Final project

Descriptive Narrative

Personal perspective:

Since I began my career in teaching, I have been fortunate enough to observe many different teaching styles.  While some methods coincided with my personal views, those that did not, provided me with the opportunity to question my practice and review my teaching strategies.   In working with Dr. Martine Pellerin in her research involving technology and literacy practices, I was able to dive deeper into my epistemological views on literacy acquisition and my approaches to teaching in a French Immersion environment.  Creating this video allowed me to pull together some of the evidence of learning I have been collecting in order to have a visual argument for balanced literacy and collaboration in the French Immersion classroom.  The main project I am presenting in the video allowed students to interact in French not only with their classmates, but also with staff members in the school.  The picture above is of our Child Development Advisors helping a student represent the number 12.  This picture, created and captured by the student was the basis for not only a classroom discussion in French, it also open up the use of doubles in addition.  If we as educators are moving away from stand and deliver pedagogy, we must also move away from teaching literacy and subject matter in isolation.    The world is coming together as a global community like never before with the help of technology, and I strongly believe that we are doing a disservice to our students if we do not show them how to collaborate and integrate their personal knowledge and the knowledge of others.  In my opinion some of the approaches of literacy acquisition in a “Oral first” French Immersion classroom does not allow students the richness of bringing their knowledge of the different literacy strands together in a collaborative environment.   It is my hope that this video will provide visual evidence of the capabilities of young language learners when teachers provide the tools they need to bring together all of the literacy strands.
The theory behind my thinking:
  Too often in early French immersion, reading and writing are viewed as separate literacy that should not be approached until the other literacy strands are strengthened.   It is my hope to provide evidence that solely focusing on vocabulary development in isolation limits a child’s ability to form their own meaning and links with literacy as a whole. The work of Genesee (1994) seems to agree with this viewpoint when it states that "Children as they become literate, are creative constructors of their language or languages.  Children engage in hypothesis creation and testing as they figure out how the written language works.  They are in control of the processes as they use information from the environment (including the people around them) in their construction of meaning” (p.137) ( I have also included another reference for Genesee's work that elaborates further on the topic of literacy acquisition and compliments his earlier work well)
Students exposed to a balanced literacy approach to teaching will demonstrate an ability to write complete sentences independently and will be able to collaborate more independently with their colleagues.  Often when we hear "21 century" learner we have visions of technology.  While I argue that this plays a crucial role in a second language classroom, I must also state that the balanced collaborative approach is just as crucial in the development of a well rounded complete learner. 

While many researchers have addressed the benefits of collaborative inquiry for literacy and social development, George Jacob and Christopher Ward (2003) detailed it well in their article for the Electronic Journal of Science. “Positive Interdependence: the feeling of support among group members such that they feel the group sinks or swims together.  Collaborative skills: e.g. disagreeing politely, encouraging all to participate, explaining by using examples and asking for examples.”  (p.1) In essence, collaborative inquiry is an essential skill needed in life, that develops students abilities to communicate, listen and interact with their peers using all of the literacy skills taught to them in their safe classroom environment.   This combined with the use of different technological mediums provides students with the opportunity to be 21st century learners.

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I hope to be presenting a modified version of this video with Dr. Martine Pellerin at the ACPI conference in November of this year. 

