If I may, I have a Flipboard Magazine that I try to curate pieces about writing, teaching, learning and technology -- and how digital writing is pushing the boundaries of composition.

Along the Edges of Digital Writing

And not all professional development has caught up -- this is the value of programs like EdCamp (where teachers lead the way) and the National Writing Project (my professional home as a teacher for the way ideas can bubble up from the classroom, and the 'teachers teaching teacher' is professional practice).

I recommended this book to many people for this reason -- the focus was on the writing and the learning and development of the writer, not the technology itself. We too often get lost in the new and cool tech, and lose sight of the learning (and the reality that many of the tools now here will be gone, so adapting to technology platforms and environments is key.)

In this context, helping students acquire skills is a school's achievement.

In public education we feel this pressure to say that _ results in higher achievement, as if connecting school to the world in which students live isn't the goal, but a means to a measured end. It seems like connecting school to the world in which students live creates a learning network we can cultivate as opposed to looking at student work as a deliverable that we want to weigh and measure. If we have an asset-focused view of students, connecting school to their lives will serve them and their talents better.

I would argue a well-designed project does a better job of covering the standards.It definitely provides a more #authentic, #real-world environment.

My wife just wrote about this for our local newspaper (as part of a partnership between our writing project and the local paper to raise teacher voices in public).

Just noting this important insight ...

The beauty of annotation is that we can embed videos right here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-lUrM-rmIE

Did teacher alert kids? Or were kids alert enough now to be following the news? Wondering about places where teachers intervene and where students take charge ....

From a teaching perspective, this pivot point -- the question posed after the discussion -- is most important, and knowing when that moment is and what to ask is critical (and takes time and mistakes, perhaps)

I interviewed Steve about his book at Middleweb

Read When Student Inquiry Becomes Student Action

If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:

• Getting started with Hypothesis
• Hypothesis education resources
• KQED's Digital Annotation with Hypothesis course, a great step-by-step primer
• How to join an annotation conversation with crowded margins
• Information about the Marginal Syllabus and our 2017-18 Syllabus hosted by the National Writing Project

Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus and May’s conversation! This is the eighth and final text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal—or contrary—to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open platform for web annotation.

Our thanks to partner author and writing project director Steven Zemelman, as well as his publisher Heinemann, for contributing this text from From Inquiry to Action: Civic Engagement with Project-Based Learning in All Content Areas to the 2017-18 Writing Our Civic Futures project.

Also join Steve and educators Mauricio Pineda, Elizabeth Robbins, and Heather Van Benthuysen and the co-founders of Marginal Syllabus, Remi Kalir and Joe Dillon, for a related discussion of the text and thoughts on annotation. The broadcast will be available at Educator Innovator on May 8.

We also want to celebrate the fact that Steve has been a regular contributor and participant in the 2017-2018 Writing Our Civic Futures. Thank you Steve!

Here's the feed with youth writing about Black Lives Matter on YVL.

I appreciate the notion that enlightened self-interest on the part of learners and a community could lead to meaningful school reform. It can also lead to the creation of pathways in our current systems.

This is a fascinating notion that I had never considered about #connectedlearning. Illich presents funding for school and 3rd spaces as mutually incompatible at least which I don't know if I buy.

Good school, rich school; Bad school, poor school via the Atlantic

Connecticut is not the first state to wrestle with the conundrum caused by relying heavily on local property taxes to fund schools; since the 1970s, nearly every state has had litigation over equitable education, according to Michael Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University. Indeed, the CCJEF lawsuit, first filed in 2005, is the state’s second major lawsuit on equity. The first, in 1977, resulted in the state being required to redistribute some funds among districts, though the plaintiffs in the CCJEF case argue the state has abandoned that system, called Educational Cost Sharing.

This reminds me of the kind of matchmaking that happens in #ds106's assignment bank and the #clmooc make bank.

I'd be curious to know how the Youth Voices kids do as they go to college and beyond public school. Have they used those skills for activism, for further connections, for jobs? Another research project for another time ...

Can we add privacy violations and data scraping to the list of why young people might be wary?

And more authentic, too, I suspect.

Now at youthvoices.live

This is fascinating to me because it speaks to the need for implementation research around projects like the YouthVoices.live work referenced in this article.

Important to note the date of this article for a few reasons: 1 How have things changed since the 2016 presidential election?

