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.

Previewing & Pre-Writing: First Year Students Dive into Freire

I’m rediscovering how important it is to provide students with multiple “ways into a topic” when approaching a new text. I admit that I used to simply assign a reading and then be upset with myself and students for not understanding the text. 

Starting last year, I took intentional steps to to solve the problem of preparing students to read. My particular challenge this semester? To access prior knowledge and to provide background knowledge before plonking them into chapter two of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  

Students React to Memorizing and/or Manipulating Ideas

I’ve been assigning pretty large doses of meta-cognitive journaling lately (see here, here, and here). I’m a big fan of having folks think about their learning. I hadn’t provided any direct instruction (either a reading, activity, or discussion) on what constitutes “learning” - at least so we could have a shared vocabulary about basic concepts of knowledge. 

So I looked up a favorite passage from a favorite textbook (Reading Rhetorically by Bean, Chappel and Gillam)  and created a three-part activity to explore the difference between “conceptual” and “procedural” knowledges. 

In a nutshell, conceptual knowledge is the kind of learning that has to do with memorizing, i.e., fact, figures, names, dates, concepts, theories, principles, etc. Procedural has to do with manipulating and applying conceptual knowledge. Lecture and reading is the primary vehicle for conceptual knowledge, recall being the primary, or at least most apparent, function of learning. Discussion, activity, laboratory - where learning is about managing and wielding ideas - are modes of procedural knowledge.

Certainly, divvying up knowledge into two categories seems to foreclose any overlaps between the two. This division may even be reductive - big time. But I figured this relatively simple contrast between “conceptual” and “procedural” would be an easy way to discuss the thinking they've experienced as well as the kind of teaching they may expect to encounter in college. 

A Wish for Meaningful Reflection: A Desire for Praxis

The agenda called for a brief quiz. Not a graded quiz. More of formative assessment - for me to see how well students were learning the material. Last week’s lesson went quite well. The class, full of first year, first-generation college student, was engaged, bright, and on task. “They’re getting it,” I had thought to myself. 

But a quick glance at their work painted a different picture - no one got even half of the questions right. Worse, when I assigned students to work in pairs to discuss the reading assignments, over half of the students actively avoided each other and the assignment, much more than I typically observed in prior classes. Was this about not doing homework? About being bored with the material? 

I marshaled my patience, attempting to dispassionately note what was going on so I could pose this problem to students later in the period.