Overcoming writer’s block with free-verse poetry

Teaching

All writers are familiar with the brain-freezing sensation of staring at a blank page or screen without the slightest clue of how to start a daunting writing task. This writer’s block symptom is intensified for struggling writers such as multilingual learners, students with un/diagnosed reading/writing disorders, or speakers of dialects who experience Standard English as a foreign language. When they consider themselves writing failures, free-verse poetry writing opportunities in any subject area are one effective way to remediate the problem and release debilitating emotional stress (Bullock, 2021). Most striving writers battle: (1) what to write about; (2) how to structure ideas for longer, multi-paragraph texts; and/or (3) how to use academic language structures in full sentences with grammatically and linguistically correct word use, grammar, and punctuation.

What is free-verse poetry?

Free-verse poetry writing does not present these challenges. It allows for associative writing with spoken language characteristics of words, phrases, or sentences without specific rhyme schemes or metric systems. There are no rules for line breaks, stanza divisions, or paragraph structures. Some free verse poetry looks like narrative writing without having to follow syntactic rules or to require punctuation. Free-verse poetry often creates images and focuses on sensory detail with figurative speech like similes (i.e., water as soft as coconut oil), metaphors (i.e., rain comes down in spaghetti strings), or idioms (i.e., fluttering butterflies in my stomach) (Craven 2021).

The following is a free-verse poem to remember that Natrium Chloride is salt:

Nate and Claire and NaCl

Nate Natrium wants a girlfriend

Through his binoculars from his Natrium castle

He spots Claire Chloride

In a hammock

Reading a romance novel

Humming a song

Nate’s heart bursts

His feet fly down the hill with a drumming heart

To Claire

And the rest is history

They have children

All with salty lips and skin

This family helps us spice our food

And give minerals to animals, humans and plants

Their license plate says NaCl-Salt

What makes free-verse poetry beneficial for striving writers?

The features of free-verse poetry described above allow writer’s block moments to gradually diminish because students can concentrate on what they have to say without grammatical and syntactical confinements of text passages. Students engage in short, creative writing tasks that provide them with growing confidence to express knowledge or feelings without being judged for writing conformity errors, especially when spelling errors are not considered. Consequently, students can creatively and meaningfully play with language and enjoy the process while engaging with content in a pressure-free, reinforcing way (Bullock, 2021).

When to implement free-style poetry writing?

At any time in any content area, teachers can implement 5-15 minute free-verse poetry writing opportunities: (1) prior to a topic to activate pre-knowledge and motivate for a topic; (2) during a unit/lesson; (3) after a unit/lesson to assess gained knowledge; or (4) as a general writing task with prompts such as a title (i.e. mountain bikes, my favorite singer), pictures, or music to engage students in free-verse writing to express their feelings and thoughts stimulated by the prompt.

What are some ideas for grades 6-12?

Providing routine writing opportunities with appropriate support while integrating students’ interests, strengths, and knowledge is crucial in breaking down writing barriers. When first introducing free-verse poetry writing, teachers use ‘think aloud’ techniques to model how to write such a poem. Then, students work in pairs to create a free verse poem before creating them individually. Students can compare each other’s poems and discuss what they learned from different poems. This reinforces the purpose and versatility of free-verse poetry writing in content areas. Students collect their free-verse poems in a writing journal or keep them with their content topic to help them study.

Additionally, a cloze text with open spaces to insert an association or sentence frames along with vocabulary banks can assist striving writers in focusing on writing free-verse poetry.

The following concrete suggestions for different content areas can be supported by thought-provoking pictures, video or film clips, or music to foster paired-up or individual free-verse poetry writing.

English Language Arts:

Relate to/ describe a character in a book.
Reflect on characteristics of a literary feature or term (i.e., idiom, climax), or jobs/functions of punctuations, capitalizations commonly mis/used.
Characterize features of standard English, dialect, or code-switching along with when each is beneficial.

Science:

Summarize characteristics of chemical procedures or elements such as H2O (water) or NaCl (salt); or components/purposes of cells or body parts.
Describe/reflect on the importance of the processes of the water cycle, polarity, electricity, or planetary systems

Mathematics:

Summarize the sequence of steps to take for a certain operation.
Describe the characteristics, roles, or properties of concepts or terminologies such as common denominators, geometric structures, or negative/positive numbers.

