Welcome! ENGL 552-81 Young Adult Literature - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Welcome!

ENGL 552-81Young Adult Literature

As others arrive, take a minute to introduce yourselves: where you teach, what classes you teach, what books you’ve read lately, and maybe what books you hope to read this semester. Feel free to look at (i.e., pick up and flip through) any of the books as well.Slide2

BOOK FLOOD!

Tonight: Speed-dating with books

Spend 30-60 seconds with a book, then either keep it (to read) or pass it to the person on your left. We’ll “date” for several minutes, or until everyone has a book or two. You may check out your book(s) by signing the check-out list.Slide3

Taking the library to the class vs Taking the class to the library

“Instead of always taking students to the library, it is often much more effective to bring the library to the students.”

Kelly Gallagher,

Readicide

, p 53Slide4

You may check out up to two books/week. Please take good care of these books, as some of them are my personal copies, and some are autographed. The book cart is available to offer you options. You are of course welcome to choose books from a library, a bookstore, or a friend.Slide5

What to do and why to do it

How to do it

Warnings

(to avoid messing it up)

Textbooks we’ll be using. (Copies are available for check-out.)Slide6

Section 59‑155‑130.    The Read to Succeed Office must guide and support districts and collaborate with university teacher training programs to increase reading proficiency through the following functions, including, but not limited to:

(1) providing

professional development to teachers, school principals, and other administrative staff on reading and writing instruction and reading assessment that informs instruction;

(2) providing professional development to teachers, school principals, and other administrative staff on reading and writing in content areas

;

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.10

Read

and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.

Read to SucceedSlide7

From

Reading Unbound, pp 7-8: Reading is certainly one of our most significant and complex cognitive acts, requiring the integration of many areas of the brain and of many separate capacities—vision, hearing, the ability to synthesize information, and much more.

R

eading is certainly necessary to navigate modern life, to function as an informed democratic citizen, to work in a knowledge economy. Using the Internet, multimodal and multimedia though it is, nonetheless requires significant reading. Being informed, especially about nuanced and complex issues, requires deep reading.

… Reading is also deeply psychological and can engage our emotions and our spirited impulses. … But even if you believe in the power of reading, you still have to recognize that all reading may not be equally powerful. Some forms of literacy may be more useful than others in allowing you to work and achieve success in the world. Some may more clearly mark you as culturally literate than others. Some may provide the means of developing your full human potential, while others may lead you in other less savory directions.

As a consequence, there’s an ongoing cultural debate abut which texts should be read and which ones should be avoided. The debate engages parents, other interested adults, policy makers, and of course, educators—from curriculum writers to classroom teachers. And even when there’s agreement about the benefits a certain kind of text might offer, there’s plenty of debate about how and when readers can best experience those benefits. Such debates can become quite intense. Teachers, parents, and cultural commentators from all political backgrounds often feel passionately about what our young people should read—both inside and outside of school.Slide8

From

Reading Unbound, pp 9-10: In her article “Reading Is Not Eating” (1986), Janice A.

Radway

argues that [those often dismissed as “junk” or “trash”] are comforting to their readers. This comfort, she contends, is not regarded as something of value. Instead the charge so often leveled at mass-produced literature is that it is not simply bad, nor even worthless, but that it is “capable of degrading, indeed of corrupting those who enjoy it.” This charge, in turn, “is based on the further assumption that similar and simple texts fail to engage readers in creative, productive response to thoughts and ideas that challenge or call their own into question.” The reading experience of such books is characterized “by its passivity, by its complacency, and by its ability to promote the illusion that all is well” (p.7).

Radway’s

own research in

Reading the Romance

(1988) demonstrates that such charges may be unfounded. She found that “some romance reading at least manages to help women address and even minimally transform the conditions of their daily existence” (p.8). In other words, readers are not passive, but active and often transformative in the ways they transact with texts and use them. Society has, she argues, “failed to detect the essential complexity that can characterize the interaction between people and mass-produced culture” (p. 9)—including, we would argue, popular books.Slide9

From

Reading Unbound, p 11: [W]e think that home and school should be places where readers are nurtured, supported, and assisted to create their own active reading lives, connected to their own life journeys. This is the only way in which students will become lifelong readers.