2 Does this article express a sense of urgency? Should it?

Youth Voices https://www.youthvoices.live/

And testing. Lots and lots of testing. All year. That's too often how computer labs are utilized in many struggling districts -- to gather achievement data instead of teaching skills for communication. This was true years ago and still rings true today in too many schools.

13 years ago. Not sure this holds up.

This is not a surprising finding, and yet, it's disheartening. I wonder if this is still true, two years later -- after the election that has divided the US. And do we want more withdrawal (giving us time to think and ponder our reaction to something) or less (engaging, but maybe engaging with diatribe)? This is all the heart of discussions about how we engage in discussions. I'm not sure of the answer ...

Including the margins ...

I'm looking at the date of this article --June 2016 -- and thinking, this term here seems almost quaint now, doesn't it? All of this has now been ramped to the extreme -- the flow of communication, good and ill -- has taken over our ability to curate and make sense of things.

Our thanks to partner author Erica Hodgin for contributing this important text to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus! Erica and guest reader Paul Oh joined Marginal Syllabus co-founders Joe Dillon and Remi Kalir for a CLTV webinar discussion about this text - it will air "live" on Tuesday, April 3rd at 4p PT.

If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:

• Getting started with Hypothesis
• Hypothesis education resources
• KQED's Digital Annotation with Hypothesis course, a great step-by-step primer
• How to join an annotation conversation with crowded margins
• Information about the Marginal Syllabus and our 2017-18 Syllabus hosted by the National Writing Project

Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus and April's conversation! This is the seventh text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal—or contrary—to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open technology for web annotation.

These sociopolitical environments are ever shifting, also. It seems as though students need to know how to engage publicly as well as how to evaluate the risks of doing so. What are ways we can ask learners to practice with these kinds of decisions?

The #BlackLivesMatter movement leverages social media in such a way that its digital footprint can be read. Would-be activists can make meaning of and draw inspiration from the public networked writing of the movement leaders and of those whose voices emerge as powerful in any given moment.

Here's the hypothesis re: directional motivation.

YES! It's time for white folks to dismantle white supremacy.

I love the image of classrooms as spaces for "triage, self-care, healing, and social transformation." This also means that those of us who are white teachers need to also do our work to make sure we aren't enacting our own white privelege (and thus anti-blackness) in our own practices.

I keep reading this and thinking about how differently the Parkland activists have been received as opposed to BLM activitists. It has also been heartening to see the way they have combined movements in response to critical readings (rooted in the lens presented here) of their movments: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/parkland-race-and-the-gun-violence-that-goes-overlooked

This is something that folks have critiqed in the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag and ideas: both in keeping with the strategy of protraying white criminals as mentally ill and also the idea that victims themselves are responsible for the violence they experience. https://www.salon.com/2018/03/25/the-sexist-racist-implications-of-the-walk-up-not-out-movement_partner/

I'm just noticing now this mention that it was a math class where this happened. I'm not sure what to make if it really, and I don't want to over-make ... but/and I can't help but wonder about the connection.

My thinking about math education and the relationship to oppression/liberation is prompted by looking recently at the resources of the Youth People's Project (such as the Flagway Game) started by Bob Moses vis a vis the Algebra Project.

http://www.typp.org/

Mission YPP uses Math Literacy Work to develop the abilities of elementary through high school students to succeed in school and in life, and in doing so involves them in efforts to eliminate institutional obstacles to their success.

Vision YPP envisions a day when every young person — regardless of ethnicity, gender, or class — has access to a high quality education and the skills, attributes, and community support s/he needs to successfully meet the challenges of their generation.

and anti-everything-but-white-ness

Could this/does this open doors for a new hybrid research paradigm (or if it exists, please share)? I see practical parallels elements you might find in a Design Science) or similar approach.

(pictured here) I pulled this photo from her profile at Ohio State here.

(Pictured here) I pulled his photo from his profile at Cal Berkeley here.

We've had a number of readers respond to this text but no notes yet about these three tangible ways traditional media narratives about Black people cause harm. To annotate this with an anti-racist focus, educators could surface examples of how they see the impacts of these with students in varied contexts.

