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In our introductory episode, the teachers of the LCA English department introduce themselves, their pedagogies, and their goals for the podcast.
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Prose and Context, a podcast about lifegiving teaching by the English department at Lexington Christian Academy.
(Intro Music)
Danah: Welcome, and thanks for joining us. This is our first episode. We wanted to take some time to introduce ourselves and talk through some of our goals for the podcast. So I am Danah Hashem, and I teach tenth grade World Literature.
Karen: My name is Karen Elliott, and I currently teach 12th and 11th grade American and British literature and some cinema.
Nancy: My name is Nancy Nies, and I teach 9th graders in an intensive English program, mostly international students from China, Japan, and Korea.
Rebecca: Hello, my name is Rebecca LaFroy, and I’ve just moved from the UK where I taught English to 11-18 year olds, and here in the States, I’m going to be teaching it to 7th, 8th, and 9th grade.
Lori: My name is Lori Johnson, and I teach 6th and 8th grade language arts, and do some technology in the school. We wanted to introduce ourselves and give some of the background of how we came to teaching, how we came to LCA, and, um, sort of the journey that’s brought us here.
Karen: ah, my name is Karen Elliott, and my journey is very odd. Uh, I went to very liberal, secular schools which I really loved, and I gained a lot from that. My background is writing, composition, and comparative literature, and, um, I wrote for a small newspaper now defunct in New York City, and, when I got married and we moved to Boston and I was writing my dissertation, and I got a letter in the mail from a little school I’d never heard of: Lexington Christian Academy. And I came in to sub for a woman who was on maternity leave, and I never left. I love it here. It’s just, I knew it was my calling.
Danah: This is Danah, and I also have an odd background. My undergrad is in chemical engineering, so I worked in biotech for about 3 years before exploring going into teaching. I had always wanted to be a teacher; I come from a family of teachers. Um, but it just wasn’t something that my life would allow at the time, but 3 years in, I ended up going back and getting my master’s in teaching and my master’s in literature, and one of the first interviews I got after I graduated was here at LCA, and I’ve been here ever since, and I love it.
Nancy: My name is Nancy, and my background is 10 years as a journalist, mostly in magazines. And then I went back to graduate school in Victorian novel and feminist theory, and I spent most of my career teaching at college level, ah, women’s studies, writing across the curriculum, and English. And then, as my career went along, I ended up working with more and more international students which led me into teaching, both graduate and undergraduate students from around the world, and I loved it. So, as my job became more management oriented, I knew I wanted to stick to teaching, so I switched to high school, and I began here 5 years ago, and I’ve been focusing on these students who are newbies, and I also teach courses that are for students who have high levels of English, but, fluency, but, uh, don’t have the cultural background on how to write in an American academic context.
Rebecca: My mum was a history teacher, so growing up, being a teacher was the one thing I didn’t want to do. Uh, however, when I came to apply for college, I knew I wanted to study drama, and so I applied for lots of different courses including drama, and one of them was, ah, called “Education with English Drama.” And that was the one that I ended up doing. During my college course, I set up an organization called Little Hats which took drama into elementary schools and enthused them about the world of drama, and I just found that I loved it. So I trained to be a teacher, um, and, ah, worked in England as a teacher for 5 years in a big, um, rural secondary school there, and then I moved to Boston, and I had to kind of rethink about what I wanted to do. I looked at lots and lots of different jobs in edtech and startups, um, but each job description I read, I didn’t find it anywhere near as interesting as, um, just being a teacher. I love being in the classroom with students, and getting to know them, growing relationships with them, seeing them progress, um, and it’s what I want to be doing.
Lori: I’m Lori. I came to LCA and to teaching in probably the most traditional way of all of us. I graduated from Calvin College in 1986, and this was my first job out of school. So I was a brand new teacher, 21 years old, teaching high school, mostly 9th grade that year, and went on to teach here for 9 years in basically every grade. I stayed home with my kids for about ten years, and 2 years leading back into teaching, I did some substitute teaching, and that’s when I fell in love with middle school kids. So the woman in charge of middle school English retired, and, um, they graciously gave me that job, and this is going to be my 12th year teaching middle school English. I love it. Wouldn’t go back, no offense to the rest of you (laughter in the background). I wouldn’t go back to teaching high school. I love the enthusiasm and just the moldability of middle school kids. And I love the freedom of curriculum. I also have a masters in Technology and Education, so that will be the focus of some of my podcasts. How do we integrate technology in an effective way in the classroom?