But what if those journeys don’t lead readers to the culture’s literary masterpieces? In many a department meeting we’ve heard something like the following: “But if they don’t read Shakespeare [or Chaucer of Melville or Hawthorne] in school, then they will never read him.” Our interpretation: “Because of the texts we choose and the ways we teach those texts, we’re likely to ruin reading for students so that they’ll never go to a Shakespeare play much less read one as an adult. That’s why they have to read it now.”

We question what being assigned ten or even a hundred well-chosen books throughout one’s schooling will do for students. First, there is the assumption that students are reading the books that they are assigned. We know from our own research that this is highly doubtful. … The takeaway: What were the kids learning? Not how to read. Not about the great themes of life and literature. Not about how texts work and can enliven and enrich us. They were basically learning how to cheat. This resonates with thinking about “opportunity to learn”. Kids learn exactly what they have the opportunity to learn. The problem is that often we think we are offering one opportunity and they are seizing, for their own reasons, on entirely different opportunities.

Further, even if a student made an honest attempt to read the hundred well-chosen books, that doesn’t mean he or she would enjoy, understand, or reflect upon them in any meaningful way. If you are not a reader with an independent reading life, then it’s tough going to experience and remember some of these very challenging books.Slide10

From

Readicide, pp 2-3:

Today, more than ever, valuable classroom time presents the best opportunity—often the only opportunity—to turn kids on to reading. Unfortunately, this isn’t occurring. Consider the following points take from

NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform

(2006), a publication from the National Council of Teachers of English:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that secondary school students are reading significantly below expected levels.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy finds that literacy scores of high school graduates dropped between 1992 and 2003.

The Alliance for Excellent Education points to 8.7 million secondary students—that is one in four—who are unable to read and comprehend the material in textbooks.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports a continuous and significant reading achievement gap between racial/ethnic/economic groups.

Three thousand students with limited literacy skills drop out of school every day in this country.

The 2005 ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading found that only about half the students tested were ready for college-level reading, and the 2005 scores were the lowest in the decade.

The American Institutes for Research reports that only 13 percent of American adults are capable of performing complex literacy tasks.Slide11

Acknowledging the Obvious:

What challenges (or “problems”) do you face with respect to getting students to read independently – or maybe with carving out time to allow

them to read independently – in your school?Slide12

From

Reading Unbound, p 12: If we are honest with ourselves as readers, we have to admit that we read a wide variety of texts for a wide variety of reasons. But at the core of it, we read because we take pleasure in doing so.

https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gokm9RUr4ME

Slide13

From

The Book Whisperer, p 1: I am not a reading researcher. I am not a reading policy expert. I do not have a Ph. D. What I am is a reading teacher, just like many of you. My source of credibility is that I am a teacher who inspires my students to read a lot and love reading long after they leave my class. I require my students to read forty books during their time in my sixth-grade classroom, and year after year, my students reach or surpass this reading goal. Not only do my students read an astounding number of books, they earn high scores on our state’s reading assessment, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). I have not had one student fail the state assessment in four years, and an average of 85 percent of my students scores in the 90

th

percentile., Texas’s commended range. I have taught students of all economic and academic backgrounds, from the children on non-English speaking immigrants who struggle with the English language to the children of college professors. The conditions I create in my classroom work for all of them.Slide14

https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ1C4B0YVM8&feature=youtu.be

Yes, it’s possible!Slide15

Course Goals:

*offer a research-based rationale for using more independent reading in the classroom.

*introduce

participants to the

variety

of young adult books available today, both fiction and

nonfiction

.

http://citadel-thompson-yalit-2015.wikispaces.com

/

http://faculty.citadel.edu/thompson/552

/

Slide16

Ways to choose/read books:

1. Teacher selects a book; everyone in the class reads it.

2. Small group members agree on a book; everyone in the group reads it.

3. Teacher selects (or small group agrees on) a topic; everyone in the class (or in the group) reads a book on that topic.

4. Teacher selects a genre or category; everyone in the class selects a book in that genre or category and reads it.

5. Students individually select and read books according to whatever criteria they please.Slide17

http://

vimeo.com/12589530

http://www.betweenshadesofgray.com

/

Slide18

Let’s take a short break, then reconvene upstairs in the computer lab to make sure everyone can get onto the class website and the class wiki.