The first line reminds me of the authors' description of the background of this piece. https://youtu.be/N5NVySOiu1U

The shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, OK. always stands out to me as a particularly evil example, in part because of the media that arose from it. There is audio taken from a police helicopter before Crutcher was shot in which a man with a southern drawl describes Crutcher as a "bad dude." At that point in the video all the police officer who was mic'ed up could see was that Crutcher was tall and black. Watching from my own chair in Denver, I was moved to blog the following:

And the cover up is such a familiar narrative that we can hear this helicopter pilot starting the cover up story even before Terence Crutcher was shot. From his arial vantage point, a white man with a badge describes Crutcher, who had his hands in the air, as a "bad dude" who is probably "on something." The officer who shot Crutcher is being described by some in the Tulsa police and by her attorney as a "drug recognition expert." Instead of calling this murder the way we can all see it, this murder is being quickly reframed as the shooting of a "bad dude" by a "drug recognition expert."

Even as I angrily blogged, I didn't make the important connection that these authors do, the connection to the way Black students will feel in the weeks after a shooting as their community seeks justice and school marches on. These authors ask "What's next for the students?" This morning I found an article about Black student responses in a Tulsa school to the same shooting. I find them haunting:

“Why did they have to kill him? Why were they afraid of him? Why does (Crutcher’s daughter) have to live life without a father? What will she do at father-daughter dances? Who will walk her down the aisle? Why did no one help him after he was shot? Hasn’t this happened before? Can we write her cards? Can we protest?” Lee wrote. “One girl closes our group by sharing: ‘I wish white people could give us a chance. We can all come together and get along. We can all be united.’ 

It is important to note that the healing referenced in the title isn't just for Black people. Our culture needs healing when these murders happen and our media channels tell a story that indicts everyone in the passive audience.

This is a powerful expression of the way white supremacy relies on the degradation of Black people. The examples that follow in the piece are plucked directly from huge media channels that reach a broad audience. I'm so thankful for the authors for sharing this type of work in a less than "mainstream" channel of another sort- the Journal of English Education.

I highlighted this callout text three time before I tried to comment here. pause I don't want to be a pedagogue. I am not a healer. I don't even know how to heal others. Most healers will tell you that mostly they just facilitate self-healing. Is this a possible healing? pause I haven't read all of this yet, but I am not sure I want the responsibility of 'transformative tools' that get applied to others. Maybe we can open up a space for all students to choose tools of transformation that are apt for them.

Here's a link tot the tweet referenced in case folks want to retweet it or follow Mark Lamont Hill. https://twitter.com/marclamonthill/status/658766053204324352

This is one of the first texts my students and I read in English class. I see its placement here as powerful in this list of references. I know the authors developed this list intentionally to send a message about what texts count in Critical Media Literacy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

A game to play as you begin this annotation or one to end with after you have done with it: an empathy map.

Here is another set of directions.

Their call to action ...

Heal and Transform. Important and powerful.

Trying to learn more: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/the-truth-about-black-twitter/390120/

I'm thinking of how Mueller's team accuses Russian operatives of using social media to stoke divisions in our country right along these lines -- the race divisions were already there but the operatives knew how magnifying these divisions on Facebook and Twitter through groups and fake protests and false news stories would further divide us. This does not let us off the hook. It does show the power of social media on many people's lives, however.

Notice the authors here naming who they are in relation to this work.

Totally agree. The gangster narrative was an easy fit for the news media, and became a shallow tale of the victim, not the bigger story of the boy.

Thinking of Parkland. Not sure if these general descriptions here hold true for that high school killer, who has regularly been described in media accounts as troubled, deranged, psychotic, sick, etc. Is the narrative changing?

Interesting that Trump and others on the Far Right are also attacking the Mainstream Media. Here, we have the attack from the Left. I'm not here to defend Media itself, as it can be biased and it can make mistakes, but as a former journalist, I wonder about the attacks on the center from the sides. And CNN fired Harry Houck for some of the very reasons this article addresses. https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/02/23/harry-houck-who-used-cnn-position-push-racist-tropes-and-defend-police-brutality-out-network/219491 I guess my concern is that the broad brush of Mainstream Media is not all that helpful to me in my understanding. Reading on ...

James Baldwin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69pi63RgeJ4

Our thanks to partner authors Drs. April Baker-Bell, Raven Jones Stanbrough, and Sakeena Everett for contributing this important text to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus. A conversation with our partner authors will air "live" on Tuesday, March 6th at 4 pm PT/7p ET - watch it here, it's a really amazing conversation.

