Welcome Blog Post

Moving Forward.....Why do I create?

Welcome to our NEW community and classroom, its absolutely NOT the same and I miss all you beautiful faces. But here is a place for us to Start to have discussions and share ideas and pictures with one another. A place for Inspiration and New Ideas, to share and to come together.

I would like to invite all of you to make a Blog of your journey through this historical time. It is a place where we can comment and watch one another progress and journey. They will all be unique and different. We will all have a different path and take a different journey. Please go to blogger.com and set up your own account. This is a place where you will post a visual and written component of your weekly progress. It should have a focus on making and fashion, and although personal information will be shared please keep the focus on the course and save other personal pictures and information for other social media sites. As well as creating your own Blog I also ask that you comment on others blogs weekly. This will be a fin way to connect and give feedback to one another. So how do we move forward when everything we had planned has changed?!?! Fashion is about creating with our hands, and making a statement that says something to the world. The world is changing before our eyes right now. I ask you, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY ANS HOW CAN YOU CREATE IT?Here is a response to a student from Central Saint martin's in London after finding out that the studio will be closed to students for the remainder of the year,  “Of course, the show is important, because of the physicality of fashion. But you have 400 people that actually attend it, and then the rest of the world sees it online anyway. Maybe this situation will allow us to develop a way of conveying work in a more interesting way than just a few catwalk photos. It might not be the outcome we had in mind setting out, but design's all about adaptation,” he finishes with. “It’s about assessing the situation you face and responding to it."Sam Jamieson, a student on the school’s MA in Menswear. 
We have to be brave and strong right now and find away to adapt that inspires us and others.We have to view the world through a different lens in a different manner. This lens may be different for all of you!

Here is a link to the rest of the article if you are interested.

https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/884be4/how-londons-fashion-students-are-reacting-to-the-coronavirus-crisis?utm_source=Vogue+Business&utm_campaign=ab0a53ee68-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_17_10_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5d1e7914df-ab0a53ee68-58066663

 What will inspire you?

Medical Mask to Support Health Care Workers

MEDICAL MASK with Ken!

As mentioned before in early post, Andrew Cuomo is requesting the help of New Yorkers to support the medical community. I have friends at Vassar who say mask are in low supply and under lock and key. I have been speaking to friends and researching how we could make quality mask to support these health care workers. The intention of this projects to support the medical community  not so much for personal (unless sick or part of the vulnerable population). I have been working with our favorite Fashion Aluminums, Ken Diaz, and here is Ken's first prototype!!! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kwFaRFHKhY - This is the one Ken made, but we are adding a pipe cleaner up above the nose area to make it safer for medical professionals.


Here are some other links I have been watching and liked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCJcE-r7kcg&list=TLPQMjIwMzIwMjCXRkXXYeLMSw&index=1

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoPSXaLKCNE

https://www.craftpassion.com/face-mask-sewing-pattern/

Let me know if you are Interested or Inspired. Just another option for all of us with sewing skills to putto work in another way.

IMAGINE: my philosophy of education

This is why we have to believe in HOPE!

Expose the Truth’s and Imagine the Possibilities

 

Throughout this entire class I have been asking myself what practices can apply to my classroom?

What promises am I going to make to students?

What are my goals? And most importantly the theme of our class

How can I turn promise into practice?

Building a Framework for Success:

I too will continue with a framework of hope despite all that is weighing upon us, because if we (as educators) don’t have hope than all is lost to the system and the neoliberal agenda. And I refuse to let go of the theme of this blog, which is too, EXPOSE the truth (Delpit) and IMAGINE the possibilities (Gatto): the possibilities of both my students and a better more just future. I will use this blog as a tool to do so; I will post ideas, articles and inspiration, as well as keep up to date info on exciting new student work (both things that work-things that didn’t work). It is a commitment to pushing my students and myself to greatness through self-reflection, artistic expression (imagine) and the use of critical literacy (expose).

Often as both teachers and humans we are creators of habit and change is a challenge, so here I am committing my CHANGES for 2011/12 school year to cyber space, beyond paper, beyond my exhausted memory, here on my blog I am making it official. I hope to continue to add to the blog as ideas continue to build. These are my new inspirations as a result of a summer of reflection.

