use their time wisely when it comes to finances. I can imagine you already do this in your role as an educator. Just put a twist on it and add the money.

  • Be nicer and less flashy.

This gets into social-emotional learning. Housel (2020) states that one “is impressed with possessions as much as you are (p. 209). He argues, instead, that we are looking for respect and admiration from our peers (Housel, 2020). Having kindness and being respectful are other ways to gain respect from our peers.

  • Save, baby, save!

Go back to recommendation #3.

  1. Help your students define what “success” means for them.

I am going to address this recommendation with my counselor educator hat on. Part of being a good counselor is to be open and congruent with clients. As the saying goes, “Clients will only go as deep as you are willing to go with yourself.” With that in mind, we need to remember the core condition of Unconditional Positive Regard (for our students and ourselves) when we teach financial literacy. We need to be Congruent and be who we are with our students when we teach financial literacy, and, finally, we need to show Empathy for those, including ourselves, who are struggling to better themselves but not knowing what they do not know.

  • Help students define their “game.”

Financial success looks different for every student. What one considers a success may be an overreach or underreach for the next. There is no way. But, we can help our students reflect, critically think, and plan for a future that fits them.

Finally, I want to leave you with some financial resources that may assist you and your students in gaining a better understanding of personal finance.

The National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) champions effective financial education. They are the independent, centralizing voice that provides leadership, research, and collaboration to advance financial well-being.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a U.S. government agency dedicated to ensuring you are treated fairly by banks, lenders, and other financial institutions.

Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empowers learners to study at their own pace in and outside the classroom.

  1. 15 Financial Literacy Activities for High School Students (PDFs) (moneyprodigy.com)
  2. https://www.kidsmoney.org/teachers/financial-literacy-activities-high-school/

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it for you. The financial literacy journey is complex and ever-changing. But what does not change is our duty as educators to help our students grow and develop into the individuals we know they are capable of.

Dr. Derrick Shepard is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Martin. His research interests include multiculturalism in counseling, social class awareness, skills related to counselor preparation and pedagogical practices in counselor education and supervision.

Infusing socio-emotional learning into K-12 classrooms utilizing “hunger” as an agricultural context

Student Contribution, Teaching

Dr. Stephanie Lemley develops socio-economic awareness as students experience disciplinary literacy in an agricultural setting. Read more about Dr. Lemley at the end of her blog.

As a literacy teacher educator and a PI or Co-PI on three United States Department of Agriculture/National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA/NIFA) grants for professional development in agricultural literacy, I have been fortunate to work with teachers across Mississippi on infusing agricultural literacy into their classroom instruction. Two of my grants have enabled me to create a summer professional development and then host the teachers on the university campus in the fall and spring for follow-up days. This school year I am working with colleagues from Agricultural Education, Leadership, and Communication, Poultry Science, and Food Science and 28 amazing K-12 teachers from across the state. The teachers’ experiences range from starting their first year of teaching to 25+ years in the classroom. We are currently working with content areas such as special education (e.g., gifted and inclusion classrooms), mathematics, ELA, science, welding, and agriculture. During a four-day, intensive workshop this summer, the teachers learned how to incorporate poultry science and food science content knowledge and lab investigations, literacy instruction, and socio-emotional learning (SEL) skills into their classroom.

 This is important because most Americans are agriculturally illiterate (Taylor, 2021, July 7). In fact, in most cases, individuals are three generations removed from the farm, which means more and more people are not aware of where their food comes from (Brandon, 2012, March 30). The American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (2012) has created pillars of ag literacy, one of which is understanding the connections between agriculture and the environment. Hubert et al. (2000) posited that teachers can use agriculture as a topic to teach about the environment and the world around them. This focus on the natural world can also be a great way to infuse socio-emotional learning (SEL) skills into the curriculum as well (Carter, 2016).

Socio-emotional learning (SEL) skills is an “umbrella term used to describe psychological constructs such as personality traits, motivation, or values” (Danner et al., 2021). When teachers teach these skills to their students, they are helping them become efficient workers who know how to build trusting relationships with others, cope with change, serve as leaders, and produce creative solutions to solve problems (Danner et al., 2021). These skills include responsible decision making, self-awareness, self-management, and relationship skills (National University, 2022, Aug. 17). Agricultural topics are the perfect place to teach socio-emotional skills to students because of the diversity of content and emphasis on problem solving. For example, when discussing food choices, students are practicing the socio-emotional skill of responsible decision making; when working in groups to complete labs, students will be practicing the socio-emotional skills of social awareness and relationship skills.

Here’s an example of how teachers who work with me in the four-day workshop investigate the topic of ‘hunger in Mississippi’ through book readings (How Did That Get in My Lunchbox?: The Story of Food by Chris Butterworth, Maddi’s Fridge by Lois Brandt, and Free Lunch by Rex Ogle), online investigations, and proposed solutions to food waste in local communities. We tied the topic of hunger to a variety of Mississippi state science standards.

