Using On-Line Bulletin Boards to Help with Reading

An important skill scholars are supposed to practice in composition is to find meaningful quotes and passages from the texts we read. We expect writers to support their ideas with outside sources. For sure, scholars’ opinions can be rooted in personal observation and experiences. But that isn’t enough; writers need to buttress their positions by quoting other thinkers, “recruiting” other writers’ words and ideas to support their own. 

In addition to finding quotes, developing writers need practice paraphrasing those ideas, rewording those quotes to illustrate how those sources fit into their own arguments. 

To practice finding and paraphrasing quotes, I’ve been experimenting with the bulletin board application Padlet to record and share the intellectual labor students accomplish. My goal was to make the process less solitary and to help the entire class profit from each others’ work. 

After we read and initially discussed chapter two of  Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I divided the class into groups. Each group tackled one of five topics we’d noted during those discussions: banking mode, problem posing, oppression/conformity, freedom/liberation, relevance/real life. I asked students to locate where Freire defined, clarified, or elaborated on those themes, urging them to look for quotes that they thought were especially meaningful or relevant.