Planning The Oakridge School's 2017 Inter-Institutional Colloquium on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Entry 2, August 18, 2016

On January 30, 2017, The Oakridge School will be hosting a colloquium on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, giving high school students the chance to present papers, works of art,  films, and more on one of British literature's most thrilling and horrifying novels. 

After much discussion with teachers in the DFW community, the consensus was clear: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein should be the focus for the 2017 Metroplex Colloquium, to be hosted by The Oakridge School on January 30, 2017. I can't think of a better choice considering the fact that we're approaching the novel's bicentennial! Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in 1816, and it was published for the first time in 1818. We look forward to welcoming students and faculty from various schools to join us in a celebratory conversation about one of literature's most influential novels.

We'll be reading the significantly revised version of the novel that was published many years later in 1831. At Oakridge, we're using the Penguin Classics Deluxe Ed., which looks like this:

• ISBN-10: 0143105035 | ISBN-13: 978-0143105039

After deciding upon a specific text, I invited faculty members from different schools in the surrounding area to join me on a google doc to plan and write collaboratively a call for papers for the 2017 Frankenstein Colloquium. I want to thank the following people for contributing to that endeavor: Jennifer Bonner at The Oakridge School, Joel Garza at Greenhill School, Christopher Schmidt at Parish Episcopal School, Chris Renshaw at The Oakridge School, and Jenny Fast at Founders Classical Academy.

As a result of everyone's creative input and suggestions, this year's colloquium will offer some excellent options for paper prompts as well as opportunities for 2D Art, Film, and MakerSpace submissions. The theme for January's colloquium is "Frankenstein 200 Years Later" and the prompts invite students to write about topics that range from literary and historical concerns to ones of a more scientific and philosophical nature. All the prompts are relevant to our experiences 200 years later in the 21st century, so go here to read more about the 2017 Frankenstein Colloquium's Call for Student Papers.

This year, we're excited to expand the invitation for student work by offering 2 new additions for the upcoming colloquium: (1) a Call for Student 2D Art & Film and (2) a Call for Student MakerSpace Designs & Products. To find out more about opportunities to showcase art or film inspired by Shelley's novel go here. And go here to learn more about the call for student MakerSpace creations (that are inspired by one of literature's greatest and most terrifying creations, namely Frankenstein's "monster").

The submission form for all student work can be found here, and all submissions must be turned in by Nov. 22, 2016.

So What Happens Next As We Wait For The Arrival of January 30, 2017?

Once the Call for Student Work was completed, I put together a blogspot as well as an official twitter account for the colloquium:

Blog: frankenstein200.blogspot.com | Twitter: @MaryShelley200

#Frankenstein200

The idea behind the blog is to provide a space where students and faculty from various campuses can come together to collaborate, share ideas, and respond to each other's work online while reading and studying Shelley's text this fall well before we meet in January 2017. In previous years, Joel Garza of Greenhill School and Deborah Moreland formerly of Hockaday School have joined me and my classes on other blogs (go here and here) to study collaboratively the texts we've chosen for previous colloquia. I think Joel and Deborah would agree that the collaborations on the blogs added so much to the overall experiences, so I encourage readers (both remote and local) to think about joining us this year online. It's worth the risk and adventure; just go here to see what I mean.

At Oakridge, we'll be reading the novel during the month of September, so most of our activity on the blog will happen then. However, other schools will be reading the text later, so activity will continue on the blog as we move into the fall and winter seasons. We'd love for you to get on the site this semester to join our conversations or to just leave a comment.

A Call for Faculty Readers and Evaluators to Help Select Submissions for the 2017 Frankenstein Colloquium

Again, submissions are due Nov. 22, 2016, meaning I need to start putting together the committee of readers and evaluators who will determine which submissions should be accepted to be showcased at the colloquium on Monday, January 30, 2017. I plan to enlist readers and evaluators from various campuses, which we've done in the previous years as well. The other task at hand is to determine what other kind of special programming do we want to include for the colloquium in January: Keynote speaker? Special panel sessions? Creative writing workshops? Theatre workshop with 1 of the many play renditions? There's so many ideas to consider, which makes the task of putting the schedule together an exciting and rewarding challenge. Please stay in tune to learn more about plans for the schedule and program! 

If you have ideas for programs or special workshops, OR if you want to be a reader or an evaluator of submissions, OR if you want to join our collaboration on the blog in a deeper way, please contact Jared Colley, English Chair, The Oakridge School, at jcolley@theoakridgeschool.org or @jcolley8.

