Friday 7-12-13 History

We started promptly at 9:00 am. Danielle gave us a run down of the day and she brought in breakfast. Haley gave us the history for Thursday.
Kathryn did a Demo in which we wrote a love letter. We wrote about all the things we are appreciative of for 3 minutes. After reading what we wrote we circled one to pursue. This took 1 minute. She then gave us 5 minutes to write a love letter to a person, idea, or whatever we wanted to write to in whatever form. For publishing, we started out with 7 minutes but we needed more time so it ended up more like 10 minutes. Kelley and Kathryn thought it would be cool if we randomly read someone else's love letter. some of the things that we love are our writing group, washed dishes, future possibilities, failures, Devon, Lisa, Bob, land, and coffee.
At 10:00 we had time to meet with our writing groups or personal writing or reading time. There were conversations all around about writing, life, love, crying, dreaming, typing, and coffee drinking.
During our workshop time we also worked on different things. People wrote or perfected a piece of writing for open mic, shared burning questions, commented on others' writing, and met with Kathryn or Danielle.
Everyone was excited about what they accomplished. Danielle wrote creatively and talked with me for a while. Haley shared her open mic piece with her group and as a group decided what happens in their group stays in their group. Bird had a conversation identity, people's perceptions, labels, read poems and blog posts, commented on them, and is reading to revamp curriculum. Marissa said that she enjoys writing group and worked on her open mic piece. Jen had a conference with Kathryn, reworked her burning question, plan for English class, and responded to blogs, Ellie read and helped Christine with her poem about poison ivy, and worked very intensely on her literary bio. Kelley tied up loose ends and read a poem about Marie Curie. Kathryn worked on piece for open mic, conferenced with Jen, and revised last year's plan.
At 12:00 Danielle put up funny youtube videos which we watched while eating or working. Afterwards, Kathryn gave us an update for next week. The required readings are no longer required because we have already been thinking about them and discussing them. They are optional if anyone would like to read them. Over the weekend we need to read over and choose one of the three categories from the list of readings, to present as a demo with a partner on Wednesday.
At 1:00 pm, we went over to the Blue Frog and all read short stories, real and fictional, and poems. Everyone did a really great job. Yea Seven Valleys Writing Group!

History (of Thursday, July 11th)

Kelley gave us a very thorough description of Wednesday’s events.

We then had a 7 minute free write in which we wrote about the previous 24 hours, and we shared our stories aloud with the group.

Next we had some time dedicated to revising our literacy autobiographies.  We then met with our groups to do another round of Writing Group Procedure.  People seemed to get a lot of their meetings.  And it was decided that what happens in writing group, stays in writing group.

It seemed everyone had a relatively quick lunch and some people seemed to be speed reading in attempt to prepare themselves for the Historical Consideration discussion.

Sarah lead us in a very thought provoking conversation.  We began by reading our burning questions aloud with the group.  After giving our reactions to the article, we got into groups of 3 to determine the definition and provide an example of the 3 main concepts of the article: literacy as skill, literacy as school-knowledge, and literacy as a social and cultural construct. 

We had detailed conversation about political musings, multicultural conversations, and what our literacy practices are.  Sarah sent out extremely detailed notes for further exploration.

After our discussion with Sarah, we were given the assignment to write a research reflection piece.  We were given the option to either stay and write or write at home.  We recapped the day and were on our way.

Bird's Second Draft of Literacy Autobiography

I've always been surrounded by books.  My childhood, my adolescence, my adulthood- all have been  encapsulated by an influential book, titles that still remain on my shelf today. I like to think that my relationship with books is symbiotic, one did not start the other, we just co-exist, feeding each other with our passion for the other.  Books need readers and I need books.

It started with my grandmother.  For each and every occasion, from birthdays to graduations, she would give me a book.  They did not vary much in author, but I loved them all the same.  Then friends and relatives gave me books.  My mother, in what I'm sure was a bid for free babysitting, would drop me off at the local library (a half an hour away from the house) while she would run errands and attend ballet class. I would greet the librarian who would write my name down for a record player and pull out my library card, which she let me keep in her files by her desk. I would sit happily listening to books on records or wander the stacks for hours, discovering new books, picking out old favorites. The experience of being at the library, the enjoyment I received from my weekly visit stayed with me throughout my life. My mother would pick me up a few hours later and each time, I would come home with stacks of books that she would read to me at bedtime, both of us laughing over the genius of Shel Silverstein or wishing we had a chocolate bar to munch on as Charlie started on his adventure through the factory.

My love of all things book (and the peace and quiet of the library) led me to create my own  library at home.  At the age of ten, I carefully sorted and labeled my books into sections like favorites, historical fiction, and non-fiction, taping pieces of different colored construction paper onto the spines of the books and filling out index cards with the appropriate bibliographic information.  Those cards were then carefully placed into an old metal business card box appropriated for the alphabetical partitions in the back. I organised the books alphabetically in their categories, a habit I still try to maintain today both in my library at home and at school.

In my early years, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who noticed my love for reading.  My upper elementary school teacher, Steve, whose cataloguing system inspired my own, hand-selected stacks of books each week, just for me. In one of those stacks was the book that defined my childhood, A Wrinkle In Time. He encouraged me to keep reading. We also wrote a great deal.  We had weekly assignments that were to write about anything that struck our fancy. Writing assignments for history could be letters from one historical figure to another. They could be writing about a place you wanted to visit, an excellent disguise for researching a specific place.   I enjoyed these writing assignments, especially the ones that were “alternative” assessment (most of our assessment was what today would be classified as alternative).  I still remember the excitement I had in researching Thomas Jefferson and his life then drafting a letter from the perspective of one of his daughter’s to him as a way to reflect on our American Revolution unit.

Steve also introduced me to my two greatest passions (outside of reading): Shakespeare and acting. Steve read the play aloud to us and then we performed them for our school production. I was a nine-year-old Ophelia, a ten-year-old Hermia, and a life-long fan of anything Shakespeare.  Upon hearing about my performance of Ophelia, a great-aunt gave me a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb’s retelling of Shakespeare paired with black and white photos of who’s who in Shakespearean acting in the 1950s and 60s.  I knew Judi Dench, John Neville, a very young Ian McKellen, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Vivian Leigh, Richard Burton before I knew of any modern actors my fellow students could discuss at length.  I was fasticnated by the elaborate costumes, the dramatic poses, the overdrawn plots, and more from this book of Shakespeare’s stories.  I spent the rest of my teenage years life trying to find local performances to attend and now teach him to my students with the passion- William Shakespeare was the best soap opera writer ever. He was the first recycler (the same names re-occur through his plays), borrower (many plots are just reformulated), and crafter of the English language as we know it today.  I like to think that my students now have a respect for the man who invented pronouns.  It helps that he invented the work puke.

But after I graduated from West Branch School, I experienced a slow and painful death of my love of reading and writing.  I wanted to love my new school, for I had always loved going to school.  I brought my report card in my pocket on the first day of school just to prove that I was smart.  Intelligence, in whatever form you possessed, was celebrated at my old school. But what I found instead was a sterile environment that slowly drained out my curiousity, my independence, and my self-assurance. There was no acting program or school plays in my public school. While at the time, I could not put a label onto the feeling, I know now that the lack of trust from my teachers suffocated me.  I was a student interesting in learning and I was capable of guiding the process myself with their help. But no one listened. To my young self, it seemed as if no one paid attention to the different literacy events we had before we walked into the classroom and I never felt that I was part of a discourse community.  We were not talking about a text, we were instructed what to think  about a text.I managed fine in seventh grade, but by eighth grade I put up my last fight. And it happened in English class. My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Rohe, routinely beat out everything that I loved about the English language. She repesented everything that I hated about public school.  I dreaded every day that I walked into her class and she knew it. I felt that I was her target.  Looking back today, I know there must have been other mitigating factors, but at the time, I felt that I had to defend every choice I made. She made me feel like dirt. My dyslexica was undiagnosed and I had a bunch of coping mechanism that had never uindergone such scrutiny.  She was convinced that I needed to comform just as much as I was convinced that I needed to stay true to myself. It was a very bad combination. I so wanted to prove to her that she was wrong.  Just because I did not know how to diagram a sentence did not mean I could not name all of the grammatical parts.  I could label them, but did not understand the construction of the diagram.  She was shocked when I proved to be “good” at something, and reluctantly called on me for oral reading assignments for Romeo and Juliet. All of my “mistakes”, she blamed my hippy school, which made it even worse for I knew that that was where I was enriched and nurtured. Before the end of the year, she finally broke me. I conformed as much as I could, with my undiagnosed disability. She became the epitome of what I wanted to never become and never experience again. Around this time, I found the second book in the Wrinkle In Time trilogy, which has a subplot of the main character, Meg, trying to survive in her stifling public school environment.  There was hope!  Other people must have had the same experiences.

