The CUNY Conference on Best Practices in Reading/Writing Instruction was full of great presentations and teachers. Here are my morning notes, afternoon notes to come shortly:
1B: Some New and Interesting Pedagogies:

Nicola Blake (Guttman Community College): Using Smartphones in Reading/Writing nicola.blake@guttman.cuny.edu

Ms. Blake gave examples of how students used their smartphones to take pictures and videos of their neighborhoods or landscapes that gave meaning to assignments fashioned around environments and spaces. The students then worked out their writing and presentations around how the images were incorporated. Ms. Blake makes her students consider how the same lens used to look at a picture apply also to our writing. Some projects she suggested were jigsaw readings (pictures and texts interspersed); twitter and animoto combinations; digital stories; documentaries ("selfies") and commercial and research projects (the phone monitors student process); paired work.  

Benjamin Lawrence Miller (Queensborough Community College): Creating an Egalitarian Pedagogy  bmiller@qcc.cuny.edu

Mr. Miller felt that in order to counter some of the digital distractions in the classroom, which isolates students' attention, transformation of the classroom into an egalitarian space would be an effective way to engage students. The question the instructor asks her/himself: How do we square the process we have been through with the instruction we are giving? Especially if students are interested in going the same direction? One approach was to do the assignments with the students. Another was to discover texts alongside the students (not pre-planned, pre-read texts). Collaborations with other professors and learning groups illustrates equal sharing and an unanticipated outcome. An example was collaborating with another class where one group wrote about the 'stop & frisk' issue; the other devised the rubric with which to judge the writing; they then came together for the final exchange and assessment.

Mr. Miller's criteria:

 - students' self-assessment

 - focus on outcomes

 - rapport with students that counteracts disciplinarian/entertainer roles of instructor.

 - response work

Shoba Bandi-Rao (Borough of Manhattan Community College): Can Mobile Apps Help ESL Overcome Grammar Errors? sbandirao@bmcc.cuny.edu

The challenges Ms. Rao wanted to address were the time restraints in class for extended grammar practice, limits on students' study time, the lack of study skills, and the need to focus on function over form. Her solution was to create a focus on "Small Chunks of Time" for students to utilize with their apps, such as travel time, waiting in lines and for appts/classes and other small increments of downtime. For this reason, Ms. Rao promoted the over 3000 apps available for ESL learners that help with the need for repetition and practice in grammar and idioms. The way to implement them in the classroom was to present them in a light, playful and bite-size way to encourage further use outside class; also encourages feedback. Group work and presentations would result. Three types of projects proposed were:

 - Vocabulary - customized and pre-selected to go with texts to ensure the right definitions and usage.

 - Student videos in mother tongues - this loosens up students to discuss aspects of their lives that can lead to more exploration. Drawback: only others in that language can follow.

 - Prosody & intonation - this can help with the difficult areas that don't always get covered in class, as they need patience, time and practice.

Websteronline was mentioned as a means to hearing American pronunciation.

This approach has to accommodate not everyone having a smartphone, in which case sharing would ensure.

Rajul Punjabi (Long Island University, Brooklyn): Using Music Lyrics in the Classroom rajulpunjabi@liu.edu

Ms. Punjabi felt that hip-hop lyrics are a great bridge to more traditional texts for young people because there exist so many parallels, multiple meanings and paraphrasing to both forms. She picks lyrics that can be connected to written texts, taking the students through the texts, looking for universal themes and time & place studies. Response papers help create a two-way approach, bringing the themes back to the students' own experiences. Through validation of the form and the students' input, it helps build confidence to then give their input to the texts that also demand the same examinations. Her example of taking Tupak Shakur's "My Girlfriend" linked to Richard Wright's story of a young man and his gun showed how this approach is effective and makes traditional texts more accessible.