Digerati Boombati

Here is the link to the wiki I put together for the eighth grade book club at Cortland High School.  Hopefully the teachers will pick up the torch and really start using the wiki, rather than letting it atrophy completely.  Even though I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to any more of the book club meetings due to student teaching in the spring, I’m going to try to send out one more encouraging e-mail and continue to monitor for updates and hopefully contribute a bit too.  Even if the wiki for the book club hasn’t become a completely satisfying experience yet, I’m still hopeful that the teachers and students might use it more in the coming months with future meetings.  Some of the students did genuinely seem interested in the wiki, these things do take time though.  And with them only meeting once per month, there isn’t much opportunity to get them hooked.  Regardless, in the process I learned for myself how easy and potentially useful wikis could be in the ELA classroom.

In my research on wikis, I did find a few useful resources that I’d like to share.  First, I found a great podcast on David Warlick’s blog that is titled “Exploring Wikis in Education with Vicki Davis and Adam Frey,” which is not only a great introduction to wikis and their potential in classrooms, but also interesting because Vicki Davis gives firsthand account of her experiences using wikis in her own classes and plenty of useful advice.  Second, I found a ReadWriteThink lesson plan idea titled “A Collaboration of Sites and Sounds: Using Wikis to Catalog Protest Songs.”  The lesson is essentially a collaborative discovery, examination, and sharing of protest songs which is an engaging way of introducing young students to the idea of working toward social justice, which we’re all concerned with as idealistic ELA teachers.  As the lesson explains, “In 2005, hip-hop artist Kanye West released the single ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’ to bring attention to the issue of conflict diamonds. In this lesson, students research and analyze contemporary and historic protest songs and then as a class catalog their findings in a wiki.”  Now, personally I don’t care for Kanye West, but I know that my preferences don’t matter so much.  Kanye West as an introduction, or a partial introduction along with some others, to the art of the protest song will get the attention of probably 75% of the average class at this point in time.  I think this lesson is worthwhile for the same reason that more closely examining all texts that students are already immersed in is worthwhile: students need to be able to read the world around them, and if the music of their world has a message or an agenda, particularly an activist agenda, which much of it doesn’t in the popular realm, then it is worth taking up.  If I’m standing up there blabbering about everything that’s wrong with the world, they’re not going to get as interested as if one of their favorite music artists is singing about it.

I know that some teachers think that examining music in English class, whether it be for poetry or media or musical elements, is lame or has no place or is cliched, but I still like the idea of building opportunities for critical thinking, discussing, and writing around the primary discourses which students are most familiar with.  And no matter what you’re producing, being able to place the end products on a wiki for collaborative editing, organizing, and further examination has to be more useful and inspiring than the typical research paper which is handed in to the teacher and forgotten about, which has no real audience outside the teacher.  I don’t imagine myself ever devoting large portions of the curriculum to analysis of music, but it seems like a great thing to do from time to time in order to get to know your students more and to help them continue to develop a functional, everyday critical awareness of the world.