While I only had her for a year, my teachers’ teaching methods, in the next four years, did not alter very much from her philosophy.  Luckly, they did not have the personal vindictivness that she did. I also had learned to be passive, not active in my learning experience. Reading and writing became personal, something that I did at home.  While I was always a model student,having figured out the equasion, I was never comfortable with how I was learning at school.

In ninth grade English, I recieved my first creative writing assignment.  We had to write a poem with a rhyme scheme that had at least eight stanzas.  I loved my poem, which was about going to the dentist. i had finally gotten my braces off and also had a hilarious story about biting my dentist when he tried to pull out one of my teeth. I labored over the poem, carefully crafting each word in each stanza. To this day, 24 years later,I still remember the first stanza:

Going to the dentist is not much fun

When I sit in the chair I want to run

Anytime, anywhere that drill can’t reach

Like the sunny ocean or the sandy beach

I admit.  It is awful, but it was the first time I had written a poem with parameters, and, at the time I was so proud of it.  It was autobiographical. We submitted them to be graded and that assignment created my life-long fasination with the question-how can creativity be graded?  Being graded on the quality of my poetry did not bode well for me.  That poem was the best that I could do.  I followed the assignment and loved the poem that I wrote, but the grade I received did not reflect my effort nor my enjoyment for writing. I gave up seeing myself as a writer.  My work had been judged inadequate. I kept my rough draft for myself but threw out the final draft which included all of the corrections I made for my teacher. I stopped writing creativley, except for my angst ridden adolescent journals full of angry girl poetry intertwined with lyrics from favorite songs and diatribes about my parents.

Then, in 12th grade, I was blessed with Mr. Farrelly as my AP English teacher. He opened my eyes in so many ways, especially to how literature is powerful and spreads messages. He was always up for an argument, if you had the facts to back it up. He constantly pushed us to think for ourselves. He taught Hamlet, To Kill A Mockingbird, Native Son, and The Invisible Man.  He slipped me copies of my favorites to keep for my personal library, marking for the school district that I had returned the books. The above mentioned books lit me on fire and made me see that there was good literature to be read and interesting topics to be discussed. I also loved these books because they were outside of my cultural experiences.  They opened windows to worlds and experiences that I had no previous knowledge about. They allowed me to experience, in some ways, different racial identities that, having grown up in a rural Catholic farming community in Pennsylvania, I had never fathomed. I knew two black people, one raised in a Catholic orphanage, the other my aunt who was born and raised in Ethopia.  Both of their experiences were very different from the characters in the books we read in class. Other than hearing the blantant racism exploding from my fellow students mouth, and having discussions with my aunt about her experiences transitioning to life in The United States,  I had never stopped to think about exploring my role in defining cultural, racial, and societal expectations. I already knew that I did not fit into the expectations of my school community, and these books gave me some hope. They also opened up a variety of questions that still remain unanswered today.

We also wrote research papers at the end of the semester.  I wanted to write mine on the 1972 Munich Olympics, an event that I had just learned about a few days before the assignment and was very interested in exploring. Mr. Farrelly said there would not be enough information on the topic.  Today, I wonder if he was trying to avoid some sort of political problem. However, he redirected me to another cultural hot spot: the massacre of the village of Me Lai during the Vietnam War. As I read what happened to those innocent villagers and to the soldier that were apart of the slaughter, I became insensed. How could this have happened? What can I do to make sure that it does not again.  This assignment guided me towards a life of activism and peaceful protest.  After having been beaten down by the system, he reinvigorated my want to “go against the man”.

We also read The Great Gabsy, Tess of the D’Umbervilles , Crime and Punishment, Jane Eyre and a few others that bored me to tears. I argued a bit about the victimhood of Tess, but stopped after a while.  I just didn’t like these books. Yes, I hated them all.  I recently decided it was time to re-read classics of literature and to see if time and my life experiences would make me appreciate them more.  I started with A Brave New World (not a required book from high school, but a classic all the same) and then re-read The Great Gabsy and with a reading guide by my side, explored all of the deeper meanings that I was unable to uncover by myself.  It was what made the book interesting and also was such an interesting view on the craft of writing.   

Mr. Farrely also was my savior. I turned in a paper that I had forgotten to spell check and he noticed the patterns in my errors. He signed my up for  diagnoses exams that discovered my dyslexia. It was the last month of my high school career.

