SPED - TLT 404, Spring 2013 - Course record

Session 5 - Tuesday, 12 Feb – meeting in STEPS 102; then heading over to Zoellner to hear Madeline Albright!

During class

• Housekeeping
  • WTL
    
    • Role of weekly forums
    • Introducing 'floating' topics
      
      • Family & School interview prep.
      • Vicarious experience of diversity ('outside reading / watching' concept)
      • Diversity in your content area (or in a learner developmental stage)
  • To come
    
    • Returning Self-in-context reflections
    • Assigning Family & School interviews
  • Next topics

After class

Session 7 - Tuesday, 26 Feb

Before class

• Complete reading
• Complete WTL, both group and individual

During class (ppt)

• Frame to start this session: Group dynamics
• Discussion of Gould, 1972 – how much of this still rings true since the 1970s?
• Discussion of Kimmel, 2000 – gendered classrooms, differing rationales
  
  • WSJ Op-Ed from 2012 on single-sex education, authored by two US Senators.
• Discussion of Katz, 1990: Heteronormative culture, heterosexual privilege
• Working with LGBTQ (etc.) individuals and groups
• Resources for further exploration
  
  • Social media I find useful / thought-provoking
    
    • Andrew Sullivan's blog.
    • LezGetReal network – see also the slipperiness of working with online information: multiple hoaxes perpetrated by the founder.
  • Books: One Teacher in Ten (available in FML)
  • Video: It's Elementary! Talking About Gay Issues in School (available in FML and on YouTube)

After class

Session 8 - Tuesday, 5 Mar

Before class

• Complete reading
• Complete WTL
• Review syllabus description of Neighborhood Walk assignment
• We'll be using computers pretty heavily tonight, so please feel free to bring your own laptop / tablet / smartphone / whatever

During class (ppt)

• Housekeeping
• Conceptual work: Families and communities
  
  • Opening activity: Selections from In My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms.
  • Families: Life cycle theory, crisis/coping, resiliency
  • Community
    
    • Again, as with individuals and families, challenge of creating acceptable models, definitions. Typology, yes; functional clarity...not so much.
    • Why study your school's community? Consider what you don't know – here's a clip from a PBS documentary about community health (Unnatural Causes).
    • To ground this conversation in a reality: Southside Bethlehem. Let's do a modified KWL activity
      
      • Establishing the frame: What geographic area are we talking about? To put a school frame on it, here are some handy websites
        
        • School district map of Northampton County.
        • Database of BASD school performance data.
        • (And if you want it: BASD website: Can explore individual schools' websites)
      • K: Write down 5 facts that you know about SSB. For each: How do you know this? Personal experience? Hearsay? Something you read or saw on TV?
      • W: Write down 3 things you want to know about SSB. For each, write down a possible source.
      • Investigation phase
        
        • Share your Ks and Ws at your table. Can you help one another out in filling in gaps of knowledge? Thinking about resources? Do you have any conflicting knowledge?
        • Turning to (social) media: Without overtly focusing on your 3 "want to know" items, use the following tools to learn more about SSB. Feel free to divide up the labor at your table, or just do a free-for-all. We'll start with a demo with this YouTube clip from April, 2012.
          
          • Organized media, focusing on Southside results
            
            • The Morning Call.
            • Channel 69, WFMZ.
            • The Bethlehem Press. You're probably best off using a Google scrape of their site, so follow this URL to this search for their items related to "Southside."
            • Patch.com's Bethlehem bureau.
            • LehighValleyLive.com.
          • Social media. Note that you need to use some surfing smarts here: Find a video or an image that seems fruitful? Look at the related items, look for more items by that user, etc. Also, keep in mind that social media is, by definition, pretty much unfiltered; surf within your own comfort limit.
            
            • Twitter feeds – start with these searches for Southside Bethlehem, Broughal, Donegan Elementary, and then try your own. (You may have to sign into Twitter to do this)
            • Flickr map, zoomed in on SSB. If you use Instagram (smartphone app), you may want to try that, too.
            • YouTube–again, surf within your comfort limit.
              
              • Search results for SSB, ordered by date.
              • Individual videos that may be good starters. I'm pretty sure these were created by Lehigh students as part of a class within the South Side Initiative. 
                
                • Community Soapbox: Southside Bethlehem. 
                • New Bethany Ministries.
              • Individual users that may be useful to explore – be sure to check out their related videos (with caution...)
                