Table 1. Example Mississippi College-and-Career Readiness Standards for Science

Example Science Standards
L.K.1A Students will demonstrate an understanding of living and nonliving things. L.K.3A Students will demonstrate an understanding of what animals and plants need to live and grow.L.2.3A Students will demonstrate an understanding of the interdependence of living things and the environment in which they live. L.2.3A.1 Evaluate and communicate findings from informational text or other media to describe how animals change and respond to rapid or slow changes in their environment (fire, pollution, changes in tide, availability of food/water). L.5.3B Students will demonstrate an understanding of a healthy ecosystem with a stable web of life and the roles of living things within a food chain and/or food web, 
including producers, primary and secondary consumers, and decomposers. L.5.3B.1 Obtain and evaluate scientific information regarding the characteristics of different ecosystems and the organisms they support (e.g., salt and fresh water, deserts, grasslands, forests, rain forests, or polar tundra lands). L.5.3B.2 Develop and use a food chain model to classify organisms as producers, consumers, or decomposers. Trace the energy flow to explain how each group of organisms obtains energy. L.7.3 Students will demonstrate an understanding of the importance that matter cycles between living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem to sustain life on Earth. L.7.3.5 Design solutions for sustaining the health of ecosystems to maintain biodiversity and the resources needed by humans for survival (e.g., water purification, nutrient recycling, prevention of soil erosion, and prevention management of invasive species).    

On the first day of the workshop, teachers investigate ‘hunger’ in their local school district, local community, and the state. First, they searched “hunger in Mississippi” and looked at sites such as Mississippi Food Network (https://www.msfoodnet.org/about-us/hunger/) and Feeding America (https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/mississippi). Then, they searched “hunger in [insert county or city name]. Finally, they looked at hunger in their own school district. One source of data they looked at was from the Mississippi Department of Education (https://www.mdek12.org/sites/default/files/documents/OCN/2023/SFSP/free_and_reduced_data_report_2022-23.pdf). They wrote information that they found on sticky notes and then shared out the information with the rest of the class.

This initial foray into hunger allowed the teachers to learn more about this impactful issue across the state. For many, it reinforced information they already knew about their own community, but it was eye-opening for many to see how big of a problem it is statewide. For example, in looking at the free and reduced lunch data, many were surprised that some of the perceived ‘affluent’ counties in the state still had multiple schools with high percentages of free and reduced lunch. As such, this topic introduced them to a part of environmental and agricultural literacy—food literacy (Siegner, 2019). Food literacy is defined as “the scaffolding that empowers individuals, households, communities, and nations to protect diet quality through change and strengthen dietary resilience over time. It is composed of a collection of inter-related knowledge, skills, and behaviours required to plan, manage, select, prepare, and eat food to meet needs and determine intake” (Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014, p. 54).  In addition, this investigation reinforced the SEL skill of social awareness—showing understanding and empathy to others—because it required them to reflect on their own students and how many of them might come to school hungry and need additional sustenance to stay focused during the school day. The second day, the teachers worked in groups to create an innovative way to address food waste in communities. This activity required them to think scientifically and utilize precise science and engineering terminology and design methods to create their solution. We chose this activity because many of the teachers had recently talked about how much food was wasted either at restaurants or at their schools during lunch and how they would like to put some of that food to good use in their community.

Figure 1. Food Waste Innovation

On the third day, the teachers, in groups, created hero scientist cards on a food science or poultry science scientist who has done work that impacts hunger in the state. This activity required the teachers to showcase a scientist who has had a positive impact in improving Mississippi’s environment and its agricultural industry. This activity also required the teachers to not only work on SEL skills such as relationship skills and self-management, but also to use discipline-specific terminology related to the food science or poultry science field when adding information to their trading card.

Figure 2. Poultry Science Hero Scientist Trading Card
Figure 3. Food Scientist Hero Scientist Trading Card

After the summer PD, the teachers returned to their classrooms and implemented lessons that we had done with them in their own teaching. Many used the agriculture texts to teach SEL skills and the food supply. They used the strategies and activities we taught them, and they also shared their new knowledge with their colleagues at their school site or in their district. During the fall follow-up day, the teachers continued to investigate hunger, but this time looked at it not just from a regional and state perspective but also a worldwide perspective. I chose to focus on hunger more broadly this time to show them how they could have their students consider hunger in their own community first (as we did in the summer) but then have them realize that hunger is not just a Mississippi problem—in fact it is a problem in our region, country, and world as well. The lesson and activities I implemented were also tied to state standards in the science, mathematics, social studies, and ELA standards.

Table 2. Example Mississippi College-and-Career Readiness Standards.

Mississippi College-and-Career Readiness Standards for Social StudiesMississippi College-and-Career Readiness Standards for ScienceMississippi College-and-Career Readiness Standards for English/Language Arts
6.8 Examine how humans and the physical environment are impacted by the extraction of resources and by natural hazards 3. Assess the opportunities and constraints for human activities created by the physical environment.ENV.4 Students will demonstrate an understanding of the interdependence of human sustainability and the environment. ENV.4.3 Enrichment: Research and analyze case studies to determine the impact of human‐related and natural environmental changes on human health and communicate possible solutions to reduce/resolve the dilemma.RI.6.7 Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue.

First, they watched a video about the area of Memphis, TN, that is a food desert (see link in resources). The video was then tied into the National Agriculture in the Classroom lesson on ‘Hunger and Malnutrition (see link in resources). In this lesson, students investigate the importance of eating a variety of nutritious foods and explore diets around the world. The teachers were introduced to more health and food science terminology such as nutrient, undernourishment, food bank, staples, accompanying foods, and hunger. They then used the National Geographic website, What the World Eats, and answered the following questions:

  1. Which country consumes the most calories in a day?
  2. Which country consumes the fewest calories in a day?
  3. Which country consumes the most 1) red meat, 2) grain, 3) sugar, and 4) fat?
  4. Which country consumes the least 1) red meat, 2) grain, 3) sugar, and 4) fat?

