Trends and Issues in Literacy in Early Childhood Education

As educators on the cusp of the digital divide, it’s likely our children know more about technology than we do. They were born into a world where lexicon like cell phones, twittering, facebook, and google are common place. The same exists with Blogs. As future teachers, we have the opportunity to provide space online for our students to publish their writing, communicate with other children internationally, and create another outlet for us to learn from and inform parents about education and educational strategies. While blogs are essentially online journals, this space for developing readers and writers can enhance their excitement and provide additional self-confidence where we can all learn from each other.

Commentary with Experts in the field:Over the past four months I have been attempting to contact experts in the field to determine where and how preservice teachers are reflecting on their practice. The following three individuals were people I contacted:1) Suzanne Miller at the

University of
Buffalo.  Below is my email to her:

I just finished Miller and Borowicz’s Chapter 3, Engaging Millennial Students in Multimodal Literacies in School and have been perusing the CVCV website.  Listening to the students videos is both inspiring and moving.  Is the CVCV program thinking about extending it’s program/initiative outside of the

Buffalo
School system?  The resources the students have to create these videos is wonderful, especially since urban school settings often lack the “extra” funds to spend on technology.  Does a grant provide these resources? I am a doctoral student at

Georgia
State
University and am currently engaged in looking for ways preservice teachers reflect on-line.  Are they’re any preservice teachers who are placed in these classroom?  Do the regular classroom teachers reflect on how CVCV has impacted their teaching? If so, is that public information?The article and website illustrate ways to make learning hands-on, meaningful, collaborative, grounded in a social phenomenon.  Any information you could provide about how the teachers in the CVCV classrooms reflect on the program would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you so much for your time, 2) I contacted Dr. Ramona Matthews at

Georgia
State
University to obtain resources which she could refer me to. Below were her recommendations:Roskos, K., Risko, V. J., & Vukelich, C. (1998). Head, heart, and the
practice of literacy pedagogy. Reading Research Quarterly, 33(2),
228-239. (attached)

Roskos, K., Vukelich, C., & Risko, V. J. (2001). Reflection and
learning to teach: A critical review of literacy and general
teacher education studies. Journal of Literacy Research, 33 (4),
595-635. (will give you a paper copy)

Risko, V. J., Roskos, K., & Vukelich, C. (2002). Prospective
teachers* reflection:
Strategies, qualities, and perceptions in learning to teach reading.
Reading Research and Instruction, 41 (2), 149-176. (at home will
bring)

Risko, V. J., Vukelich, C., & Roskos, K. (2002). Preparing teachers
for reflective
practice: Intentions, contradictions, and possibilities. Language
Arts
Journal, 80 (2), 134-144. (attached) 

3) Lastly, when presenting at AERA I met with a professor who was conducting research on preservice teachers’ reflections. We met after class and she provided me with her email address to send her a request for her references list. I have not received the reference list yet, but eagerly await its arrival! Anyone else know someone I can contact? Thanks! (Dr. McGrail, I tried posting this to the blog, but it was acting up. If I can get it posted I will let you know). 

Come check our our new website: http://www.preserviceteacherreflection.edu-a.googlepages.com/home.

 We designed this website in attempts to draw more attention to the dearth of research and literature about the places preservice teacher reflect. We also hoped this website might help in the designation of more on-line spaces where preservice teachers’ collectively reflect as a community and grow as professionals in the field.

Jamie Myers and Richard Beach, in their article Hypermedia Authoring as Critical Literacy (see link to article below), contend there is a need to provide students with myriad strategies for analyzing their “social worlds”.  Similarly, I believe students must be provided with the tools to critically evaluate and interrogate the socially situated worlds we live and grow in. 

Hypermedia, as the two authors present it, serves as an excellent resource for this critical thinking.  Isolating and analyzing song lyrics, photographs, graphics, and digitizing videos are a few of the examples the authors present in their article. They describe the theoretical framework of hypermedia (i.e. immersion, identification, contextualization, representation, critique, transformation).  I cannot help but question the omission of reflection from this framework.  While it is obvious reflection is embedded in each of these pieces, I believe reflection places a critical role in students’ examining how they are positioned, or represented, in the media culture. Why is reflection absent?

