Keeping Students at the Center
from NCTE INBOX 2-7-12
The January 2012 issue of English Journal, "EJ @ 100: Celebrating a Century of Publication," looks back over the last 100 years of not only the English Journal but also of the National Council of Teachers of English. One important influence to both EJ and NCTE was James Moffett. Many of his ideas, shared in 1968, are still alive today, including the idea of student-centered learning. Read more on that topic from NCTE contemporary resources.
The Language Arts article "Empowering Fourth-Grade Researchers: Reaping the Rewards of Web 2.0 Student-Centered Learning" (E) shares how Web 2.0 digital tools have the potential to engage students and teachers in highly intentional collaborative composing, revising, and communicating via multimodal texts.
In the Voices from the Middle article "Out of the Narrow Tunnel and into the Universe of Discourse" (M-S), the author shares how, working from a foundation of student-centered learning, "school stops being an academic exercise and transforms into a place where we practice real world writing . . . and real world thinking." She describes how this philosophy plays out with a specific student example.
In "Finding Center: How Learning Centers Evolved in a Secondary, Student-Centered Classroom" (S), from English Journal, the authors elaborate on the experience of creating for high school students effective multisensory, hands-on learning centers that address a full range of elements from the English language arts curriculum. They share examples to show how learning centers can help students become more involved in and responsible for their learning.
A student-generated video can provide motivation in a writing course as described in the Teaching English in the Two-Year College article "Student-Generated Texts on Writing: Giving Students an Active Voice in the Writing Classroom" (S-C).
"Devising/Revising Student-Centered Pedagogy" (C) from CCC Online summarizes various approaches from devised theater, a collaborative approach to theater-making, as well as performance theory and improvisation. Student-centered pedagogy can benefit from a perspective of devised theater that sees trust-building and responsibility-sharing as the bases of successful project-based work. (Please sign in with your NCTE username and password to access this article.)
In seeking to understand one teacher's experiences, the authors of "Praxis Shock: Making the Transition from a Student-Centered University Program to the Corporate Climate of Schools" investigated how one teacher's university program, her student teaching experience, and the site of her first job mediate her development of the concept of student-centered teaching.
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