Music education:

Characterize/compare famous musical periods, instruments, musicians, or songs of certain periods.
Describe strategies to play certain instruments or to be successful in a choir or band.

Physical/health education:

Reflect on the benefits of particular nutrition items (i.e., protein, carbohydrates, water, food pyramid).
Describe the interaction of certain nutritional components in the human body or the benefits of exercise and the dangers of sedentary life.

Social Studies:

Reflect on/describe the roles of historical characters or their emotions and feelings during a time period (i.e., Anne Frank, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X).
Reflect on/describe the roles of government branches or features of democratic, authoritarian, fascist, or socialist government structures
Present a timeline of events that lead to a certain historical event

Conclusion

In sum, brief, free-verse poetry writing is one creative, student-engaging approach to help promote a sense of growing confidence and creativity among striving writers at a low-risk level in grades 6-12. Nobody can go wrong. Every creative contribution counts and matters. Success at that level encourages students to tackle longer writing tasks while also reinforcing the disciplinary content they need.

References

For some examples of free-verse poetry by established authors, see:

Bullock, O. (2021). Poetry and trauma: Exercises for creating metaphors and using sensory detail, New Writing, 18(4), 409-420, DOI: 10.1080/14790726.2021.1876094.

Craven, J. (2021, February 15). An Introduction to Free Verse Poetry. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-free-verse-poem-4171539.

Bullock, O. (2021). Poetry and trauma: Exercises for creating metaphors and using sensory detail, New Writing, 18(4), 409-420, DOI: 10.1080/14790726.2021.1876094.

Craven, J. (2021, February 15). An Introduction to Free Verse Poetry. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-free-verse-poem-4171539.

Macintosh HD:WINTHROP:FALL 2022_classes & tasks:IDA proposals for F22:BIO PIC Elke.png

For the past 20 years, Dr. Elke Schneider has been a professor of literacy, special
education and multilingual learner education at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The Millennium Project

Teaching

This post is written by Miriam Necastro. Read more about Miriam at the bottom of this post.

They say you can’t go home again. However, in the case of myself and some of my colleagues, we did by returning for round two at Brookfield Middle School; this time as teachers. At the beginning of the previous school year, our principal had set a goal for us to conduct more cross-curricular collaborations. When we were turned loose for common planning time with our grade-level teachers, we began brainstorming what we could integrate seamlessly across the curriculum divide. My colleague Brad, who teaches 7th grade World History, is also an alum of Brookfield. We started to reminisce about the different cross-curricular projects we completed during middle school. We both agreed that it was as if most of our classes back then were involved in these instructional projects. The other element we remembered was the excitement–our teachers were excited, which made us excited.

The project in question was known as the “Millennium Project.” At this time, during the early 2000s, A&E Biography released the program “100 Most Influential People of the Millennium.” In our World History class, our teacher wrote each of those individuals on slips of paper, and during class, we drew a name out of a cup. The name of the influential person we drew was the person we would be researching during classes, writing an informational essay, first-person biographical speech, creating a visual display, and portraying this person during the Night at the Museum presentation. What if we brought this project back to life after a seventeen-year hiatus?

We started by creating a dual Google Classroom page where we sectioned off different topics for all the project materials, examples, and assignment drop boxes. He covered the history assignments while I did the Language Arts ones. For example, areas of historical research would be covered by history, while ELA would cover the biographical essay. Based on the event date that was scheduled on the school calendar, we then collaborated on due dates for essential project assignments, agreeing that these would be flexible, if need be, once the unit got underway. Since the students had never completed a large project of this nature, covering two of their core classes, we knew this would be a learning experience for everyone. The fun part came first– having the students select the influential person they would be portraying for the project. The list of influential people ranged from Gandhi to Diana, Princess of Wales to Jane Goodall, Tomoe Gozen, George Washington, Jackie Robinson, Neils Bohr, Dolly Madison, and others.

The best collaboration tool we utilized was Google Classroom. Creating a joint classroom page specifically for this project assisted us in making sure that all students had the same information and materials in one central location. For example, research database websites were organized in their separate section, and my colleague and I would add links if we found a new site that would benefit student research. From an ELA and World History standpoint, we emphasized the importance of credible resources for research, especially when in seventh grade, Wikipedia is so convenient. Our students knew the ‘Research Resources’ section of Google Classroom as their one-stop shop. In an effort to not only conserve paper but also lessen the chances of lost materials, everything was digital. Students printed out their visual presentation text elements when constructing their museum board. As with Google Classroom, we could see student progress on the different parts and pieces of the project, so we could differentiate our instruction in our respective classrooms.

