About SCALE | Join SCALE | Contact SCALE | Join Mailing List
Children from poor families lost an average of 2 months of reading every summer and half have no books at home. Join us to learn how Communities in Schools of Durham is addressing this problem through Durham READS, a research-based program that reverses the summer reading loss. Throughout the workshop we will highlight the practical issues of funding, implementation, and evaluation of this program. In this presentation we will discuss how to create or enhance a student literacy mentorship program using service-learning. Service-learning is a teaching and learning method that integrates meaningful service with instruction and reflection. Participants will learn to create a program where students can gain volunteer experience by tutoring or teaching other students in reading and writing. Focus will be placed on how to enrich the program through reflection and education on literacy. Additionally, how to successfully evaluate the program will be covered. Great for those new to service-learning or those who want to expand their knowledge! Participants will identify problems in instruction and/or program management. These will guide the resources I demonstrate on Thinkfinity Literacy Network. As we examine resources, participants have a worksheet to help them capture resources that address problem areas identified. At the end of the workshop, participants complete an action plan for using Thinkfinity Literacy Network. Within multicultural education, culture is frequently defined as a person’s practices and beliefs; thus, students frequently learn about other cultures through celebrations, activities, and lessons on tolerance and understanding. However, Leo Vygotsky, a prominent psychologist, whose ideas are frequently cited in child development, defined culture as the language and concepts of a group of people. If culture is central to understanding and forming meaning, then it must be incorporated into teaching and learning. This presentation will discuss Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and how it can be applied in literacy instruction to help students read and write. Gary is the founder and CEO of America Learns, the premier performance measurement and learning organization in the volunteer literacy community. The organization’s core work involves helping school districts, adult schools, universities and nonprofits ensure that their volunteers are providing the best services possible to youth and adult learners. In 2007, Bill Clinton recognized Gary and America Learns in his book, “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World”. Echoing Green named Gary as one of “the world’s ten best emerging social entrepreneurs.” Thursday, November 5
The Read & Succeed presentation is an entertaining multi-media demonstration that familiarizes our tutors with the goals, highlights, and steps involved in becoming a confident Read & Succeed tutor. These steps include strategies to use before, during, and after reading with the children, as well as special information to help ELL students. This presentation will trace the rise of print literacy as the dominant form of literacy in the United States. It will then argue the position that many students, particularly those who come from the working class, bring other forms of literacy to the table, but these forms are subsequently marginalized and devalued during the early years of schooling. This repression often leads to a rejection of other forms of literacy as well as the pleasure associated with them by the students themselves. By providing new books to children in need, First Book addressed one of the most important factors affecting literacy—access to books. In low-income neighborhoods, there is on average only one book for every 300 children, compared to 12 books per child in middle-income neighborhoods. First Book believes in the power of book ownership and enabling the educator closest to the child to choose the best books for the children they serve. This presentation will show you how to connect your program with First Book resources, so you can provide brand-new books to the children you serve. For many teachers it is an endless process of “correcting mistakes” with no long term sustained effects. Common instances in the classroom demonstrate recurring syntactic corrections of sentences at the pronominal subject level, such as, (Them girls are smart), or use of multiple negation (it ain't no cat), negative inversion (don't nobody know), mismatch of subject-verb agreement (She don’t know nothing), and dropping third-singular -s inflection, to name some. Correcting each instance at the surface level without providing a context for the correction and demonstration of acceptable patterns at a deeper underlying level, results in a ‘band-aid’ approach where those errors resurface again. This session will highlight language issues that contribute to literacy achievement, as well as, instructional strategies to address those issues. Adolescence is a critical period in which an individual seeks to develop his/her identity. An influential factor in this process is the adolescent’s environment, which includes his/her learning community. Very often, the structures in place to deliver secondary education to marginalized populations can foster a sense of powerlessness and low expectations for achievement in a setting where the participants have little choice but to define themselves by what they are not. This workshop will examine how you can use literature to discuss social justice issues and develop possible solutions through service-learning experiences. The presenter will share proven, practical ways to engage students in civic responsibility, academic curriculum and social action. The presenter connects reading to reality, using literature as a springboard for change. Friday, November 6
The focus of this presentation is an analysis of an ODU Summer Program entitled “Our Stories.” This program intended to increase literacy skills and explore attitudes of urban students in grades 4-9. The students exercised active reading, writing, and speaking skills as they connected with their community. Inspired by NPR’s StoryCorps program, students collected and published oral histories of local community members including four members of the Norfolk 17, a group of the first African American individuals to be integrated into the public schools after the Brown v. Board decision. It is ironic that schools are 'getting back to the basics,' effectively limiting what students are allowed to think of as 'literacy,' while students are becoming increasingly multiliterate outside of school. As students participate in multimodal ways of communication that include music, image, audio, spatial, and gestures (Jewitt & Kress, 2003), they are learning new possibilities and constraints for representation. This presentation addresses the emancipator nature of allowing students greater access to meaningful literacy practices within school, thus empowering their voices. Representatives from the Corporation for National and Community Service will present on key developments in national service programs resulting from the 2009 Kennedy Serve America Act. AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve America, and Senior Corps, the national service programs, have all been affected by the passage of this new act. Participants will learn what new funding opportunities have been created and how they can participate in national service programs in this new era of service. This workshop will look at a variety of classroom activities that can engage students (and teacher!) in the unruly discourse of Modern poetry. Teachers will come away with an array of tools to help guide student-directed learning, meet classroom technology goals, and strengthen student interest in poetry. Student and faculty representatives of SMART PATH Service Learning for Social Justice share features of a learning community that has emerged from the program’s three year history within the eastern corridor of Greensboro, North Carolina. Their service learning-based tutoring program supports 3rd-5th graders who sometimes struggle with school literacy or math, and has demonstrated 1.5 years of growth in reading per year of child participation. The presentation explores the role of service learning and civic engagement in cognition, tutoring strategies and training, advocacy and leadership development, program management and assessment, volunteer recruitment, and sustaining a program. |
|||