After they had worked on this investigation, we discussed what they found across groups. These activities continued reinforcing SEL skills such as social awareness, relationship skills, and self-management as they negotiated group tasks. It also provided them an opportunity to continue to investigate environmental and agricultural literacies specifically food literacy. This is important because part of being agriculturally literacy involves understanding the food system and the importance of plants and animals to our environment.  The workshop concluded with the teachers being introduced to two short films from Mississippi State University Films: one of which was on food insecurity, and one of which was on a local school district response to schools shutting down during the COVID-19 pandemic and getting food to the students who relied on school lunch as part of their food sources daily. These videos provided a real-world example of people using socio-emotional skills, such as responsible decision making, compassion, and relationship-building to make a difference in the local community. Further, the teachers learned about ways that community members are stepping up to help end food insecurity in their own backyards through the creation of local farmers markets and other means. This can help further develop their agricultural literacy knowledge because they have a deeper understanding of the food system.

I wanted to share these lessons and resources with my teachers because I wanted to show them how they could help their students become more agriculturally literate with a topic that is relevant to everyone—hunger and food. Over the school year, some teachers have emailed me to share how impactful these agricultural literacy SEL lessons have been for their students, particularly reading the book Free Lunch with their class and then investigating hunger in their community and where food comes from.  Others expressed this in their delayed post follow up survey. For example, one teacher wrote that creating trading cards has been the most successful activity with their classes. They noted, “The kids love it and are all 100% into it.” Creating the trading cards on scientists allowed students to showcase their learning in a creative way. Another teacher wrote that participating this year helped them have “more opportunities for students to learn agriculture in different cultures, bringing awareness of food deserts and waste.” The teacher said the students particularly enjoyed exploring the National Geographic website and watching the videos about Memphis and food insecurity in the Mississippi Delta; learning about this topic had them think about what nutritious food was available to them on a regular basis outside of school.  Another teacher wrote participating in the professional learning gave her “an enhanced sensitivity to food deprivation within my classroom.” These lessons over the past year opened this teachers’ eyes to hunger in their own students and the teacher has made it a priority to have nutritious snacks available for the students. Two others wrote, “All of the SEL!” for their response. Finally, one additional teacher wrote, “From ACRE 2.0, I’ve already used interactive simulations and hands-on experiments in my class. Next, I plan to add collaborative projects and real-world problem-solving tasks. These activities deepen understanding and build teamwork skills. Additionally, I’ll integrate more tech tools for personalized learning.”

References

American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (2012. Pillars of agricultural literacy. https://www.agfoundation.org/files/PillarsPacket062016.pdf

Brandon, H. (2012, March 30). At what cost the disconnect between agriculture and the public? https://www.farmprogress.com/commentary/at-what-cost-the-disconnect-between-agriculture-and-the-public-

Carter, D. (2016). A nature-based social-emotional approach to supporting young children’s holistic development in classrooms with and without walls: The socio-emotional and environmental education development (SEED) framework. International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 9-24.

Danner, D., Lechner, C.M., & Spengler, M. (2021). Editorial: Do we need socio-emotional skills? Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 1-3. 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.723470.

Hubert, D., Frank, A., & Igo, C. (2000). Environmental and agricultural literacy education. Water, Air, Soil Pollution, 123, 525-532. https;//doi.org/10.1023/A:1005260816483

National University. (2022, August 17). What is social emotional learning (SEL): Why it matters. https://www.nu.edu/blog/social-emotional-learning-sel-why-it-matters-for-educators/

Siegner, A.B. (2019). Growing environmental literacy: On small-scale farms, in the urban agroecosystem, and in school garden classrooms [Doctoral dissertation, University of California Berkeley]. UC Campus Repository. https://escholarship.org/content/qt4p16p53v/qt4p16p53v_noSplash_53f7a6e2917068410defb11335b7ac1b.pdf?t=q6z2hg

Taylor, B. (2021, July 7). Ag illiteracy: What happened, and where do we go from here? https://www.agdaily.com/insights/ag-illiteracy-what-happened-where-to-go/

Vidgen, H.A., & Gallegos, D. (2014). Defining food literacy and its components. Appetite, 76, 50-59. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2014.01.010

Resources

Judd-Murray, R. (2013). Hunger and malnutrition (grades 3-5). National Agriculture in the Classroom. https://agclassroom.org/matrix/lesson/388/

Mississippi Department of Education. (2023). Mississippi college-and-career readiness standards. https://www.mdek12.org/OAE/college-and-career-readiness-standards

Team, I. W. D. (2024, February 14). The hungriest state. MSU Films. https://www.films.msstate.edu/series/the-hungriest-state

What the world eats. National Geographic. (n.d.). https://www.nationalgeographic.com/what-the-world-eats/

YouTube. (2019, November 20). The food deserts of Memphis: Inside America’s hunger capital | divided cities. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6ZpkhPciaUxs

Funding Statement:

This work is supported by the USDA/NIFA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, AFRI Agricultural Workforce Training Priority Area, award # 2022-08873.

Stephanie Lemley; Studio Portrait.(photo by Logan Kirkland / © Mississippi State University)

About the Author:

Dr. Stephanie M. Lemley is an Associate Professor of Content-Area Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy Instruction in the elementary education program in the Department of Teacher Education and Leadership in the College of Education at Mississippi State University. She is the recipient of three USDA/NIFA grants on professional development in agriculturally literacy (either as PI or Co-PI) and in the last four years has worked with approximately 150 K-12 teachers across the state, either virtually or through face-to-face instruction, on infusing agricultural literacy into their classroom instruction. She can be contacted at smb748@msstate.edu .

Webinar: Financial Literacy is Financial Behavior

Teaching

We welcome Dr. Derrick Shepard to our conversation on Financial Literacy! In this webinar, he empowers teachers to explore financial literacy as a social means of communication, co-constructed through the lens of their other identities. Read more about Dr. Shepard below.

