New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, Summer 2013

Course Descriptions 2013

Writing and Technology: Using Blogs, Wikis, and Digital Stories in the Classroom

July 1-12 (2 weeks; NO class July 4)

ENGL 911 (section 01) 4 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

Geek your teaching, says an educator on the World Wide Web. How do you do that? By using Web 2.0 tools and digital storytelling software to teach your students to create and innovate as they read and write. You and your students can make dynamic multimedia presentations for class with Prezi or digital stories using Photo Story 3; students studying a book can use WordPress to blog about it with classmates and students from other schools; students can write a story together or collaborate on a research project using a wiki on Wikispaces.

We’ll discuss ways to use these and other tools, and what students learn by working with them. The course will include hands-on experience with digital stories and wikis for classroom use.

This course is aimed at those with little or no experience with these tools.

Instructor:

Lisa Miller is an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She teaches news and feature writing, editing, and a course on how the news works. She is the author of Make Me a Story: Teaching Writing Through Digital Storytelling and Power Journalism: Computer-Assisted Reporting. In 2005, she received the College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award. Lisa has worked extensively with teachers and schools to bring digital storytelling into the language arts curriculum.

Purpose, Passion, & Play: Developing Real Readers & Writers

July 1-12 (2 weeks; NO class July 4)

ENGL 920 (section 01) 4 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

“Reading this book is like hitting my head against a brick wall over and over!” says Elizabeth, a seventh grader. She is not alone in her quest to get through assigned texts that leave her downright disengaged. This course will focus on creating real readers and writers through student choice, authentic response and engaging students in literature and writing that is relevant to their lives.

We will create our own community of readers and writers as we discuss and share children’s literature, young adult literature, picture books, poetry and more. We will create text sets based on themes or passions that include a variety of genres around a topic or idea. Using these texts as mentors we will practice reading as readers and then reading as writers. We will use our reading to compose mentor texts of our own that we can use with our students in the writing workshop. We will then engage in ways to process, share, and celebrate literacy through discussions, performance, and memorization.

Instructor:

Tomasen M. Carey is a field coordinator for the University of New Hampshire Learning Through Teaching program, working with teachers and their students on literacy. She also consults for Heinemann on reading and writing and most recently established her blog at www.conversationeducation.wordpress.com/ where she comments on the current trends in education, and encourages others to get involved in these important conversations. She was also a classroom teacher for 11 years and has been published in the New England Reading Association Journal.

Reading, Writing, & Visual Literacy: What Information Looks Like

July 8-12 (1 week)

ENGL 922 (section 01) 2 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

VisualLiteracy

Instructor:

Louise Wrobleski is the site director of the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes. Her blog and her most recently published article in the New England Reading Association Journal celebrate the outstanding teachers she meets in her role as coordinator and consultant for the University’s Learning Through Teaching program. She is a New Hampshire delegate for the New England Reading Association.

Writing in the World

July 8-19 (2 weeks)

ENGL 922 (section 02) 4 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

This summer we will mentor ourselves to award-winning journalists (David Finkel, Katherine Boo, Malcolm Gladwell) and researchers (Siddhartha Mukherjee, Rebecca Skloot, James D. Watson) who embed facts and figures into compelling narratives that inform or argue. Mostly, we will live like writers. We will examine writing from research in order to write our own.

We will collaborate around the regular reading, writing, sketching, revision, conferring, and sharing in a writers’ workshop each day in class. We will write in notebooks to probe our thinking as well as to experiment with writing from charts, tables, and graphs of information. Throughout this course we will share ways to empower adolescent non-fiction writers as we discover the power of this writing for ourselves.

Instructor:

Penny Kittle (see Keynote Speakers, p. 2)

In Pictures and In Words

Currently CLOSED - (Email a waiting list request to nh.literacy@unh.edu)

July 15-19 (1 week)

ENGL 920 (section 02) 2 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

In Reclaiming the Imagination, Ann Berthoff said, “Artists at work have a lot to teach us about the composing process.” In this course, we will work to reclaim our own imaginations as teachers of writing as we study the composing process of picture book illustrators.

While illustrators and writers use very different mediums to compose, they actually use very similar processes and craft with many of the same qualities in mind. To tap into the potential of this composing connection in our teaching of writing, we’ll work first to understand picture book illustrations as compositions and study the decision-making informing them. Then, we’ll consider the parallel craft lessons for writers implicit in the decisions we see illustrators have made. Our days will be filled with close study, sketching, and writing.

Participants will read from three texts during the course: Molly Bang’s Picture This: How Pictures Work; Katie Wood Ray’s In Pictures and In Words; and a third book on the craft of writing chosen individually from a list of possibilities.

