Maker Movement & English

If there's one thing I'd love to make English, it's more hands-on. Imagine it, a classroom where students are busy and happy making things that enhance their understanding of reading and writing... Wait a minute... hands-on English? How? I've had students make resources for me before and create visual images as part of the curriculum, but how can I embrace the maker movement into a subject area often seen as abstract.

The make movement puts students in the role of designers, constructing artifacts and applying technology in novel ways. It encompasses 'traditional' crafts like knitting, calligraphy and metal work, along with computer programming and hacking. It's about experimentation and risk taking. Social interaction is a key part of the process, including conversations and feedback from peers.

In English, the obvious two ways we create are through writing and visual texts. There are certain rules that students are expected to follow with writing (you want your audience to be able to read it, for starters, so a bit of grammar and spelling is useful), but there is also a lot of flexibility to experiment with genres and text conventions. Students could explore ways of bringing their writing to life through technology and craft.

Traditionally, in my school at least, students create visual texts either digitally or on paper. These visual texts are usually intended to develop ideas in a text. There is significant scope to extend the media used to create them. Rather than using pencil and felts, students could be encouraged to use a range of material gathered around the school or home. These materials could be symbolic of the meaning that they are wanting to convey in their images, such as wrappers or newspapers to symbolise the wasteful society in Wall-E for example. Michelle Schira Hagerman writes about using LED lights to highlight aspects of a character, action or setting. What a fantastic idea!

And why stop at 2-D images? Why not give students the opportunity to create models and sculptures to show meaning, encouraging them to incorporate technology where possible?

Even better, give students a brief and let them figure out what and how they can make something to show meaning.

The maker movement gives students the opportunity to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills, but as teachers we need to take to not kill creativity by focusing these activities always on assessment.

Check out these websites:

http://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2014/03/21/the-maker-movement-and-english-language-arts

http://remakelearning.org/blog/2014/09/22/the-common-core-meets-the-maker-movement/

http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3758336

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Modern learning environments vs the old. Exciting.

Last week I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit three Auckland schools as part of the Big River Learning and Change Network. This was my first chance to see what a modern teaching environment looks and feels like; my school was built in the 1920s and subsequent expansions strongly reflect the time periods they are built in, so the flowing open plans were quite a contrast. I like to challenge myself with my teaching. I take ideas from Twitter, Pinterest and (perhaps) more serious sources and try to use these in my classes as I can. However, the timetable and curriculum approach that Hobsonville Point Secondary School  utilises is far beyond what I envisaged for my classroom. This is undoubtedly because any changes I make to my classroom practice is realistically confined to this space, whereas HPSS has been built through new teaching theories and practices and there is a whole school philosophy. The challenge that I (and my school) face is taking the 21st ideas used by ...
Read more

Changing my Teaching

My final Mindlab challenge: condense 32 weeks of learning and reflections in under 600 words.  Have I reached my Mindlab goals? A key motivation for enrolling in the programme was to develop my skills in collaborative and digital teaching. I have certainly achieved this, becoming a more research-based teacher in the process. I have reflected on developing 21st-century skills in my learners, planned and implemented a video-making task, critically reflected on my leadership style and incorporated different leadership tactics in a plan for my depart . I have read and reflected on a range of academic articles for literature review, which was used to develop a TAI cycle. Perhaps most beneficially, I have reflected on my learning throughout the course, utilising this blog. These reflections cover most of the PTC, particularly PTC 1 (establishing and maintaining professional relationships)  through feedback and interactions with other Mindlab students. This has pushed me outsi...
Read more

Applying Growth Mindset

Image
I've seen growth mindset discussed at various times in forums such as Twitter. The concept interested me so I had done a wee bit of research on what it was, although that was admittedly as far as I went. The traditional view of intelligence was that it is innate and there is nothing you can do about it, no matter how hard you work. I see this attitude reflected at various times in my classroom by students who think that they, for example, find creative writing difficult and so put little effort into producing finished work, or they struggle with aspects of grammar but don't try to figure out the rules and apply them to their work. I have been guilty of a similar attitude towards Maths, and have caught myself making comments along the lines of I suck at it, therefore someone else solve the problem for me. With the Maths thing, though, I've become more conscious of what I say because I have a daughter who I want to encourage into STEM and I realise that how I role mod...
Read more