                • Lehigh student (A. Detterline), channel created for a class: http://www.youtube.com/user/brey825 – sorry, video taken down. Here's something similar, from a Lehigh PR class: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOSP5-12r7Y&feature=plcp.
                • Skate enthusiast PoHeezy.
      • Discussion at your table: What did you learn about SSB? What sorts of information did different media channels tend to offer? Try to focus your discussion on funds of knowledge – what funds of knowledge were presented in the organized media? Social media? What funds of knowledge do you think exist within SSB that the organized media might not report? That the university might not know about? 
    • L: Class-wide discussion of what we learned, what we would need to do to investigate further. 
  • Putting the exploration of the Southside into a larger context
    
    • Research perspectives vs. parent perspectives
    • Schools' community action efforts to support schools and/or support families
    • Support families: Deficit-based approach and/or asset-based approach
    • Real-world examples
      
      • Broughal as a community school
      • Asset map of Easton
      • Harlem Children's Zone
• Closure
  
  • Plug for two sources that certainly push my thinking about community, families, and education
    
    • The documentary Born Into Brothels– VERY uncomfortable to watch, lots of ambiguity to deal with, definitely worth thinking about. The FML Media Center has a copy.
    • The writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I read his blog; you could also consult his memoir (The Beautiful Struggle). Here's an interview he did on NPR about his memoir.
  • Building up your own employability: See the questions on p. 193 – GREAT material for interviews during the "Do you have any questions for us?" stage.

After class

• Re-visit Amatea Ch. 5 and Ch. 7 – be sure to note that handy job-interview prompt!
• Follow up on our community investigation as needed. What community will you visit? How can you use the links (e.g., school data, maps) to prepare? To plan the walk? To reflect?
• Plan out when (and with whom!) you'll complete your walk
• Plan out when you'll complete your Family & School Interview, fieldwork, etc.
• WTL
  
  • Indiv
  • Group

Session 9 - Tuesday, 19 Mar

Before class

During class (ppt)

• Community-building
• Following continuing threads
  
  • Same-sex rights
    
    • http://www.advocate.com/politics/2013/03/11/queen-elizabeth-stands-gay-rights-without-mentioning-them
    • http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/poll-new-high-of-58-percent-support-same
  • Gender confusion (?) in children
    
    • http://articles.cnn.com/2012-01-13/living/living_girl-scout-boycott_1_gsusa-cookie-boycott-troop-leader?_s=PM:LIVING
    • http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/us/in-colorado-a-legal-dispute-over-transgender-rights.html?pagewanted=all
• Conceptual work
  
  • Opening anecdote: Classism and a car alarm
  • Class in America
    
    • Class inventory activity
    • Sharing experiences of class, class-conciousness
      
      • Self-disclosure: My middle name is (was) a car
    • Playing mother-may-I with American household income
      
      • 1979-2003, then we'll go back and do
      • 1947-1979
    • Example of how things aren't getting any better: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/in-the-south-and-west-a-tax-on-being-poor/
    • Examples of class as the Forbidden Subject
      
      • What do we talk about when we talk about tax policy? Handy (longer-term!) link to the National Taxpayers Union data. (Note that they would strenuously disagree with the argument I'm making, even though I'm using their data.)
      • American History as a vision of progress? A history of competing social classes?
    • Considering that most of us are (or grew up in) middle class / affluence, and that many students come from less economically advantaged backgrounds, how do we prepare to teach them? Well, here's a handy Framework for Understanding Poverty. 
  • I have an agenda to sell you
    
    • Ruby Payne and Understanding Poverty. 
      
      • Book.
      • YouTube channel from consulting arm (aha Process).
      • Ramping up out of K-12 education: Bridges Out of Poverty. 
      • Criticisms of Payne's model: Bohn, Gorski, et al.
    • E.D. Hirsch and cultural literacy.
    • Ron Clark and...whatever label you want to apply to it. Sub-components
      
      • Books.
      • Ron Clark Academy.
      • Things to buy (could this be you in ten years??)
      • Teacher community: Great American Teachers Club– just $150/year!
    • And to be fair: James A. Banks and multicultural education.
    • And here's a callback to our gender discussion, courtesy of Gina: Senators KB Hutchison and Mikulski's Op-Ed in the WSJ: A Right to Choose Single-Sex Education.
  • Complexity of social encoding of class: Focus on language
    
    • Selections from the body of research on SES, parenting, and early childhood outcomes 
    • ...and a (humorous) demonstration of how we judge and self-enforce class norms within language, courtesy of Key and Peele.
• Closure

After class

• Work on Family & School interview, field work
• WTL
  
  • individual
  • group
• Reading
  
  • 3+ self-selections from http://www.edchange.org/handouts.html
  • 3+ self-selections from any of the items linked in the class session materials, above

Session 10 - Tuesday, 26 Mar

Before class

• Complete reading
• Work on fieldwork, Family & School interview

During class

• Housekeeping
• Following up loose threads in our class conversation
  
  • Institutional classism / racism: "The Ghetto is Public Policy"
  • Discussion of CDC report on gun deaths. 
• Language as a gateway: Selections from the body of research on SES, parenting, and early childhood outcomes 
• Conceptual work: Culture & acculturation
  
