Whirling Around in Graduate Courses, But Now It's Wednesday

Phew. Tuesday nights mean Wednesday exhaustion. I don't get home until late at night and, given I-95 traffic, sometimes the drive is absurd (that was last night, but I made it).

In the meantime, I am reflecting on how awesome graduate students are at Fairfield University and how magical they make the back-to-back classes.

In preparation of reading Lost Boy, Lost Girl: Civil War in Sudan, a non-fiction text I'm coupling with Nonfiction by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst, I surveyed the content areas of my students and ended up finding articles about hurricanes written in Spanish, French, for literature types, historians, mathematicians and scientists. Each had their own article to read and to report back to us what the piece purports. My point was to demonstrate that every event can become a literacy event if you think strategically with how it connects to the content one is commissioned to teach.

Before we got here, however, we did a whirl-around based off of writing prompts: a time when the weather wreaked havoc in your world, a time where relocation and change was inevitable, or a time when one was hooked on the news by a world event. We shared these narratives, followed them with reading in the content areas, then used them to begin a conversation about why a text like Lost Boy, Lost Girl might be used in a content literacy course.

It was magical, as I've never done instruction like this, but the whirl-around showed it worked (and demonstrated the cross-curricular ways one might pair Probst and Beer's text with the reading of non-fiction materials.

Ah, but then it ended. Still, I am curious how the Big Questions will become part of the design my graduate students eventually make. Yet, shucks, I have a meeting in 20 minutes and need to hit the road right away. This stuff never ends!