LLED 449 Blog

Hey everybody. Well, I’m happy to share any of my literature units from the past 17 years… but I’ll settle for this one because it’s probably the most current in terms of emergent media/literacies. I spent some pro-d time with a Vancouver podcast company in order to pull together software, hardware, and storytelling strategies, which I’ll nutshell for you.

Storytelling: I have a graphic novel that explores podcasting that I love. It’s Out on the Wire, and it has our favourite podcasters as “characters” giving away all their storytelling secrets (e.g. Ira Glass from This American Life, etc). Super useful.

Here’s a couple favourite episodes (mostly from Snap Judgment) that I like to work through with students to unpack a variety of what works. We start out talking about what they hear… voices, sounds, music, and how it all works toward a theme. We talk about “signposting” which is where the music will stop right before a big idea… lots of ideas from Out on the Wire.

“The Spelling Bee” from Snap Judgment – this one is great because it’s short (5-6 minutes is about the length I ask them to shoot for). It’s also great content to explore perspectives–I’ve had students wildly disagree about whether the events described are a “true” experience of racism. Then we eventually come around to the need to validate the author’s experience as legitimately his own.

“Girl Scout Cookies” from Snap Judgment. This one is longer (16 minutes), but it’s so much fun. It’s great for exploring the idea of escalation and tension–how do we create these? How do we take a story and develop a narrative arc?

Every Immigrant’s Favorite Game from Snap Judgment (Play at 22-30 minutes) This one begins funny but takes a very, very serious turn. It’s fun because it’s delivered live, and it values the immigrant experience–a hilarious immigrant experience. It does mention abortion and teen pregnancy.

“Staph Retreat” from Radio Lab. This one is great for demonstrating that just about anything can be told as a story. It’s the “story” of the discovery of penicillin. The sound editing is awesome.

This CBC piece is nice for teaching narrative arc and tension–two things every podcast needs.

Inspiring article from English Journal on “Teaching Writing with Radio“.

And here are some student samples from my former school. These are grade 11 students.

In terms of student creation–I usually ask them to pitch me at least two ideas. Then we spend time scripting (with the knowledge that they can deviate from the script in their recording). I’ve found it’s very, very important to spend at least a day on voicing. Bringing in a theatre arts teacher is great. The voicing is the hardest part–students have a very hard time sounding natural without practice.

Hardware: the Zoom H2N is a fantastic device (it’s what CBC radio guys use when they do interviews on the street). It’s like a mixing board, mic, and mini-computer in one, with multiple folders for students content. It costs about $250 each from Long & McQuade, so this is where you get your school librarian/grants involved. Before then, kids can just use their phones. The trickier thing is finding quiet spaces in a school for recording…

Editing software: Audacity is a free download. Students can use their public library cards to access Lynda.com to learn how to use the software. I’ve assigned sections 1-4 of “Up and Running with Audacity with Garrit Chow” and it was useful. They can also just play around–it’s not hard to learn. Alternatively, if you have access to Macs, Garageband is perfect. Here’s my tutorial for editing audio with Garageband for students who haven’t used it before.

Sound layers: There’s a thousand ways to do this. It’s a good idea to work with your school librarian to ensure copyright is clear. Garageband has great loops that are useful for background music. I also send students to Incompetech, which is a searchable database of free music that can be searched by “feels”, tempo, genre, or length. Also, Soundbible is a great source for free sound effects.

And here’s a rubric/self-reflection I’ve developed to assess a 3-5 minute student podcast.

In September I’m trying something new. I’m working (as teacher librarian) with a grade 9 English teacher to have classes produce collective podcasts in small groups on a theme. We’re shooting for something along the lines of This American Life, where groups choose a theme, and each student produces a story. I think Amber’s idea about delivering a box of random stuff to groups and having them “find” the theme would be a PERFECT opening activity. Can’t wait to try that.

As student and as teacher of literature, I don’t have a problem with the principle of there being a canon.

I think canonization is less a matter of gatekeeping and more a matter of sedimentation – almost an inevitability, really. As time passes and more and more literature is produced, history passes judgement: the worthy continues downstream, read year after year for any number of reasons; the not-so-worthy settles to the bottom. There’s nothing wrong with this process, per-se – a culture can’t carry with it each and every text it ever produced, so it needs such a mechanism. Canonization comes unstuck, though, when the ‘river’ is artificially narrowed and when worthy ‘sediments’ are prevented from continuing downstream, both of which have happened in our history. This isn’t an indictment of canonization – it’s an indictment of us.