If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:

• Getting started with Hypothesis
• Hypothesis education resources
• KQED's Digital Annotation with Hypothesis course, a great step-by-step primer
• How to join an annotation conversation with crowded margins
• Information about the Marginal Syllabus and our 2017-18 Syllabus hosted by the National Writing Project

Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus and the March conversation! This is the sixth text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal - or contrary - to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open platform for web annotation.

This is a thread that runs through Pedagogy of the Oppressed and much of the Youth Action Research work that fascinates me.

How can teachers help develop agency in students like Moussa while also showing them that there are paths to a non-traditional but manageable post-secondary education? This question can inform text selection in humanities classes and broader pedagogy design.

This was a frustration of mine watching the new PBS documentary American Creed. There is a scene (19:00-23:00) in which a principal in a Tulsa elementary school talks about how her Native American students can grow up to be whatever they want at the same time she explains how many of the schools' families are trapped in a cycle of poverty, drug abuse, and incarceration. How long will that message ring true for these students given their surroundings? The principal, a Native American woman herself, is "living her American dream," in large part because her family owned land and struck oil.

Here's a question that stems from my own work with students and research: How might playful approaches to the teaching of argument foster this type of motivation? Or, how might a Credible Hulk badge and playlist to support the development of this type of motivation?

This issue has become branded by the most recent presidential election but I think it is important to see that "fake news" is not a recent, or Russian invention.

Evaluation of evidence is something we can practice with and model for students as we work through reading and writing processes.

Perhaps we already knew this ... but the study here confirms that need for expansion of critical media studies in all classrooms ...

Balance ...

Fascinating the way bias ties into the reading process.

What are the implications of this on trust in our schools?

Can't help but be immediately skeptical of statistical analyses tied to emotionally-fueled research.

I often look to the open course, Calling Bullshit (Univ. of Washington) as a starting point.

Find a supporting conversation on Educator Innovator's Connected Learning TV, where Joseph Kahne talks in depth about some of these findings and implications for educators: https://educatorinnovator.org/webinars/educating-for-democracy-in-a-partisan-age/

Directional motivation is a key concept. I think we all have a little bit of it in us (similar to "confirmation bias), especially when thinking about politics. Making students aware of this is an important step – as is being aware of it in my own thinking.

Getting students to take on an accuracy motivation stance is the goal. Those kinds of thinking routines have to take place often and over time if they're going to stick though

I like that the focus here is not just on skills but on the development of a commitment to -- which is related to expectations and practice.

Thinking about the implications of this ... going back to read danah boyd: https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention-economy-9fa1daca7a37

Again, not inevitable. Designed.

Seems important to highlight!

This might as well be at the heart of the Russian Interference Doctrine for the United States Election ... pay for information push on Facebook, and understand that users will freely distribute misinformation to their friends and family, who will then push the misinformation further and further ...

Yep. We want to believe what we already know.

Of course, that seems a lifetime ago. Seven years in the social media might as well be a few generations.

https://ypp.dmlcentral.net/projects/youth-participatory-politics-survey-project

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan

So, thank you Facebook and Twitter and YouTube for doing your part ...

See: 'Fiction is Outperforming Reality': How YouTube's Algorithm Distorts Truth via The Guardian on the role of algorithms ...

This is the message we all need to keep shouting, loud and clear and with consistency. And we need to it together, teachers and librarians (media specialists) and technology integrationists and parents.

Our thanks to partner authors Joe Kahne and Ben Bowyer for contributing this important text to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus! Joe also joined a number of educators for a Connected Learning TV webinar that will air on February 6th at 4p PT. You can watch it here.

If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:

• Getting started with Hypothesis
• Hypothesis education resources
• KQED's Digital Annotation with Hypothesis course, a great step-by-step primer
• How to join an annotation conversation with crowded margins
• Information about the Marginal Syllabus and our 2017-18 Syllabus hosted by the National Writing Project

Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus and February’s conversation! This is the fifth text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal—or contrary—to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open platform for web annotation.

Amazing that the NRA still has such influence despite their tone deaf responses to school shootings. It isn't surprising to me that the gun debate still persists, but the staying power of the NRA as an organization is shocking.

Here are some facts that the Washington Post might have included: Two black men who are social icons and community leaders commented on a presidency marked by lies, and the stupidity of a president who mistakenly believed Frederick Douglass is still alive. The response of a conservative journalist was to question their intelligence and belittle their work by painting the entrepreneurs as dumb physical laborers.