Experience of the video: 
Students are capable of great things when we provide them with the tools they need to be successful.  These tools are not uniquely technological, but are also many of the tools we have been trying to help students with for years, such as problem solving and collaboration.  In French immersion when students are able to work together and record themselves, they have a sense of pride in their work and they strive to use as much French as possible.  As seen in the video, students are engaged and are putting in their best effort to use their known French vocabulary.  They are motivated because of technology and because they know that another student is depending on them.  I hope that this video begins to wet the appetite for teachers who do not feel comfortable or are not yet using technology in a collaborative manner in their classroom.
Connection to theory from class:
As our class reading showed us, narrative can play a vital role in learning and assessment.  The use of technology can allow children to share their narrative freely without feeling judged  by speaking in front of classmates. As we saw in in the work of Barrett and Stauffer ( 2009) "we construct our understandings of the world mainly in the form of narrative, stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing and so on." (p.9)  We must remember that this is the same for students of any age.  Our students are taking in their understanding of the world from their environment.  We must give them different outlets for expressing their understandings, and technology and collaboration with peers is an essential tool for deep learning.   Teachers can no longer feel as if they are the only source for understanding.  Teachers also need to take stalk of their own epistemological beliefs and how they effect their teaching and their students understanding.  As seen in the work of Ackermann (2004) " The beliefs we held about children's learning are deeply grounded in our own convictions on what it means to be knowledgeable, intelligent, experiences and what it takes to become so." (p.15)  As I address in my video, students will rise to your expectations.  If you do not feel as student is capable of achieving they will not succeed, mostly because the teacher will not provide them with the tools they need to be successful.
What I want viewers to do with this information:
In combination of this video and the presentation that I will help give at the ACPI conference in November, it is my hope that teachers will begin to see that even young children are capable of utilizing and learning from and with technology.  They are capable of balancing literacy strands if these strands are taught in collaboration and are presented in an authentic manner.  I have provided some references for future reading about the balanced literacy approach in French Immersion, so that as the debate about literacy acquisition continues, teachers can reflect upon their views, the information provided during the video and the presentation and the readings in order to form a whole view of the capabilities of their students. The links provided at the side of this blog are offered as practical tools for French Immersion teachers to use.  Some are easy to use French websites teachers can use with their early immersion students to get them using laptops and technology and some websites are practical ideas for French Immersion to use for their own unit and theme development.  It is my hope that this will at the very least get teachers thinking about their current practice and personal views on teaching.

Connections:

I wanted to take this course in order to make connections between the domain of digital content and my classroom pedagogy. In creating this movie I was able to revisit the TPACK model we touched on in class to question and revisit my methods ans reasoning for using various technological mediums. I have begun to integrate the use of IPods, IPads and Smart boards into my daily classroom practice, but during this class I have begun to question the reasoning behind not only technology, but also why I have chosen to use those particular tools. A lot of my choices come down to what is available in the school and what I am most comfortable with.  While I do not fear using technology, I do fall victim to the “everything right now” mentally of this new Google search generation and I can get frustrated when things do not work the way I think they should. From this point on I plan on really taking the time to think about the curriculum and my pedagogy instead of starting with the technology.

  During the creation of this video I appreciated the opportunity to have discussions with colleagues about what was working for them and what was proving to be difficult.  One reason I chose this class was because it was offered on campus, and that is important to me because I value face-to-face collaboration.  The richness of discussions and the brainstorming completed in small and large groups in this class allowed me to reflect on the design of my video, the reasoning and the content of my video.    Although it was very meaningful for me to complete this project by allowing me to reflect on how far I have come, it also showed me how much further I have to go in my personal and professional growth and I look forward to continuing the journey of growth with my students, learning with and from one another, much like we did together in this class.

References and interesting links:
Achermann E. K., (2004) Constructing knowledge and transforming the world. Presented in: A   
                    learning zone of one's own: Sharing representations and flow in collaborative learning  
                     environments. pp. 15-37
Barrett, M. S., & Stauffer, S. L. (2009). Narrative inquiry: From story to method. Narrative inquiry    
                   in music education (pp. 7-17). Springer Science and Business Media.

Gestny, E, Straw, S. (2001). Literacy instruction in Two French Immersion Classrooms in Western Canada. Language, Culture and Curriculum. Vol. 14, No.2p.187-199. 

 Genesee, F. (1994). Educating second language children:  the whole child, the whole curriculum, the whole community. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Genesee, F., Jared, D. (2008).  Literacy Development in Early French Immersion Programs. Canadian Psycology. Vol.49 p.140-148.

Jacobs, G. M., Ward, C. (2000). Analyzing Student-Student Interaction from Cooperative Learning and Systemic Functional Perspectives. Electronic Journal of Science Education, 4, Article 3

While I have not cited this directly in my text, I feel as if these authors could help enrich an interested
party on the possibilities out there for language acquisition and balanced literacy in second language
classrooms:

Lyster, R. (2007). Learning, and-Teaching Languages Through Content A counterbalanced approach. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Miller, J. (1999) Becoming audible: Socia identity and second language use. Journal of Inercultural Studes, 20 (2), 149-165

Wesche, M, Paribakht, S. (1996) Enhancing Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading; A hierarchy of Text-related excercice Types. Canadian Modern Language Review v52 p.155-78

Multiple Intelligences. http://www.edwebproject.org/edref.mi.th6.html
References for Images:
http://scphoto.com/blog.php
http://www.semiconductorstore.com/pages/asp/Item.asp?ItemNumber=SII9287BCNU
office.microsoft.com/en-ca/images/ 

 Final video: