Pedagogy Review

·         Diversity:

o    ethnicity/gender/race/culture/religion

§  literature you teach must be diverse—not all dead white males

§  not specific ideology

§  language--teaching composition

·         incorporate texts that show nonstandard English, other languages, cultures (use of slang, Ebonics, etc.)

·         easier to move from concrete to abstraction through familiar cultural context (Bloom’s taxonomy--)

Bloom’s theory of learning involves moving from mastery of “lower-order” mental functions/intellectual skills to “higher-order”

Gulliver’s Travels (1720s)—student reading outside his/her culture/experience will have trouble with the lower-order functions

Higher order functions are about abstract thinking: analyze/synthesize/evaluation

·         analysis--understand the parts—dissect—a work as a whole (the rose as love symbol in “The Sick Rose”)—thinking beyond limited or particular text or experience

·         synthesis—how parts relate to the whole—or making connections between two or more texts (looking at rose symbolism in more than one text)

·         evaluation—is this good or bad, beautiful or ugly, logical or illogical, moral or immoral—critique

Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1850)

·         knowledge—read the text, understand all the words, follow the plot, etc.

·         comprehension—being able to tell the story in your own words, draw a picture, sing a song, diagrams, etc.

·         application—how does this story apply to listener? what does it say to me? journaling, class discussion, group-work, debate (is this narrator crazy or not?)—engage prior knowledge (I’ve known crazy people, I’ve read about insanity) or theory

·         analysis—abstract idea—the narrator’s sporadic tale-telling (scattershot) indicates schizophrenic disorder

·         synthesis—abstract idea—see pattern in Poe’s work—series of unreliable narrators who are always crazy (“The Black Cat” “Ligeia”—obsessive paranoid delusional

·         evaluation—good from a utilitarian point of view (easy for students to read and note the unreliable narrator); good writing style (short and economical vs. Poe’s early long-winded stories); immoral: does this guy “pay” for his evil—does he even understand his evil (will this story make some readers go out and kill, or reinforce their sociopathy) (how could we defend Poe from this charge of immorality?  The “beating heart” suggests that there is an innate human conscience that you can’t escape no matter how “crazy” you are.)

Just as you need to recognize students’ multiple intelligences, you need to teach to lower- and higher-order functions.  (Take home assignment that focuses on comprehension—putting story in their words).

Learning and development (middle schoolers still learning lower-order functions/ you don’t start to use abstraction comfortably until high school)

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/development/piaget.shtml

1.      Sensory-motor Development  (first two years of life)

2.      Preoperational Period (2-7)

3.       Concrete Operations (7-11) concrete problem-solving (get cookie off top of desk—pull chair, etc.)

4.       Period of Formal Operations—abstract thought (11-15)—formal logic, abstraction—higher-order Bloom functions

a.       Can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systematically 

1.      assignment/activity: journaling about the story—anticipatory questions (where is plot heading)

b.      Becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the future, and ideological problems 

1.      being able to come up with their own questions--don’t spoonfeed every response; learn to think critically and independently

Kolberg’s Stages of Development (Moral Growth)

Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)

1. Obedience and punishment orientation

(How can I avoid punishment?)

            2. Self-interest orientation

(What's in it for me?)

Level 2 (Conventional)

            3. Interpersonal accord and conformity

            (Social norms)

            (The good boy/good girl attitude)

            4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation

            (Law and order morality)—Many adults never make it beyond this stage (why do

            you not rob a bank—eventually you will get caught)

Level 3 (Post-Conventional)

            5. Social contract orientation (idea that government is allowed through the

            consent of the governed, not through brute force/powers)

            6. Universal ethical principles

            (Principled conscience) (why would you not rob a bank—it will hurt other

            people, either financially, induce fear of banks in society—banks are necessary

            function in society and to disrupt it, disrupts society as a whole)

In terms of teaching literature/writing, Kolberg can inform assignments as you seek to get students to identify conventional and post-conventional morality

Writing Process

Whole Language vs back-to-basic literacy