pdZone

The workshop I attended was given by David Booth from OISE/UT. It was all about boys and literacy, but was a lot more than just “boys need books about cars”. Mr. Booth is a very engaging and informative speaker. Much of what he said was not entirely new, but it pulled a lot of threads together and helped to plant some seeds of ideas. One of those seeds was for a project that I began to plan with another LL teacher from my board, a project that we began to discuss after the workshop.

I took notes on my Palm as he spoke, as I wanted to hang onto some of the ideas that came up. Here they are as I jotted them down:

• “what boys want, we don’t”
• why do we do book reports? -not that useful
• let them play to their strengths, but expose them to new things
• we tend to do things in school that aren’t used later in life
• reading is perceived as a “girl thing”
• novels developed in the 17^th century for women
• boys need to see reading, or any kind of learning, as valued
• boys are often only called upon in class as behaviour control
• music lyrics are today’s most popular text
• “the enemy is worthlessness”
• “literacy is a culture”
• boys’ egos can be damaged easily
• computers have allowed men to feel comfortable writing – don’t have to worry about handwriting
• computers have allowed people to write more than in all of history – reminds me of The World is Flat
• even text messaging is literacy
• I was one of only two in a room of 50 teachers to know what blogging is
• read whatever the hell you want to read
• new literacies will become more and more important
• students who take shops (usually boys) don’t get the same type of enrichment activities that music students do
• you get as much or more from books on tape as from real books
• 2/3 of all men print rather than write cursively
• get them to read more, more in-depth
• literacy is making sense of any text we get
• “the literate guy will be the one who wins”; the one with the most options
• Cris Tovani – an excellent resource
• we don’t have students read contemporary scripts
• allow students to make meaning
• It is gratifying to hear some of these things from someone from up above.
• graphic novels are huge trend – biggest thing from publishers – give boys something they want to read
• boys used to read comics, but we didn’t recognize this as literacy
• video games require high degree of cognitive ability
• we need to expose kids to full range of literacy opportunities
• idea – have students make core list of books for students in younger grade
• create context for reading – give students background for text to be read
• the more meaning you make, the better understanding you have
• get the kids to read what they want to read
• make your own video – get kids to talk about their view of literacy in school

This was really fascinating/engaging stuff. This is what I would love to use for my practicum or for Master’s. I am trying to figure out something specific that I can create as a final product for my practicum. I was lookng at some sort of a technology plan, but I would like to make it something practical and link it to literacy, particularly boys’. Overall, this was a great day.

I still want to try to do something with the “real men read” idea. I also want to try to set up some sort of blogging reading response space. Perhaps a shared reading/writing wiki space could be use as well. This would allow students to share the writing process.

Another suggestion was to set up a staff book club. The school could have assemblies through the year to allow teachers to share (model) their reading with students, particularly for the boys.

Mr. Booth also suggested guysread.com when I was talking to him after the presentation. I think I have visited this site before, but I’ll have to check it out.

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