Financial Literacy is Financial Behavior

Dr. Derrick Shepard is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Martin. His research interests include multiculturalism in counseling, social class awareness, skills related to counselor preparation and pedagogical practices in counselor education and supervision.

Writing to Learn: Strategies to Engage Students in Writing and to Deepen Content Knowledge

Teaching

As a follow up to her webinar, Brooke Hardin expands on her resources for using multi-modal writing responses to engage students in writing.

In twenty years of teaching English Language Arts, helping students discover their “writerly life” has remained a passion. To live a writerly life means that individuals write often and with a fair amount of ease, that they see their everyday ordinary lives brimming with writing topics, and that they can use writing to reflect their ideas and potentially gain new ones. In order to begin to live a writerly life, one must be motivated to write. As teachers, engaging students in writing tasks can often be a challenge, but certain elements increase both students’ motivation for writing and their efficacy for writing tasks. Student choice in topic, modeling of strategies and techniques, consistent time to share, give, and receive feedback on writing, and invitations to write in varying modes have all been identified as ways to more likely engage students in writing. This post serves to provide strategies related to the latter idea, using various modes for writing and how these modes might inspire students to write and deepen their knowledge of disciplinary content.

What is Multimodal Writing? What Might it Look/Sound Like?

Multimodal texts are print-based and digital texts using more than one mode or semiotic resource to present meaning; mode is defined as a socio culturally formed resource to make meaning (Kress, 1010; Serafini, 2015). Authors have been exploring multimodal response for over a decade and have seen its potential to engage students in personal response and critical analysis of literature, while also developing their appreciation of genres (Dalton & Grisham, 2013). Expanding students’ literacy palette to include the modes of image, video, audio, and writing offers them more choices for how to develop and express their thinking about reading. When readers write about, interpret, or respond in some fashion to their transaction with a text, a new text is produced as the reader-turns-writer; that is, a writer or creator who seeks to express that experience with the text (Rosenblatt, 1994). Writing in a poetic form or creating a digital design as an aesthetic response to the reading positions the reader-turned-writer to adopt an aesthetic stance in which the student’s attention is focused on the lived-through experience of the reading: the emotions, moods, intuitions, attitudes, and tensions connected to the ideas and characters embodied in the text (Rosenblatt, 1994). Thus, one of the benefits of multimodal writing tasks is their potential to deepen comprehension and/or content learning.

            One strategy for multimodal writing is called a half-and-half portrait (see Image 1). To create this piece, a student would first “write” the portrait about themselves. The portrait is a visual representation of an individual done by drawing one half of the person’s face using physical features (i.e., hair style, eye color, nose shape) and then filling in the other half of the face with images, quotes, or other ideas that relate to the person’s attributes, interests, life experiences. Once a student has created a half-and-half portrait about themselves, they can apply the strategy to a character from text, historical or present-day figure, or any other person. For example, the physical side of the portrait is created using the features visualized by the reader based on descriptions in the text. The other half of the character’s face uses images and other ideas related to the character and inspired by evidence from the text. For example, students might read the middle grades novel Refugee by Alan Gratz, which portrays the refugee experience of three distinct, fictional adolescent characters. Students reading this novel could further explore and demonstrate their understanding of these characters through the creation of a half-and-half portrait (see Image 2).

Image 1: Personal ½ and ½ Portrait (created by author)                  

Image 2: Isabel from Refugee (created by author)

In addition to creating the portraits, students can also create video or audio recordings that explain the thinking behind their multimodal writings. Teachers might ask students to discuss both the materials used to create the portraits and the ideas represented in the portraits. In multimodal writing using a visual art form such as this portrait, selection of materials and images or quotes used should be as intentional as word choice is in written texts. An example of my explanation for my half-and-half portrait can be found using this link.

As with any new genre of writing, students need mentor texts they can reference for ideas and inspiration. Picture books, especially those that have been recognized for their illustrations, serve as some of my favorite mentor texts for multimodal writing with visual art (see Images 3 and 4).

Image 3: Illustrations made with stones in Stepping Stones: A Refugee FAmily’s Journey by Margaret Ruurs

Image 4:

Illustrations made with layered collage featuring book pages,

tattered book covers, neon paints, and cloth in How to Read a

 Book by Kwame Alexander and illustrated by Melissa Sweet

Engaging Students in Writing with Poetry

Poetry is another genre that often engages students in writing tasks. Poetry is subjective and its structure can vary. Some forms, like haiku, have a particular form, but poetry can also be as simples as a collection of a person’s favorite words. The rules of writing become more relaxed in different types of poems, which allows students to tap into their creativity and use their voice to play with words, line breaks, and the appearance of the poem. Many poems are what I call “bite-sized;” thus, they are also less intimidating to write for more reluctant writers.

Definition Poems

Definition poems are a specific type of poetry that follows a form but also holds space for students to use craft moves and have agency with the writing. This form of poetry is inspired by some of the pages from the middle grade novel The Crossover by Kwame Alexander (see Image 5). Written in verse, the novel features several poetic styles, including definition poems, that might serve as mentor texts for students poetic writing. The definition poem invites students to engage in writing while also enhancing their vocabulary knowledge and using learned content to create something new.

