Living Wide-Awake Lives
In visiting this classroom, I am reminded of Greene’s (1995) wise dictum regarding the need for learners to live wide-awake lives and the importance of situated engagements with multiple art forms as a means for releasing the imagination. Greene writes, “We need bto recognize that the events that make up aesthetic experiences are events that occur within and by means of the transactions with our Replica Omega environment that situate us in time and space”.
Mr. Krantzman introduces students to the importance of time and place through selected class readings of The House on Mango Street (Cisneros, 1991) and 145th Street: Short Stories (Myers, 2001). With Cisneros’s text, Mr. Krantzman reads aloud the opening vignette, and across a few days, students put into order the next 35 vignettes. He divides his class of 24 students into four groups of six students. Each group receives a packet of vignettes, photocopied without page numbers. Students then work to arrange the vignettes they have in an order that makes sense. Mr. Krantzman listens in as the groups discuss and debate rationale but resists leading any of these discussions, as this is an opening engagement for the school year, and it provides him with important information about the students and how they are reading and problem solving together.
After this initial round, Mr. Krantzman continues to reduce the number of groups until by the second day there are just two. Again students work to order the vignettes correctly. On the last day, the whole class works to build a sequence of the 35 vignettes, listing the chapter titles on chart paper and arguing for their ideas. Before reading aloud the remainder of the text, Mr. Krantzman debriefs the work, asking students to comment in their notebooks about the process, what they noticed about themselves as readers, and the social nature of reading. He explains, I want to emphasize reading and rereading deliberately. By doing this in September, I see a greater engagement around reading and students are more successful. By the time I hand them a copy of the novel, they have read most of it and heard me read the ending. They reread with a picture of the neighborhood in mind. All students meet with success, and this becomes an important boost of confidence.
Through this engagement, students begin to notice textual details, consider logic, and understand how that they are and who they are not influences how they understand what they read. This learning is enduring. At the midpoint of the year, for example, Mr. Krantzman asks students to reflect on their learning. In a four-page essay, Sofia writes, Reading House on Mango Street allowed me to think outside the box. Not only was the book itself amazing, it was a different type of writing. I remember a lecture on our brain patterns. How we already have method Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Watches paths burned into our brains. When we try something new, it becomes more difficult to understand because we have no path to follow. Now, I understand this concept. The House on Manyo Street allowed a new path to form in my learning process.
Forging new ways to learn is important work, and Mr. Krantzman explains that arts-based thinking is a means to this end. “I really want to emphasize collage and juxtaposition throughout the year. What happens if we randomly put x next to y What do we learn” Again one is reminded here of bricolage insomuch as Mr. Krantzman continues to make use of what is at hand in new and interesting ways.
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