- Sep 2022
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www.edweek.org www.edweek.org
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Every child deserves the opportunity to see where that path takes them.
Choose Your Own Adventures!
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Could my students gather data outside, which could be analyzed or graphically displayed? Could they make observations outside to provide material for writing, music, or art? Or find questions outside to be answered through scientific or historical inquiry? Could they explore outside and map their observations in a second language? Or make our school grounds more green by engaging in a planting project?
Core WriteOut ideas here --
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Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England
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The chance to play, explore, and learn in the natural world is a vital part of growing up, and our students are missing out on both the physical and mental benefits.
Thinking of my own childhood, and how much time I spent in the woods, lost (in thought).
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Look at the design of just about any public school, and you will get the message loud and clear: Serious analytical thinking is an indoor activity.
This is true for most of our schools, although maybe the push towards community gardens and spaces might indicate a shift.
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- Oct 2019
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writeout.nwp.org writeout.nwp.org
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A Place for Local in Critical Global Literacies
Amy joined Rich Novak and others for a video chat about the article ... this gives more context to the piece and the interactions here ... https://youtu.be/0faB6_8BrbM
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Things Fall Apart
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“Where I’m From,”
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To use place critically is to consider how social construc-tions of space engender ways of thinking or particular viewpoints from which we approach our world and, in so doing, we learn to name the world around us and our relationships in and to it.
As a National Park Service Employee, this idea really struck me. I've been SO trained (Bachelor of Arts in Environmental studies and Geography and Urban Studies, Masters of Science in Resource Interpretation, 10 years working for a public lands agency) to look through the lens of place.
Place is so important in my world view, that it's become a blind spot- I take for granted the ability to read a landscape and make sense of it, so some extent. I often ask myself questions that might not occur to others looking through different lenses, for example "What histories are layered here?" or "Were those colonial looking houses REALLY from colonial times?" or a tree fell in a forest and there is a lot more light now, and you can see the under story going through ecological changes because more light is getting to the forest floor.
I forget that others have experiences/were trained to look through different (yet as valuable) lenses. I can't speak for other NPS employees or land managers, but I think this is pretty common- we care so much about place, but we forget that we need to create simple "on ramps" for others to enter with a place perspective.
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If the aim of critical global literacies is to pro-mote a social awareness and a crit-ical consciousness (Yoon 51), then young people must engage in these dual acts—understanding their sense of place if they are to em-pathize and care about places far more distant.
How best to harness students' curiosity about a place while also highlighting for them the way their background or experience with a place supports their understanding of issues with global importance.
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However, a critical pedagogy of place further nuances the use of place by suggesting that critical understandings of place challenge educators to grapple with decol-onization, re-inhabitation, and the relationships with the lands we bestow to future generations (Gruenewald 4)
I take this to mean that a critical understanding of a place requires grappling with a place's history. It strikes me that it might also challenge educators to think about how a place is contested space, or space with potential.
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If teachers use a narrow view of place in the curriculum, its use could become provincial, potentially affirming place as a means to reify national-istic views.
Important note for us to think about more via #writeout
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Therefore, to engen-der critical global literacies, we must first seek to critically under-stand our local world
I am interested in the power of events like #writeout to connecting both locally and globally alongside the tensions that rise between networked digital technologies (resource use, algorithms, AI, access, etc.) and our natural world.
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English teachers
I appreciate this focus on English teachers and I wonder, as folks who are in other disciplines connect here too, how do you feel positioned to guide these kinds of understandings and connections?
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CRITICAL GLOBAL LITERACIES
Our thanks to Amy Price Azano and NCTE publications for contributing to Write Out 2019. A short bio of the author is included at the end of this article.
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AMY
Thank you, Amy, for giving permission for us to annotate your article for Write Out.
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English teachers are uniquely positioned to help guide students’ understand-ing of the interconnectedness of the world and to think critically about their role in it.
I agree ... the expanded notions of literacies open many doors for the English classroom to overlap with other curriculum areas more readily and more easily than the other way around (but that is not impossible, either, for the creative teacher).
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