The first assignment for Literacy and Curriculum in Middle & High School Classrooms has to do with our understandings of the words "literacy" and "curriculum". For literacy, we all made videos using the app Shadow Puppet to explore what literacy is and how we interpret it in our content areas. For curriculum, we explored some curriculum orientations in class and created a video on the app Explain Everything describing what orientations we identify with as future teachers.
These two projects were helpful in exploring how we want to develop as future educators and what our goals will be for in the classroom. We had the opportunity to examine different teaching styles through the curriculum orientation then talk about how we can apply them to help produce students who are literate in our content areas. One overlap I see when creating these videos is a strong focus on how teaching must be student-centered. In the orientations I discussed, Humanism and Progressivism, the common idea was that students should be encouraged to explore their academic interests. Progressivism had a strong focus on exploring through experimentation, whereas humanism had an emphasis on individual freedom and choice in their studies. The two orientations are both student focused to help shape the next generations into intellectual citizens, rather than teachers being more concerned with the school's performance ranks. This is why when I discussed mathematical literacy, I put a strong emphasis on problem solving. Problem solving teaches you how to think and is a transferable skill you will need in any given setting, and will help shape the next generations into strong thinkers.
The two videos meet several performance criteria, the most important I see being 4.2, to make the discipline accessible and meaningful and 3.2 designs approaches that engage. This is shown not only through the curriculum approaches focusing on the students' questions and interests, but also by the example given at the end of the curriculum video. A former teacher of mine used to have each student pick a topic they are interested in and research how it has to do with math, then present it to the class. This is one thing that I am most excited to implement in my future classroom because it is an absolutely great way to get students engaged in math and to show them how applicable it is to the world around them. This project made math more meaningful for many of my classmates when they did this project, and that is why I want to implement this into my future classroom.Some other performance criteria these videos meet are 5.1 and 5.2, a perspective from varied disciplines and cross-disciplinary skills, as Mike and I explored how math literacy and physics literacy overlap through applications of the content.
Through these two video projects I had the opportunity to learn two apps I hadn't experimented with much. Not only did I use the app to create a project from a student's perspective, but our classes also discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using these technologies in our future classrooms. In addition, I expanded my definition of literacy. At first I thought literacy was strictly involving reading and writing, but I really enjoyed researching all the things that math literacy can be: from numeracy, to spacial understanding, to problem solving. Learning about math literacy helped me to realize the big picture as to why it is so important for students to be able to understand and analyze math.
Literacy of Mathematics and Physics:
My Curriculum Orientation:
