For the first reading assignment of the quarter, we are
reading Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet’s “Constructing Meaning,Constructing Selves: Snapshots of Language, Gender, and Class from Belten High,”
an article that investigates the social and linguistic activities of the jocks, burnouts, and the in-betweens to show how people use language
to simultaneously create solidarity and differentiate themselves from other
groups.
One of the first activities we do in class is to define
terminology, both to set a tone of the class as a collaborative learning
environment and model close reading practices straight out of the gate. Using a
pair-share model, students worked with a partner to look up one of the words or
phrases on the list and then reported back to the class. As each group reported
back to the class, I served as a scribe to capture the essence of the
definition they found for the shared list, asking questions to clarify the meaning
they wanted to convey and asking questions about where they found the
information and how they evaluated the source.
And here's where things went somewhere interesting for me as a learner...
One of the groups was
asked to define the term “Community of practice”—the term that I expected to be
one of the easiest to define. The words were recognizable and the phrase could
be broken down to figure out the basic meaning, even if the technical meaning
was lost. The students found a solid definition provided on the website of the
one of the scholars that coined the term twenty year previously (Etienne
Wenger), although it reflected a more recent version of the definition that
didn’t quite fit with the article that we were reading in class. And while the
students had indeed found a credible source, they had no context to recognize they
had found a primary source. But here was the best part, the students were skeptical
about the source—and with good reason. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, the authors
of the article we were reading, had not cited the original source (Lave and Wenger)
when talking about “communities of practice” even though they included a footnote
reference in a similar article published a few years later (Communities ofpractice: Where language, gender, and power all live). In other words, the
students couldn’t follow the bread crumb trail back to the source because some
of the crumbs were not there. I was impressed to hear the students share that
they didn’t know whether to trust the definition on Etienne Wenger’s website (who
is now a private consultant in social learning), because the .com URL
suggested that it may be a consumerist rather than education site. The students
demonstrated that they have been listening to the lessons about evaluating web sources,
but that didn’t mean they were able to make sense of what they found (even when
they hit gold).
The irony is that even with all this information at our
fingertips in the information age, there is even more to wade through—and not
necessarily with ease.
This activity reminded me of the importance of asking
questions in the classroom. Had I not asked the groups about their thinking
process, I would not have seen what they DID know and how they WERE applying
their knowledge. Nor would I have really understood how they came to the
conclusions they did.
More than ever I am convinced that we are more effective
teachers when we can assess what already students know, ask what they are
thinking, and help them learn how to learn. This is meeting students where they
are and help them make the leap to the next level.