Ideas for Fashion Design and Merchandising Class

 2011/12 School Year:

Fashion Article Blog Group’s -

I will lead kids to generate their own list via a singles mixer to help come up with 5 essential questions to explore for the year dealing with social justice and the fashion industry. Students pick a social justice theme (inquiry question) and create a blog, post articles, questions, add images and share out responses!! No more Socratic seminars- My goal is to create a more student inspired authentic learning environment where students explore ideas that matter to them and their futures.

Ms. Sheehy, the Technical Trade Communication Instructor, will sketch while we write everyday. The students will see writing is like drawing, it takes practice everyday to improve. We will commit to writing daily as a class, myself included.

Use different technique’s to help organize writing assignments – specifically focusing on Thinking Maps (Jackson and Cooper, 2007).

Using Circle Maps for my do now writing pieces. Building a framework for successful writing for ALL students.

Make sure students write a justification/ artist statement for all design work in fashion class. I will be prudent about this and it will become routine.

Senior Project – online presence- Still thinking on this one? How can I add multi-media more – digital story maybe? I am not sure what it is but there is a way to make the Senior Project stronger and guarantee that all students do all writing components.

General food for thought: USE Multiple text and Give choices, lay out the framework to be successful, use appropriate tools, and discussion based learning (Allington). Making it matter through the power of inquiry (Wilhelm and Smith, 2007). Explore trilingualism, and respect the home language.

Use Lisa Astarita Gatto’s model of teaching as an inspiration for my classroom. Give control to the students, total control, let it be completely there event. I will lead and provide structure but they will be the driving force to determine directions of the show (this will be by far the biggest challenge for change that I committed to this blog). Gatto is a true inspiration and strives towards creating the classroom learning environment she advocates for.

The list continues………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..more .............................................................................................more to come.

Closing The Gap

 Why is something like this considered normal(opposed to disturbing, concerning, problematic, etc. anything but NORMAL)?

It is more than just the Economy; it is Critical Literacy( "a response to injustice and the production of illiteracy"(Tuck, 20011) as the answer to closing the gap:   The framework of critical literacy is to provide the door used to close The Gap. The ever-looming gap between the middle class Whites population and the Black, Latina/o and poor White population. A gap in everything from median net worth, academic achievement, incarceration rate (a Caucasian male born today has a one and twenty chance of spending time in jail while a black male born today has a one in four chance of spending time in jail (Moses, 2001) unemployment rate, teen pregnancy, to the drop out rate. The list goes on and on, and MUST be closed (but currently is widening). Many of today’s school practices, “Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as process of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence”(Freire, 1997), mirror the oppressive and institutional racist practices of society as a whole. Civil rights advocate, Robert Moses raises many questions about today’s educational system and advocates for, “the students at the bottom”. Asking, “How do young people at the bottom get into the mix” and, “Are we going to have a society where only a small group of people are prepared for the future, where there’s a huge knowledge gap” (Moses)? So how is critical literacy an answer to this question, and how is it a means to not only bridging the gap, but also closing the gap?

First we have to look at what is literacy and how we, as educators, view it? According to Gatto (2007),“Literacy is a practice, something that gets DONE, not skills to be learned for use at a later date…. literacy is “shorthand for social practices of reading and writing”(Street, 1995). My approach is to provide experiences and problems that engage students in expanding their existing literacy practices in order to construct and use new ones”(Gatto). It acts as a means for, “Targeted young people finding their voice” Moses suggest opposed to telling them what their voice is, how it should be, and what it sounds like. When we look at literacy critically it is much more than just reading and writing skills, it begins to be an agent for social change.

So, how do we use critical literacy to create change? First, we must change, “the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students”(Freire). Education has the potential to be the great equalizer used to, “Foster students’ identities as learners and their sense of agency as participants which, position the teacher as a co-collaborator in an inquiry classroom” (Allington, 2007). Helping the marginalized students work towards achieving, “Authentic liberation-the process of humanization”(Freire) in which,  “Liberation is a praxis; the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it”(Freire). This role reversal of teacher as student and student as teacher in combination with their reflection of themselves on the world is a fundamental principal in effective critical literacy.

