Unlearning the Myths That Bind Us.

I loved reading this article!  I am such a sucker for articles that discuss hidden meanings in literature.  It is always amazing to me time and time again that I never noticed these hidden messages.  I was aware of the message of certain stereotypes etc. because I had focused on this as one of my points in my MGRP.  It is true that most media contains white, well to do characters that are often without worries.  This issues causes lots of children and adults from other racial and societal classes to be left out and feel bad about themselves. 
I know as a child, I was always reading and watching media that enacted these stereotypes.  I loved Disney movies; I loved Popeye; and I loved Duck Tales.  Every type of media guilty of stereotyping was enjoyed immensely by me.  I love looking back at everything I loved and see just how bad they really are.  This topic often makes me think of my sister.  She always had lots of dates and hardly had a long term relationship.  She always claimed she wanted the kind of romance you saw in the movies.  The romance, she learned through movies existed in real life.  Luckily she has gotten over the idea of the "perfect" guy and married a really great guy and has children.

Week 12 Readings

We had three readings assigned this week and the Evans and Igor readings really reached out to me.  I found the Hill reading much to choppy and difficult to really get into.  The first article I read was by Evans and it was called Literacy Moves On.  In this article, Evans discusses how the format of literacy has been radically changing through the past couple of years.  It is important for us as educators to be aware of this changing literacy formats and attend to them in the classroom.  Many children are finding literacy outside of books alone.  This article fits in well with the idea of the multiple genres we created for our MGRP.  Until this class, I had never considered the idea of literacy being outside of books.  I am happy I am now aware of the large of amount of literacy available. 
Another reading I completed this week was by Igor.  The Inner World of the Immigrant Child is about a young child Dennis and how coming to a new school and new country was difficult for him.  This article discusses how the teacher reached out to Dennis and made him feel comfortable.  The idea of making a new child feel comfortable is very important in their success.  We are educators need to be aware of this fact and do everything we can to make immigrant and new children feel comfortable.  There are many mixed emotions when entering a new classroom.  A child can feel anything from culture shock to excitement or a mix of the two.  Every child needs to have their needs met and it is important for us to figure out ways to do this.

MGRP reflection

Through the completion of my multigenre research paper, I learned a lot.  I learned a lot about my topic of critical literacy as well as ways to improve my writing and research skills.  I have never really liked writing papers, but being given the option to write about anything within elementary literacy, I became much more interested in my research.  The actual research was a lot more fun than normal research and the creation of the genre pieces was tons of fun.    

After finishing my project, I feel as though I have developed a better sense of the way I would like my future students to complete research papers.  The paper itself will always be the hardest part for many children, but when given an opportunity to write about whatever a person chooses, the paper becomes more fun.  I feel as though the genre pieces could be used even by themselves without the paper in certain circumstances.  I am positive I will at least use the genre pieces in my future teaching.  I really enjoyed taking what I had researched and had knowledge on and turning it into something else.  It was a creative way to reiterate what I already knew and make the knowledge even more concrete.