 However, my own quest for the perfect book did not end.  I used my babysitting money to buy books from book orders.  I read books in college just for fun, books on top of the ones that I was assigned in class.  While in college, I discovered that teaching, like reading, was something that I was good at and something that I enjoyed doing.   They both invigorated me.

So, through a series of events and various false starts, I became a teacher. I wanted to inspire people to read.  I wanted to show people that books came in all forms: stories, plays, video game manuals, murals, songs.  I did not understand when my students said they could not stand reading or thought it was boring.  I just assumed, and still feel this way today, that they had not found the right match quite yet.

Books even factored into the purchase of my home.  Having seen multitues of homes, I was won over by a 1920s farmhouse that had been gutted in the 80’s and had a living room with one whole wall of shelves.  Finally, a place where I could lay out all of my books to view and select whatever was my pleasure.  Nine years later, these shelves are double stacked, with an additional shelf in my husband’s studio upstairs.

More and more, I am starting to realise that I just look at literacy as texts, but have forgotten to acknowledge the other aspects of literacy.  It has been interesting to journey back to my first draft and see the holes after reading more about literacy theory.  I began to examine race, socio-economic relationships, and other factors that have identified my literacy experience.  While my family did not have a lot of money growing up, my parents felt it was important for me to attend a private school a half an hour away from our home.  Without that experience, I would have never met Steve, who nutured and grew my love for literacy through books, games, and plays. It also fostered the type of teacher that I wanted to be.  My teachers at the school were facilitators, not instructors. We did not sit in desks lined up in rows. We were treated as individuals that had interesting things to say.

This is what killed my love for reading and writing when I was in public school.  It did not return until I went to college, and even then, the classes that I loved were all around large tables where the teacher sat and talked with us about an piece of text.  We were asked our opinions, we argued with each other, and we were allowed to take risks.  I gained a bit od displaced arrogance and frustration with the traditional row of desks and the teacher that lectured.  I felt that if they weren’t willing to put in the effort, why should I?  Thank goodness I went to a school where those classes were few and far between otherwise my GPA would not have reflected my capabilities. I had found a college, that for the most part, suited my literacy domains and practices.   

And that's what I want to do.  It's what I do not.  I am a book hunter, a book scavenger, a book engulfer. I love the challenge of finding the right book for the reluctant reader.  I love having my students recommend books to each other.  I love talking about books with my students.  In my classroom, I have created a community of readers inspired by myself, my teachers over the years, and by Reggie Routeman.

But in all of the reading that I explored and the community that I formed in my classroom, I realized that I needed to strengther my writing and I needed to learn how to find the right words to express myself, just like my students needed to do.  We began the journey together, and I found that I needed to continue to research and explore myself as a writer, but I didn't know where to start.  I needed a push, a shove, and a lot of guidance.

I am ready to be a student again and I am encouraged (and a little petrified) to be in a classroom again, this time sitting on the opposite side of the desk and I am so worried about being judged not good enough. I always tell my students that if they think they are not good enough, its just because they have not given it enough time or effort or practice. We are a non-graded school so these conversations always occur during a writing conference and is their own feelings and hang-ups about the creative process. And now,  I try to tell myself the same thing as I sit here thinking I'm no researcher and what on earth are my literacies.

My quest for the perfect book still has not ended.  Once the “perfect” is found, I realize that it was perfect for the moment (kind of like the adage- he doesn’t have to be the one, just the one right now).  The books that represent me are ones that fit who I was at the time.  While they all still strike a personal chord, it is not that they are great literature.  Henry VIII  will never be as good as Rich in Love, the bible for my parent’s divorce and still sits on my shelf today. As in my classroom, different books appeal to me at different times.  Which may explain why I can’t find a book right now that I love.

I realize now that I cannot separate my literacy from who I am, from childhood   It permeates from every aspect of my life from my trips to the library (where I catch up on the local happenings, get recommendations from people there, and help assist in the Teen literacy program) to eagerly anticipating Much Ado About Nothing in the movie theaters to my recent crave for a Superman tee-shirt because David Tennant wore one in both leading roles in Hamlet and in Much Ado, making me wonder if the S stands for Shakespeare and that is pretty cool in my book. I have an allotment of pins I wear to school about editing and about Shakespeare and handed out awards that were pins of Hogwarts houses, Hunger Games quotations, and Percy Jackson stuff before all of the “cooler” prizes were taken.  Without literacy, the pieces of who I am would slowly crumble until there was nothing left.

