July 13, 2010
Exponential Attrition and the Promise of Acceleration
Katie Hern and Myra Snell recently collaborated to create an article for the RP Group’s statewide newsletter Perspectives. The article argues that high rates of student attrition are structurally guaranteed in long developmental sequences and presents evidence from Chabot and Los Medanos colleges that one-semester, open-access courses are a promising way to increase student completion rates in college-level English and Math. The full article is linked above.
Acceleration, Basic Skills in Context, Literacy, Making Visible, Math, Multimedia, Reading, Using Institutional Research, Video Evidence, Writing |
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June 30, 2010
On April 15, 2010, the De Anza College Office of Instruction, Office of Diversity and ICCE, and Office of Staff and Organizational Development presented their annual conference devoted to student success. The event, “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” brought together both students and faculty and was a huge success. To facilitate an extension of the ideas generated that day, Tom deWit was invited to present on June 10, 2010, at a followup event he called “The Space In Between.” Tom arrived with his team of collaborators from the Faculty Inquiry Network who staged the space by placing numerous soccer flags all around the front of the room–a visual metaphor for the “labyrinth of attitudes.”
Labyrinth of Attitudes Activity
The opening activity invited student and faculty attendees to read and consider the following quote from James Baldwin:
“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person.” (The Fire Next Time p. 44).
After analyzing and discussing the quote in its own right, attendees were then asked to apply the quote to the arena of Education. To enrich that discussion, a short text-film meditation was also shown. On colored handout stickies, attendees then wrote down their responses to the question: What attitudes can fill up the space in between teacher and student or student and institution? The responses broke into two general categories: negative and positive attitudes. (The responses can be found here.)
The dialogue then deepened around a series of questions:
♥ What do you do as a learner or as a teacher to inspire a labyrinth of attitudes?
♥ How do we defy the inertia we work inside of?
♥ How do we engage and honor the labyrinth so that learning is a creative, effective and positive experience?
First Kiss with Your Discipline/ Learning:
These questions lead into a discussion of the role of Love in Education. Attendees wrote responses to a prompt that asked them about their “First Kiss”–that is, the first time they recall really loving learning. (The insightful and moving responses can be linked to here.) The ensuing discussion served as an effective springboard into the second half of the day.
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Bringing Love into The Classroom/ Learning Assignment
For the second half of the day, attendees first were shown an excerpt from Door Number One, a film made by students from Chabot College. The excerpt delves into the emotional and affective dimension that students bring with them when they first arrive at college and enter the “labyrinth.”
Tom then lead the attendees through a Live-Learning exercise that explored the following questions. Attendees worked in groups, sharing ideas and experiences; they then collaborated to create written responses. The responses are linked here.
Prompts for Live Learning Assignment
♥ What do you need to do to bring your discipline, learning into the classroom so that it can be fallen in love with?
♥ How will you constructively leverage the labyrinth, with some lovin’?
♥ What are the conditions for love to flourish?
♥ This is about claiming your own learning; everything we will discuss is already in you and we are going to honor you by creating a space to bring it out…
Prompt Supplements
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous foam rubber that we have substituted for it. (43).♥
“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth” (95).♥
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Basic Skills in Context, Equity, Fear, Identity, Literacy, Metacognition, Student Confidence |
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May 12, 2010
You are welcome to view the first Think Aloud video from our East Los Angeles College FIN team. The link to the videos appears as an url at the bottom of this post. First, we explain our project and the background to this video.
At East Los Angeles College, our Reading Apprenticeship FIG is a re-conception of our original project. This year, rather than examine a lower-level reading course, we are now looking at how Reading Apprenticeship methods can inform us and allow us to help students as they tackle reading in a wide array of disciplines. The areas of our FIG members include Literature, Basic Skills composition, Basic Skills Reading, Child Development, Politics, Art and Chemistry. We kicked off with a taping of think-alouds of two students from an ART103 course. Kevin teaches this course at a sister community college, although his full-time job is with East as our Web 2.0 facilitator. Two key advantages to Kevin being the first of our group to tape a think-aloud: 1) his ease and enthusiasm for technology and 2) no other FIG members hold expertise in his content area. Two key disadvantages: 1) Kevin, unlike other FIG members, is not trained yet in Reading Apprenticeship, and 2) Kevin’s students, prior to the evening of the videotaping, had not practiced metacognitive reading techniques.
As you watch the tape, you will see that Student A does little previewing. She pretty much sticks to silent, rapid, reading, and then reacting to specific pieces of text. Katie Hern, upon viewing this tape, noticed neither student verbalized misunderstandings. In the case of Student A, however, Kevin was pleased to see that she specifically paused at the parts of the text he had stressed in that night’s lecture.
At this point, she may have decided to concentrate on the areas of understanding, and delay looking at areas of misunderstanding until a future re-reading. Student B appears to do little more than read and then paraphrase. However, Kevin reports that Student B displayed a more reflective process during the practice session that night, and that his nervousness about the camera apparently flawed his true abilities. Katie is likely correct that the student’s nervousness reflects his need “not to appear stupid.”
Our group is still considering how much prior preparation to provide the students for Think Aloud and how we might assure that students use an array of techniques as they use Think Aloud. Katie has given us some suggestions, which we will continue to consider as we refine our Read Aloud procedure.
We have posted the Art text pages, this video, and many resources related to our FIG Reading Apprenticeship exploration on our group facebook page. If you are interested in joining our facebook group to view our postings, please send search on facebook for the “ELAC RA FIG ” group and send a request to join, or email me, Linda Whitney, at whitnel@elac.edu
To view the video, cut and paste this URL into your browser: http://www.kevinhuotari.com/elac_ra_fig/reading_videos.html
Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIG), Learning to Learn, Literacy, Metacognition, Reading, Revised Inquiry Plans, Think Alouds |
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May 4, 2010
Click above to view the Keynote Presentation by the Faculty Inquiry Network
Click above to see FIN CTE Coach, Lin Marelick’s (in collaboration with Maryanne Galindo from LATTC) presentation.
Click above to view FIN Coach and Team Leader, Jan Connal’s presentation (in collaboration with Cerritos team member, Lydia Alvarez).
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April 20, 2010
Hello and welcome to the home of Intersecting Literacies, a working conference held at San Diego Mesa College April 16th 2010. Here you will find materials passed out to participants as well as the responses and “queens” we collected. Stay tuned!
Click here for the Intersecting Literacies Multi-Modal Packet
Click above to see the Post its we compiled at Mesa, April 16th
Click the fun colored paper to read the “Queens” produced by the participants of Intersecting Literacies.
Click above to go back to the Flyer and Intersecting Literacies’ Homepage
Equity, Integrative Learning, Literacy, Making Visible, Metacognition, Multimedia, Reading, Student Confidence, Student Voice, Technology, Video Evidence, Writing |
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March 16, 2010
Recommended by our very own Inquiry coach and internal evaluator, Jan Connal.
About Many Eyes
Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.
All of us in CUE‘s Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.
We all deal with data that we’d like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.
Click the Logo
Examples of Representations:
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