#and use my language comprehension skills to realize that they are not excluding me

[gcmonsterappreciation]

Or, hear me out, I can realize that not everything has to cater explicitly to me (Someone with a trait atypical of my sex)

I think it's funny how trans activists are always like "BuT wHaT aBoUt InFeRtiLe wOmEn?!?". As an infertile (technically sterile) biological woman who had my fallopian tubes removed at 22. I have never once not felt included in any definition of woman? Like wtf are they talking about?

[ambpoitan]

Readerly Exploration 1.25.21

Advanced Readers in Reading First Classrooms: Who Was Really “Left Behind”? Considerations for the Field of Gifted Education

Big Take-Away

To record the progress of advanced readers over a span of 3 years in comparison to their non-advanced peers and how the Reading First classroom tended to their reading needs.

Nugget

In an attempt to determine how the needs of advanced readers were met in RF class-rooms, it is necessary to examine the research concerning the attributes of advanced readers. This is a difficult task due to the fact that reading researchers cannot come to a consensus on the definition of precocious, advanced, gifted, or fluent readers (Olson et    al., 2006; Reis et al., 2004).

This explanation revealed the reading coach’s misunderstanding about the philosophy of differentiated instruction, including the erroneous belief that higher level thinking  skills  are  reserved  only  for  those  students  who  are  identified  as  advanced.  

If  the  goal  of  gifted  education  is  to  develop critical and creative thinkers who are able to reason, problem solve, and critically analyze potential answers for their degree of fit, these students should be given opportunities to do so in the context of learning.

heterogeneity:  the quality or state of being diverse in character or content.

precocious:  (of a child) having developed certain abilities or proclivities at an earlier age than usual.

advanced:  far on or ahead in development or progress.

gifted:  intellectual ability significantly higher than average.

fluent readers:  read in phrases and add intonation appropriately.

anthology-style:  a published collection of poems or other pieces of writing.

supplementary books:  a little something extra to fill in a gap, like when your teacher suggests supplementary reading material that you may or may not get around to checking out. Supplementary can be an important part of something or just extra support.

fidelity:  faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support. OR the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced. 

Covariates: characteristics (excluding the actual treatment) of the participants in an experiment. If you collect data on characteristics before you run an experiment, you could use that data to see how your treatment affects different groups or populations. Or, you could use that data to control for the influence of any covariate. Covariates may affect the outcome in a study.

data corpus:  A collection of linguistic data, either compiled as written texts or as a transcription of recorded speech. The main purpose of a corpus is to verify a hypothesis about language - for example, to determine how the usage of a particular sound, word, or syntactic construction varies.

trepidation:  a feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen.

clandestine: kept secret or done secretively, especially because illicit. 

formidable:  causing fear, apprehension, or dread: OR  of discouraging or awesome strength, size, difficulty, etc.; intimidating: OR  arousing feelings of awe or admiration because of grandeur, strength, etc. OR  of great strength; forceful; powerful:

Engage in the reading process to increase the likelihood of text comprehension (pre-reading, reading, responding, exploring, applying):

Before you read, skim the assigned course reading(s) for unfamiliar terms. Then, take the time to look up the definitions of those terms.

I typically have a hard time reading case studies such as this one, so I already had expectations that I would have to look up many unfamiliar terms before I even started. This thought alone gave me insight into what kind of expectations my students will bring into assignments before they attempt them. Whether those are positive or negative expectations, they both have an impact on student motivation. To my surprise, skimming the article beforehand increased my confidence when I recognized I didn’t need to look up as many words as I thought. Surely, a 37 page document would have more than a few unfamiliar terms if it was beyond my comprehension. Looking up the terms beforehand, helped me anticipate what kind of ideas I would be encountering within the text. It was especially helpful when I realized that a word I had looked up, appeared many times throughout the article. I thought the rule with vocabulary in a text was, if you don’t have to look up that many terms, then you should be able to understand the text with ease; interestingly enough, that was not the case for me. Although, I knew most of the words I was reading, it didn’t mean that I would be able to understand the text any easier than I had initially anticipated. I am assuming the format in which this information is given is probably the deciding factor in how well I retain the information I am reading. This was an interesting concept, as my students will also be faced with text that does not necessarily seem out of their reach, but it could very well be the type of text that they’re reading that hinders their comprehension. 

[ivyttt-blog]

Reflection Essay for UWP 1

Taking the UWP 1, I get more access to learn various writing concepts than I did in the previous writing class. The lectures and readings provide me a comprehensive understanding writing concepts in this course, such as discourse community and genre. Meanwhile, two major papers encourage me to apply these ideas in writing. Before taking this class, I was lacked the experience of constructing the research paper, and I had no concept of the structure and format of an academic research paper. Besides, writing a narrative paper is painful for me. Even I did a lot of practice in the previous UWP class on this type of essay; I was still worried about reflection part in the paper. I tried to tell all my story in the narrative paper, but the result always looks like a flat and one-sided journal which was absent with profound thinking. Participating in the UWP 1 promotes me to overcome the obstacles in my writing, and my improvement can be found in my two major essays. More important, this course took progress and helped me to approach the learning outcome of the UWP 1 successfully.