We have to challenge the authority that exist within a system built on power over instead of power with, “Authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it”(Freire). We have to assess the, “dichotomy between human beings and the world” (Freire), and inspire a shift in thinking and actions of students and teachers from the roles that exist today, towards the new ones listed below:

(1)-Being for oneself not others (Freire). (2) Being with the world versus merely in the world (Freire).

(3) Being a spectator, versus a re-creator (Freire).

(4) Turning passive learners into active learners (Moses)

Critical literacy inspires students to change the world not adapt to it. The distinction is essential to forward progress. As Freire states,” Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change then into objects”(Freire). And I believe that no teacher should have the power to commit such acts of violence.

We have to confront these practices, and bring new breath into the system. We have to show administrators and educators alike that, “We believe our students to be literate before they enter classrooms. We have to use their experiences, interest, history, culture, language and literacy practices to develop to the literacy ”(Gatto). Instill, faith in our students, faith that they can feel, and know, “If you say you love your students, then you can be sure that they will test that protestation of affection”(Kohl, 2007). Let them test and prove that we are right, we care, and we care immensely. Show the power in creating, “Real conversation requiring that participants have ideas, that they articulate those ideas, and that they bring them to the group, decide how to address them, and then engage with one another”(Probst, 2007). Lets bring value to our students through respect in the classroom. Lets support Freire’s problem-posing education, “affirming men and women as being in the process of becoming- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality”. Our mission as educators is to bread change and, “Scripted lessons mandating Tuesday’s writing be the same for each student in every school are guaranteeing mediocrity”(Rief, 2007). The world deserves more!

IMAGINE: A classroom where ALL students write everyday with meaning!

This is what Lynn Astarita Gatto has accomplished and is a model for authentic learning that engages all students.

In Gatto’s depiction of her elementary class 12 week vivarium project she took her students through the whole process of creating, designing, building, researching and completing a butterfly vivarium. Through this process she encompassed multiple content areas and covered all of her curriculum standards. The classes experience was truly inspiring, and what I always imagined school should be like. She created a classroom with real world application and meaning, which lead to a challenging and engaging environment.

Although I consider my classroom to be a lively and enriching environment I also felt a desire to reevaluating some of my teaching practices after reading, Gatto's article. I began asking questions like, "What control can I give over to the students"? "What can I let go of"? “What outcomes have I been forcing”? And yes, I do have an engaging vocational curriculum with  “integrated academics”, and we put on a huge fashion show which serves as a motivator with real life application- but something was missing. Something was different about Gatto’s classroom than mine, and I want to figure out exactly what it is – what I am missing? What the key is? So I tried to break down her steps and see where I could apply her process to mine: (I marked in red the lessons I learned from Gatto’s work, and her words and experiences in black).

Believe that all students are literate and valuable to the classroom experience

Gatto constantly demonstrated her belief in her students, “I believe my students to be literate before they enter my classroom. I use their experiences, interest, history, culture, language and literacy practices to develop to the literacy ”(Gatto, p.88). She respects every child and involves everyone in the classroom,” Every child knew they had something important to contribute to the unit right from the start”(Gatto,p.79). There ideas were recorded and posted and then most importantly acted upon.

Consider every learning environment to be unique and always changing

“Considering the individual students, planning carefully, selecting appropriate materials and activities, and adjusting activities are all important aspects of what I do to establish a successful literacy program”(Gatto, p.77). Gatto explains how her word wall and vocabulary change year-to-year depending on her students needs. She never takes one-size fits all approach to education.

True integration- not add-ons,

Gatto explains, everything that she did in her class had meaning and was for demonstrating the practical social use of literacy, which entailed mixing literacy’s to work towards a common goal (just as we do in real life).“Literacy is a practice, something that gets done, not skills to be learned for use at a later date”(Gatto, p.78).

Leave the unknown-unknown-Let the students decide the outcome

Gatto only put the idea out there to the class. She never told them how they were going to do it. She made them responsible from kids generate questions, acting to answer them, designing and building a vision, and sharing it with the community. They class decided what they wanted and worked as a class to make that happen. Kids decide everything; “Every child had a part in the construction of the vivarium”(Gatto, p.81). It was a real community effort with incredible outcomes.