2017 Frankenstein Colloquium's calls for student work:
1. A Call for Papers
2. A Call for 2D Art & Film
3. A Call for MakerSpace Designs & Products
4. Submisstion Form for all student work (Due Nov. 22, 2016)

Contact Info.:
Jared Colley
Chair, English Department
The Oakridge School
jcolley@theoakridgeschool.org
@jcolley8
frankenstein200.blogspot.com

More on Authentic Audiences for 21st Century Students: Why We Read, Write, and Think for Each Other

Joel points out in his post the fact that independent school teachers often have a lot of pedagogical & curricular autonomy, which is mostly a good thing… mostly. 21^st century technologies, however, have brought changes to almost all areas of our cultural landscape – changes which make clear that teachers with autonomy need to revisit questions about the benefits of collaboration and connectedness (if not for their sake then for the sake of today’s students). One reason: we’re not the only experts to whom students have access whether at school or outside of the traditional classroom. Technology has made this evident and undeniable. More importantly, in my opinion, connectedness and collaboration make it possible now for teachers to provide authentic audiences for their students’ voices in ways unthinkable in the recent past, and one thing that can bestow purpose and meaning on a student’s learning experience is the presence of a real audience.

More than ever, it’s possible to have students read, write, and think for each other (as opposed to doing such things for their singular teacher) – making the activity more real, more connected, and perhaps more fun. In recent years, I’ve been employing various digital, web 2.0 technologies to get my students to connect and collaborate with students in classrooms from other campuses. (Go here to see how my students at The OakridgeSchool connected with classes at two other campuses, Greenhill School & TheHockaday School, to read together James Joyce’s collection Dubliners. Of course, we did it again last year, this time studying William Shakespeare’s history play, Richard III.)

One of my favorite methods we experimented with was getting students from one class to frame questions for their peers in other classes from different campuses. We did this through various means:
-my students at Oakridge collaboratively posted blog articles (here) that always concluded in a series of questions for Greenhill and Hockaday students.  Greenhill and Hockaday would respond employing various modalities of expression such as text, video, or mp3. (More examples: Greenhill which leads to Oakridge's response;  Hockaday which leads to Oakridge's response; Greenhill which leads to Oakridge's response and then to Hockaday's final word)
-we also had the advantage of augmenting our digital collaboration with visits in person to each other’s campuses – something that’s only possible with the benefit of geographical proximity. Using the responses of the Greenhill students (which were born out of the blog), Mr. Garza (teacher from Greenhill) visited The Hockaday School, bringing his students' questions to their Hockaday peers.
-Hockaday blogged about their perspective of the visit, providing insight and more questions for both Greenhill and Oakridge classes as we struggled with what were very difficult literary works.
-Greenhill students made use of Audacity to record an mp3/podcast both for Oakridge and Hockaday students. Their recording was guided, of course, by the evolution of questions being posed by classes from the other campuses.
-Using GarageBand, Oakridge then responded in kind by putting together their podcast response; here's some highlights:



Oakridge student citing Hockaday student's blog post

At this point, students were citing each other by name, complimenting each other’s readings with expressions of appreciation. They were reading and thinking for each other, serving as meaningful audiences in a community of collaborators. I can’t emphasize it enough: namely, the joy they felt once this exchange became real – once the students received a validating response from an unknown peer who heard them and who cared. As a teacher who is a community of one, I can’t recreate that kind of meaningful learning experience on my own, but by collaborating and connecting with other campuses, such an experience can be designed and realized with ease and joy.



Greenhill student addresses Hockaday teacher's point

What happened next, however, was even more amazing: simply put, we started writing for each other. For me, this first occurred when my students sat for their 9 week midterm. Instead of a comprehensive exam, Oakridge students wrote essays for their Hockaday and Greenhill audience and posted highlights on the blog. (See Hockaday’s response here) Never had I seen developing writers operating so keenly in terms of connecting word, audience, and purpose in their writing. These students weren’t grudgingly writing for me, the teacher; they were eagerly sounding out their voices to peer groups across the digital channels of the internet. Eventually this evolved into composing more formal papers to conclude the project, but in many ways, their compositions were not traditional at all. Students wrote to each other (to each other’s teachers). Many of my writers chose to cite blog, mp3, and video pieces posted by students from other campuses. It was a real learning community full of curious writers and readers, open-minded speakers and listeners, and there was so much joy! By formally engaging nontraditional, digital resources, students were learning the connections between digital literacy, research, and composition as well (while validating each other’s voice in the process!).

So why should we integrate technology to craft authentic audiences for our students? When a student writes for their teacher and that instructor is the only one who will see that composition, why should she make it great? But if she’s writing for a communal audience of peers and teachers alike, not only will she feel the push to make it better, she will act on the desire to make it great because there’s an authentic audience! Bottom line, it makes their learning meaningful, relevant, and worthwhile, and one might just catch them enjoying the process as well.

-Jared Colley

Prof. Anthony Brandt Demystifies the Creative Process: Why Students Need to Create More and How to do It Well

Last year when working on a digital project together, a colleague passed along an article by Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner called “No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait.” We were having our classes from separate campuses collaborate online via blogger while reading Shakespeare’s play, Richard III. At the time we were discussing quite intensely the purpose of the blog space and more specifically how we could make the site a more student-directed platform as opposed to one that relied more on the direction of the teachers involved. One of the many things the above article made clear was that students needed to be the creators and curators of the digital content and not just the consumers of whatever information may be posted on a platform such as blogger. This has been one of the many ways I’ve tried to push myself as a teacher; I’m continually asking myself: am I creating spaces for learning where students create presentations of information in addition to just consuming it?

For teaching to be maximally effective and relevant in our 21st century cultural landscape, instructors have to do more than employ technology to disseminate information more efficiently and expediently. The kinds of literacies required for today's world include the many modalities of digital communication that have recently redefined what it means to be an effective communicator in the professional and personal realms of human interaction. As an English teacher, I believe that’s one of the more important duties of my vocation - namely to help students discover how to express and communicate their passions and ideas as effectively as they possibly can. Just as students cannot become dynamic communicators by simply reading/listening to others’ impressive displays of verbal eloquence, the same is true of the more recent, nontraditional modalities of communication. Students have to write, make speeches, and give presentations themselves to complete the process of learning how to express themselves well. The same is true of blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.; students need to have opportunities to create such products to hone their digital literacy and rhetoric.

One question that comes up for many educators is how to assess creative demonstrations of learning whether digital or not, and this is something I’ve wrestled with as well. Oftentimes one will assign a creative project that gets students to make media through video or web 2.0 applications; students will follow the requirements listed, completing the project as instructed, but the digital demonstration of learning still lacks in presentational, aesthetic quality. What I’m getting at here is that all media-based projects will have an aesthetic component that, if ignored, could make or break one’s ability to reach their audience, and the fact of the matter is a lot of times students turn in poor quality products, aesthetically speaking, while the work still meets the requirements listed by the teacher. It's awkward to demand students to be more creative, especially when we tell ourselves that considerations of creative, aesthetic value are subjective in nature...

So how do we get students to make better products aesthetically speaking without seeming subjective? How do we assess the aesthetic component, namely its creative quality, while remaining fair and transparent? Teachers (myself included) often shy away from assessing creativity because we tell ourselves it’s too subjective, and I think this is partly why the arts gets relegated to the sidelines while the monolithic “high-stakes” testing industry emphasizes the more objective, quantifiable skills for each student’s curricular development.

I saw Prof. Brandt give a talk at St. John’s School in Houston when presenting at the SummerSpark conference back in June 2013. Watch Dr. Brandt's TED talk on creativity, the arts, and the need to value them more in all core-curricular programs:

Dr. Brandt's demystification the concept of creativity immediately triggered idea after idea for me in relation to helping students make better, more creative demonstrations of learning. I want my students to create, but I want them to do it meaningfully by doing it well. I don’t want them to just communicate information clearly; I want them to express it effectively by moving, inspiring, or pleasing their audience. That takes creativity and a keen aesthetic sensibility, and Professor Brandt’s breakdown of the creative process gave me a conceptual vocabulary that enables me to have that conversation with students. Creativity is not a mystical concept that some of us get while others don't; creativity is a core skill that can be learned and cultivated by anyone who is genuinely curious about the process. Our job is to fire up that curiosity by finding ways to structure projects that are relevant, meaningful, and interesting for each of our unique students. And there lies one of our many exciting challenges as 21st century educators...

-Jared Colley

From Anxiety to Joy: A Conversation about Collaboration across Classrooms

First off, I am excited to launch this new blog space; it's something I've been meaning to do for a long time. My desire here is to see this space grow into a collaborative network where multiple contributors could introduce and guide conversations about pedagogy, 21st century learning, innovation, plasticity, collaboration, as well as many other topics that could help inform a productive conversation about what we should do with our classrooms.

I'm also excited to announce that Joel Garza and I will be leading a conversation at EduCon 2.7 in Philadelphia this January 2015. Our conversation is titled "From Anxiety to Joy: The Emotional & Technological Anatomy of 21st Century Collaboration." Here's a sample of what that conversation could sound like:

Joel and I recorded that conversation as part of the "Stories for Learning" strand for the 2014 K12 Online Conference: Igniting Innovation. We're excited to take some of what we've shared there to the EduCon conference this January 2015. Personally, I look forward to seeing how a conversation such as this one could be explored more deeply by opening it up to a greater carnival of polyphonic voices. EduCon appears to be the perfect place for such a thing:

Those attending EduCon this year, please join us for an honest, energetic conversation about the emotional anatomy of collaboration for 21st century learners and educators.  We'll be telling our story about the successes and challenges with project-based learning across campuses, but more importantly we'll be inviting others to discuss with us difficult questions about the emotional demands involved in such risk taking. How do we get colleagues to collaborate? Where are the boundaries? How do we handle moments of conflict, jealousy, or criticism? Who owns what in such endeavors and when do we yield to others? What kind of similar demands do we make on our students?

If you plan to attend, leave a comment here. What do you want to talk about in relation to the topics being addressed in this post and in the above video? What are the important questions to be asked when exploring the emotional terrain of collaborating with others - especially when they're strangers from other campuses? Tell us what you want to talk about, and hopefully, we'll see you in Philly this January!

-Jared Colley