  • Immigration in the United States
    
    • Personal history of immigration 
    • Overview: 1820-2007: http://vimeo.com/2424744
    • Pair up and inspect decade-by-decade, country of origin by country of origin: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/10/us/20090310-immigration-explorer.html
    • What were you familiar with? From what context – classroom instruction? Media? Interaction with family and/or friends?
    • What about the gaps? What do they tell us? What was happening?
    • Context of immigration into the US: pushes, pulls, pushing back...privilege?
  • Culture & acculturation
    
    • Cultural profiles activity
    • Acculturation -- see, for example, measurement scales: http://www.multiculturalcenter.org/test/
    • Another lens on multiple cultures (stemming from multi-racial individuals): "swirl" concept
    • http://swirlinc.wordpress.com/about/
    • http://www.swirlsyndicate.com/About.html
    • See also Beat Nation, blending indigenous and urban cultures (from Canada, but I assume there's an American analog...somewhere). One of my favorites: Sonny Assu. 

After class

• Reading
  
  • Read through PDE ELPS, focusing on your grade levels / content areas
  • Gonzalez, 1995
  • White et al., 2005
• Assignments
• WTL
  
  • Individual: Whatever you like
  • Group
    
    • What language learning experiences do you have?
    • Do a K and a W on ELLs; I’ll ask you to do the L after next week’s class
• Work on fieldwork, Family  & School interview

Session 11 - Tuesday, 2 Apr

Before class

• Complete reading
• Work on fieldwork, family & school interview, neighborhood walk
• Complete prep steps for our visit from Mrs. Vanblargen (see WTL, above)

During class (ppt)

• Follow-up links
  
  • Bethlehem Area School District's Center for Language Assessment – Mrs. Vanblargen works for them; lots of resources. Definitely worth bookmarking
  • My list of bookmarks for working with English Language Learners: https://delicious.com/tchammond/ELL -- I'll be augmenting this with the resources mentioned in the presentation. 

After class

• WTL
  
  • Individual
  • Group: Write the 'L' of your KWL from last week.
• Keep working on fieldwork, family & school interview, neighborhood walk. I'm grading and posting material as quickly as I can, so check and see if your submissions have already been graded. 
• Reading: I've posted in CourseSite several articles and other resources on this topic; select any two. 

Session 12 - Tuesday, 9 Apr

Before class

• Complete reading (see descrip above)
• Examine bookmarks on working with ELLs. Bookmark anything that seems useful for your own future reference. And while you're at it: What system do you have for storing and organizing bookmarks?
• Complete WTL
• Work on remaining assignments

During class

• Housekeeping
  • Upcoming topics
  • Teacher resource assignment example: http://prezi.com/n_age3nedudl/teacher-resource/
• Wrapping up language
  
  • Example of instructional technique: Sheltered Instruction.
  • Who here has studied a language other than English? Who here speaks one? (And how can you tell if someone's American?) 
  • Who here speaks a second (or third? Dare we hope for fourth??) language? What was the context of learning it? Using it? 
  • The challenges of learning another language: mental, physical, emotional – even perceptual! See Ta-Nehisi Coates on learning French; his commenters are even more useful!
  • Examples of things we don't think about
  • Class roster exercise
    
    • For more in that vein: See pp. 3 onwards in Language Transfer Supports.
  • Language is more than words; hearing is more than de-coding sound waves – think about language and culture via...
    
    • BBC announcers – example 1 (start at :30; her BBC page is here) ; example 2 (his BBC page is here)
    • Amy Walker's 21 Accents video
• Tackling the intersections of culture & race & schooling
  
  • Discussion of textbook case study 6.1 ("Leaving Midland")
  • School IS society – revisiting cross-cultural boundaries with "SooLing" scenario
  • Race, society and schools, starting with the Carlisle Indian School
  • Unpacking race
    
    • Sorting People: Who Goes Where? - http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_01-sort.htm.
    • Race as biology?

      http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_02-traits.htm

    • Race as behavior? YouTube clip of random KPop video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kyG5tTZ1iE) – of course, this has lost a lot of the surprise factor in our post-Gangnam Style world...

  • Considering role of race in social contexts: schooling, labor

  • Education research on impact of race

  • Setting up your reading of Harry & Klingner, 2006, Ch. 5
• Closure: I've been wanting to somehow work in this point about tarantulas.... YouTube clip from 'Dr. No':

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS3Lb7PZDtQ; related article from Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/2012/03/tarantula_a_revolting_creature_.html

After class

• Reading
  
  • Amatea, Ch. 6
  • Harry & Klingner, 2006
  • Blanchette, 2006
• Assignments
  • WTL
    
    • Individual
    • Group: Two threads, pick one an participate in it
  • Keep working on assignments, turning them in as you go
  • Get started on teacher resource

Session 13 - Tuesday, 16 Apr

Before class

During class

After class

Session 14 - Tuesday, 23 Apr

Before class

During class

After class

LAST DAY TO TURN IN ASSIGNMENTS: Tuesday, 30 April

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