Heading out to Denver for AERA tomorrow. I want to especially encourage anyone to attend the interactive symposium listed above. Detailing the work of the UCLA IDEA Council of Youth Research, the symposium highlights the research of more than 30 Los Angeles High School students that I’ve helped work with. The students – as well [...]
A student asked me to put these photos up – my third period is writing an essay analyzing the narrative and intent behind a recent mural on campus.
I fear that maybe in thinking about counter-narratives and the role of storytelling, I’ve been thinking too small. Maybe we need to start with a macro-vision of life in the classroom. What would it look like for students to develop their own creation myths? In disrupting the “single story” of their neighborhoods and various cycles [...]
In the past two days, I’ve received no less than five emails asking me if I’ve seen this article (I have now … thanks to each of you!). Apparently my research interests have been made pretty explicit at this point. In any case, I was reminded of a couple of impromptu lessons I created that [...]
One of the things that Mr. Carlson and I experimented with using during his intersession was comics. Specifically, we had students create comic strips through Pixton. The best thing about having students create stories through Pixton is that it just happens. Other than guiding students through the registration process, Mr. Carlson and I never needed [...]
If you have a spare moment, please check out the blog a group of intersession students is currently contributing to. All posts (aside from the sporadic teacher post from Mr. Carlson or myself) are written and (possibly) edited by the students. Yes, there will be occasional typos, grammatical, and spelling errors – isn’t that part [...]
I’m currently in the midst of a revamped unit with my 11th graders involving concurrently analyzing The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Broken Spears. We’ll be reading additional texts and watching films related to Thoreau, Subcomandante Marcos, Gandhi, the South Central Farmers, and whatever else we can cram into the next few weeks before [...]
I’m fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in my car. It’s Los Angeles, after all, and working and going to school on opposite sides of town lead toward frequently lengthy commutes. Left alone in a silent room long enough and I’ll go crazy – as I am now, sitting in the jury selection [...]
I want to contrast experiences in my classroom and in one of my graduate seminars. At this point, I can reasonably predict what will transpire in my 11th grade classroom when introducing students to the writing process. Admittedly, the way I teach writing has changed dramatically over the years – the old me would [...]
This started as what was going to be an email to a colleague. However, I’m thinking that posing this as a discussion maybe a more fruitful dialogic exercise. My situation is as follows: I have a class of upstanding and exceedingly bright individuals. These students regularly point the way toward large-scale change but hesitate at [...]