By marrying hypertext and multimedia, hypermedia emerges as a form of critical literacy. I agree with the authors that hypermedia authoring can help students understand their place in the world, as well as questioning norms and biases.  Empowering students by allowing them the opportunity to analyze, edit, and modify representations they embark on a journey where literacy is retired and critical literacy emerges as the MVP.

http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/ele_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/jaal/3-01_Column/index.html

I found the following article extremely informative and motivating.  Marc Prensky discusses the issue of teachers needing to meet students in a meaningful way.  The meaningful way, he describes, is speaking and teaching digitally, the way the current generation of studnets is growing up.  We, teacI have attached a link for all who are interested in further reading.

http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Greetings Fellow Bloggers,

Please take a few moments and listen to my podcast. I share, what I believe, to be insightful information which inquiring minds might want to know; however, I also pose some questions which I’m hoping you might be able to help me with. Thanks so much!

podcasting-trial.mp3

So, I’ll start by being quite frank and honest, since the first time I heard about podcasting, I’ve been afraid of it. I don’t know why; perhaps its why some people are afraid of the internet and others the ocean.  It’s a big, dark, unknown and I have no plan of action for how to begin to tackle podcasting.  However, Hargis and Wilson (2005) turn the “scary world” into an open door for the amateur podcaster, while
Richardson’s (2006) chapter, Podcasting and Screencasting: Multimedia Publishing for the Masses, provided the courage for entering.

            I have just successfully downloaded iTunes (I know, it’s a sin that I haven’t yet) and I meandered through all of iTunes available podcasts.  As
Richardson (2006) suggests “just getting familiar” with podcasts, I’ve spent time this afternoon just “playing” and learning.  I agree with the authors of both pieces that podcasts offer an invaluable resource for education.  From teacher created to student created podcasts, the creativity and freedom behind the source can help us all learn and grow.  Similar to blogs, yet with the ability to be carried around on an iPod, podcasts offer another means of broadcasting information with the “freedom of speech”.

            Interestingly though, I searched diligently for podcasts which may serve as a source, or resource, of/for preservice teachers’ self-reflections and found none. It appears the movement for reflecting on podcasts has not yet hit the ceiling in terms of popularity.  However, this could be a new bridge to build as an avenue for preservice teachers to self –reflect.  The question is, do you think preservice teachers would use podcasts?  Would they listen, more than they offered? Or, would they speak more than they listened?  Any thoughts on their thinking?   

Colleagues, thank you so much for your suggestions pertaining to the Collaborative Project my partner and I are currently engaged in.  Your suggestion to check out “Dave’s ESL Cafe” as well as different cyber cafes for instances of preservice teachers reflecting was a huge success. You also suggested researching some Yahoo Chat Groups, which I did and had some luck. I’m excited about this new avenue for us. I just went to yahoo.com and in the search engine typed in “preservice teacher yahoo group” and got some interesting hits. 

Some relevant Yahoo Groups which will be great data sources are:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newteacher/ , http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Schools___Education, http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Schools___Education/Teaching_and_Research

Thesea are great leads for my partner and I.  Thanks for all of you input and happy searching to my collaborators!!!

Collaborative Project Proposal 

Purpose 

      As the standards based movement and high-stakes testing era in the United States grows more popular, the value of teachers’ self-reflections risks being “swept under the table” due to its lack of tangible, quantitative data; however, these reflections offer us, as researchers, a chance to illuminate the importance of continual implementation of reflection in the classroom and teacher education programs. Reflective teaching is important, not only as a tool for teaching, but as an aim of education. In this sense, reflection can be an avenue which improves both teaching and pedagogy. However, the act of developing personal theoretical perspectives through the reflection during teacher education programs is finding much resistance.

Both British and American political figures contend too much time is being spent by preservice teachers learning about theory and reflecting, while too little time is spent putting experience into practice (Griffiths & Tann, 1992). Although this might be true in some cases, we do think that most teacher education programs really support preservice teachers by providing subject matter instruction, theories of child development, and sound models of teaching and classroom management strategies. Classroom observations, peer-teaching exercises and field placements are usually employed to further prepare the novice teacher to meet the demands of the classroom and students with innovation and a strong knowledgeable vision.

So, more important is the need for providing opportunities of thinking in a reflective way. Reflection provides the opportunities to identify where one needs to improve and generates practical ideas about effective instructional skills. The purpose of our research is then to examine the multimodal types of reflection preservice teachers are engaged in.  Are there on-line resources for preservice teachers to reflect together as a community?  If so, what are they and how are preservice teachers reflecting on these sites?

MethodsHOW:

            We propose conducting on-line searches using (Google, Google reader, manual searches, GSU library, EBShost, etc.) to collect evidence/lack thereof of the various mediums preservice teachers use to reflect.  In conjunction with on-line searches we will be researching scholarly articles to review current studies relevant to avenues of preservice teachers’ self reflections.  We will post URLs, reflections, PDFS, etc. to our weblogs and will be communicating each week through blogging, email, and face-to-face communication. 

WITH WHAT:

            Our blogs will serve as a tool for Eudes and I to reflect and grow in understanding related to the paths preservice teachers use to self-reflect.  We will collect public examples of preservice teachers’ self-reflections (ex. Blogs, websites, MySpace, wikis, etc.).   

