Class Discussion

"Zitkala Sa was an Indian teacher who challenged and countered educational norms that silenced Indian voices and erased Indian culture"(118).

The significance of this quote is her pedagogical resistance in a time where minority rights were iqnored. She was trying to establish the inherent right of native Amiericans to decide their own values, modes, styles, voice,etc. We can learn from her resistance to conform to what was expected, and know more about the history of the past.

As a writing teacher I care about this because everyone regardless of race, gender, etc., should have the inherent right to their own VOICE. Everyone deserves respect, and that voice is crucial in the classroom. We, "can both contribute to and learn from" the work of rhetorical sovereignty" (118).

Contact and Negotiation

This week I really took pleasure in reading Joseph Harris, Contact and Negotiation. I found to agree that there needs to be much more of a diversity awareness in our classrooms today. There needs to be more “balance.” There needs to be “two-sides” to all issues. I have seen dialogue and truth replaced with dangerous blind faith. From denial of global warming to the teaching of intelligent design, we have entered an era where the foundations of democracy are not being chiseled away but openly hacked down, degraded and destroyed. When people, adult and children, cannot back up their accusations, they rely on the frightening rationale of “just because.” Facts no longer matter where ideology is blindly and dangerously driven by a complete obedience that does not question the results of the order.
“Dissent is dealt with by not being noticed-much as, Pratt argues, the views, experiences, and writings of minority cultures have been studiously ignored in most American classrooms, even in schools where many students are black, Asian, Hispanic, or working class. This leads Pratt to call for classrooms where such voices do get heard, even if at the cost of some conflict or confusion-for pedagogical contact zones rather than communities” (118).
The teachers aren't telling students what to think — they're getting their thoughts on it. I truly believe that teachers should emphasize that students need to think for themselves in order to achieve success in life. It is important to educate children with a greater awareness of others around them, especially those who are different. Teaching content is the ultimate result we as teachers must achieve; framing the content within the curriculum so that it is culturally responsive to the students in the classroom will ultimately make it more relevant. Students who are taught to respect and be curious about culture will ultimately develop a better understanding of the cultural differences that exist around them. This will help them to be better citizens and more productive members of society as a whole. Educators do not believe that all learners are the same. Yet visits to schools throughout the world might convince us otherwise. Too often, educators continue to treat all learners alike while paying lip service to the principle of diversity. An individual learner's culture, family background, and socio-economic level affect his or her learning. The context in which someone grows and develops has an important impact on learning. Every learner benefits from an excellent teacher and an engaging learning experience. Every student and teacher deserves to be treated with respect. Every student should have an opportunity to reach his or her individual potential.

My rough draft is by all means a "rough" draft. It is very un-organized and not finished. My thoughts and I have not been devoted to this paper as it should have been. My fiance and I found out this weekend that his mom has cancer and chemo-therapy is not an option. My rough draft needs a lot of work, and I cannot concentrate on it at all.

