After
reading about the need to avoid teaching standardized content, the question of “what
should we then teach and what overarching themes should be incorporated into
that content?” While the content is our own responsibility, Burke lays out
plainly what students in this era need to be competent with and how teachers
can incorporate that into lessons in the English classroom. Technology
competence, reasoning skills, leadership, teamwork, evaluating, integrating,
flexibility—and lo behold, he manages to connect this with a person’s literacy.
Burke doesn’t just define this as merely the ability to read, but to comprehend
and analyze and respond to what is being read. He emphasizes the need for not
just one type of person, but multiple that make up a successful workforce that
can collaborate on what needs accomplished and can effectively do so.
The
three literacy skills—information and communication, thinking and
problem-solving skills, and interpersonal and self-directional skills—are clearly
laid out and make sense to coincide with literacy. As future teachers, our
employers are looking for these skills not only in our own abilities, but also
in what we teach. In many of my high school classes, the technology
incorporated was limited so the strategies my teachers incorporated were mostly
within the realm of Socratic seminar. This method is not discounted entirely;
however the age of technology would demand a more collaborative integration of
technology. As a future teacher, I do think it is important to use technology
so students can become more comfortable with using it for more than just
checking their social networking websites. However, I am not an advocate for
replacing the element of human interaction. Teamwork does work with technology
as the middleman, but it won’t surpass the benefits of working in groups where
students can see and hear their peers directly. Online discussion threads,
while having the opportunity to be arbitrary, do possess the value of freedom
for the student. They can share what they may not be able to conceptualize
immediately and then come back to class with a better grasp on the lessons.
What
I believe Burke was trying to evoke in his writing was that teaching should be
student centered. Everything he claims students need to excel at in order to
achieve and maintain a good job involve letting the students be innovative for
themselves. Not to be confused as a way to be lazy, but there was the
implication that teachers are merely the guide that directs students to their
own critical thinking. This is especially true for high school students who
respond better to working with their peers and having the freedom to discuss the
concepts explored in class. Giving the students opportunities to direct their own
learning will prepare them to direct their own work as adults.
One
idea I got while reading this chapter was to encourage students to free-write
with only a line of un-translated Latin. This came from Burke’s section over
synthesizing; having the students look at a broader picture without the
specifics of the translation would be an excellent way to get them to look at
words and try to develop a personalized image of what they are responding to. In
order for the free-writing to be complete, they would receive the translation
and then build off what the Latin actually means and seek out a broader
picture. While it may not initially coincide with his concepts from the synthesizing
section, the idea sprung from Burke’s comment by Pink to see relationships from
apparently different things.
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