Timeline (Weblogs will be used throughout to communicate with each other through ideas, reflections, questions, clarification and relevant URL postings.)

Week of 2/20/07: Turn in completed Research Proposal

Week of 2/27/07:  Jointly researching on-line resources (e.g. blogs, college/university websites, scholarly journals) for evidence and research concerning preservice teachers’ reflections.*

Week of 3/06/07:  Jointly researching on-line resources (e.g. blogs, college/university websites, scholarly journals) for evidence and research concerning preservice teachers’ reflections.*

Week of 3/13/07:  Independently review data sent from partner and further familiarize ourselves with our own findings.  Meet and disaggregate our data.

Week of 3/20/07:  Independently review data sent from partner and further familiarize ourselves with our own findings.  Meet and disaggregate our data.

Week of 3/27/07:  Begin writing our findings.

Week of 4/03/07:  Continue writing our findings.

Week of 4/10/07:  Continue writing and begin class presentation.

Week of 4/17/07:  Finalize paper and presentation

Week of 4/24/07: PRESENTATION and CELEBRATION!!!!! 

* Throughout the data collection period we will be sending each other our findings and relevant research. 

Requests for support

1. Does anyone know of any online resources (e.g., blogs, podcasts) for preservice teachers to self-reflect on?
2.   Do we need IRB approval to conduct this research?
3. Does anyone have any scholarly journal articles which directly relate to preservice teacher reflection?
4. Does anyone have/know of any examples of on-line preservice teacher self-reflection?

   Jens Kjeldsen (2006), in his article The Rhetoric of PowerPoint, makes some very bold, very honest, and very thought-provoking statements.  Could PowerPoint presentations be creating a “cognitive overload” for our students?  Are we hindering our young students’ knowledge by presenting information on PowerPoint slides with bullets? How are we teaching preservice teachers to use PowerPoint presentations in the classroom?      As my research project for the semester focuses primarily on preservice teachers and self-reflection, I could not help but ask myself how PowerPoint might help, or hinder, reflectivity.  Kjeldsen presents bold statements deafening the potential of PowerPoint, and to a great extent, he is correct.  As we implement the use of PowerPoint in higher education to teach our future teachers, are we using the slides and bullets as a form of bringing back the “old-fashioned, didactic form of teaching” OR could these presentations be used to elicit reflection from our preservice teachers?

     There are two sides to every story, in this case, one scary and one enlightening.  I have no doubt that some preservice teachers are being exposed to forms of PowerPoint which are neither content, nor teacher-oriented, which hinder their creative thought due to the bareness of the depth and breadth of the presentation.  We have all sat through a presentation where we would have rather been twirling paper towel instead of subjecting ourselves to the “voice of the presenter”.  You know what I am talking about…the speaker who, you are convinced, has no clue there is an audience in the room and reads from the slide as if  he/she is trying to win the nobel prize for “Dullest Presenter of the Year.”  I do, in fact, agree with Kjeldsen that this has the potential to hinder the growth and self-reflective tendencies of our preservice teachers.  I also believe, though I have no research to prove it, that teachers who are taught this way may be more likely to use PowerPoint the same way in a classroom of their own.

     Now, the bright side of the story:  PowerPoint can serve as an amazing tool to spark conversations, deepen reflection and help preservice teachers to grow into amazing, thoughtful teachers.  If the information presented on PowerPoint slides is meaningful and thought-provoking, whether bulleted or not, and presented in an engaging, empowering way, preservice teachers will grow, will think, and will pass the torch of knowledge on.  Again, I believe preservice teachers will be more likely to enter the field and flourish, passing on this reflective style to students.

    A quick disclaimer; I am not saying that I believe the preservice teachers who were dealt the bad hand, with the world’s most boring presenter of PowerPoint presentations, will be a bad teacher, or vice versa; however, I do believe the students exposed to the mundane presentations of slides will be more likely to use the tool in their classroom that way.  That said, I’m anxious to know your thoughts about the good, the bad and the ugly of PowerPoint and its potential impact on preservice teachers and reflection.  What do you think?

     I’ll leave you with two thoughts to ponder, the first is Kjeldsen‘s view of PowerPoint, the second, I’m playing the devil’s advocate.  Where do you fit in?

“If time after time we squeeze complex ideas into a series of disparate slides, with fixed templates and fragmented bullet points, we simplify not only speech and content but also the way in which we perceive the content.  Indeed, we influence all our ways of thinking” (pp. 14-15).

If time after time we provide thought-provoking, meaningful ideas and issues presented in a series of related slides (yes, even sometimes bulleted), we amplify not only speech and content but also the way in which we perceive, think about, and reflect on the content.  Indeed, we influence ALL our ways of thinking.