We know students always like to ask the question, “when am I going to use this outside of class?” We felt this project was the perfect opportunity to answer that question and put it to practice. Even though this was considered a history project at first look, the majority of the project was rooted in ELA. Without the Language Arts/writing skills, the students would not have been able to complete the project. The biographical essay that the students completed for their influential person aligned with the Ohio State Test Informative Writing Rubric, and used the research they completed in history class. In both classes, we expressed the importance of not just copying and pasting information from their research sources into their essay; they must use their personal voice. In doing so, not only did it save them from plagiarism, but it also proved to us that they understood the information. They read the information, processed it, decided how it fit into the boundaries of the project, then, put it in their own words. Historical research plus writing and grammar skills combined in these areas of the project: historical research outline, biographical essay, visual display title, biographical timeline, key facts, word cloud, and fake social media page. ELA standards also include goals for speaking and listening. Students fulfilled this standard by using points from their biographical speech to write a speech from the perspective of their historical person to deliver during the “Night at the Museum” event when someone came up to their station.

The culminating event took place during school hours, where our seventh-grade students dressed as their historical person, stationed in front of the visual display they created, celebrating and sharing their knowledge acquired in both history and ELA over the last months. This project proved that lines between curricula don’t have to be so definite. If we combine our areas of expertise as teachers, we can maximize student learning.

Miriam Necastro has 6 years teaching experience and is the 7th grade ELA & Reading teacher at Brookfield Middle School; Brookfield, Ohio. She is currently pursuing an M.Ed in Literacy from Clemson University.

Photo by Skye Studios on Unsplash

Complicated, and Worth It: Fashioning Links in Literacy

Teaching

This post is written by Jason D. DeHart, PhD. Read more about Jason at the bottom of this post.

Were I to conduct a thematic analysis of my career in literacy so far, “I don’t like to read” would rise to prominence as an often-stated reality. Even if students feel that they are capable readers, they do not always express connection and engagement with the texts that they encounter in school settings.

This was true in my time as a middle school teacher, it is a theme that has inspired my scholarship, and it is a mantra that continues to resonate in the K-12 setting in which I am working now. When I consider the types of texts that continue to be honored – voices from hundreds of years ago, many of which include problematic language related to ethnic, racial, and gender identities – it is no small wonder that instant buy-in is so rare.

While there are many potential solutions to discuss, the word that also comes to mind in my thematic thinking is linking. This notion of linking speaks directly to the work of Literacy in the Disciplines in terms of thinking about the strands of critical inquiry that can be fashioned between and among content areas and types of texts. As I start a new semester, I am continuing to revisit the ways I can make content rich and relevant for my students through thoughtful connections between and among content areas, types of texts, and voices old and new.

The Rising Voices

Text selection is a key part of this process. When I first began teaching my students, they were reading Steinbeck’s outsider report of migrant farm workers in Of Mice and Men. That same year, in 1937, a book called Their Eyes Were Watching God was published. I was fascinating by this cultural dichotomy and struck by the opportunity to find a voice from the intersections of gender and ethnicity that could broaden my students’ perspectives about the lived experiences of people in the past. Zora Neale Hurston was, famously, an anthropologist, and her attention to ethnographic detail shows up in her writing.

I then worked with students across my courses to trace this literary journey to Alice Walker, who was instrumental in bringing attention once more to Zora Neale Hurston’s work in more recent times. This conversation between authors across time was one that I could discover and share with my students, linking to their current stories as part of American culture(s). It is both a linking of time and a critical inquiry that travels through a chain of inspiration.

In addition to Hurston and Walker, we read Jason Reynolds, Jericho Brown, and additional contemporary voices who have shared about facets of America that are simply not discussed in many canonical works. It is also important to me to choose works not simply because I am drawn to them personally, but as a way of filling in a gap that exists in what students might have discovered in literature so far.

Critical Analysis and Honest Stance

At one time, suggesting that a revered work of literature contains problematic content would have caused me insecurity. I desperately wanted to be a “good English teacher”, and I thought that meant holding the classics up on clouds. At this point in my teaching career, I recognize the value of honestly evaluating the limitations of thought and experience represented by literary canonical figures. In this way, I can be clearly critical about what it means to be an inside or outside voice related to a particular topic or way of being, and I can invite my students to think critically about these questions of authorship, as well.

