Where are you wanting to go next in this course to build on the work now done? Thoughts, ideas, dreams --

I am interested in discussing the ways that literacy can be taught in a critical manner, similar to the concept that I brought up in class (meta-conversation, looking beyond the obvious, contextualizing material, learning about the author/origin of the material). I appreciated the quote in Rose that stated, "They liked books and ideas, and they liked to talk about them in ways that fostered growth rather than established dominance" (Rose 58). This explains the difference in learning between becoming enlightened and liberated rather than oppressed and stifled. Sometimes students and even teachers are unaware of the oppressive nature of their pedagogy, and it is important to critically examine one's curriculum/method. We touched on the issue of critically learning literacy in class, as we discussed the idea of making students more active in order to allow for their own creation/shaping of their individual educational path. Agency is crucial to an effective education. I also believe that actually seeing the different forms of literacy learning at play in videos/documentaries would help me conceptualize how to teach literacy critically. 

I so enjoyed hearing everyone's excerpts yesterday, and I just want to take a moment to say that I really did learn _so_ much while writing the literacy autobiography essay and while trying to create my own definition of literacy.  Moving forward, I want to first and foremost say that I'm confident I'll learn so much (and have many threshold concepts!) regardless of which project we do next in which order.  However, I personally am the most excited about connecting our abstract literacy questions/definitions to something more tangible and concrete.  It seems like it could work to do the curriculum project next... I think there's something intriguing about exploring and complicating the notion of literacy (done) and then going ahead and trying to pin it down and think about its intersection with practical, day-to-day programs, etc.While I have no doubts that the thrice told tale project would also be interesting and generative, it seems like after doing this definition project we might benefit from applying our abstract ideas to something more concrete?  I'm absolutely flexible though!

Seeing as that our the Literacy/Edu Comrades already have a strong sense of how they are defining literacy, I am really curious as to how the definitions fit into practice. We can all sit down and theorize what’s best, but the ideas do not exist until we do something about them. My favorite superhero, Batman, once said, "It's not who I am underneath, but what I *do* that defines me. " I don't believe I am because I think, I believe I am because I do. Thinking alone keeps the ideas in our heads, but we need to channel those definitions by putting them into classroom as well as the real life context. For example, what we think of literacy could be completely different in different settings. Thus, we could start analyzing our field placements in the context of our definitions of literacy. Instead of trying to fit everything into our definitions, we should leave them as working definitions that will be evolving with the placement advetures. I would be very interested in learning about how all of our definitions are co-evolving with the classrooms we are working in. Furthermore, the last paper topic was a very challenging one. Part of the reason to why I struggled was not receiving enough feedback after writing my paper. My main concern with the paper was if I was able to communicate my ideas properly, but I didn't know that because my peers didn't get a chance to see my draft. Perhaps, we can establish a deadline to have the paper in class, then go through a peer review process to strengthen our writing. I really like how this week we looked at excerpts of each other’s papers, but that didn’t help me in figuring out if my formatting helped convey my point.

I think the next step is to focus on the "how" of literacy. I do not love the idea of doing a project where we create our own curriculum or activity that promotes literacy and this is probably stemming from the fact that I do not plan on becoming a teacher. I am really enjoying the book "Lives on the Boundary" and I think it creates a lot of opportunity to discuss the how of literacy.  If we continue with the current trajectory of the course I think that this discussion will come about naturally.