Students have to make the connection NOT be told by the teacher-very very important!!
Gatto always allowed the students to generate their own inquiry question, “Why are we reading a book that has nothing to do with butterflies if were going to study butterflies? She never answered the question; instead she posted it on the board and allowed each student to discover the answer on their own. This is when true learning happens.

Create rituals and routines

As much as Gatto allowed for freedom and gave much of the control of the classroom to the students, she also created simple rituals and routines in which the students knew what to expect everyday and how the classroom operated. There were many practices Gatto used to engage with the students daily: keeping a journal, post it note selections in readings, silent reading, word walls, personal student spelling book, use of multiple text, research to answer students own questions, (I can not get high school students to do this), etc., which intern all lead to KIDS WRITING DAILY.
 
Make real life connections

Gatto constantly was making the real life connections. She was always taking the students on trips to enrich their learning experience and to make the personal connection, which drives motivation to learn. She, Constantly, “contextualized the topic of the unit within our community and world events”(Gatto, p.83). She created lots of dialogue and have to come up with consensus (extremely important real life skill). She remained open and flexible- a true authentic learning environment- not scripted and never the same- always bringing real life examples into the class- Wonderfully done!

Multi-cultural/Humanistic Perspective

Gatto’s involved and valued all students and didn’t only use middle class white values (she even used books written in Spanish first) to drive her curriculum. She looked at her student’s differences as assets to the classroom experience and used her Spanish-speaking students experiences and language to enrich the learning environment. She was then able to make emotional connections, which lead to empowering change, (letters to Mexican government, questioning life, questioning media). Inspirational!

Let go of control- (biggest lesson for me)
“Letting go, getting out of the way, leaving them on their own so that they may assume the responsibility”(Probst, p.55). Gatto had such faith in letting the story unfold for itself. She had a vision of the project and was a guide for the students but by letting go of control she was able to let the lesson take on a journey of it’s own which lead to incredible valuable teachable moments (letters to the Mexican government, not trusting the media, morning the death of a local artist). As well as a successful vivarium being built and shared with the community.

Gatto’s classroom experience was incredibly inspirational. It is the way education/literacy should be; there was nothing stopping Gatto from creating social justice practices, engaging all of her students and pushing them to the highest limits. She demonstrated a real life example of Freire’s problem-posing model of education. Gatto was able to touch on everything that Freire prescribes to, “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other”(Freire, p.52). This is the process I believe Gatto to have given to her students – a real gift, and what I will strive to continue to work

CREATING VOICE:

 

“You who are poor and oppressed; you need, you must, make change. You must fashion a struggle.Young people finding a voice instead of being spoken for are a crucial part of the process. Then and now those designated as serfs are expected to remain paralyzed, unable to take an action and unable to voice a demand- their lives depend on the good work and good will of others”(Moses, p 19).

So the question remains: How do we create VOICE in school, through literacy?

Some may answer with standardization and others may answer with variation. I am going to argue on the side of variation, as does one of my personal heroes, Malcolm Gladwell.

We need critical literacy, meaningful, rigorous, curriculum for ALL, not for the privileged, not for the selected few, not in the AP class, but in every aspect of the day for every student. Simply stated through findings in Allington’s research, “kids differ. All students, not just the academically talented, need high-quality instruction all day, every school day”(287). I mean this doesn’t sound ground breaking, you would think it was a fundamental aspect of teacher education, so why is it so hard to understand and implement?

ABC’s- Actions, Beliefs, and Conditions: The problem is that it is much easier said than done, and like the title of the book, putting Promise into Practice is not always as easy as one may hope for it to be. Sometimes, the best intended teachers just miss the ball, others miss the whole court, and others spend countless hours always reevaluating how to catch the ball better, but with little success. And often, it is because they are looking for the WRONG ball. It is about the context, and turning promise into practice is a challenge. There is no “one size fits all” answer, but there are conditions, actions, and beliefs, to finding meaning and creating meaningful critical literacy for all students.

1. CREATE FLOW – “Csikszentmihalyi argues that we are most fully engaged and happy when we are in the flow, in other words, when we are experiencing something so intensely that nothing else seems to matter”(Wilhelm and Smith, p.231).