I feel that this approach honors my students’ intelligence and acumen in noting these inconsistencies in human stories, as well as their awareness of the absence of some stories in what they have discovered in curriculum so far. This critical stance is not only possible in English class, but can lead to inquiry in history and social studies courses, discussions of equity and equal access in science and health care, and questions of ethics in technology courses, to note a few possibilities.

Asking students to evaluate an author biographically, not to simply suggest that they did not know better than to use language at a certain period in time, but to consider authors’ biases and positionalities is part of deep thinking and ethical work. This need not be a full lecture on the author’s history, but rather a point-by-point glimpse at some major details about them, considered historically alongside literature.

Ways of Reflecting

Finally, all of this critical work requires some kind of outlet. I cannot imagine teaching a class about virtually any topic and not having my students respond in some way each day, either in a paragraph, a sentence, or a few take-away words. I embrace videoed content as students have created zeitgeist poems and adapted key narrative scenes in groups, using their cell phones as one-stop shops for moviemaking. I embrace the visual, not just in thinking about remembering vocabulary words, but in sharing multimodally and symbolically about reading and viewing experiences.

A question stem to encourage this kind of response might be something like: Locate or create three images that represent your thinking about the representation of political unrest in Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez, or Create an infographic to help us understand the setting and context of Elie Wiesel’s Night.

In this way, students can explore links between and among stories that have existed for some time, as well as those that need to be (re)told. Moreover, as I have explored in this post, students can become aware of, critique, and even compose links between historical and contemporary voices, and engage in the process using tools and approaches that build their mathematical, artistic, and technological skills.

Teaching and learning is truly a linking and connected process, from past to present and across multiple literacies. All of this rich complexity requires attention, but I have found the conversation to be worth the time.

Jason D. DeHart is a passionate educator, currently teaching English at Wilkes Central High School in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He served as a middle grades English teacher for eight years and an assistant professor of reading education at Appalachian State University from 2019 to 2022. DeHart earned his PhD from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash

Fostering a Love of Reading

Teaching

By: Kim Ferrari, South Carolina High School English Teacher

“I hate reading.”

“I don’t read.”

“Books are boring.”

“I’d rather watch the movie.”

These are all statements that I have heard from my high school students throughout my time as an English teacher. At first, I would get disappointed when I heard a statement like that from one of my students, but now I smile and nod at them when they say that because I know that by the end of their semester with me, they won’t have such strong feelings against reading.

What once felt like pulling teeth now feels more like cheering. What is the secret to getting students to not hate reading and maybe actually even fall in love with it? Well, it’s not so much a secret and more just a matter of taking the time to help students find the right book for them. For some students this is done in a matter of minutes, while other students might take a little longer.

Host a Book Tasting

One of my favorite ways of helping students find books that interest them is by holding a book tasting (also known as a book pass or book speed dating). Early in the semester, I work with my media specialist to pull a wide variety of mostly YA novels in different genres: action/adventure, romance, realistic fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, dystopian, historical fiction, graphic novels/comics, sports, and mystery/thriller. We sort the books onto different tables by genre and students rotate through the stations. At each station, students choose one book to sample for 3 minutes, and they are instructed to read the front and back covers, the inside cover, and begin the first chapter. After the 3 minutes has ended, students decide whether the book is a yes, a no, or a maybe, and record it on their graphic organizer. They then rotate to the next table with the next genre and the process repeats.

After students have rotated through all the genres, I pull aside anyone who still needs help finding a book and work with them to look for options that might interest them. Before we leave the media center, students check out one book, though I always have several students asking if they can check out more than one. Depending on how long your class periods are and how many students you have in each class, you can modify how this is set up, but I have found that exposing students to different genres helps them to realize that just because they don’t like a specific type of book doesn’t mean that they don’t like all books.

The Importance of Modeling

Modeling reading for students is important, so while they are reading, I spend the first few rounds circulating the room and “tasting” books. After a few rounds though, I start to look for students who have yet to find a “yes” book and use what I already know about them and what they have rated the books they have already previewed to help me suggest titles at their next station.