As a teacher, I never really know exactly what is happening on at home for my students. Some do a great job at hiding their struggles while others do not. We all have our own struggles to go through in life. Students should feel good when they are in school. They need to see teachers genuinely care and want to help them succeed.

Learning from my students is one of the things that I look forward to the most when teaching. They inspire me constantly to learn more and look at things from a different perspective. They remind me to question what I read and what I am told.

So much of teaching is focused on test scores today. As a math teacher, I find that not only students but teachers are more worried about test results than what learning is actually taking place. Taking a test is not an easy task for all students. There needs to be a better way to indicate learning than simply taking tests all of the time.

I find this to be related to what I have been learning through STEM lessons. Much of the push requires students to learn through their own experimenting and hands on activities. It is much more student centered than teacher centered. Students are able to find solutions and defend their work rather than simply follow steps to produce results.

Students like many adults today need to find a reason to do something. Learning does not happen fully if a person does not see the value in what they are learning. There has to be a motive.

I find this more of a triangle in today's education system. It is not only teacher and pupil or teacher and child, but rather all three in constant communication and contact. It truly is a team effort when it comes to learning.

You can write about this line.

(One possible response frame: The purpose of democracy is to __.)

You can write about this line.

(One possible response frame: As I worked through _ with my students, I realized for the first time in my own life _.)

You can write about these lines.

(One possible response frame: If you had peeked in on us, what would you have seen? By and large all we were doing was __.)

Do your own social reading of the Declaration here.

Note: this text does include a period after “pursuit of happiness,” a point Allen examines in depth and argues changes the meaning of the document in a profound way (for a brief explanation, see Allen’s Washington Post op-ed on this subject). You might want to keep this point in mind as you read, sharing your own opinions on what the punctuation lends to Declaration’s overall translation.

Crazy, contemporary word choice.

This is a call to action for cult of pedagogy folks like me. As a teacher of English, I'm inspired by the notion that this foundational text needs new reading because the readings to date have a shortcoming, and because our citizens have a real-life need to understand.

Not a "best practice," not something scalable for the purposes of spreadsheet data, the learner's growth is a mystery that only the learner can help us solve. If we try to quantify the learning we talk about learning in the language of accountants and auditors. When we avoid the temptation to oversimplify assessment and instead get curious about what changes readers and writers, the job of teaching gives rise to infinite inquiry possibilities.

The risk factors her night students endure are assets that help them make meaning of the text better than her more privileged day students. Asset focused teaching.

This definition of autonomy is an important one for education leaders to think about for so many reasons. It reminds me of last month's reading authored by Linda Christensen, where we read about how teachers actually have more space than we occupy. Some teachers see autonomy where others feel confined.

How often has domination (or downright genocide) accompanied a "declaration of independence?" Very much depends on the subtext, so the skepticism, unfortunately, seems historically justified. If only we could mean well AND do right.

To be vulnerable within this power-dynamic is perhaps the ultimate display of truly teaching. The skill is to to so while gaining, not losing, respect and admiration (I'm not there).

I'd love to know more about her insight here ... I suspect she refers to her "inheritance" of ideals from the Founding Fathers.

Well, the ideas of equality but perhaps not the reality of equality, right? Words are all good, but it is only when those in power use those words to create equity and access and openness that it means anything. See above: power corrupts.

This is the beauty of the perfect text -- it crosses all sorts of boundaries and opens the floor for all sorts of discussion ...

Yeah .. this is irreverent ... a diversion ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcoVWSpJFG4

She won't say it, but I'll say it: Maybe it was your teaching, your compassion, your guidance, your listening, your small points of inflection and reflection. Maybe, likely, it was you, Danielle.

This deserves a soundtrack ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u37lgz7b3lQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H51Omsr8gy4

SparkNOTES: examination of the quote from the piece ...

People such as this, the speaker says, inherit “heaven’s graces” and protect the riches of nature from expenditure. They are “the lords and owners of their faces,” completely in control of themselves, and others can only hope to steward a part of their “excellence.”

This back and forth -- a duet of stories -- is already an intriguing frame to look at how our classrooms can be in sync with others, and not. I'm noticing the importance of life experience, perhaps, more than age of students. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it is both, and neither.

We learn

by naming worlds

by navigating the interior

and dancing along the longitude lines

of faint sparks of

what we don't quite yet know

but sense.

