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

Blending Practices, Skills, and Content in Teaching and Learning

Research

In our educational spaces, we often break our areas of expertise down into specific subject matters. We educate, train, and certify classroom teachers in terms of grade bands and content or disciplines. Students in schools spend time blocked off in different subjects where they receive instruction in a content area and earn grades that signify their level of expertise and competence in that area.

We separate our time in the educational pathway into grade levels and content areas to make it a bit easier to certify and support educators as they work with youth. But, these artificially designed pieces end up creating silos where educators and students set up camp and develop expectations about what, why, and how we learn. This raises the question about whether we need to erase the boundaries between disciplines, or do we need to—in a sense—harden them so that students learn where they start and end and are therefore better prepared for their futures?

A transdisciplinary lens challenges educators and researchers to consider the spaces in which learning occurs and overcome established paradigms and competition within and between disciplines. ¹ This post will examine the ways that education tries to carve out a space for collaboration and ambiguity between the disciplines and suggests there is a need to deconstruct assumptions made about educational structures and systems to de/re-territorialize teaching, learning, and assessment. ²

Interdisciplinarity

Some theories of education shift the focus from understanding of formal concepts to meaning-making to encourage students and educators to cross disciplinary connections. ³ As instruction moves away from traditional understandings of content areas and disciplines to craft new blended content areas (e.g. Humanities, STEM, STEAM), there is an opportunity to find content area literacies in context in other disciplines. ⁴ A desire to study across “individual attributes, at the nexus of institutional and material practices and textual cultures, instrumentality, and the production of agency and identity.” ⁵ Educators seek not for disciplinary purity and isolation, but to explore knowledge, discourse, and literacy practices around mutual areas of inquiry. ⁶ Instruction may also focus on teaching strategies that integrate multiple domains of knowledge into a single unit of study, such as authentic learning ⁷ or project-based learning. ⁸

In the graphic above, you can see two disciplines with their own sets of practices, skills, content, and dispositions. In an interdisciplinary perspective, educators and the content work together synergistically to understand an object of inquiry.

One way to consider this is to think about a science teacher and an art teacher working together on a unit with students. The science teacher would consider the content and curriculum they are teaching. The art teacher would think about their content and curriculum. The process or product of the interdisciplinary unit might have students use art to illustrate or creatively express content of the other discipline. This is not a bad thing, but we’re reminded of Aristotle who stated, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”

Metadisciplinarity

Metadisciplinarity is the understanding of the structure of a discipline, “of what the discipline is, what it tries to accomplish, and how it tries to accomplish its aims.” ⁹ Metadisciplinarity goes beyond one discipline into the structural understanding of various disciplines in order to make comparisons and connections between disciplines. ¹¹ The elements of metadisciplinarity include practices such as defining notions, generalizing ideas, drawing parallels, developing classifications, choosing proper classification grounds and criteria; to find out causal relationships, building logical reasoning and making (inductive, deductive, analogical) conclusions. ¹²

In the graphic above, metadisciplinarity finds the connections, or correspondence (marked with “μ”) between subsets of practices, skills, content, and dispositions from one discipline to the other.

One way to think about this is using our example of a science and an art teacher working on a collaborative unit. Teachers and students would examine and compare the similarities and differences between the two content areas. They may consider the affordances of each of of the disciplines.

Transdisciplinarity

As detailed above, educational research and practice can be framed as a spectrum starting from content area silos and a disciplinary focus to more of an integrated interdisciplinary connection that includes multidisciplinary associations. The concept of transdisciplinarity is slippery, in flux, and has a plurality of definitions. ¹³ One of the features of transdisciplinarity is blurring and transcending disciplines. These spaces have been shown to provide fertile grounds for exploring patterns of change, transformations, and invariants in and across content areas. ¹⁴ Transdisciplinarity breaks down the silos and pro-
vides an enriched experience that is more true to life in that disciplines are experienced
simultaneously rather than in isolation. ¹⁵

In the graphic above, transdisciplinarity involves the blending of disciplines by blending of practices, skills, content, and dispositions from one discipline to the other.

One way to think about this is with our example of a science and art teacher working together on a unit. They consider the concepts, expressions, and forms shown in art, science, and in-between. They study gardens as heterogenous assemblages where art, science, and people meet. They consider how the plants need water and cultivating in order for the garden to prosper. In their work, they include elements of art, science, and beyond. But, their work process and product is an iterative assemblage as they consider where the living sciences, and abstract nature of art meet.

This post was written by Nenad Radakovic and Ian O’Byrne. This was originally posted here. Portions of this content from our publication titled Toward Transdisciplinarity: Constructing Meaning Where Disciplines Intersect, Combine, and Shift.

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

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.