Prioritizing Reading

Once students all have books to read, we begin every class with independent reading. The first few days are usually a bit of a struggle as students learn the procedures and expectations for this part of class, but after a week or so, independent reading becomes a regular part of our daily schedule and students know what is expected of them. Our daily schedule is built around independent reading to ensure that no matter what, we have time to read. While students are reading, I walk around the room reading my book. This allows me to model independent reading for them because they can see all the different books I read and it allows me to quietly redirect students who may be off-task or distracted. Modeling reading for students helps to encourage them to read and motivates them to continue reading. Because I am reading when my students are reading, I am able to read a lot of books every year, which helps me recommend titles that I think students will enjoy based on their interests. Independent reading is a skill that needs to be developed over time, so we begin with reading for 7 or 8 minutes and build up to around 15 minutes as students’ stamina increases. The more students are engaged in their books, the longer they will read for, which is another reason helping students find books that interest them is so important. If I notice a student appears to be disengaged with their book, I keep an eye on them and if a day or two later, they’re still not engaged, I have a conversation with them and recommend a different book.

Making independent reading a priority in my classroom has led to increased reading stamina, higher engagement with books, and significantly fewer groans when I announce it’s time to read. At the end of each semester, I ask students to reflect on their experience and every year, there are positive comments that remind me why I put so much effort into helping students find the right books and making independent reading such a focus. Students share that this is the first time in years that they’ve finished an entire book, that they found themselves looking forward to independent reading each day, that they didn’t know reading could be fun, and that our independent reading time gave them a chance to relax. Some students even come back after they leave my class asking for book recommendations or if they can borrow one of my books, so I get to continue to foster their love for reading. When students come back to me years after graduating high school and tell me about the books they’ve read lately, I know I have done my job of creating lifelong readers, which to me is the ultimate goal.

About the Author

Kim Ferrari is an English Teacher at Manning High School in Manning, SC. She received her Bachelor of Science in Secondary English Education from the University of Maine at Farmington and is working on her Master’s in Literacy from Clemson University.

Supercharging our Content Teaching with Language Objectives

Teaching

By: Samantha Rainwater, South Carolina High School English Teacher

Back to the Basics

Like every teacher during March of 2020, life threw me quite a difficult curveball: in the course of a few days, I needed to scrap all of the plans and dreams I established with my students and reimagine the rest of the year virtually. I don’t know how y’all handled it, but I was at a complete loss. My very organized book clubs, the brand new unit on The Kite Runner we had just launched, the highly-technical argument unit and Convince Me project we were in the thick of, all of it, upended. I had to start thinking about what—with my very limited time—I would focus on with my students. Ultimately, I decided that literacy through interesting and meaningful reading and writing would be my primary focus for the rest of the year.

I bring this up specifically to discuss how, even as an English teacher, I have a lot of content that doesn’t fall under the “reading skills” category. However, literacy is the key to our students’ ability to access our content. If I wanted my students to be prepared for the next school year, the task was not to continue my content-heavy units or teach all the figurative terms they would encounter in English 3, but to make sure that students’ literacy skills continued to develop.

We’ve heard it all before, maybe from a district official or an administrator at the beginning of the year: We are all reading teachers. But let’s be real. We have standards and pacing guides and benchmark assessments and end-of-course tests and the list goes on. For content-area teachers, how can we possibly add on the task of developing students’ literacy? After all, they take ELA.

The Case for Disciplinary Literacy

I had a major revelation this year when it came to literacy, and I think in many ways my background as an English teacher kept me from this revelation sooner. Secondary education relies on literacy skills as a means of accessing content knowledge; however, literacy isn’t just literacy. There are two major theories regarding how literacy works: content-area literacy, which suggests reading strategies transfer between content areas (Vacca, Vacca, and Mraz 2011), and disciplinary literacy (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012), which suggests and “acknowledges that different disciplines contain different purposes for language, ways of communicating, and requirements for precision” (Croce, 2017). While it’s important to understand that some reading strategies do transfer, it is also important to acknowledge the merits of disciplinary literacy. It’s not like kids learn to read, then immediately their literary lives are unlocked, and they can henceforth access all written knowledge presented in all subject areas. Each academic discipline has its own discourse styles and structures that students have to learn and master because they are so unique and different from the typical ways we engage and use language socially. The literacy and discourse structures that are taught in the ELA classroom might not be sufficient for students dealing with the very specific types of literacy present in the science or math classrooms. For this reason, the very best teachers of literacy in content-area classes are the content-area teachers themselves! I know, what does an English teacher have to say about literacy in other disciplines? But hear me out. It might even make teaching your content more effective.

