Learning Argument Practices Through On-Line Role Play

by Richard Beach and Cadance Doerr-Stevens
in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
March 2009

The article knits together several ideas about engaging kids in writing and argumentative literacy. It borrows ideas from Harris (How to do things with texts), Flower (Community literacy and the rhetoric of public engagement), and Graff (They say/I say). The example, of an on-line collaborative argument/problem solving, addresses engagement, authenticity, role-playing, building argumentative skills. The article addresses teachers' role in helping kids negotiate the recent media movement to the "echo chamber" of particular value groups.

I'm going to try to use some of this in my fourth-quarter writing assignment for English 1.

New Literacies are Everywhere!

Including the March 2009 issue of Educational Leadership. I've read the lead article: "Orchestrating the Media Collage," in which author Jason Ohler says, "New media demand new literacies," and gives the following 8 guidelines for teachers:

1. Shift from text centrism to media collage
2. Value writing and reading now more than ever
3. Adopt ART as the next R
4. Blend traditional and emerging literacies
5. Harness report and story ("creative nonfiction" "blend research and storytelling")
6. Practice private and participatory social literacy
7. Develop literacy with digital tools and about digital tools
8. Pursue fluency (not just basic literacy)

If you're interested in "new literacies" -- visual literacy, media studies, film study -- come check the issue out.

Then and now

Here’s an interesting then and now for you! (and it’s two pieces of visual literacy):
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/02/jonathan-kay-on-the-lesson-from-israel-apartheid-week-anti-semitism-is-now-a-creature-of-the-left.aspx

Here’s the argument: anti-semitic pictures have replaced the image of the hook-nosed Jew with the Israeli tank/gunship shooting down innocent kids. Anti-semites used to be part of the far right, now they’re aligned with the far left. Provocative and interesting.

Academic Vocabulary BIG LIST

Coxhead (2000) compiled the Academic Word List containing the 570 most common academic words.

Here are the top 570 Academic Vocabulary terms: http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/awl.htm

Why Bother Theorizing Adolescent's Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?

Why Bother? by Donna E. Alvermann in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Sept. 2008

see PBS Documentary - "Growing Up Online" aired Jan 22, 2008.


"the increased availablity of hypermediated digital texts is having profound effects on how young people process information" (see Dresang, 2005

a move from "collection" to "connection" (Luke, p 400, 2003)
"Akin to Freire's banking concept of education, collection code curriculum implies that teachers depost knowledge 'bits' into students who, in turn, accumulate, indeed collect, largely disconnected discipline-baed facts and figures through skill-and-drill pedagogy. By contrast [in connection code courriculum], digitalized knowledge and networked environments, critical understandings of teh relations among ideas, their sources and histories, intertextual referents and consequences, are as important if not more so than mastery, reproduction, and recomination of discrete facts or units of information"

Bean and his daughters offered this observation: conventional text-bound teaching in the content areas belies how contemporary youths locate and use information that has relevance for them. (Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999)

The work of literacy instruction is as much about listening and learning as it is about telling and teaching. Kirkland (22).

Bean. 1999. Intergenerational conversations and two adolescents' multiple literacies: implications for redefining content area literacy. JAAL, 42(6), 438-448.

Kirkland, (in press)

Luke, C. (2003) Pedagogy, connectivity, multimodality, and interdisciplinarity. RRQ, 38(3), 397-403.