The prompt that is not a prompt

Okay:

For Wednesday of next week, two parts.

This morning (to rehash for the benefit of those who were stuck in a snowbank or otherwise indisposed) I asked you to write down ideas and questions that our class has brought up for you this semester, connected broadly to language and English education, and we heard a number of them this morning – questions about how to teach about language variety and still communicate the social status of Standard English, for example, or about teaching within systems that might not (probably won’t) share just the same values about education and the social purposes of schooling that you bring to the classroom (to name two examples).  My intent is that you use a question that begins from a place of engagement as a starting point for a final project/paper for the semester. 

For Wednesday, I want you to come with a question or an idea that you find engaging and that matters to you, and I want you to come with some sort of proposal that begins to describe what you’ll be doing, producing, engaging in. One option, of course, is a more or less traditional sort of final paper, and if you choose that, we’ll name (as a starting point) a 7-8 page paper that is supported by outside research. (That can be your barometer for other projects.) But maybe you don’t want to do a final project – maybe you want think about a curriculum design or a set of lessons that will highlight language variety (with an explanation about what you’re on about in that curriculum). Maybe you want to interview and put together in a collection a set of oral histories with teachers, exploring what they think about the English language. Maybe you want to create a video that introduces a particular topic, or a web page, or some other form of multi-media text. Those are just ideas.

On Wednesday, you should have an idea or a question, articulated as clearly as you can make it, and a sense of what kind of project you want to do.  What matters here, most of all, is that you understand both the topic and the approach as interesting and relevant to you. Without that as a starting point, why bother?

Second, read through chapter 6 of Gee, and then turn to a specific passage in the Common Core document, one that is connected to language and/or literacy in some way or another. Look closely at what it says about what you’ll teach first, and then how it says it.  To do this, sit with the passage and run it through the sets of questions Gee provides us chapter to chapter.  Don’t pick a really long passage, and don’t give up on this too quickly: trust that you’ll start to see something you didn’t expect to see as you continue asking. On your blog, I don’t want you to answer all these questions, but I want you to write about what you did notice, what sort of perspective this process gave you on the material in the Common Core document.

Remember, in all of this: you are trying things out, making tentative moves, informed but perhaps not-quite-yet-formed guesses. Any evaluation I make of you this semester will be not on whether what you came up with was “right” or met some sort of formal requirements. I want to see, instead, engagement, curiosity, and a sense that you’re learning to ask questions about your future as a teacher that matter to you. I’m asking you, that is, to think like a professional teacher, before you are one – so of course we’ll be in murky territory.