An Example: Disciplinary Literacy in the Science Classroom

Science teaching, for example, depends on informational texts to communicate content knowledge, to teach facts to students. However, what happens when a student’s observations of the world around them do not match the facts being presented in the scientific texts they are reading? What understandings of the scientific method and peer review process do students have to understand in order to comprehend and learn from these texts? Consider the words of Croce (2017):

“According to conceptual change theory, a number of conditions need to be met in order for a student to change his or her mind about a science concept. Would a student be considered a poor reader if those conditions were not met and the student did not change his mind (in other words, learn a concept) after reading the text? I would argue that a student is not a poor reader if he or she does not immediately change his or her mind about a science topic after reading a text. This is because when we assess students as readers of science, it is impossible to separate who a student is as a scientist from who he or she is as a reader (emphasis added) (Croce, 2015).”

Being an effective scientist depends on being literate in scientific discourse styles, specifically. If we expect students to learn how hurricanes are formed through reading a text, we have to approach the reading of that text as scientists, which requires different literacy foundations than what is required in their English class (and reading in science, math, and social studies often has different goals than in ELA). Scientific texts also have unique language patterns (i.e. cause and effect relationships in scientific sequences) that need to be explicitly taught to students. Students reading in their literature classes may never encounter those specific language patterns. When students are taught these discourse styles, they are then able to make sense of the content presented in these texts.

First Steps: Introducing Language Objectives

I don’t think that we necessarily have to be reading specialists on top of our content-area and pedagogical expertise. I do think, though, that we need to be aware of how our disciplines use language and provide instruction for our students so language isn’t a barrier to learning the content. One of the most meaningful ways that I’ve started doing this in my own classroom is through language objectives. Language objectives are similar to content objectives in that they articulate what students’ will be able to achieve by the end of a lesson or period of time. The only difference is that while content objectives describe what students will know and be able to do, language objectives describe how students need to use language in order for the content to be accessible. If you need a place to start in terms of understanding how language should be used at different proficiency levels, I recommend viewing WIDA’s Can Do statements.

As you are planning a lesson, ask yourself a few questions: What discipline-specific and general academic vocabulary do my students need to know to meet the content objectives? How is language functioning in this lesson (Are we listening to a speech made by an historical figure? Recording observations in a science experiment? Describing? Predicting? Comparing? What language styles and structures do we need to employ to do these things?) What language structures or grammatical features are common in this lesson? (Are we reading an academic text with frequent passive voice? Imperatives? Does the organization of the text need to be understood for students to comprehend it better?) What functional language is used during this lesson? What do I observe about my students’ needs when it comes to language?

By doing this, we will become more aware how language works in our disciplines, and we can then work to lower the linguistic hurdles students need to overcome to understand and excel in our content. We can also take the answers to these questions and design focused objectives and direct instruction related to the language of our disciplines. The beauty of designing language objectives is that it occurs alongside the teaching of our content objectives; we don’t pause our instruction to teach language and grow literacy. This can happen with small mini-lessons embedded in the larger instruction for the day. For example, in a high school chemistry lesson, the language objective might be that “Students will be able to use adverbs of time in their lab report to describe their observations (first, next, later)” (Echevarria et. al, 2011). Maybe, in a math lesson, students need to understand the language of conditionality in order to solve a word problem. From there, you would design a language objective. This might take all of 10 minutes, but it will enable students to meet the task of writing their scientific observations within their lab reports.

Developing and strengthening literacy specific to our disciplines is not a separate, full-time job. Instead, we can use language objectives to make our content teaching even more effective.

About the Author

Samantha Rainwater is the current English department chair at Richland Northeast High School in Columbia, South Carolina. She has eight years of teaching experience in the ELA classroom and is currently working to complete her ESOL certification.

New Literacy Studies: For What It’s Worth…

Research

By: Dr. Todd Lilly, University of South Carolina

(For what it’s worth, this blog is peppered with a few hyperlinks to entertain the reader and to illustrate New Literacy Studies… for what it’s worth. Enjoy!)

Here’s a scene you might recognize: Everyone is concerned about the mental health of the young prince. The father of his fiancé finds him alone in a room in the castle, absorbed in a book. “What do you read, my lord?” The prince stops reading, flips through his book as if to try to find an answer to this most-important question. Then, as if making an astonishing discovery, he answers: “Words. Words. Words!”

