Take Two
The partnership of community and classroom is an aspiration of many teachers. Community members offer an extensive wealth of knowledge that deserves time in the classroom, and Angela Wiseman’s piece featured in this month’s “Take Two” emphasizes their importance. In Now I Believe if I Write I Can Do Anything”: Using Poetry to Create Opportunities for Engagement and Learning in the Language Arts Classroom (2010), Wiseman recollects her observation of a classroom that is engaged in authentic poetry experiences provided by a community member, and what unfolds is nothing short of exceptional. Find the author's reflection and link to the article here.
Scholars Speak Out
A number of years ago, when I was teaching a graduate level methods course, a male student in my class suddenly stood up and started shouting at the other students. He was quite angry about what some of the other students had said. At that moment, I didn’t know what to do. I froze. But then I began to make sense of what was happening. I knew that this student was a Vietnam veteran. I also sensed that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that can lead people to become momentarily angry. I asked him to step out of the classroom to talk with me in the hallway about the reasons for his anger, shared sense-making that led to a return to his usual, friendly demeanor.
In this commentary, I propose some ways to examine sense-making processes in these often unpredictable, unfolding classroom events. My purpose is to demonstrate that students can benefit from engaging in sense-making through collaborative, dialogic interactions in classroom events. Rather than assume that sense-making resides solely in people’s minds, the focus of sense-making is on the meanings constructed in the interactions between people, as was the case with the interaction between my student and his peers and between the student and me.
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