Image 5: Definition poem from The Crossover

When teaching students to write definition poems, teachers should use the same principles they would use with teaching any other genre. Reference the mentor text, such as one of Alexander’s poems from The Crossover, and engage students in inquiry by asking them to take notice of how the author wrote the poem – that is, to think about and name aloud the “ingredients” used in the poem and what might be required for someone else to write the same style of poem. For example, teachers would point out how each stanza begins with “As in:” and how the vocabulary term is used in each stanza. Teachers might use a shared writing approach to co-author a definition poem with the whole class and invite students to co-author this kind of poem in pairs before they write one independently. Again, this kind of poem can be used with vocabulary from novels students read and to other content areas. See Image 6 for an example definition poem written about the math term parallel. As seen in the example, the poem offers students the opportunity to sustain their thinking about a word and its meaning and invites them to see how vocabulary terms are relevant to their lives. Additionally, these kinds of poems can serve as a piece of writing in a larger multimodal piece. For example, students might be invited to illustrate each stanza of the poem to add a visual layer.

Image 6: Example definition poem (created by author)

Golden Shovel Poems

Golden shovel poems are a poetic form created by Terrance Hayes and inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “We Real Cool.” To write a golden shovel poem, the writer must do the following:

  • Take a line or lines from a poem you like.
  • Use each word in the line as the end word in each line of your poem.
  • Keep the words in order.
  • Give credit to the original poet.
  • The new poem does not need to be about the same subject as the original poem, but they can be related in some way if the writer chooses to do so.

Inspired by Terrance Hayes, Nikki Giovanni wrote the book One Last Word, which is a book of golden shovel poems about the Harlem Renaissance. Using two of the poems from this book as mentor text (see Images 7 and 8), teachers can help students see how the poem is written and gain inspiration for their own writing.

Image 7: “Storm Ending” from One Last Word 

Image 8: “Truth,” a poem written by Nikki Giovanni using a line from “Storm Ending” by Jean Toomer

Teachers should immerse students in reading many different poems, invite them to bring in poems – including song lyrics – that they admire, to gain ideas and inspiration for writing their own golden shovel poems. Again, teachers may want to scaffold this kind of writing and co-author poems with students in a whole group setting before tasking students with writing one on their own. Golden shovel poems are complex but also provide students an opportunity to play with word choice, syntax, line breaks, and be creative in their writing. Inspired by a poem from Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs, I show students my own attempt at this poetic form (See Images 9 and 10).

Image 9: Excerpt from “Luke’s Junkyard Song” by Mary Oliver                    

Image 10: Golden shovel using the last two lines from “Luke’s Junkyard Song” (created by author)

Final Thoughts

No matter the strategy used, teachers must remember to embrace vulnerability and write alongside of students, both modeling the techniques and making the cognitive side of writing – word choice decisions, art medium choices, etc. – become evident and accessible for students. Writers need to see and hear other writers engaged in writing to discern the process and be inspired. Writers also need room for creativity. Each of the strategies offered here provides space for creativity and the opportunity for students to express themselves while also learning and showing their content knowledge.

References

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London, UK: Routledge.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1994). The transactional theory of reading and writing. In R. Ruddell et al. (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (4th ed). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Serafini, F. (2015). Multimodal literacy: From theories to practices. Language Arts, 92(6), 412-423.

Brooke Hardin is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education at USC-Upstate. Her experience includes elementary and middle grades classroom teaching as as well as curriculum literacy specialist. This webinar reflects Brooke’s special interest in multi-model writing as a response to reading.

Using Student-Learning to Foster Students’ Ability to Curate, Analyze, and Understand Primary Sources

Teaching

This webinar features Beth Shaver and provides resources for collecting Social Studies resources from multiple perspectives. Click here to access.

Elizabeth (Beth) Shaver is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Science at North Carolina State University with a concentration in Social Studies. She has taught social studies for fourteen years between California and North Carolina.

Writing Learning into Shape: Using Concrete Poetry to Explore & Reflect Content Knowledge

Teaching

This post is written by Brooke L. Hardin. To learn more about Brooke, please visit the bottom of this post.

What Is Concrete Poetry?

Concrete poetry, sometimes called shape poetry, is poetry whose visual appearance matches the subject of the poem. The words of the poem form a shape or shapes which illustrate the poem’s topic in visual form as well as through their literal meaning. This type of poetry has been used for thousands of years since the ancient Greeks began to enhance the meanings of their poetry by arranging their characters in visually pleasing ways back in the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC (Nesbitt, 2023).

In the 1950s, a group of Brazilian poets known as the Noigandres developed a manifesto to define the work of concrete poetry and give us the name. The manifesto states that concrete poetry communicates its own structure: structure = content (Eppley, 2015).

How to Write Concrete Poetry

There are two main ways to create a concrete poem. The first is referred to as an “Outline Poem.” The writer creates an outline of the subject of the poem or of an object that relates to the subject and fills in the outline with words or phrases. The words or phrases used to fill in the outline usually describe the subject or how it makes the writer feel in some way, provide information connected to the subject, or possibly tell a story related to the subject. Some examples of this technique for concrete poetry are provided in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1: Black Hole

Note. From The Day the Universe Exploded My Head: Poems that Take You Into Space and Back Again, by Allan Wolf, 2019, Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press

Figure 2: Buried Treasure

Note. From Shaking Things Up: 14 Young Women Who Changed the World, by Susan Hood, 2018, New York, NY: HarperCollins.

My son and I recently spent an afternoon at a local bike park. Following the trip, he and I co-authored a concrete poem using the “Outline” technique. The video embedded below shows how I used questioning to help him come up with the words and phrases for the poem while I acted as a scribe. Image 3 shows the final poem we created.

Figure 3: Mountain Bike

Another technique for creating concrete poems is to use the lines of words to make the lines of a drawing. One thing to note about this technique is that the subject does not have to be an object, but it does need to be something that can be drawn with “stick” figures. Examples of these poems are below.