I know what you’re thinking: “I’m not an English teacher! What’s this got to do with me?” Well… In the context of New Literacy Studies…Plenty. For what it’s worth, there was certainly a whole lot more in the prince’s book than words, and that should interest all of us.

“private property” by Lost Albatross is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Our house backs up to a popular public recreation area, so our Home Owners’ Association (HOA) posted signs: “Private Property/ No Trespassing!”

Many third graders would have no trouble sounding out the words:

“Pr…Pr… Pr as in Pretzel”

“Tr…Tr…Tr… as in Truck”

Hmmmm… I have no idea why the ‘ATE’ in “ PRIVATE” shouldn’t be pronounced like “8” or why the ‘ei’ in “eight” should. What exactly is a ‘ə’ anyway? “I’m not a reading teacher!” Anyway, that’s the gist of old literacy studies.

So, maybe we secondary teachers don’t actually know all that much about Old Literacy Studies, but still, we get the idea: If kids know enough rules to sound out words, they can read just about anything we give them, whether it’s a social studies text book or Hamlet. It’s an autonomous design: Learn to decode and you have power. It’s that simple.

Well… actually, no, it’s not that simple. And neither are the literacy events and practices we expect students to engage in when they enter our classrooms. That’s where New Literacy Studies gets interesting.

About 30 years ago, just about the same time as “You’ve got mail!” several out-of-the-box smart people from a few English-speaking countries got together and kicked around the idea that literacy was more than decoding, semiotics, and semantics. In the mid-1990s they saw how the rise in popularity of digital technology had the potential to radically change the way people produced and consumed all kinds of texts. They got so excited about this “New” idea that they made plans to meet in a small New England town, New London, New Hampshire, just to talk about it. And they did. They came to be known as “The New London Group.” What was their conclusion?

This might be a good time to get up, stretch, visit the bathroom and/or the refrigerator, maybe do a little yoga… Ok, here goes:

They decided that literacy is a social event embedded in a complex web of power-laden social and technological contexts that all revolve around texts and language. (Yes, English teachers; that’s what Pygmalion, written a century ago was all about… “Duh!”). Another way of looking at it is that literacy exists by means of some technology (a book, a sign, a billboard…) in a social space between a producer and a consumer. It involves ways of speaking, thinking, acting, and believing, which would mean that one’s identity and membership in social groups can and does affect meaning. This mutation from literacy as merely decoding to literacy as a social practice was coined “the social turn.”

So there. Move over Gutenberg!

That’s pretty much what they could agree upon. I can imagine the discussion got a bit contentious when they started thinking about the definition of “text.” Is an embroidery of birds on a pillowcase a text? Seriously, that’s an important question in the context of multiliteracies, but we’ll save that for another blog.

For now, let’s consider the “No Trespassing” sign above as a text. It’s not a Falkner novel or a Shakespeare play, “but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”

Someone created the sign, someone nailed it to a tree, and there are indeed people who have come along and read it. The sign successfully transfers an idea from the sign’s producer to the consumer: “Keep off OUR property!” The literacy event is accomplished. What more might these New Literacy folks say?

Well…plenty. They would point out that that the posting and reading of the sign was but an event, part of a larger practice that brought together myriad social and power connections. The sign was initially a reaction to a legal context. At our annual HOA meeting, our lawyer noted that if we hadn’t posted these signs, we would be liable for any damages incurred by anyone who stepped onto our property. (Don’t you just LOVE lawyers?)

There’s also, of course, a power dynamic. Who are these potential trespassers? We can only imagine them happening by and reading our message: We own something/ you don’t/ you can’t have it/ We deserve it/ You don’t. Nanananana… “The sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside…Ugh!”

I’m sure y’all noticed the graffiti on the sign, probably a tag, a unique form of literacy that a certain group of people (in this case, graffiti writers) use to identify their work: Loosely translated, it says: “Hey, I’m somebody too!” And am I wrong to deduce a bit of anger and animosity?

If literacy, then, is all about contexts and social memberships, who gets to decide meaning? ELA teachers have heard this refrain before; it’s not new.

Student: “Mr. Lilly, I think Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is about Santa Claus.”

I can’t remember my reply, but now in my current life, I call forth the literacy gurus:

Louise Rosenblatt would have said, “Ok, a reader has a right to make meaning out of otherwise meaningless symbols.”

