Textual Transactions 1 Running head: TOWARD MEANINGFUL TEXTUAL TRANSACTIONS Life Paths and Destinations: Toward Meaningful Textual Transactions for a 12th Grade British Literature Class Jeremy T Headrick University of Georgia ELAN7408: Capstone Seminar in English Education 11 December 2005Textual Transactions 2 Life Paths and Destinations: Towards Meaningful Textual Transactions for a 12th Grade British Literature Class Table of Contents Rationale: p. 3 Texts: p. 12 Assessments: p. 13 Overarching Assessment Goals: p. 14 Materials: p. 15 Lesson Plans Week 1: p. 16 Week 2: p. 23 Week 3: p. 30 Appendices: p. 35Textual Transactions 3 Rationale Within a semester-length curriculum with the guiding question, “How do I make this text meaningful to me?,” the subsequent unit will address students’ needs to identify their current life paths and to pursue their future destinations (aspirations)—in other words, to self-assess their statuses so that they might plan to pursue their long-term goals. Utilizing the entire text of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in addition to various approved student-selected texts, we, as a class, will work towards producing multigenre portfolios, which will be accompanied by culminating synthesis papers (Appendix B). I will defend the unit according to three of the six justifications enumerated by Smagorinsky (2002): 1) current social problem; 2) psychology/human development; 3) literary significance. A current social problem of exceptional significance is how to educate the people of the United States. The problem of education in the United States existed even before it gained its independence from Great Britain and established itself as a nation, but I will restrict my argument to English teaching in particular, though some of my argumentation may speak to U.S. education in general. Overall, English classrooms over the last 100 years (English as a worthy area of study, as opposed to the traditional Latin, did not begin to emerge until the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Bizzell, 1986; Connors,1985).) have remained basically the same in superficial appearance and structural organization. In a traditional classroom, roughly 30 desks are arranged in rows that face toward the front of the room; the teacher stands before the class, near the chalk board (or now the marker board), and lectures; students copy down notes or do whatever else might be required of them, including essays, worksheets, tests, and readings—ideally working individually, remaining seated at their desks, and keeping still and quiet (see Kutz & Roskelly, 1991 for evidence of this, or simply ask me about my schooling experience).Textual Transactions 4 Though Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” (Waters, 1979, track 5) may represent an explicit rebellion against British educational practices, the song, with its refrain, “We don’t need no education,” may be as easily understandable in the context of how many U.S. students’ have responded to the traditional English classroom. In keeping with the arrangement of the classroom described above, the roles of teacher and student and the definitions of knowledge and learning are also rigidly defined and practiced. A teacher is the unquestionable leader of the classroom, from whom, with the assistance of textbooks, all knowledge is transmitted; a student is a vessel for receiving knowledge from teachers and textbooks; knowledge is tiny pieces of information that a student receives from a teacher and the textbooks, all of the bits eventually accumulating into a mass (of knowledge) in a student’s brain; and learning is rote memorization of facts (e.g., grammar rules, vocabulary lists, names, and dates) which may be demonstrated by taking a test that requires one to display (some have said regurgitate), as accurately as possible, what knowledge one has absorbed. The aforementioned roles and definitions represent “transmission” theories and practices (I take “transmission” from Smagorinsky (2002); but this concept has been given many other names (e.g., see also “endogenous constructivisim” in Bruning, Schraw, Norby, and Ronning, 2004; “empiricism” in Case, 1996; and “traditionalism” in Kutz & Roskelly, 1991)). A transmission framework all too often seems to neglect, if not completely ignore, a student’s wants, needs, and background, and this shortcoming has become increasingly evident over roughly the last fifty years, particularly with the influx of non-traditional students (according to race, class, gender, etc.) as a result of various sociopolitical movements (Hairston, 1982; Bizzell, 1986). This is not to say that all schools abide by a transmission model of education, that a clearly definable school structure is a bad thing, that teachers should be withoutTextual Transactions 5 authority, or that students should disregard “facts,” but it is to suggest that schooling should seek a balance among sociocultural, teacher, and student goals. A unit emphasizing life paths—which may include, but not necessarily be limited to, students’ identities according to geographical setting, interpersonal relationships, vocational choice, and leisure activities— seeks such a balance and may prove particularly useful for high school seniors—who may be beginning to negotiate the tensions outside of their caregivers’ residences (e.g., work, more school, marriage, voting, etc.). In short, schooling must not miss life’s “bigger pictures” by emphasizing narrowly and rigidly prescribed educational notions. By no means endorsing a wholesale dismissal of traditional educational notions, current understandings of psychology/human development establish a more inclusive view of education and provide another justification for my Paths and Destinations Unit. From the overarching concept of “constructivism,” which, at its most general level, suggests that students construct rather than receive meaning from texts (Smagorinsky, 2002; Case, 1996, Bruning et al., 2004), three essential ideas emanate: 1) multiple intelligences, 2) textual literacy, and 3) metacognition—all of which may transform schooling. Gardner (1983; 1993; 1999 as cited in Smagorinsky, 2002) has expanded what learning is and how it may be accomplished through his theory of multiple intelligences. Basically, the theory of multiple intelligences argues that there are at least eight different ways (i.e. linguistic,