                  

politics- my father was so diffeent from me that I wanted to become aware of what other thoughts were out there.  I wanted to meet people that had my same point of view- discourse community

Jen's Burning Question

-->

How can I help my students to invest in their writing and care whether their message has been understood, while facilitating effective academic writing and thinking strategies and minimizing formal assessments?

Jen Liddy

Close Reading to Discover Burning Questions

Close Reading to Discover Burning Questions

Danielle Sullivan, Teacher Consultant

Kathryn Cernera, Teacher Consultant

The Big Idea

Using “Everyone Sits at the Big Desk” by Nancie Atwell: Rhetoric and Composition , “Let’s Take Another Look at That Fish” by Bob Tierney, and “Everything I Know About Teaching Language Arts, I Learned at the Office Supply Store” by Kathleen O’Shaughnessy, to inform our thinking, we will explore and flesh out what is teacher research, how we can utilize it in our practice. These articles are models of teacher research.  We will examine how these pieces mimic the research process, and what issues are the author struggling with.  We will use close reading strategies and writing to tease out what changes did they try to make and how did they synthesize these burning questions into a piece of writing?

History for 7-9-13

History for 7-9-13: Its the End of the Literacy World As We Know It.

1. After enjoying a lovely breakfast by Jen and her history from the previous day, we  warmed up our writing minds through an assignment: write an outrageous story about yourself.  It could be fictional.  After writing, we each shared our stories and Kathryn asked whose was based on a true story and whose was fictional. It was split pretty evenly. People took risks and tried new things. Go Summer Institute 2013!!!!!
   
   
2. Kathryn led a demo on character development.  We explored creating a character based upon ourselves, from a fictional perspective. First, we wrote our personal traits that we present to the general public and then wrote the traits that were private.  Afterwards, we shared three of those traits, from either list.Then, we selected one trait from the private list and wrote a seven minute fast write with the goal of showing the element of the private persona.  Afterwards, we read the stories aloud while each member of the class wrote feedback on a post-it note that was then passed to the reader. Taking the feedback from the note, we revised these drafts for fifteen minutes and then shared two sentences.
   
   
3. This brought us to 11:15 am, when we wrote or worked on whatever we wanted for a whole hour.   Thank you Writing Goddesses that planned the day. We also had a reminder that we would be reading our work on Friday at the Blue Frog cafe. A few people panicked, myself included.
   
   
4. LUNCH BREAK- good conversation and some even ventured outside of our den, taking short walk around the block
   
   
5. After lunch, Sarah Hobson led a thought-provoking discussion on the article on Situated Literacy.  For me, it was the end of literacy as I knew it. Sarah asked us to write about what our reactions to the article were, what stood out to us, and what questions did the article raise.  We spent about ten minutes working on this.  Next came the discussion. We paired off and annotated the article, shared the information with Sarah, and she guided us (with a chart) through the important terms and our reactions to the article.  Sarah gave us a question to think about over the next few days- If literacy practice and events are situated in social contexts, how so we make sense of the differences in resources for different communities?  How can we account for the different types of resources? She also  requested that we start coding out Literacy Autobiographies to reflect the different domains in our lives. Some heads hurt after this discussion, especially mine. It was spinning.
   
   
6. 3:15- adjustment of the daily agenda and reassessment of tomorrow’s plan.  We each selected a piece of reading we would present tomorrow and decided that we were on our own for breakfast tomorrow.
   
   
7. 4pm- asked Kathryn about doing these notes.  She mentioned that she tried to write them in ways she had never tried before.  Having spent my class time writing these notes, I didn’t want to scrap them, but am planning on putting a creative spin to my next go around.  

Personal Reflections about our literacy events (I just had to work that in) of the day- I saw so many people take risks, step out of their comfort zone, and really begin to talk about what it is that we do and what we want. Thank you so much ladies for being such excellent models.

8-8-2013: Character Development Demo

Character Development- exploring yourself as a character

Kathryn Cernera, Teacher Consultant

DeWitt Middle School, Ithaca City School District

kathryn.cernera@7VWP.com

The Big Idea

We’ve all heard the advice that you should “write what you know”, but sometimes writing about yourself and your own experiences can be a little too personal. In this demo, we’ll engage in bit of introspection to create a detailed character who is like you, but entirely fictional.