Rhetorical knowledge In this class, we discussed the audience, purpose, and mode of the paper, and the rhetorical concept that we mainly focus on are the discourse community and genre. We define the discourse community and discovery various genres in both our daily life and academic studies. “Discourse community” is a new term for me, and before I did the reading in class, I thought discourse community is a way to categorize our society broadly, such as media or school. After reading Schmidt and Vande Kopple’s article about discourse community, I understand this term as a group of people who discover the same concept, share same common knowledge, evaluate related problems and use same professional knowledge. Meanwhile, I applied this term when I chose the topic for my research paper. Since I am majoring in the clinical nutrition, I decided to discuss nutrition as my academic discourse community. In this community, we share the same goal in the nutritional study and use our specific languages to discover the aspects that we are interested and passionate about in balanced diet. Furthermore, I used another rhetorical concept in my research paper, which is the genre. According to Devitt genre enact the purpose, value, and goal of a community. In my research paper, I focus on the how different genres generate specific and unique communications in my discourse community. I separated communication into two categories—communication between nutritional professions and communication between experts and non-members. 

Processes

The processes to outline and revise my literacy narrative essay is different with the paper of discourse community. However, the progress of constructing two papers from the first draft to final draft encourages me to dig deeper into my topic and introduce more suitable examples to support my statement.  

Literacy Narrative

I did a self-reflection on my writing background before constructing the literacy narrative which could help me to draw a map of my writing route from primary school to college. In my first draft, I did free writing about how my middle school writing experience in Newspaper club and my high school teacher affected my writing method, writing style and my attitude toward writing. Getting the feedback from my peers, I added additional examples to support my statement. For example, in the essay, I talk about a good paper should be detailed and profound. I mentioned the book report of Oranges is not the Only Fruit to underline my argument. Furthermore, the feedback from the professor directed me to only focus on one specific “story” in my paper. Therefore, in my final draft, I deleted the part about my middle school writing experience and removed the irrelevant information from the paper.

Research paper

To begin this paper, I had to identify the genre that I expect to discuss. But, I was struggling in deciding the kind of communication that I want to discover in nutrition because I thought that in my discourse community, the conversation has to be happened face to face since people need to discuss balanced diet and health maintenance. The chat between professor and I inspired me to consider other methods of communication, such as the book, food label and scholar paper. In the progress of revising my paper, the workshop helped me to figure out my concerns and points out the lack of this paper. For instance, the professor suggested me to develop the “My Plate” part which can emphasize my statement. Also, I explained some vague concepts clearer in my final draft, such as the aspect of “green flag word" and "red flag word."    

Knowledge of conventions In the UWP 1, we talked about the variety of genres and discourse communities. Exploring different discourse communities and genres helps me to have a better understanding of these concepts. During the class, we discussed discourse community in both our life and academic field. In the broadcast that we listened in class, we discover the genre in the Instagram community. Learning their purpose of uploading the pictures and commenting on their friends’ posts, I was able to connect discourse community with the genre, and this example helped me to comprehend the meaning of genre. And acquiring the knowledge about these concepts aids me to write better in my research paper.

Research I did various research on my discourse community, and both primary and secondary research facilitated my argument. For the primary research, I created a survey to the public about nutrition to support my paper. It was a challenge for me to decide the question in my survey. In order to gain more expectable result from the questionnaire, I had to narrow down the range of the question. Therefore, instead of asking the respondents what they know about nutrition, I tended to inquire where they get knowledge about the nutritional concept and their method to maintain the balanced diet in their life. The result from the survey provides an influential support “non-member” communication. The secondary resources that I used in the essay are course readings, scholar papers, and books from the experts. When I referenced the idea from the books, it was significate to analyze and pick up the useful information from a hundred pages books. For example, when I introduced the history of nutrition. I chose some milestone of nutritional research in the past instead of the list every single historical event. And excluding the redundant information from the research paper can promote the effectiveness of outside resource using in my paper. 

Metacognition Metacognition is a process to reflect on my paper. We built up our metacognition through writing the memo for papers. When I wrote the memo for the first draft, I would ask myself some simple questions, such as “Am I on the right track,” “what is the advantage of my paper” and “what is my concern.” Answering these questions can guide me to recognize if my statement is clear and if I accomplish the purpose of this essay. For my second draft, I will consider the development of each idea; meanwhile, I will check coherence and unity of the whole paper. This reflection will help me to realize some exact problem in my writing. Therefore, I can correct and revise the unclear part of the final draft.

Overall Reflection The practice, assignments and reading materials in the UWP 1 lead me to meet the learning outcomes step by step. The research paper not only give me experience in academic writing, but it also prepares me to do a better job in other science class. When we need to do a lab report or professional research, the skill that I acquired from this class can facilitate my work. Therefore, in the future course, I may have access to know more rhetorical knowledge which is different with this class, but the concepts I learn from the UWP 1 can pave my writing journey and prepare me to face upper-level concepts and writing. If I have more time on revision, I will develop the paragraph under each subtitle in the literacy narrative. And for the research paper, I may add more detail for each example I used in paper and explain more about the relativeness of the evidence and my topic. Besides, I will improve the conclusion of the paper. I think the conclusion of the paper is too general. It will be better if I can make more connections with my discourse community and genre and practical social concern or event in the nutritional field.