                                                Figure 4: Lightning

Note. From Wet Cement: A Mix of Concrete Poems, by Bob Raczka, 2016, New York, NY: Roaring Brook Press.

Figure 5: Robert’s Four At-Bats

Note. From Technically, It’s Not My Fault: Concrete Poems by John Grandits, 2004, New York, NY: Clarion Books.

Instructional Considerations for Concrete Poetry

When teaching students to write concrete poems, whether using the outline or drawing technique, consider these reminders.

  • Model, model, model! Planning instruction with the Gradual Release of Responsibility (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) in mind will help students better understand the cognitive and physical aspects of composing concrete poems.
    • Use inquiry to analyze some exemplars like the ones provided above or those found in books listed in the references to help students take notice of the elements of concrete poems.Select a topic as a class and write a concrete poem together, with students offering the words and their arrangement while the teacher acts as a scribe. Use questioning, such as the type seen in the video above, to help students think about their subject and form written ideas from those thoughts.Invite students to co-author a concrete poem as a pair or small group.
    • Finally, provide opportunities for students to independently write concrete poems, get feedback from peers, and share their final drafts.
  • Concrete poems do not need to rhyme.
  • Concrete poems can be written on traditional paper or digitally. If using paper, suggest to students that they use a pencil when drafting the poems. This allows them to erase and move words around where needed.
  • Encourage students to play with the size, color, and shape of their letters to better capture the essence of the poem’s subject (e.g., I might write the word TTEEEETHH in different shapes and font sizes when writing about a shark). This helps to reinforce the reciprocal nature of reading and writing by providing students a chance to consider the purpose of their craft moves.

Writing Concrete Poetry to Reflect Content Area Learning

Writing to learn and writing about learning are necessary in content-area classrooms. While many argue and I can agree that these are different notions, writing concrete poems can accomplish the aim of both.

Writing, as discussed above, must involve a discussion of ideas, leveraging the social side of learning where knowledge is co-constructed, and misunderstandings can be clarified. Additionally, when and where questions arise to inform written ideas, further research may occur; thus, more learning takes place during the writing process. For example, a student in a 7th-grade science classroom is drafting a concrete poem about a cell as part of a Life Science unit. They may refer to class notes, talk with a partner, or watch a video about cells to (1) draw the outline of a cell and/or (2) write a line about the nucleus – possibly drawing it inside another shape that is made of letters spelling out “membrane,” given that the nucleus is enclosed in a membrane. The writing of the concrete poem has the potential to reinforce learning that has occurred, provide new content, and/or inspire ways to show learning.

Both the reading and writing of concrete poems present teachers in discipline-specific classrooms with innovative methods for motivating students to engage in the content. Given their interesting appearance and brief lines, concrete poems as supplementary texts in units of study to teach a specific topic (see Image 1 about the Black Hole and Image 2 about the female paleontologist Mary Anning, who, in the early 1800s, found complete fossils that laid the foundation for Darwin’s theory of evolution) may appeal to students who are reluctant to engage with textbooks and other longer documents. As an alternative to traditional analytical research papers and essays, writing concrete poems related to learning may motivate students to take a deeper interest in the content to present their learning in a creative way. I would also maintain that crafting a line of concrete poetry deepens comprehension and calls upon sophisticated critical thinking; taking a line from prose (e.g. an article or textbook) and rewriting it in one’s own words to fit a poetic style is rigorous cognitive work. With regards to standards related to research skills and speaking and listening, I would further suggest that students provide a reference list to accompany the poems and give presentations where they explain craft moves and inspiration for certain lines.

As a former middle grades ELA/Social Studies educator, I can attest that using concrete poetry in a content area classroom allows students to reimagine learned content creatively and critically while deepening and extending their understandings and knowledge. Give it a try and share your poems with me!

References

Eppley, C. (2015, January 21). Concrete Poetry of the Noigandres, 1958-1975. Retrieved from http://avant.org/event/noigandres/

Nesbitt, K. (2023). How to Write a Concrete Poem. Retrieved from https://poetry4kids.com/lessons/how-to-write-a-concrete-poem/

Pearson, P. D., & Gallagher, M. C. (1983). “The Instruction of Reading Comprehension,” Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8, pp. 317-344.

Children’s Literature References & More to Consider

Grandits, J. (2004). Technically it’s not my fault: Concrete poems. Clarion Books.

Grandits, J. (2007). Blue lipstick: Concrete poems. Clarion Books.

Hood, S. (2018). Shaking things up: 14 young women who changed the world. HarperCollins.

Raczka, B. (2016). Wet cement: A mix of concrete poems. Roaring Brook Press.

Wolf, A. (2019). The day the universe exploded my head: Poems to take you into space and back again. Candlewick Press.

Brooke Hardin is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Her research interests include writing development and instruction for intermediate and middle grades students, teaching and learning through technology and new literacies, literacy professional development and teacher education, and interdisciplinary approaches to reading, writing, and the utilization of Children’s Literature. Her years of experience as an elementary and middle grades classroom teacher and curriculum literacy specialist frame her research interests and commitment to teacher education.

Photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash

Prisms, Pathways, and Portals: Disciplinary literacies as tools for possible futures

Teaching

This post is written by Michael Manderino. You can learn more about Michael at the bottom of this post.

“We cannot remake the world through schooling, but we can instantiate a vision through pedagogy that creates in microcosm a transformed set of relationships and possibilities for social futures, a vision that is lived in schools. This might involve activities such as simulating work relations of collaboration, commitment, and creative involvement; using the school as a site for mass media access and learning; reclaiming the public space of school citizenship for diverse communities and discourses; and creating communities of learners that are diverse and respectful of the autonomy of lifeworlds.”

