What we do is who we are. I repeat this phrase often as I think about a project I’m starting with first-year teachers in grades 4-6. What we do is who we are.
One topic we’ll discuss at our first get-together at the end of August is how teachers can learn details about their students’ lives that help them customize book recommendations and identify starting points for writing workshop. The thought is that the more quickly we dial in to who our students are, the more quickly our time together in school will be relevant and motivating.
In the past, I’ve introduced new teachers to surveys that investigate students’ reading and writing lives. These kinds of questionnaires have yielded interesting, useful information, but as the demographics of student populations change, it has become clear that the surveys assume a lot, and privilege narrowly. They assume that students come to us with rich and rewarding reading and writing lives. And the content of the survey questions honors a certain type of literacy, sending a subtle but strong message about what’s valued in a classroom.
For more than 10 years, one of my professional keystones is a set of questions that Jerome Harste urges teachers to consider: “In terms of your classroom, it is important to ask, What kinds of social practices are in place and, as a result, how is literacy being defined? Who benefits from this definition of literacy? Who is put at jeopardy? What social practices would I have to put in place to make the everyday literacies that students bring with them to school legitimate? What kinds of things would I have to do to show that I honor the home literacies that students bring with them to school?”
Harste’s definition of literacy is a gut check for me, one that reminds me to embrace an asset perspective about the students (and teachers) with whom I work, to remember that everyone has successful literate lives when we define literacy broadly. Our challenge as teachers, then, is to understand how students’ social and cultural lives, as well as their experiences outside of school, support (or hinder) their learning in school. From there, we can work to ensure that we’re honoring our students’ funds of knowledge through the approach we take to knowing them and creating a learning environment that allows them to shine.
My World Maps
At the same time I was considering how to revise those “getting-to-know-you” surveys so that they were more inclusive of the literacies students bring to school, I was reading about a project that asked new teachers to do neighborhood studies of the communities that surrounded their schools. A neighborhood study, teacher research at its finest, involves investigations of a school’s surrounding community, from grocery stores to playgrounds, community centers, and sidewalk design. Just think about bulletin boards in public spaces—a treasure trove of information about what’s valued and where people spend time.
I was smitten with this idea, and thought, Why not have students conduct their own neighborhood studies? Where do they spend their time, and how often? How do they feel when they’re in certain places? What we do is who we are. Could a student-created neighborhood study yield information about students that uncovered their social and cultural capital in ways that were valuable points of connection for teachers, and maybe the whole classroom community?
As this idea developed, I thought about the power of visual literacy. What if students created a map of their movement around their neighborhoods, rather than a written description?
From there, the My World Map assignment was emerging. Here’s how I’m planning to introduce the idea with new teachers as a getting-to-know-you tool. We might even set aside 20 minutes of time to try it ourselves.
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Explain to students that you want them to draw a map of their worlds.
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Drawing skill doesn’t matter.
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Relative distance doesn’t matter.
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Each person can define the boundaries of his or her world—local, state, nation, world.
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Each person can decide the time period represented in the map—over the course of a day, week, month, or year.
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Consider offering the students a choice of creating hand-drawn or digitally created maps.
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Teachers: Consider making a map of your own to introduce students to your world.
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On their maps, students should include the places where they spend time, and label those places.
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Consider making the size of the places proportional to how much time you spend there—kind of like a word cloud where a frequently used term is bigger than others in the cloud. A soccer field might be larger than the grocery store based on time spent at each location. The Museum of Natural History might be smaller than Grandma’s house.
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Consider adding an emoticon next to the locations to indicate how you feel when you spend time there.
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When the maps are complete, schedule individual meetings with students to talk about the details of their maps.
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After meeting with students, collect the maps temporarily to study patterns in locations, frequency of time spent at locations, and feelings associated with spending time at different places, just as you would study students’ responses to a traditional reading/writing survey.
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Return the maps to students after this qualitative analysis. Have students keep their maps in a damage-free location.
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Consider returning to the maps on a regular basis to add details.
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Use the maps to spark ideas for recommending writing ideas and books. For example, one sixth grader’s image of time spent on the couch playing video games is larger than all the other locations on her map. Maybe she’d like to write a story about a gamer who is suddenly transported into the game she likes to play. She could read Inkheart to see a similar plotline but with readers entering books instead of screens.
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Consider creating wall space to post your class’s My World Maps.
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Include the display as part of the agenda for back-to-school night when families can get a snapshot of who the class is, based on where students go and what they do.
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Integrate the maps into a social studies lesson about coding data during a content analysis.
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Invite others (students, the principal, community members) to study the maps and make inferences about the worlds in which students in their community spend time. Compare and contrast experiences. Write about their insights on sticky notes that frame the wall space.
The My World Map project may actually reveal two simple truths, instead of one when we think about getting to fully know our students: what we do is who we are, but just as important is the idea that where we do it is revealing, too.