Technology in the Classroom
Over the past two years, many school districts, such as Fort Worth ISD have installed new technology and have upgraded their teacher eduaction programs to include the Promethian Board. The Promethian Board incorporates the benefits of a white board, an overhead projector, an audio/visual system, and incorporates the infinetely adaptable technologies of the computer. Promethian Boards are poised to change the future of education as we know it. The incorporation of this technology enables educators to create, customize and integrate text, images, quizzes, tests, web, video, and audio content, so they can more easily enthrall students and inspire them to both pay attention and participate more readily in their own educations. It also makes it easier to accommodate several different learning styles. Though, as I have experienced as a substitute teacher, there are positive features of the Promethian Board, and drawbacks. Nonetheless, the Promethian Board allows educators to meet their students’ technological capabilities, and the curriculum standards, while meeting students’ individual learning needs.
The Promethian Board differs from teaching in a traditional classroom by creating a computerized, technology-based classroom. “The change-a potentially more social, collaborative environment,” requires teachers to adapt to a more collaborative pedagogy in their classroom. “Much more frequenlty, scholar’s note ways in which collaboratve pedagogy levels the teacher-student hierarchy. When teachers are no longer dispensing knowledge in lectures but are guiding students in the collaborative process of discovering and constructing knowledge, students are empowered” (Howard 57). The Promethian Board enables more students’ engagement through the integration of technology in the classroom. Students are able to not only work on the board, but explain to their classmates what they did on the Promethian and why they did it. I have noticed that they enjoyed what they were doing and it was appropriately challenging for them. The students reflected on what they were doing and suddenly understood on their own and from their peer’s problematic issues they were faced with. The Promethean Board is a wonderful asset in a classroom where the teacher's goal is to produce students who are meaningfully engaged in their learning throughout the day. With its various accessories, the possibilities for collaboration, communication, and interaction among students is endless. The Activclassroom makes learning come alive, encourages students to embrace technology, provides immediate feedback on student comprehension (through the use of Activotes and Activexpressions), and gives a new dimension of interactivity to lessons. The Activclassroom assists in students by providing flexible ways to access and display lesson content, opportunities for active student participation in complex interactive activities, and engaging ways to obtain immediate feedback.
The Promethian Board’s interactive applications work well for involving all students in the learning process.The Promethian Board accomodates different learning styles. Tactile learners benefit from touching and using the Activpen to mark on the board. Audio learners take advantage of videos and podcasts, and visual learners see what is taking place as it develops on the board. The visual learner is able to watch as the teacher or student manipulates images, shapes, colors, and words. The sound system allows the most distant student in the classroom to use his audio learning capabilities to full effect. Though, even with all the benefits of this system, integration in classrooms is not taking advantage of the full capabilities of the board. This is primarily due to available resources for preparing teachers to use this educational technology system in their classroom. “Technology has the potential for educational harm as well as good, teachers and administrators must plan ahead as they implement computerization” (Sidler, Morris and Smith 234). Rebecca Howard Moore believes that, “collaboration offers the benefit of discover; students learn more by working together” (Howard 63). I have seen that students in a computer-based classroom are focused on what is being taught at hand, rather than social issues. “In only one category of interaction-student contact with teachers outside of class-did the traditional classrooms have higher levels of contact than the computer classrooms. Yet this may stem less from reluctance on the part of students in the computer classrooms to seek out their teachers outside of class than from a sense that they didn’t need to do so” (Sidler, morris and Smith 259).
“Most students have a good initial reaction to the computer and feel that it can help them in their work, though some users, especially older students, may be uncomfortable with the technology or may even be “computerphobic” (Sidler, Morris and Smith 405). I have personally experienced this “computerphobia” in many students. Several students find the board intimidating and want nothing to do with it. They view the board as challenging by the technology it offers and scared of change in the traditional classroom they have been accustomed to for so many years. The Promethiann Board promotes collaboration by the students working together, and some may be against this type of learning. Some students feel they are better prepared to accomplish their assignments independently and struggle with working with others.
My own experience with the Promethian Board has been amazing. I was astounded at the ease of the system. A simple point and click interface and I was creating pictures and graphs with the Activpen. The projection system allowed me to show images to my audience from the Internet as I surfed for valuable information, and the impressive sound system kept the class entertained as I played music during downtime. The Promethian Board is the future of education. The large collection of the premade and teacher made lesson plans and activities for the ActivStudio software make the ActivBoard very versatile and convenient to use in a wide variety of classroom and applications.

Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch

I want to start this blog with a quote from Drama in the Archives: Rereading Methods, Rewriting History by Cheryl Glenn, and Jessica Enoch. “For years now, historians of rhetoric and composition have studies the history of university-level writing practices by turning their attention toward archival and primary documents such as, “actual student writings, teacher records, unprinted notes, and pedagogical materials ephemera that writing courses have always generated but never kept” (323). Archival research practices are, “a Burkean framework of “scenes, acts, agents, agencies, purposes, and attitudes” can invigorate our understanding of historiographic methods and open up new possibilities for future histories of rhetoric composition” (322). This article is particularly important because it touches on issues that are central to feminist pedagogy. Namely the question of whether it is productive to essentialize women's writing. Looser, in demonstrating the dangers of blindly accepting essential definitions of women's writing, is able to make a case for examining closely when and how we invoke these descriptions. This fits into the debate surrounding teaching masculine and feminine (for lack of better terms) modes of writing in composition classes. Looser suggests that it might be dangerous to perpetuate these restrictive categories without a clear examination/explanation of the reasons behind doing so. Therefore, the question becomes: are our students sophisticated enough to understand that we are not advocating a split between masculine and feminine writing, but that we are merely attempting to articulate a need for a more accepting academy? In other words, should we bring this debate into our classrooms, where we may be reinforcing the dichotomy instead of working to eliminate essentialisms?
I enjoyed how Glenn and Enoch emphasized that, “not all research in rhetoric and composition begins-or ends-on a university campus or at a great research library” (326). I strongly believe that some of the best research comes from a number of different sources. For example, I had to write a history paper a few years ago and some of my research and sources were from my grandfather and his friends. I had gained so much insight on what really happened and the emotions that they experienced during that time in the war. They also kept records like newspaper clippings, diaries, letters and postcards that helped me tremendously. Their stories and records helped my archive research experience to be efficient, fun, and less daunting. Glenn and Enoch go on to state, “in their research, these scholars could not access catalogued materials that had been archived by professional librarians at the university library. Instead, they leveraged the collections of their “pack -rat” colleagues” (327). That is more often than most the best kind of research!