Chris Sloan

Teachers Teaching Teachers #259 Getting Ready with Youth Voices 8.10.11

Youth Voices Hangout

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we are joined by Kevin Hodgson, Charles Freij, Margaret Simon, Judy Jester, Ronnie Burt, Gail Desler, Chris Sloan, Adam Cohen, Dan Polleys. We talk about our plans for the fall and how using Youth Voices might fit with our work with our students.

(Sorry about the over-modulation on some of these voices. We'll improve sound quality in the future.)
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #258 What would Peter Little think? Inquiries for curriculum on the Horn of Africa 8.3.11

Peter Little

This episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers started a couple of weeks ago on Google+. Here's the story of why we invited anthropologist Peter D. Little to join us in our planning for classes this fall. 

It started when I (Paul Allison) asked a couple of questions after reading about a meeting in Rome, where the international community rallied "to the aid of drought- and famine-affected populations in the Horn of Africa with an immediate, twin-track programme designed to avert an imminent humanitarian catastrophe and build long-term food security in the region" (The Standard, 07/25/2011). I wanted to learn more about what was happening on the Horn of Africa, and so I ventured forth by quoting a couple of paragraphs from this article, and by asking a couple of questions.

These two paragraphs leave me with a lot of questions. The notion of a pastoralist is new. I want to learn more about these livestock owners who travel from place to place. How does that work? And the notion of "agropastoralists" seems to imply that they also do farming, which would mean that they move less often. How do these people work in Somalia and other countries? Are they in one ethnic group? Is the famine affecting these folks? Can they provide long-term solutions?

Soon after I posted this, and some back and forth had begun, we received this note from Kris Jacobson, a high school librarian who is interested in learning, libraries, education, professional wrestling, news and politics:

I'm glad that the proposed solutions include letting agropastoralists & pastoralists maintain their nomadic way of life and their animals. Development specialists should not be in the habit of trying to make people abandon their cultures and economies. If you're interested in East African pastoralists, Peter D. Little is one of the top researchers in the field:
http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-we-can-learn-from-african.html

What a wonderful lead this turned out to be into my ongoing inquiry into the Horn of Africa as we plan curriculum together for this fall. With a hat tip to Kris Jacoboson, I continued to read and to write on Google+ about what I to what I was learning:

Thanks to +Kris Jacobson I've just been educated on the pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. Carol Clark writes with knowledge and clarity about the the pastoralists, whose lives, Professor Peter Little has been documenting for some time. As he writes:

During the past 27 years, my research has addressed the anthropology of development and globalization, political economy of agrarian change, pastoralism, environmental politics and change, informal economies and statelessness, and food insecurity in several African countries. Most of my field studies have been conducted in Africa, with a primary emphasis on eastern Africa (Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia).

I was off and running, inspired because I had a frame to work with. I followed up by reading a couple of studies and a chapter in a book by Peter Little, and I found that his voice was echoing in my head, with hope in local solutions in Somalia. At least librarian Kris Jacobson and the writer of the Emory University blog, Carol Clark had sent me through Peter Little on a quest to find what local knowledge and indigenous culture and industry and agriculture there might be in Somalia and Ethiopia and Kenya and the rest of the Horn of Africa. How are the people there dealing with the droughts and what's preventing them from finding their own solutions? I began to ask. 

As my inquiry continued, I found myself wondering, "What would Peter Little say?" His work had provided for me a perspective, perhaps a conscience as I have been reading (and writing) about the complex, ever-developing issues surrounding the famine.

And so, we asked him to come on Teachers Teaching Teachers to guide us toward the questions we might be asking our students, to wonder what approaches he will be taking this fall himself, and to dialogue with him about the famine that we are facing on the Horn of Africa.

Thanks also for our other thoughtful guests, Shannon Sullivan who developed curriculum for PBS, Chris Sloan, Zac Chase, and Adam Cohen.

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #257 Youth Voices with Alice Barr, Matt Montagne, Sandy Scragg, Sheri Edwards, Valerie Burton 7.27.11

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we get together and talk about Youth Voices with Alice Barr, Matt Montagne, Sandy Scragg, Sheri Edwards, Shantanu Saha, Valerie Burton, Chris Sloan, and Paul Allison. 