2. BREAK THE MYTH –No one is born naturally gifted at writing, math, science or art. Just like sports everyone has to practice. “We learn to write by writing…We do not learning anything without practice”(Rief, p. 191). Practice, practice, practice!

3. INFRINGE FEAR- Allow for some freedom (evaluation change) – We can’t always be judged on what we do wrong (Rief). Evaluations should highlight strengths (NOT JUST WEEKNESS’), “To develop a new identity, you must not only believe that you can be successful at exercising the competence required but also experience initial success”(Wilhelm and Smith, p.241).

4. FIND VALUE – You have to create a real audience, “We won’t work hard unless we know are practice is going to be used in a real game… We want to know our words made someone feel, think, or learn. This is writing with Voice”(Rief, p.191, 201).

5. INSPIRE - Use inquiry questions, questions that all students can grapple and bring to their interest field, “Situational interest will work to promote the engagement of all students, regardless of the multifarious individual interest”(Wilhelm and Smith, p.233).

 “When writers are engaged in the process of writing something that matters to them, for which they have their own purposes, that writing often surprises, delights, and empowers them, encouraging a stronger commitment to the crafting of their writing”(Rief, p.192) Not Visa-Versa!!!

Practice Hurdles: All of these things require commitment; it’s not easy to make changes, and there are always hurtles along the way, but with enough ingenuity I know we can all get over all the hurdles with enough practice (as Rief suggest).

1. MAKE REAL LIFE CONNECTIONS – Missing your audience- Context is everything! Don’t forget that our students are not in High School when we were – there is a generation gap. Our audience is not there audience.

2. CHALLENGE STAGNATION- Take a look in the mirror. It is hard to move sometimes, it take’s a commitment, self -evaluation, honesty and often support from others. Challenge yourself to change.

3. PUT YOURSELF IN YOUR STUDENTS SHOES-For example-I had a revolution this summer by looking at myself as a writer: I was forgetting the visual- “I never thought about drawing as thinking, where drawing didn’t count, and spelling didn’t count”(Rief, p. 202). I am a visual learner and love thinking through images so why am I not doing this for my students?

4. REMOVE SCRIPTED LESSONS – Don’t forget about the teachable moments and to challenge your old lessons. Yes you have the tried and true, but remember, “Scripted lessons mandating Tuesday’s writing be the same for each student in every school are guaranteeing mediocrity”(Rief, p. 204). We don’t want to make students into robots.

We want to create a shift from passive learners to active learners (Moses).

Make the Shift: There are subtle changes we can make in our pedagogical beliefs that can lead to great changes in student achievement and output.

APPLY THE 5 M’s -promoting competence: “Model, Mentor, Monitor, and provide Multiple Modalities and Measures. It is a simple shift, like Wilhelm and Smith suggest, “develop the skills a historian needs rather than providing her with historical information”(Wilhelm, Smith p.239)?

QUESTION COMPETANCE & ENGAGEMENT- “The correlation between competence and engagement… are so close that it is unclear in which direction the casual error goes”(Wilhelm, Smith, p. 242). Shift your thinking from competence first to engagement first and see where that can lead you – unknown territory is always fun!!

DENIE MEDIOCRATY-We see study after study that advocating for changes and proving what works in school, but resistance to change feels overwhelming. Just as permission to fail(Ladson-Billings) is a problem, I see a number of students suffering from Acceptance of Mediocrity- often leading to girls who “do” school with no emotional connection, and boys who are “bored” beyond belief. It is not just poor and minority youth at risk (although the consequence is much greater), it is the whole country at risk now. We have to challenge the status quo, “You cannot move this country unless you have consensus. The country is to big, too huge, too diverse, too confused”(Moses, p. 21). We must send the message and find consensus, and students must demand more. It is not about improved test scores, it is a clear message of inclusion- it is for everyone. As I started with Robert Moses’ words I will also end with them, “To make my self very, very, very clear, even the development of some sterling new curriculum---a real breakthrough – would not make us happy if it did not deeply and seriously empower the target population to demand access to literacy for everyone”(19).