When I walked in the doors of Russell Byers Charter School on Monday, I was unfamiliar with media literacy education and Powerful Voices for Kids, but I now feel as if I have found a new educational home. Even before this week, I had embraced much of PVK’s philosophy, from valuing students’ powerful voices and helping them meaningfully and creatively express themselves using multimedia, to helping students collaborate and grow into reflective, critical thinkers and learners. This week has helped me to both more clearly formulate and understand these values and their power. In the past, I had integrated multi-media and digital technology into my teaching as a way to teach to students’ multiple intelligences, to meet students’ various learning styles, and to make use of the power of web 2.0 tools, such as Voicethread and wikis, to build a community of learners and provide an authentic audience for students' voices. But this week, PVK has opened my eyes to a broader vision of literacy, which gives me an even greater foundation to embrace these values and philosophy!
I also am grateful to PVK for helping me grow my repertoire of approaches to skillfully teach my students. Through PVK’s inspiring and thoughtful teaching that I observed both in the students’ classrooms and in the teachers’ workshops, I have gained so many fabulous teaching ideas and strategies that I can bring back to my classroom and share with my colleagues. The key questions of media literacy, learning targets, highlights and lowlights, media charades, and a new understanding of copyright are just a few of the many treasures I’ll be bringing back to my classroom and school. I don’t even think I am truly aware of all the wonderful repercussions this transformative week will have for my teaching.
I love that this week has encouraged me to wrestle with challenging questions in teaching, such as how do we teach about stereotypes without reinforcing stereotypes, and issues of whether some chaos is an integral part of creative collaborative projects. I loved watching how PVK teachers skillfully divided impressive, huge projects into manageable smaller pieces so that students could grab on and tackle them in baby steps. These steps helped turned what could have easily been chaos into order. I’m still wrestling with ways to best encourage collaboration while letting each individual voice be heard. I found it fascinating observing groups and noticing that students were more engaged and were able to better share their individual voices while working in pairs rather than groups of three or more. But even in groups of two, there was often an individual who dominated the process. In my own classroom, to ensure that students have a chance to discover and grow their individual voice and passions, I make sure that for each genre / project I teach, students create at least one piece individually. For pieces created individually, I bring collaboration in as part of the revision process, where I make space and time for feedback sessions with rich discussion and growing ideas together.
I left PVK yesterday feeling so sad that the week was over. Sad because I won’t be going back to soak in more of the wondrous teachings and speakers Renee fabulously put together to enlighten us, sad because I won’t be hearing more of the wisdom from the educators attending the week, and sad because I won’t be observing the powerful voices of the students and teachers in the PVK classrooms. But while writing this reflection, I began to feel better, gaining hope that my learning and connection to this awesome PVK community will continue as we keep posting on posterous, as I continue to wrestle with meaningful educational questions, and as I live out the transformative effects PVK will have in my philosophy and teaching. Thank you PVK for an extraordinary, visionary week of teaching and learning!
Ruth Aichenbaum