(a little line lifting poetry for the annotation)

My first read through of this paragraph I switched citizens for students. And I loved that read through too

If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:

• Getting started with Hypothesis
• Hypothesis education resources
• KQED's Digital Annotation with Hypothesis course, a great step-by-step primer
• How to join an annotation conversation with crowded margins
• Information about the Marginal Syllabus and our 2017-18 Syllabus hosted by the National Writing Project

Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus and January’s conversation! This is the fourth text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal—or contrary—to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open platform for web annotation.

Chapter 1 from Our Declaration: A reading of the Declaration of Independence in defense of equality by Danielle Allen. Published by WW Norton & Company, 2014. Used with permission.

We are thrilled to feature this first chapter of Our Declaration in this month's Writing Our Civic Futures annotation. Here we dive into Allen's teaching as well as the very nature of equality as laid forth by the founding fathers and illuminated by her students.

We also invite you to, like Allen and her students, to engage in a "slow reading," via social annotation, of the Declaration of Independence.

In January 2018, The National Writing Project, Educator Innovator and Marginal Syllabus invite you to annotate the Declaration of Independence, along with Danielle Allen’s chapter, "Night Teaching," from Our Declaration (re-published with permission). In her book, Allen reflects on the purposes of democracy after a close reading of The Declaration with her night class students, who bring their own experiences to the text. If you don't catch the annotation this month, her chapter will remain on the Educator Innovator blog, so you can join the convo at any time.

Hear Danielle Allen discuss the problem with this version of the Declaration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUTyxNb3bEM

According to Danielle Allen, this period is NOT original. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-declaration-of-independence-punctuated-with-confusion/2015/06/12/8a05bd14-106b-11e5-a0dc-2b6f404ff5cf_story.html?utm_term=.4d2c4567fe0c

Here is the original:

"The manuscripts written out by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; the version voted on by Congress, as attested to in the official minutes recorded by Charles Thomson; and the official poster printed up by John Dunlap at Congress’s request, on July 4 and 5, 1776, record a very long second sentence, reading as follows:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

I also keyed in on this little teaching suggestion here: to invite students to imagine themselves in another's shoes when this particular text is so problematic. How are teachers scaffolding discussions of the ways this text reinforces some pretty stereotypical and racist narratives? How do we find space to make room for counternarratives when the cannon stands so firmly uncontested in our classroom spaces? Just something I'm thinking about these days...

This reminds me of the first reading we did about youth activists: our students become activists when they are empowered to tell their own story, rather that the story of their "disadvantage." There is danger, as we know, in a single story. The danger of a single story: TED TALK

This is an incredible way to describe the opposite of a deficit stance towards students. Beauty unleashed is what I want for all our students.

Thanks to dogtrax (Kevin Hodgson) for both his blog post inviting educators-as-annotators to create "a multimedia collage of thoughts and connections," as well as his annotations in these margins that blend hand-written with digital marginalia (here's one example), I'll share another from my reading:

I'm inspired by Linda's emphasis on teaching as a sustained argument against inequality. In doing such work (for it is work, and more on that later), what - and who - offers sustenance so as to sustain such argumentation? How is such work sustained, particularly over time? And what is the role of networks in sustaining arguments against inequality? I also appreciate Linda's use of the word "work," for teaching is a labor - in this case, literacy education is a means of laboring for equality and justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uduhUhcQQhU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eGgkIyiB78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDWZkXjDYsc

The relevance of this kind of curricular planning appeals to me. I was reminded of how important Linda's work is when I saw a news story in my own community about a company's insensitivity about the issue of gentrification and how it led to civic action on social media, as well as some genuine civic unrest in Denver. The New York Times saw fit to report it.

It always stands out to me when teachers frame reading in ways that apply to understanding the world. This kind of framing makes everyone a reader, and highlights how reading strategies are thinking strategies.

If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:

• Getting started with Hypothesis
• Hypothesis education resources
• KQED's Digital Annotation with Hypothesis course, a great step-by-step primer
• How to join an annotation conversation with crowded margins
• Information about the Marginal Syllabus and our 2017-18 Syllabus hosted by the National Writing Project

Our thanks to partner author Linda Christensen for contributing this important text to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus! Linda will be featured alongside Andrea Zellner (Literacy Consultant for Oakland Schools and Teacher Consultant, Red Cedar Writing Project), Kevin Hodgson (6th grade teacher in Southampton, Massachusetts and Outreach Co-director at Western Massachusetts Writing Project), and Marginal Syllabus organizers Joe Dillon and Remi Kalir in a Connected Learning TV webinar scheduled to air on Tuesday, December 5th. This annotation will be updated to include that webinar video.

Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus and December's conversation! This is the third text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal—or contrary—to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open platform for web annotation.

I mentioned at the end of the video with Linda that this metaphor of the collective story now extends beyond her text, as we are writing (with her ) in the margins. We are creating our own collective text with her students' text as the inspiration. This one of the many powerful aspects of digital annotations. We each add another branch to the story tree.

When we focus on test scores, what are the things that go out of focus for us?

I am reminded of the blog post I read of Dana Huff, who reflected on her realization of lack of texts around LGBT issues, and her struggle to find that right balance.

Read Dana's piece: http://www.huffenglish.com/slice-of-life-writing-a-rationale/

In a comment back to my comment to her, Dana wrote:

... there are circumstances that have arisen in my community that have given me pause and shocked me out of my complacency.

This is what connected her text to this text ....

The fact that Linda noticed this, and then used this for her reflective act of change, says a lot. Perhaps too many of us see this kind of shut-down, and blame the students, not ourselves.

highlighting to hold onto these 3 lens

Important. Schools are included in this.

highlighting this call to action.

I like this, not just participating but interrogating. In CLMOOC research we found that just being open isn't enough and have looked at some language from participatory design work around "infrastructuring" that gets more to this focus on being active agents and not just participants.

What are some ways that this conversation is invited in schools? Any examples anyone here has to share?

And media. See http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EE/0492-jan2017/EE0492Stories.pdf

Highlighting.

Highlighting the ideological aspect and the impact of that in excluding and narrowing our vision of what it means to be a citizen.

I understand the value of mobilization and awareness, but I also understand the critiques of "clicktivism" or "slactivism." I think the better, less judgmental term is "hashtag activism," as used by Bonilla and Rosa 2015, #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnogrpahy, and the racial politics of social media in the United States (not sure if this link is behind a paywall or not). But then again, a former student of mine who this time last year was a viral photo and BLM activist is now a Charlotte City Council Member, having received the second-highest number of votes for an at-large seat this past Tuesday. How do we understand the continuum between hashtag and 'real' activism?

I've taught both the Boellstorff and Nardi ethnographies in my digital anthropology class (http://digital.anthro-seminars.net/), and I'm very conscious of the ephemerality of cyberspace (itself a term that is less commonly used nowadays). This semester, while we didn't read the whole books, they read articles by Boellstorff - I had to explain what Second Life was, show them the trailer of Life 2.0, and it still seemed to the students like a far-off, historical way of living, as exotic as the Amish.

So important the way these authors challenge contemporary "best practices." This connects back to another piece co-authored by Antero Garcia featured in last year's #marginalsyllabus which pointed out the way notions of best practice are problematic. Here's an annotation about from that text.

I don't want to speak too soon, but this concerns me. I'm all for imagining new kinds of civic participation or "innovation," but at some point there needs to be a connection to the established means of engagement and action, right? If everyone is just Tweeting and note marching or Tweeting and not voting, then we have a kind of virtual movement.

And social media platforms. Check out Safiya Noble's work on "Algorithms of Oppression."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRVZozEEWlE

I love the phrasing of this question. It perfectly captures what @dogrtrax calls the messiness of it all above.

For all the frequent grumbles about the passivity of most forms of Twitter activism, this was a moment in which the form fit perfectly with the message: The goal of #MeToo, as Milano’s friend told her, was simply to give people a sense of “the magnitude of the problem.”

excerpted from The Movement of #MeToo by Sophie Gilbert

It seems important to me that educators actively value "little p" politics. Youth who haven't engaged in traditionally valued forms of civic participation bring background from spaces like Minecraft servers, where they encounter things like:

• user polling
• procedures for reporting misuse
• procedures for appealing server bans My children play on the hypixel.net server, a rule bound online space that serves tens of thousands of players at a time.

Yes for amplification ...

I wish there were even more examples that demonstrated the power of hashtags as a gathering point for action beyond a tweet. But I suspect there are -- beyond my own small field of vision, right? I hope so.

