Dramatic Activities

    As I continue with Me Read?, I needed to pause to copy down some ideas it lists on how to integrate dramatic arts with book reading:

• Role playing: Students take on the roles of characters in a text.
• Dramatic play: Students use a situation from a text as a springboard for creating their own story or drama. 
• Guided imagery: Students are asked to imagine scenes, and subsequently write about or visually depict them.
• Snapshot drama: Students are asked to depict a moment from the text as a “freeze frame”, particularly as a way of describing characters’ expressions and gestures at that moment.
• Analogy drama: Students enact a story from their own lives that parallels a situation in a text.
• “To tell the truth” game: As in the television show of the same name, a fewstudents, each of whom is depicting the same character from a text, are grilled by a panel that ultimately determines which student has most convincingly“become” the character.
• Correspondence: Students write letters, diary entries, and advertisements in the roles of various story characters.
• Missing-scene scripts: Students write scripts for scenes that, while suggested in a text, were not explicitly described.
• Newscast: Students produce a news broadcast based on characters and events in a text

    These were listed in a section discussing how "visualization strategies" like writing, acting, and incorporating music can help keep boys' attention when reading. I majored in theatre as an undergraduate, so I will definitely be using some of these ideas in my library work, and wanted to paste them here for future reference. (I supposed this counts as "processing" for the purposes of my inquiry.)

Retrieving and Processing

    This past week was a productive one for my inquiry project. I now have what I feel are enough sources to move forward, and I have begun digging through them and exploring my topic more deeply. Me Read? was not only a helpful overview, but also led me to two very helpful books that happened to be available at the library where I work and were easy to grab. I will be focusing on those books, Me Read? , and a few of the other online sources I've already discovered. I also intend to follow the book authors' citations if they mention any previous research that I find especially relevant.

    Currently, I'm about halfway through Me Read? and about a chapter in to one of the books. Reading progress has been slow, as I normally try to get reading done at work when things are slow, and things have been very much the opposite of slow at work this past month. I'm hoping I'll have more time to focus on this project now that the main season at my museum is over. 

    I have been doing a lot of thinking and making connections about my topic in my everyday life and conversations, however. For example, I work part-time at a living history museum and spend most of my time in their Civil War area. During the fall, we have lots of school field trips come through - usually 500-1500 kids a day ranging in age from K-12. My coworker was a bit disturbed at how often the kids treated the violence of the war as a game; at our site they get to train for the Union army and run mock drills with sticks of wood shaped like muskets, and they often play with the fake guns, pretend to shoot their friends with them, etc. I find it disturbing also, but explained to my colleague that children under a certain age probably can't understand what violence means on a cognitive level. I've tried to explain to some of the children, in character, what joining an army and killing another human being actually means, and it usually just confuses them unless they're closer to middle-school age. The day after that conversation, I read Newkirk's first chapter, in which he discusses the culture surrounding boys and violence post-Columbine and argues that enjoying stores about violence doesn't necessarily translate to boys committing violence in the real world. Combining the perspectives of Newkirk, myself, and my coworker (who, I should add, is an adult male gun enthusiast) has given me quite a bit to puzzle over for the past few days. Newkirk examines these violent impulses from the perspective of school teachers, and I'm trying to decide on the ideal way to approach it as a librarian. Should I encourage boys to read violent books if that's what interests them? Of course, the question may really be how I, their parents, and most importantly the book's author treat and discuss the violence in the book. If it's trivialized in the narrative, that would probably not be a book I would recommend. On the other hand, a book that I felt dealt realistically with the consequences of violence in an age-appropriate manner would be a good resource to recommend to young patrons. Perhaps further reading on this subject will help me decide what exactly my approach to discussing violence with boys (at both my jobs) should be...

Identifying Sources Pt. 2

    A few weeks go I explored some of the resources I was already familiar with, so the next week I decided to hit the databases. I began with Education Resource Complete and initially performed a simple keyword search with the terms "literacy" and "gender differences". Applying some additional limiters, including articles from the past 34 years, academic peer-reviewed journals, and subject terms related to gender differences in education gave me 17 articles to sift through. I narrowed those down to 6 to save for further reading.

    Several of the suggestions added to my wiki post were helpful, especially the Ontario Education guide, "Me Read?". I've linked to it in the index of this site.

    My academic library also had a couple of books in the education section that seemed relevant. I checked them out, and cited them in the index as well.

Changing Platforms

I started this journal using Weebly, but I've decided to switch formats. Weebly is probably a great tool for creating websites, but its "blog" pages are really difficult to use, so I don't think it's the best place to keep this journal. I've moved it to Blogspot and I'm already having a much easier time writing and posting entries (plus, check out this awesome book background).

From now on, this is the inquiry project journal's home...unless I decide to move it again.

A Conversation and A Challenge

I had dinner with my best friend this evening. She got engaged in February and is now preparing to be a stepmother to three kids: two boys aged 8 and 11, and a 7-year old girl. Over fondue, she told me that Brayden, the middle child, is struggling with reading. Apparently he's below the reading level that he should be at in second grade and his parents and teacher are having trouble finding books for him to read that are at his level but not condescendingly so. I tried to suggest some books I'd heard of, but had the same trouble I always had with this question as a librarian.

This conversation renewed my determination to study this topic. Brayden is a cool kid - very hands-on, loves to fish and mow the lawn and help his grandfather fix things - and I'd like to meet the challenge of helping him do better in school. One of the added goals of this inquiry will be presenting my friend with a better list of book recommendations at the end of the semester.