"Situated Literacies" Ellie

So literacy comes in all sizes, shapes, and forms.  Music has its own place in literacy, and so does computer science.  When a child "reads" pictures, that is literacy.  When we listen to audio books, that is literacy.  This bears out in my work in oral traditions.  When I taught English, I had my students collect stories from their friends, neighbors, and relatives.  We compared the different ways language was used as apart from "standard" English.  These "texts," according to Barton and Hamilton are every bit as valid as anything we will ever find in our social studies books or English anthologies.  Only the domain is different.  How can we use this information to create a more multicultural curriculum? 

"Situated Literacies" Discussion

On page 13, the authors write, "For instance, there are ways that literacy acts as evidence, as display, as threat, and as ritual. Texts can have multiple roles in an activity and literacy can act in different ways for the different participants in a literacy event."

Since I am always trying to connect theoretical information to the practice of teaching I started thinking about how I see each of these roles play out around a shared text in a classroom.

I'm wondering, what are the advantages and disadvantages to literacy acting in these ways? Is the student whose literacy experiences are acting as a "display" really growing? Is the student whose literacy experiences are acting as a "threat" at risk? Do you think there an ideal literary experience for a classroom or is it dependent on the student?

Situated Literacy Discussion

Bird- I love the different types of literacy.  It reminded me of Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences.  My burning question is what are we doing in our schools to address the different literacies, K-12 and on. How are we creating a learning environment that allows film, acting, computer, etc. types of literacy?  Also, how do we we foster the cultural aspects in such a large nation?

History: Monday, Week 1

-->

The History of Day One

What did we do?

·      Kathryn led us through a demo on doing a History, in which we reviewed, read, discussed, wrote about, and shared our insights concerning identity using the notes from the Pre-Institute.

·      After a break at 10 am, we learned how to engage in a Writing Group effectively, using the specific model explained by Kathryn. We practiced using an excerpt from Jen’s literacy identity autiobiography. Then we moved into small groups of four to thoroughly apply the process to each of our autobiographies.

·      After lunch from 12:15 – 1:15, David Franke took us through a demo called Exploding a Poem, in which he showed us how to deeply read a text in an engaged, collaborative manner. There was a lot of interaction and every member of the room was an active participant.

·      After David’s enjoyable demo, we deconstructed it, examining its elements and how his presentation was similar to/different from other professional development experiences we’ve had. We took notes on our thoughts and created a document with these ideas.

·      We moved into some free writing time for an hour, from 2:40 – 3:40, during which we were encouraged to work on whatever we needed to: blog post, comment post, autobiography, etc. We were made aware of the space to head to if we wanted to collaborate or if we wanted to work alone in silence.

·      We ended the day first by wrapping up today, writing about one thing we really wanted to remember or take with us from today. We reconnected with what we did today and had ample time to write and process these ideas, and Kathryn asked us to share two sentences from this freewriting.

·      Finally, we prepared for the next day by establishing who was doing today’s History and tomorrow’s breakfast. Kathryn made us aware of what assignments were impending and suggested different ways to use our time to prepare for those.

submitted by Jen Liddy

David's Demo, Day One, 7.8.13

Exploding a Poem
Close Reading, Writing from Reading, Analysis of Complex Text, and Fun

Often we struggle to have students read for depth, not coverage. In our rush for “information,” it is easy to overlook the fact that much of the meaning of a text is in the experience of reading, not the “takeaway” facts. Though this text is literary (a poem by Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate), the skills involved in reading it closely and deeply (what we call “exploding” a text) are applicable to any level and content area.

History of Pre-Institute

One of the traditions of the Summer Institute is to start each day with a history of the previous day. Each history is created by one member of the group in whatever format they would like. As a result the history becomes a way to showcase yourself as a writer and to try out new ideas, genres, and formats. The history is intended to be a fun way to reconnect with the learning we have done.

We write histories for a variety of reasons: they help us to remember what we have been thinking about, they entertain, inform, or challenge us, they help the writer to synthesize a day's worth of learning into a short presentation, and they allow us to explore different ways to present information. By sharing our histories on the blog we create an archive of our experience and help those who are not in the room connect with the work we are doing.

For the history of Pre-institute I chose to develop a demo that focuses on close reading strategies. We used our notes about identity as the text for this demo. We read and annotated the text, shared our thinking on the text, and then synthesized that thinking in the form of a poem. The poems we wrote are shared in the comments below. I hope you enjoy reading them!