E.D. Hirsch might exclain: “Hogwash! Go ask Frost!”

Michel Foucault would look up from his bath: “Go for it kid ‘cuz Robert Frost is dead!”

Here’s some song lyrics that were a bit more popular than Frost when I was a kid:

“Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re aways afraid. You step out of line, the man come and take you away.”
–Stephen Stills

In the words of the great Yogi Berra: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” For you youngins (“Ok, Boomer…”), long before Post Malone, Lizzo, Chance, JayZ/ Beyoncé; long before Justin and Taylor, even before Back Street Boyz and still further back before AC/DC there was the Buffalo Springfield. Band member Stephen Stills, in 1967, during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights, immortalized these words in his “For What It’s Worth” which rocketed to #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Ok, what’s it about? Vietnam Protests? The Generation Gap? Was it a precursor to NWA? “Words, words, words.”

Nope, it was about an event in which riot police confronted a large gathering of young people who came together to protest a curfew in Hollywood, California. But to hundreds of thousands, it represented a division in America, an anti-establishment movement that exists to this day. If you don’t recognize the lyrics, I’ll bet if you click on the above link, you’ll recognize the tune. And if so, is the tune an integral part of the text? (If you actually click on that link, you’ve officially become involved in New Literacy Studies!)

Ok, that’s cool, but here’s the kicker: What happens to a text when it becomes older than the generation for which it was written? In the 1990s, about the same time the New London Group met in New Hampshire, the Buffalo Springfield band members (minus Neil Young, of course) all in middle-age, allowed their song to be used in a Miller Beer commercial. What?! An anthem of protest converted into an anthem of capitalism?! “Something’s happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear…”

Well, actually, it is quite clear. The baton had been passed to a new generation. The context, the setting, the medium, the identities and power dynamics of the producers and consumers had changed from social injustice to quaffing a cold one. If you think about it, it’s much like what kids experience when they march from math to social studies to ELA and to lunch, all in the course of a typical morning. Everything changes. Students might read the same word in each class’ lesson, (“plot,” for example), but it will have a totally different meaning as the bell rings and students march from one class to another. The fact that they can pull this off day after day demonstrates remarkable sophistication. No science teacher is going to accept a lab report written as a rhetorical composition. As soon as students cross the threshold into the science room, they abandon the aesthetics of poetry that defined the day’s ELA class and magically conform to the inductive reasoning espoused by Francis Bacon, whoever he was.

Where old school technology goes to die-
Alex Watson, CC.org

Nothing is benign; a literacy event is always at the intersection of competing contexts (identities, histories, cultures, purposes, technologies) that can wax and wane over time. While in the course of a single day, we demand students think like a historian, think like an artist, think like an author, think like a scientist, think like a mathematician, think like a musician; all of which require a different literacy practice.

This past March, those kids were sequestered to rooms in their home “castles” somewhere in the village or in places even Verizon won’t go. And at the flip of a switch we were found alone at our laptop at our kitchen table desperately trying to replicate the old literacy practices of a face-to-face classroom and project it onto the new, unseen, unfamiliar contexts of the students’ existence. We tapped out words that were meant to convey the same curriculum and the same standards, but we all sensed the inevitable: “Something’s happening here/ What it is ain’t exactly clear.” More than a few of us have been confronted students’ equivalent of “No Trespassing/ Keep Out;” maybe not in so many words,

This could be a very long, very hot summer!

Robert Davy “Protest” Licensed through Creative Commons

“What a field-day for the heat. A thousand people in the street. Singing songs and carrying signs. Mostly say, “Hooray for our sign!’…You step out of line, the man come and take you away. It’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down…”

For what it’s worth, this New Literacy Studies stuff never gets old.

“It’s only words and words are all I have to take your heart away” –Shakespeare (Just kidding; it was the Bee Gees, and if that makes a difference to you, welcome to New Literacy Studies!)

About the Author

Todd Lilly has been a teacher for over 40 years, the majority of which was invested in middle and high school ELA and theater classes in and around Rochester, NY. Over the past 10 years he has served on undergraduate and graduate faculties in Wisconsin and currently at the University of South Carolina. He earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include out-of-school literacy practices and the stories of marginalized, disenfranchised students. He is married to Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly who holds the John C. Hungerpiller chair in the College of Education, University of South Carolina