New London Group, 1996

It often amazes me how prescient the text (quoted above), A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures (1996) was and what it argued for just before the dawn of the 21st century. Now in the year 2023, using terms like 21st-century learning doesn’t resonate much as we are nearly a quarter way into the 21st century. I often question how much we have really taken up from the ideas even extracted from the quote above. While disciplinary literacies have been at the forefront of theory and research around adolescent learning, I believe that we need a future vision of the possibilities of disciplinary literacy. We need more than practices that simply reproduce knowledge.  We need an expansive theorizing of what disciplinary literacies can be or else we will continue to reinscribe old ways of knowing and doing for a future that is yet to be written.  

Despite a need for a widening of thought, we collectively find ourselves presented with seemingly predefined choices for where we need to stand pedagogically.  Dialogues have shifted to debates over everything from the “Science of Reading vs. Balanced literacy, Online reading vs. Offline reading, or the use of the canon vs contemporary fiction.  The pitting of the pedagogical constructs against one another creates a reductionist view of the complexities of teaching and learning.  Rather than reducing complex pedagogical constructs to binaries, perhaps we should be interrogating the possibilities for pedagogical expansion. While simple answers feel more reassuring, they do not account for the beautiful complexity of teaching and learning.

One reductionist view we might interrogate is the narrowing of what counts as disciplinary inquiry.  Expert novice studies have provided invaluable insights into what are core disciplinary practices yet can often be taken up as the singular way to approach disciplinary literacy.  Disciplinary literacy in its early conceptualization offered new ways to think about advancing knowledge building in content-area classrooms.   What follows is a set of possibilities for consideration of what might be taken up in research and practice around disciplinary literacies. Using the metaphors of pathways, prisms, and portals, I argue for the use of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches in disciplinary inquiry.  

Pathways 

Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash

Disciplinary literacies can be pathways to explore through multidisciplinary perspectives. Pathways can be paved, worn by repeated traffic; serve as shortcuts or trails that lead to hidden beauty. Pathways can diverge or converge.  People use pathways to get somewhere or to meander. Sometimes along the path, new discoveries are made, or new paths are forged.   Pathways can serve as a metaphor for multidisciplinary inquiry. One may choose to look at a problem or topic from the lens of different disciplines. Like choosing a path or multiple pathways, inquiry can be shaped by one, two, or more disciplines. While it is critical to understand the beliefs, practices, texts, and tools used in a discipline like science or history, it is also important to see that inquiry questions can be approached from multiple disciplines. For example, we can look at a problem such as food scarcity from the perspectives of geography, economics, agriculture, and mathematics, to name just a few. We need to engage with the world from multiple perspectives that are often shaped across disciplines. Food scarcity is not a simple problem that can be understood or tackled from singular perspectives. If we only hyperfocus on singular disciplines, we may lose the forest through the trees.  

Prisms  

Photo by Braxton Apana on Unsplash

Disciplinary literacies can also be prisms for seeing new possibilities. Using singular lenses to problem solve or problem pose does not account for the complexity of the problem. Prisms can reflect and refract light to illuminate the full spectrum of colors that are being absorbed. Prisms help us see things in a new light. We can think of interdisciplinary inquiry as a tool for seeing the full spectrum of perspectives around topics and problems. Interdisciplinary inquiry relies on the interconnected nature of disciplinary practices and perspectives. If we expand notions of disciplinary literacy to interdisciplinary, we add the nuances of the comparative and contrastive beliefs, tools, texts, and approaches to understanding phenomena. For example, the role of art, music, and literature provides indispensable insights into complex phenomena that cannot be fully explained through a historical or scientific analysis. By using interdisciplinary inquiry as a prism, students have access to new ways of seeing the world and their role in the world.  

Portals 

CC0 Public Domain

Disciplinary literacies can serve as portals to newly designed futures. During the Covid-19 pandemic, author Arunduti Roy (2020) argued that the pandemic could serve as a portal to new social possibilities. The notion of portals to new dimensions or time/space scales is one that is speculative and hopeful. To see disciplinary literacy as opening portals to solving wicked problems to create more just worlds is a goal that makes learning consequential. Portals also lead to the unknown. Much like disciplines themselves, portals are unsettled terrain and are absent critical voices who are often erased or silenced. To account for these silences and erasures, transdisciplinary research is conceptualized as a way to be inclusive of multiple perspectives not simply from the top down (academia) but also from the ground up (lived experiences). A transdisciplinary approach to inquiry opens opportunities for problem-posing and solving that values indigenous and local knowledge and its relation to disciplinary traditions. This expansion of disciplinary literacies offers opportunities for youth to engage in knowledge production and critique that affirms and sustains the rich tapestry of knowledge that shapes our worlds. For example, a former student and colleague, Diana Bonilla articulated the need for plant biology units to also incorporate the familial and indigenous use of plants for medicinal and culinary purposes in Latinx communities. To keep those practices obscured from disciplinary knowledge reduces our humanity and reason for understanding disciplinary perspectives. Transdisciplinary inquiry opens portals to a more inclusive and just learning environment.  