Instructor:

Katie Wood Ray (see Keynote Speakers, p.2)

Multigenre Writing

July 15-26 (2 weeks)

ENGL 911 (section 02) 4 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

“I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,” wrote Walt Whitman in 1855. Whitman could have been describing what we will do with our writing in this course. Test limits. Break rules. Blend genres. We will read texts that do this and discuss how linguistic play, stylistic experimentation, and rhetorical rule-breaking can lead to powerful and surprising learning and communication.

We’ll examine how multigenre fits into the K-12 curriculum and aligns with the Common Core Standards for reading and writing. Addressing personal topics that matter, participants will write in a variety of genres and try out a number of strategies. For the major project each participant will write a multigenre research paper.

Topics and activities include:

• Small and large group peer response

• Conferences with instructor

• Daily writing workshop

• Teaching demonstrations and applications

• Oral performance of writing

• Assessment of multigenre papers

Instructor:

Tom Romano teaches English methods and writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of books, articles, and poems about teaching writing. His newest book, The Multigenre Companion, is in press with Heinemann.

The Art of Writing

July 15-26 (2 weeks)

ENGL 920 (section 03) 4 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

Reading and writing are two of the ways we capture, develop and interpret our sense of the world around us. We will read and write, in a variety of genres, but we will also extend our notions of literacy through the visual arts, in order to draw the most meaning from our experiences.

For many of our students, especially those who struggle with words, opening wider our notions of literacy invites their voices into the classroom. Although our focus will be on writing, we will look at drawing as thinking, as well as drawing as performance. We will use a variety of visual tools to capture our ideas as writers, as well as our understandings from reading.

Bring your sketchbooks, your art tools, your laptops, and your cameras. When we are not on field trips, we will split our time between the University of New Hampshire and my own classroom at Oyster River Middle School.

This course has the twin goals of extending our own literacy—and then exploring ways to provide richer and more diverse opportunities for students. You will also leave with an extensive collection of art and writing ideas from your colleagues/classmates.

Instructor:

Linda Rief teaches 8th grade at Oyster River Middle School in Durham, NH. She authored Inside the Writer’s-Reader’s Notebook, 100 Quickwrites, Vision and Voice, and Seeking Diversity; co-authored Visual Tools; and co-edited the book Adolescent Literacy and the National Council of Teachers of English journal Voices from the Middle. When not in the classroom, she relishes watching her four grandchildren craft their own voices as writers, readers, and artists.

From Memory to Story: Writing Memoir

Currently CLOSED - (Email a waiting list request to nh.literacy@unh.edu)

July 22-August 2 (2 weeks)

ENGL 911 (section 03) 4 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

How do we carry our memories onto the page in ways readers will find worthwhile and engaging? Which stories matter? Where do I start? Will I hurt the people I love? Memoirists have tools available that provide solutions to these questions. By utilizing the essential narrative skills of the fiction writer—details of place and character, bodies in action, dialogue and reflection—we are able to see the shape and meaning of the stories we all carry as memories.

We will write a series of short narrative pieces, crafting memory into story. Each writer will receive workshop feedback from the other participants and from the instructor. We will read and discuss published essays as models of narrative memoir. Each writer will have an individual conference with the instructor. We will work as a committed, lively, kindly group of writers seeking to improve our own writing and helping others to do the same.

Note: This course will not satisfy the writing requirement for MFA students.

Instructor:

Meredith Hall teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. Her first book, a memoir titled Without a Map was a New York Times Bestseller and named Kirkus “Best Book of 2007,” BookSense “Pick of the Year,” and Elle magazine’s “Reader’s Pick for 2007.” Hall’s first essay won the 2005 Pushcart Prize and was a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2005. She was awarded the $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, and received the Maine Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, Five Points and many other journals and anthologies.

Reading, Writing, & Remixing: Interpretation for the 21st Century

July 22-August 2 (2 weeks)

ENGL 922 (section 03) 4 credits

Monday-Friday, 8:15 am-2:15 pm

We teach a young generation adept at understanding, creating, and utilizing visual modes of all sorts—and we need to seek out ways to draw on those experiences for our teaching. Integrating multiple literacies in our English classes helps our students enter complex traditional texts and can offer them opportunities to create new kinds of multi-modal texts. Holden's Remix

In this course we will immerse ourselves in a web of texts and study new possibilities of literacy. Using various media, we will create and recreate texts. We will adapt photography, videos, artwork, and written texts to compose visual representations of literary works, to craft photo essays, and to explore where narrative and visual forms intersect. Our inspirations will come from such works as Moby Dick in Pictures by Matt Kish, “Windows on the World” of the New York Times, and Days with My Father by Phillip Toledano.

Instructor:

Terry Moher has been a secondary English teacher for 34 years—currently at Exeter High School. She is also an instructor for the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes and has written several articles on teaching writing, her most recent appearing in Teaching the Neglected ‘R’.

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This page was last updated: Apr 18, 2013 9:27 AM