More than this, I think to teach is to pass authorship of Spaceship Earth’s story; a society’s story; a culture’s story from one generation to the next. Such a handover requires a) teaching re. the chapters we’ve written so far and b) learning re. the wisdom and skills we’ll need to keep writing new and as-yet-unimaginable chapters. Given its sheer depth and breadth, (a) requires two things: a measure of consensus and a measure of editorial anthologization. This is precisely the role a canon serves – a canon is a collectively-agreed-upon anthology designed to encapsulate our Sunday Best to facilitate transmission of collective identity via shared story. Yes, we’ve been rubbish editors. But again: this isn’t an indictment of canonization – it’s an indictment of us.

Hi folks:

Here is a sample of my Death Note graphic novel unit on Microsoft OneNote.

Note that this unit is not complete and that there are some links to be updated to conform to copyright.

here is a link to a published YA novel from my Toronto writer friend Jonathan Marshall Freeman called Teetering.  If you have a group that is interested in presenting it, Ordering and novel info, as well as an excerpt can be found at http://jmarshallfreeman.com/

I myself might either be doing the manga Barefoot Gen (with Stephanie)

Charles Coderre

During my practicum, I was asked to teach Indigenous literature to a class of Grade 8s in a Humanities class. I had read a fair number of contemporary Indigenous writers’ work and was initially excited to choose something that I had read and studied previously for my young students.  I was able to find a short story in the reader called “Context & Comedy” by Lee Maracle. Maracle is a contemporary Indigenous writer whose style and content fit well into my unit about oral texts as history, and I just generally was a fan of her work. Although my students were initially a bit cold about this text, they quickly related to it being a story about childhood embarrassments. The conversations we had around this text as a class were very illuminating, funny, and intimate considering the students’ age. This text became a springboard for students to write their own embarrassing story and to see how humour could be used as a means of “owning” an embarrassing story and removing the shame from the event. I really enjoyed exploring this text and the themes with my students. It was a happy accident that seemed to pay off and celebrate our shared vulnerabilities and insecurities.

I haven’t read much of the canon—Poe, Wordsworth, 1984, Animal Farm, Dickens, Fahrenheit 51—these names ring bells, but I have never read them. When scholars or fellow English-majors hear this, they often look at me with disbelieving eyes asking “how have you not read [insert novel written by straight white man here]!?” with an air of elitism. And the truth is that I have no desire to read most of them—much less teach most of them. I feel like this may be controversial and I don’t mean it to be. I’m just wondering if I’m alone in this mindset.

(I’m sure these is value to these texts, but I also think there is equal value in other, more diverse, and current texts)

The benefits of using text sets when teaching literature, particularly giving students the option of choosing their own texts and themes, really resonates with me. In grade 10, my English teacher took this approach in our literature circle unit, where we were able to choose our own books from the library to study (as our canon-studying friends in the other classes watched with envy). My practicum school is known for having the largest variety of texts in their book room among the schools in Richmond, including novels and graphic novels such as The Hunger Games, The Book of Negroes, Watchmen, American Born Chinese, The Help, The Kite Runner, and other counter-canon titles, which offers students autonomy in their literature studies.

During my practicum, I taught “The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen”, a non-traditional text that is slowly becoming more popular in many school districts. While my students enjoyed reading the novel, I had some parent push-back because it was an unfamiliar text that deals with bullying and school violence. Even though justifying the book was nerve-wracking, it was worth the effort because my students gained valuable skills and had critical discussions through the novel.

An activity that went really well during my practicum was a King Duncan Death Scene Rendition. I had students split into groups and re-enact King Duncan’s death in Macbeth with a contemporary twist. I knew the majority of my students in the class were also in Drama so I was hopeful. My students loved the activity! They had a blast watching each other kill the rightful king. I think this activity worked well because I tried to cater to my students’ interests and strengths.

After reading the article “Courageous Voices: Using Text Sets to Inspire Change,” I reflected on the importance of providing a text set for students that is at each student’s reading level. As a primary teacher I find it a challenge to find levelled resources to accommodate the wide range of readers in my grade 2 and 3 classrooms (ranges from barely identifying letters to reading past grade 5). I wonder if Secondary teachers face the same challenges.