Karen: This is Karen Elliott again, and we’re going to sort of talk about our unique ways of approaching reading and writing. Uh, for me, I think because my background for a long time was not in the Christian environment, I grew to really find that my faith and what I was teaching and learning about really went together. It wasn’t just me pulling something out of the prose, the context. I realized that, you know, the more my faith grew, I realized that these authors were talking about God, they’re talking about who we are, whose image we’re made in, and it’s, and it’s honest. And so, for me, what I love to do with my teaching, and what I’m really passionate about is finding your faith and seeking the truth in literature in its proper context. And so that’s what I will be talking about with my podcasts.
Danah: And I’m Danah. And I would say my interdisciplinary background probably makes my classroom a little unique just because my writing and my reading has been something that has spanned the curriculum organically for me in my life. That’s something that I really value. I’m really passionate about interdisciplinary writing in my classroom, and that has led me to put a lot of focus on rhetoric and audience awareness and accomplishing specific goals for a wide variety of different contexts. So I think my classroom is probably a little more focused on rhetoric and interdisciplinary writing than usual.
Nancy: I’m Nancy, and I would say there’s several things that sort of characterize my classroom. One of which is that it is really important to me that language, when students are coming from another country and they’re immersed in another culture, that language is used as an authentic means of communication, and not something that is simply mastered like a set of rules or grammar or just getting through a difficult text, but rather becomes a meaningful conversation just like it would be for a native speaker, but at a different level, so that people are actually communicating their lives. Because the research says that when students communicate what’s important to them, and they actually try to communicate with each other in authentic ways, then real learning occurs because they’re actually formulating their thoughts in the new language, so I try to create contextual assignments that draw on the 4 reading, writing, speaking, listening skills, skill-building, but at the same time, really help them engage in a way that matters to them. Another factor I would say is really important is creating an awareness of culture. Both our culture and the culture they came from. Students come in, like all 15-year-olds, they’re not very self-aware, uh, and they come out of a country, you don’t really know a country until you left it, and you discover, what are the values that you’ve grown up with? How do they differ from the place that you’ve now arrived? I try to foreground those differences in culture so they can see and make value-driven choices about what they believe in, figure out what they already believe in and what they want to choose to believe in as they are emerging young adults. The third focus I would say is writing because I have a strong writing background both as a writer and also in teaching writing across the curriculum. I see writing as a form of thinking, and that you use writing to generate thinking, and a lot of students, especially from international backgrounds, learn to write in a very rote way. You follow a format. You simply put it down, whereas I want students to engage with the material. I want them to engage with their own thinking. I want them to use writing as a place for exploration, and then, yes, of course, do the formal, more structured writing after they’ve generated ideas. So those are sort of my three areas.
Lori: I totally, this is Lori, I totally agree. I say to my students all the time: “Writing is thinking!” You don’t have to just sit there and brainstorm and come up with everything you’re going to write, and sit there for 2 hours. Start writing. Get it on paper. As a middle school teacher, and I think all of us agree, one of the goals that we have for our students is to be passionate about reading. That, if they are passionate readers and read all the time, that that’s going to translate into better writing, larger vocabulary, and I think, for us, more importantly, it’s going to translate into them being better human beings. More empathetic, um, and, as Christian teachers, giving them literally more to be Christian with. Helping them see their neighbor in new ways, helping them understand the world in ways that they can’t just living here in Massachusetts, so I want my kids to be passionate about reading. So we have a lot of choice. Every day begins with 10 minutes of reading whatever they want to read, whether that’s graphic novels, whether that’s reading under their grade level, fiction, nonfiction; it doesn’t matter to me. I want them to read and love reading. In the same way, I want them to not be afraid of writing, so student voice is really important to me. Student choice is critical because I believe that students actually perform better and learn more when they have some control over the things that they are reading and writing. I’m also passionate about using technology, uh, for specifically writing, but also just creating. How do we express our thoughts not just in the written word, but in the spoken word, or creatively in a visual way. So I am passionate about having students leave my classroom thinking about themselves as writers and readers.
Rebecca: So I have quite a cross-arts approach to the way that I teach reading and writing. Having a background in drama means that I love bringing theater into the classroom, so I’m going to have a drama space within my classroom where kids can get into characters and develop their empathy for characters, and, um, use drama as experimentation as a basis for creative writing. I also think art is really helpful um, in reading and writing, and I’m going to be doing a podcast on this later. Um, I think that so many concepts in the arts world overlap with one another, and I think by studying art and looking at art and how narrative is told through art, we can be better readers and better writers and develop a more sophisticated way of thinking about reading and writing and author’s craft. Um, as is probably suggested by that, I’m also really interested in doing research in the classroom, both informal and formal. So I’ve done some research into a cross-arts approach to teaching reading and writing, um, and I’ve also done some work on verbal feedback, and I will be talking about those in later podcasts.