Provocations for future practice 

I hope the metaphors of pathways (multidisciplinary inquiry), prisms (interdisciplinary inquiry), and portals (transdisciplinary inquiry) provide provocations for future practice. Are there spaces in your curriculum that warrant a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach? How might we redesign our inquiry questions to open possibilities for interdisciplinary braiding of knowledge and knowledge-building practices? How might we use this space to share ideas and iterate collectively? To me, this is an inflection point in education that we can see as filled with possibilities for drawing on the passions and inquisitive dispositions of youth to expand learning activities rather than reducing learning to a series of disconnected tasks.  Youth deserve opportunities to remake our world and to design social futures in spaces that are lived in and out of school.

Michael Manderino is an associate professor of literacy education at Northern Illinois University.  He taught high school social studies for 14 years and served as a literacy coach, literacy coordinator, and Director of Curriculum of a two-high school district for 5 years.

Follow on Twitter at @mmanderino

Email: mmanderino@niu.edu

Cover Image Photo by Robynne Hu on Unsplash

The Power of Parallel Reading

Teaching

This post is written by Charlene Aldrich. For more about Charlene, please visit the bottom of this page. The webinar recording for this material is embedded at the bottom of post.

How do we get students to read at home? We probably have to require it. We know in lower school, students are asked to read 15-20 minutes every evening. Students have free choice; parents monitor the requirement by initialing a document. But how can that requirement morph into a habit that positively affects the student’s academic future?  “Let them choose” becomes the mantra. When given open choices, it’s human nature to struggle. 

BUT when we provide themes, topics, or text sets to choose from, we make a choice manageable. It’s then that students fulfill our targeted purpose for outside reading. It’s then that students look at titles as a way of previewing the content of the text. It’s then that they engage in ‘reading to find out.’ It’s a win-win.

“I don’t have time to hunt down reading selections and/or books!” cry many content-area teachers everywhere.  And maybe teachers won’t have the extra time during their first or second year of teaching. Or the first or second month of the year.  HOWEVER, when teaching and planning become automatic, time becomes available to investigate the themes and text sets curated and available online. Content-area teachers can introduce reading selections of all genres; these support the ELA curriculum and provide background, cultural understanding, or applications of specific content-area curriculum.  This is where the idea of parallel reading emerged – collaborating across the content areas in ways that grow overall literacy proficiency AND reinforce content-area learning.

Parallel – side by side, never touching. Reading – the crosstie that connects content areas. Juxtaposed with another discipline, text is a way to connect things that would otherwise run side by side. Through parallel reading, teachers approach their content from a literacy mindset. Take math, for example.  One might say that reading is not necessary to do the math.  However, knowing ‘pi’ is essential, but where did it come from?  WHO first used it for achieving a measurement?  WHEN did it come about? WHY was it necessary? A planning question becomes, “Who were the movers and shakers beginning at the onset of mathematical thinking and going forward?”

How do you implement your new mindset?

  1. Review the major topics of your curriculum.  OR
  2. Look at the calendar for events or holidays. OR
  3. Look at the school calendar for half-days and identify a theme, especially those that are more social than curriculum related.
  4. Ask students what ideas they would like to explore, then factor their ideas into your curriculum and text set search.
  5. Ask the librarian to identify a wide range of texts and genres that connect to your theme or topic. 
  6. Search in the following text set resources for reading selections connected to the theme or topic.
  7. Construct your curated list for your students to choose an interest to read and share.
  8. Most of all, limit the rabbit holes that you might find yourself in as you realize the plethora of choices that you can provide to your students.  

Arousing curiosity and satisfying it with reading develops a positive attitude toward reading.  It empowers students to read to ‘find out why’. While the answers to those questions are easily found with a Google search, connecting to the culture of the times happens best when biographies or primary sources are available for reading.

Text of all kinds becomes the primary connection between every content area. Students who read first-hand accounts of the Jim Crow era have a deeper understanding of the literature of that time. The struggle of the Indigenous people has a more significant impact when seen through their eyes in diaries, songs, and poetry. Understanding the building process of the pyramids or the Roman aqueducts connects math with sociology or history.

I alluded to curated text sets above and encourage you to investigate some of my favorite resources. NewsELA, ReadWorks, CommonLit are just a few places to find digital text sets created and classified by readability, theme, topic, holiday, and current events. One of my favorite articles is in NewsELA regarding Halloween and how much money is spent: nine billion dollars in 2018! Each of the above resources contains a wide variety of stand-alone reading/writing projects for those short classes on short days where there’s no time for an entire lesson!

Your teaching librarian can also curate book sets that support your curriculum. Other grade-level teachers may welcome the opportunity to collaborate on reading and writing assignments. Making connections across content-areas strengthens learning and increases the likelihood of creating lifelong learners.

Ponder my truisms about lifelong learning:

  • Learning requires reading from diverse perspectives.
  • Linking new learning to prior learning lays a foundation for future application.
  • Social consciousness is developed when empathy is aroused.
  • Citizenship has a whole new meaning when students discover that the ‘yous’ of this world are more important than the “I”. 

Parallel reading projects grow a body of students who will begin thinking outside of their high school, content-area silo. That is certainly how they will live upon graduation. Stereotype book reports don’t have to be the outcome of parallel reading. How would your students like to communicate their reading experience to others? Encourage them to move beyond summaries (which can be found online) to how their perspectives have shifted because of the reading selection.  

Try it. Identifying the selections is half of the fun! What’s the other half? Sharing them with your students.  Through themes and topics, students can connect with text in ways outside of a required curriculum text. They can take ownership of their reading which just might result independent readers and learners.   

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Charlene Aldrich is an instructor in the Office of Professional Development at the College of Charleston. While content-area literacy is her specialty, she also teaches Assessments in Reading, Foundations in Reading, and Instructional Practices as required by South Carolina for recertification. She serves as the Treasurer of LiD 6-12.