Tech + 'classic" curriculum = what?

[NWP Ning Team]

Hi all,

Sara Bauer posted this item as part of a group in the NWP Book Group Ning. But it's a question you all might have some thoughts/interest in here too, so I'm posting her question here. Any thoughts? Sara wrote:

"I'm curious about how you reinvent the classics or work to make them applicable to 21st Century students.

My colleagues from the NWP @ Rutgers, Joy Mazur and Kristy Lauricella, will co-present a session about how we use technology for this purpose. I will invite them into this discussion so that they can share their own techniques in the near future.

After thinking carefully about audience and authentic audience, and reflecting on the words of Will Richardson, who delivered a keynote at our Mid-winter Conference in February, I have worked to incorporate podcasting for this purpose. This year, my sophomores in American Studies worked together to create two podcasts. One focuses on The Grapes of Wrath, the other on The Scarlet Letter. Because they worked exclusively to satisfy an audience of their peers, the ideas and the delivery were catchy and appealing for teenagers. This is not to say they weren't academically appropriate or "thin." I was pleased to find that, without my lectures or explicit instruction, students were capable of hitting upon all the things I wanted them to learn: history of the text, author background, themes, characterization, symbolism, setting. Since they unearthed these things themselves, through research, and translated them into podcast segments, their learning is thorough and I suspect they are more likely to retain the information than if I had delivered it and asked them to retain it for the purpose of answering test questions.

In teaching the classics, do we, as English teachers, default to preparing our students to become little English teachers? I sometimes find it difficult to resist the temptation. What works for me is consideration of the question "What is this book good for?" I find my students answer this question more thoroughly than I do."

[Kevin H.]

Podcasting is a natural shift into technology, but so is creating videos and I think the possibility of exploring their learning through multimedia rich documents makes a lot of sense. The trick is to balance the integrity of the work of art with a tool for learning that engages the students, right?
I am curious to know what others think.
Kevin

[Sara Bauer]

Kevin: My students have often asked me, "Can't we do videos instead?" So far, I have resisted. Here's why. Teenagers are so self-conscious that recording video, rather than audio content takes the emphasis away from writing and away from voice into the nether-world of hamminess and imitations of crazy, reckless, and inappropriate things they've seen people do on television. Writing, revising, and performing podcast scripts keeps the emphasis on writing and the writing process. Plus, students are very concerned about how they will sound on the recording and take care to rehearse and speak clearly in ways that astound me. There's also the anonymity factor. Recording students and posting videos requires more red tape than I'm willing to take on right now.

Sara

[Kevin H.]

The teaching part of these kinds of projects requires new skills from us as teachers, too, and that makes it a bit difficult. I don't have the answers here except that I have never seen my students more engaged in their learning than when they are producing a short film (we do stopmotion). The red tape sucks, though, if that stands in your way.
Kevin

[Shannon Rooney]

Just wondering...where do you teach? Shannon

[Teralyn Cohn]

The curriculum I am directed to teach to my sophomores is Early American Literature (up to 1920). This presents several challenges since the content is quite dry, so I focus on making the activities both reflective and technology based. My students create videos, hyperlinked texts (research), one pagers and soundtracks to the book. I also try to match contemporary young adult fiction with the classics and have students present the connections between the texts. We use wikis for study guides and spring boards for projects. I am currently writing a text on how to incorporate technology applications into existing lesson plans. Hopefully will publish this year (self??).