I participated as a fellow in the University of Illinois
Writing Project
Summer Institute this summer. This portfolio represents some
of my
thinking.
I am an English teacher because I am committed to empowering my students through literacy. I want them to be able to access, speak back to, and speak with power. In order to do that they need to be confident readers and writers. The UIWP's focus on literacies (as opposed to literacy) attracted me to the program. Our month-long discussion of how to best promote and practice digital literacy and multi-modal composition was enriching and I'm left with a recharged sense of responsibility. I now see teaching digital literacy as a social justice imperative. My students, who have varying levels of experience with and access to technolog(ies), all need to leave my class with the research and writing skills that will help them say and get what they want. I now feel better equipped to appreciate what they already know, understand, and can do and better prepared to teach them how to use their voices as readers, writers, thinkers, and citizens.
I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity the UIWP gave me to collaborate with educators from all around the community. Day to day, it's difficult to collaborate with people outside of my department, so the chance to learn from and learn with teachers who work in different schools, different content areas, and at different grade levels was exciting. Now, I feel like I have practical ideas to bring back to my classroom that are grounded in sound theory. I look forward to continuing to collaborate with these insightful local educators. I feel more part of a community, a movement than ever.
Here you'll find some of the work I did this summer,
although to be honest, the most important thinking I did
this summer was with my UIWP classmates. I wish I could
capture that thinking
more easily, distill theoretical dialogue into portfolio
form. The discussions and debates we had together were
thought-provoking and invigorating. Thank you to the UIWP
leadership team and fellows for an energizing institute. I'm
excited to make what I learned from all of you happen in my
classroom.
Writings:
This section includes samples from our hour-long morning
writing
sessions. I know I'm going to miss having
that quiet, pensive time
every day. I'm
inspired to make an effort to deliberately reflect
through journaling during the school year
to maintain (at least some
of) this sense of clarity. It was
refreshing to remind myself that I am a writer. The UIWP has
reminded me how to identify as a writer. I
want my students to see themselves as writers and now I feel
like I can model that
identity more purposefully and sincerely.
Demonstration:
I looked forward demonstration time every day the most. The
approaches to teaching my classmates
theorized were refreshing and
original. Many of their demonstrations
informed the demonstration I
gave on June 30. In this section I give
an overview about my
demonstration and
reflect on my approach, using the valuable
feedback I received from my classmates.
I've included the
slideshow I used and other presentation
materials. Also, this section
includes my UIWP classmates' ideas about
how to teach social action
in their
classrooms.
Media
projects:
In this section I include a video I made about my writing
process and a podcast I created with a UIWP fellow. The
video is about my writing
process and the podcast is about reading as a process. These
projects prompted me to
think a lot about why I read and write and when I
feel
compelled to read and write, and also helped me reflect on how I
read write. Realizing
the way that I read and write is so particular and
personal reminds me of how
many individual thinkers there are in my
classroom, each with their own specific needs,
each with their own
sense of self.
Strangely, making something so completely "me" helps
remind me to consider
and appreciate how many ways there are to
do these acts.
I'll also say that being in touch with my writing process helped me create this portfolio. I trusted my process - which is initially messy and jumbled - and didn't organized my many thoughts until later. First I put anything I could possibly say on these pages, then I trimmed them down. It was helpful to start with so much and polish later. I hope this draft of the portfolio feels substantive but concise.
Reading Responses:
My reading responses do not reflect how much I read or how engaged I was with my reading this summer. Having the time to read and reflect independently was productive, but nothing compares to the discussions I had with my colleagues, which were reliably great. I've decided to include these responses not because they're brilliant, original pieces of writing, but because they're the pieces that triggered the most conversation with my classmates.
Rachel teaches English at Urbana High School where she
also serves as the Social Justice Committee co-chair. She
graduated with a BA in English and a minor in Gender and
Women Studies in 2009 from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. She received her MAT from National-Louis
University in 2011.