Nancy: This is Nancy. Now we’re going to talk about what are our overall goals for the podcast. For me, I guess one of the things I want to really talk about is what are the particular challenges that face English language learners? And it can range from how do you deal with multi-levels of fluency within a classroom where you have a big range and people really cannot contribute at the same level, and how do you handle that? Which actually occurs of course with native speakers as well. Another question with international students is teaching the cultural norms of the American classroom whether it’s writing a thesis-driven essay, whether it’s using sources without plagiarism, there’s just all kinds of issues that arise simply because of cultural barriers. So my focus is how do these cultural barriers have an impact on teaching, and what can we do to help mitigate that and empower students?
Karen: This is Karen. My main goal for the podcasts is how do we take anything written down, whether that was 1500 years ago or 5 years ago, how is it applicable to our lives? And that, I love talking about that with my students. You know, you look at “Beowulf.” Is that really relevant to today? I would argue that it is, and I’m going to talk about that. Um, I’m going to talk about some controversial novels. I’m going to be talking about books that maybe a lot of people haven’t heard about, but they’re a fantastic author, and it’s worth the read. But one thing that I love about our department, and something that I know I’m passionate about is that we don’t excerpt a lot. We like to make a commitment to a text, and I think that one of the many things that I’d like to address in my podcasts is that when you commit to a text, it becomes a relationship, and books are very very personal things. And they should be personal, and, uh, how we read into them draws us either closer to God or makes us look at ourselves and the kind of people that we are and that we’d maybe like to be different. So there’s just so many ways I’d like to look at literature, but the real way is is it applicable, and why?
Rebecca: Well, when I heard the English Department that I was going to be joining was running a podcast, I was very excited. What a progressive, forward thinking, innovative department. Um, so I’m really excited to be having a go at doing a podcast myself, and to hear different ideas from my colleagues about pedagogy, about literature, about language. So I’m looking forward primarily to listening to other people and what they have to say. I’m also excited about the idea of a podcast. Podcasts give voices to people who might not otherwise be heard. I’m looking forward to voicing my own ideas about research and about certain texts. I’m looking forward to hearing the voices of students who might not otherwise get to speak within the public arena.
Danah: So this is Danah, and my main goal for this podcast is to explore how we help students develop identities as readers and writers, particularly for me, as writers, as I view myself more as a teacher of writing than of reading. And so, when we’re talking about how we express ourselves and how we communicate and how we make meaning out of the world around us, I’d like to use some of this podcasts to explore ways that we can encourage our students to do that in strategic and intentional ways and making use of the tools that surround them. So I would like to talk a lot about multiple modes, writing using sound or image or sculpture and art and then using those modes within different disciplinary contexts and really being strategic about what do we want our compositions to accomplish, and what does that say about us? and how can the things that we make and write and say create real impact in the world around us? In order to accomplish that, I think as a sort of extension and to zoom out a little bit, I think you need to create a space, a very specific space for your students to operate in, and another one of my huge areas of passion is creating classroom culture and cultivating trust and camaraderie between students and between students and educators, so one of my other goals for this podcast is just to be further engaging in that ongoing dialogue of how do we do that. How do we create environments where our students trust us and they feel like they can take intellectual risks, and they’re curious and they want to take those risks? So these are some of the things that I’m really looking forward to exploring.
Lori: Great! This is Lori, and I have a lot of different interests (background laughing), yeah! they all laugh! Yeah, I have a LOT of different interests, and I sort of want to sort of dabble in all of them, ah, so, my podcasts will be a little more focused on pedagogy. I’m really passionate about assessment. We’re going to use standard-based grading this year in 6th grade; that will be a new sort of experiment that I’m really excited about, and also, you know, have opportunity to share some of that journey with you. I’m also passionate about young adult literature, and specifically some of the really outstanding books that have been written in recent years for middle grade students and high school students, so sharing some of those book titles. My first episode will be with my daughter, but also I want my students to be involved in this and looking at how we can work with other colleagues. I co-teach an interdisciplinary course, and so talking about how does that work? What are the mechanics of it? What is exciting about a lot of the new ideas in education? And how do those apply to my classroom? Because I’m all about taking what I’ve learned from blogs and conferences and books and applying it, um, just experimenting and taking some risks in the classroom with how to teach English.
(Outro music)
Danah: We’d like to dedicate this introductory episode to the VanderBrug Grant, and we want to thank them for their funding to help support this podcast.
Karen: Thank you so much for joining us today with our first episode of Prose and Context. We hope that you will subscribe to our podcast, and we are so excited to journey with you through the things that we are all really passionate about.