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #250 Meenoo Rami on #engchat and and Samantha Adams on mobiles in the NMC K-12 Horizon Report 6.8.11

What are your personal learning networks (PLN) online? What do your students do? Do we use different or similar tools to learn online? Do you use mobiles? Do students? What do students’ PLN’s look like now? What will they look like in 1, 3, and 5 years?

Samantha Adams and Meenoo Rami are two of our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.  Samatha Adams joined us for further conversations about the NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition, and Meenoo Rami let us know what’s happening at #engchat on Twitter on Monday evenings and beyond.

Samantha Adams
Director of Communications, NMC (www.nmc.org)
Samantha Adams came to the NMC with an extensive writing and research background in both print and digital publishing. After working with the top trade publishers in the world for a previous job digitizing content for ebooks, she fell in love with writing about emerging technologies. At the NMC, she works closely with CEO Larry Johnson to spearhead the NMC Horizon Project, which encompasses the The NMC Horizon Report series. In the recently released NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition, she was deeply involved in the research and writing of the report. As the lead writer at the NMC, Samantha also focuses on strategic communications within and outside of the NMC member community, promoting special events and publications, while managing the organization’s social media forums. In her free time, Samantha enjoys writing fiction and has recently published an anthology of short stories.

Meenoo Rami and a couple of her colleagues who helped make #engchat the place to be on Twitter on Mondays at 7:00 PM Eastern / 4:00 PM Pacific. Here a recent sampling:

What are your personal learning networks (PLN) online? What do your students do? Do we use different or similar tools to learn online? Do you use mobiles? Do students? What do students’ PLN’s look like now? What will they look like in 1, 3, and 5 years?

Samantha Adams and Meenoo Rami are two of our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.  Samatha Adams joined us for further conversations about the NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition, and Meenoo Rami let us know what’s happening at #engchat on Twitter on Monday evenings and beyond.

Samantha Adams
Director of Communications, NMC (www.nmc.org)
Samantha Adams came to the NMC with an extensive writing and research background in both print and digital publishing. After working with the top trade publishers in the world for a previous job digitizing content for ebooks, she fell in love with writing about emerging technologies. At the NMC, she works closely with CEO Larry Johnson to spearhead the NMC Horizon Project, which encompasses the The NMC Horizon Report series. In the recently released NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition, she was deeply involved in the research and writing of the report. As the lead writer at the NMC, Samantha also focuses on strategic communications within and outside of the NMC member community, promoting special events and publications, while managing the organization’s social media forums. In her free time, Samantha enjoys writing fiction and has recently published an anthology of short stories.

Meenoo Rami and a couple of her colleagues who helped make #engchat the place to be on Twitter on Mondays at 7:00 PM Eastern / 4:00 PM Pacific.

Click Read more to see a recent sampling of #engchat
and a copy of the chat that was happening during this webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #249 - Writing, Making, Sharing, and Learning about Gardens: National Writing Project Makes! 6.1.11

gardening show from June 1, 2011

Do you garden with your students? Do they make things? And do they read and write about these experiences, japan_136.jpg.scaled.1000and sometimes publish the results online?

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, you'll hear National Writing Project teachers from Colorado, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and California describe the gardens and writing projects they are doing with their students.

One of the guests, Patricia Paugh, recently did a session at the National Writing Project’s Urban Sites Network meeting in Boston.

Adventures in Text Analysis: Reading and Writing a Community Garden Project
Mary Moran and Patricia Paugh,
This session investigates theories related to genre pedagogy enacted in a year-long project on community gardening in an urban neighborhood. The session will include analysis of multi-genre texts and sharing of artifacts related to purposeful writing by students who worked with an urban farming collaborative. (Patricia C. Paugh, is an Associate Professor Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Massachusetts Boston.)

We were also joined by an elementary school teacher, Denise Ferrell, who told us about the multiple garden projects she has been doing with Annie Ortiz and other colleagues at the Skyline Elementary in Stillwater, Oklahoma:

We are fortunate at Skyline to have several kinds of gardens. We have a butterfly garden, an 83 ft raised bed, 5 small square raised beds, a cistern, some small dwarf fruit trees. We also have an outdoor classroom.

Fred Mindlin, Associate Director for Technology Integration at the Central California Writing Project, joined us from a Whole Foods store! Fred has been working with gardeners and digital stories and videos, and more as part of the National Writing Project’s Makes project.

Marshall Woody from the Southern Colorado Writing Project who has just starting gardening with his students, was on the call with us as well.

Enjoy!

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.


Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Chris Sloan