Rationale

//“Students and teachers are learning together. Teachers do not have an answer in their minds (for everything) and they explore the answer with students together. The most important points for students are to find appropriate, sufficient evidence to support their claims,” (He Huang, 2010).//

We are three educators from diverse backgrounds. He (Stephanie) is from China, a brilliant second year doctoral student, and has experienced fascinating emic (insider) evidence of coming to the United States as “other.” Diane is American and is completing her M.Ed in order to boldly go teach in our challenging public school system. I am First Nation Cherokee and am completing my first year as a doctoral student in Teaching Curriculum & Teacher Education with a concentration in Counselor Education.

We decided to build on what our students already know and to allow them to go more deeply into the concept of short film for added depth to their understanding. For example, in each of our lesson plan, we design interesting activities to elicit students' background knowledge. We do believe that students' prior knowledge is a valuable resource for our teaching. First, students will be more engaged in learning new knowledge when they realize teachers appreciate their contribution. Second, students’ anxiety level about new knowledge will be lower if teachers can gradually move from what students already know to the field that they may know little about.

We have also taken rigorous steps to ensure that our non-native English-speakers’ needs are addressed. We understand that English language learners (ELLs) will be an important group of students in our future teaching, so it is essential that we design instruction that will enhance ELLs' academic language skills. They may come to school with no English learning experience, or they may be able to converse fluently with friends, yet struggle to express their thinking in class. Our use of language and content objectives serves to make the focus of each lesson clear to both teachers and students. Moreover, language objectives help teachers to identify what language skills that they need to build before teaching new contents. We strongly recommend that teachers teach language explicitly and use comprehensible language during the whole lesson.

More importantly, new and key vocabulary words must be defined in context, not just in the dictionary. In our lesson plans, we encourage students to use their new vocabulary words, or metalanguages, in their oral and written productions. Our goal is for students to integrate this knowledge with what they already know and thus transfer the practice of using new vocabulary words (in one context) to different contexts. Although we believe teaching needs to accommodate different student proficiency levels, we maintain high expectations for all students. In particular, we expect our students to enjoy and appreciate the beauty of English language arts, master the skills of analyzing narrative structure and design elements in different forms of media, and disentangle the values embedded in them. We also expect our students to confidently verbalize their thinking on how mass media influences or changes their lives--and to happily create their own forms of communicating meaning to others through various forms of media and technology.

Our target group of students are already experienced readers of multiple types of texts, so it is a natural progression of their literacy practices for them to become creators and consumers of making meaning and courageously foraging for new concepts (Hunter-gatherer analogy, Pace, Lecture Notes). According to Pace (2010, p. 4):

//“Media literacy is about more than comprehending media. In includes the ability to create personal meanings rather than accept interpretations of events and of life that are offered by others. In includes paying attention to the texts that populate daily life and to the demands of active citizenship in order to make wise choices and to participate in contemporary culture. These abilities become more important as new forms of media emerge.”//

Collaboration is an integral part of our instructional strategies, taught with clear framing, and revisited as often as possible using established norms for protocol. Collaboration is an excellent strategy for collectively pooling funds of knowledge for the betterment of group presentations in the area of “unavoidable challenges for schools” (Cortes, 2005) The experience is necessary for use in the global world of problem-solving as our society struggles with issues that require generous collaborative spirits. This is especially true in the area of teaching media literacy to our young (Schwarz, 2003). With mass media so deeply embedded in our culture, we feel it is our responsibility is to provide critical, culturally responsive pedagogy that will empower our students to critically assess and intelligently respond to the vast amounts of information that they daily encounter as they are learning how to interact meaningfully with others and contribute to the betterment of the world.

We have learned a great deal from our LAE 6861 course literature, particularly Pace's //Handbook on Teaching Literacy with Narrative Media and Technology// (2010) and the Cortes article, //How the Media Teach// (2005), and we plan to be generous in sharing what we have learned with those with whom we come in contact, whether they are students, colleagues or others. We invite the readers of this Wiki to visit our References page and Resources page and delightfully explore a great wealth of educational, cultural, and practical information for teaching and learning. Thank you.