Here is a key element ... how school do or do not provide these kinds of learning opportunities for our students ... perhaps this is why so many after-school programs are funded by foundations. Untethering action from traditional settings is difficult work, but reaching all students with this potential is important (not just those in after-school programming) -- sorry, that was a little aside

A shift ...

Nicely defined ...

Yes, good to acknowledge the messiness of all of this.

This is what we hope. And have hoped. All the news about how tech/social media have systematically turned a blind eye on abuse in their own networks, in order to pave the way to the bank with barrels of cash in return for our data and privacy, makes me dubious and concerned, and I hate feeling that way. I'll read on ...

This chapter by Nicole and Antero is associated with an issue of the journal Review of Research in Education that explores the theme "Disrupting Inequality Through Education Research." If Marginal Syllabus participants are interested in other articles from this issue and do not have access via an academic institution, please contact me privately (i.e. via Twitter DM, I'm @remikalir) and we'll make arrangements.

Our thanks to partner authors Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia for contributing this important text to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus! We anticipate that Nicole and Antero will join our annotation conversation throughout November. In addition, please check out these additional resources:

• Nicole and Antero will be featured in an episode of Connected Learning TV, alongside Marginal Syllabus organizers Joe Dillon and Remi Kalir, scheduled to air on Tuesday, November 7th. We will update this annotation and embed the video once it's recorded.
• Antero was also a partner author during the 2016-17 Marginal Syllabus. Antero and co-author Cindy O’Donnell-Allen contributed the introduction from their book Pose, Wobble, and Flow: A Culturally Proactive Approach to Literacy Instruction. You are very welcome to read and join that previous annotation conversation, too.

If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:

• Getting started with Hypothesis
• Hypothesis education resources
• KQED's Digital Annotation with Hypothesis course, a great step-by-step primer
• Information about the Marginal Syllabus and our 2017-18 Syllabus hosted by the National Writing Project

Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus and November's conversation! This is the second text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal—or contrary—to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open platform for web annotation.

Maha Bali and Autumm Caines wrote a review of this report, and raise some interesting points to consider: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/equity-in-edtech-a-report-review/64513

Hi everyone, this recent report from Justin Reich and Mimi Ito has a lot of resonance with the Marginal Syllabus topic for this year. Wondering if others might like to annotate with me? Please feel free to join in!

Again, which seems to be a problem for most of these critiques, is the acceptance of fb's claims about who/what they are. FB started as a way to rate college students based on their looks. It's now the biggest surveillance engine the world has ever seen. Zuck pitches "community" but users of the platform have no rights other than those granted by Zuck, no ability to make or change the rules of the "community" and no choice in how that "community" uses their data. It's telling that users are an afterthought in most of these suggestions.

The way that he casually mentions whistle blowers and dissidents is troubling to say the least. Also, will dig up studies, but removing anonymity hasn't really shown to decrease trolling or other bad behavior. Also, "privacy" anyone?

http://theweek.com/articles/632929/problem-internet-trolls-isnt-anonymity

I respect Albright, but this buys into the notion of "sharing" that facebook (and other platforms tbh) have sold us. The model of fb is to monetize our relationships and control the feed to maximize engagement. This is antithetical to trust and respect--the information asymmetry and lack of user control don't allow for trust or respect.

Again, this is a bit problematic given the whole "use your real name" thing that happened a couple of years ago, when people were getting kicked off for using their chosen names (esp. queer people, in the examples I remember). Like Jeremy alludes below, it's a fine line because unequal power means that policies have different effects on different people...

I also wonder about the difference between "solutions" and "alternatives."

I'll hope for the first and worry about the second. And will resist the snark here ... :)

Are you seeing this happening? Are there places where you have surfaced marginal views and perspectives in texts from the margins? Not just us "usual folks" but a more expansive set of voices? Have you been choosing pieces that cross the wide political spectrum or have they been mostly from the margins on the Left? I'm not critiquing ... just wondering. I know this is difficult work, and appreciate the ways that Marginal Syllabus is always inviting folks in.

This is an interesting concept ... merging crowd annotations into an open textbook format ... I can see a lot of logistical issues, but the potential for shared knowledge, and insights, and points of view could be intriguing!

I was one of the open students of NetNarr, and that potential of merging a class of students with open participants via something like Hypothesis has potential for enriching conversations and differing viewpoints (not sure NetNarr quite got there but it showed a way forward)

Thanks for sharing ...