Multiple texts 2014

EDLL 5341/EDLL 5344Module 8March 2014

Agenda:

•RTI and “Struggling” Readers

•A Synthesis of Research on Causes for “Struggling Readers”

•Teaching “Struggling” Readers with Multiple Texts

Response to Intervention

“Struggling” Readers:

•Think about students you know who you would consider to be “struggling” readers.

•What attributes do they possess that places them in this category for you?

What Research Says about Attributes of a “Struggling” Reader:

•Cultural Mismatch Theories•Deprivation Theories•Difference Theories•Normative Theories

•Cultural Mismatch TheoriesStudents who do not have previous experiences with “school” expectations for reading including linguistic and metalinguistic experiences. These students are deemed to be behind their counterparts who come from backgrounds that mirror school definitions, values, and expectations for reading. As these students get older, they are often identified through their attitudes towards school reading tasks and may simply cease to participate in school reading curriculums.

•Deprivation Theories

Students who do not perform well on reading tasks as measured by standardized, performance-based, or informal tests and teacher observations. These are students who are deemed to possess cognitive processing problems that interfere with their ability to read successfully in school settings.

•Difference Theories

Students who have the potential to perform at grade level with reading tasks but do not because of the type of instruction they receive. These students may be deemed to struggle with reading because of developmentally inappropriate reading instruction or because of culturally unresponsive reading instruction. The bottom line is that these students need different instruction in order to be successful.

•Normative Theories

Students are arbitrarily placed into the position of being a “struggling” reader based on a social need to label students’ reading ability relative to an arbitrarily determined norm. Someone has to be a “struggling” reader in order to identify “successful” readers.

As you consider this list of reasons why students “struggle” with reading, which reasons do you feel apply to the students you have known?

How might a “struggling” reader respond to the following text?

The Dust Bowl:For eight years dust blew on the southern plains. It came in a yellowish-

brown haze from the South and in rolling walls of black from the North. The simplest acts of life — breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk — were no longer simple. Children wore dust masks to and from school, women hung wet sheets over windows in a futile attempt to stop the dirt, farmers watched helplessly as their crops blew away. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted about a decade. Its primary area of impact was on the southern Plains. The northern Plains were not so badly effected, but nonetheless, the drought, windblown dust and agricultural decline were no strangers to the north. In fact the agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose effects were felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains was also profound. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the skys. The skys could darken for days, and even the most well sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads.

Multiple Texts About the Dust BowlInstead of teaching this topic from one type of text (e.g., a textbook), imagine teaching with multiple types of text such as the following:•Timeline•Historic Photographs•Children’s Fiction Chapter Books: Out of the Dust,Esperanza Rising•AP Article from the AJ•Oral History from Cesar Chavez•Documentary•Music from Woody Guthrie/Children’s Picture Book

Let’s explore different genres of text on the topic of the Dust Bowl.

As you view each slide, please pay attention to what stands out to you from each text/excerpt of a text.

Comparative Events in HistoryThe Mexican Revolution

World War I

The Great Depression

The Dust Bowl

World War II

1910-1920 (with sporadic war continuing until 1929)

1914-1918 1929-1939-early 1940’s

1931-1939 1939-1945

Historic Photographs from the Dust Bowl: Images of Children

Images of Children cont.



Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse“Tested by Dust”

While we sattaking our six weeks testthe wind roseand the sand blewright through the cracks in the

schoolhouse wall,right through the gaps around the

window glass,and by the time the tests were done,each and every one of us,was coughing pretty good and we allneeded a bath.

I hope we get bonus pointsfor testing in a dust storm.

April 1934

Esperanza Rising“Is there any more talk of striking?” asked Josefina.“Things are quiet now, but they are still organizing,” said

Marta’s aunt. “There is talk of striking in the spring when it is time to pick. We are afraid there will be problems. If they refuse to work, they will lose their cabins in the migrant camps and then where will they live? Or worse, they will all be sent back to Mexico.”

“How can they send all of them back?” asked Hortensia.“Repatriation,” said Marta’s aunt. “La Migra—the

immigration authorities—round up people who cause problems and check their papers. If they are not in order, or they do not happen to have their papers with them, the immigration officials send them back to Mexico. We have heard that they have sent back people whose families have lived here for generations, those who are citizens and have never ever been to Mexico.” (p. 170-171)

Scientist Unearths Possible Cause of 1930s Dust BowlBY BETSY BLANEYASSOCIATED PRESS

Will-Allen Jameson still remembers the sound the huge, rolling wall of dust made before it reached her family's West Texas ranch. "You could kind of hear a faint roar, and it would get real quiet," the 76-year-old Plainview woman said as she described one of the many dust storms she witnessed as a youngster. "Birds were alarmed. They could sense something was coming up." In the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s a single dust storm could linger for days.

In a study published recently in Science magazine, Siefried Schubert determined that slight changes in the surface temperatures of two oceans created atmospheric conditions that caused the Dust Bowl from 1931 to 1938. It was the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, a time when drought choked the Great Plains stretching across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado. Soil from America's breadbasket filled the skies. The storms were the result of a severe drought — beginning as early as 1931 and not ending until the fall of 1939 — and poor agricultural practices. Grasslands, which held soil in place, had been plowed and replanted with wheat.

Associated Press Article Continued:

With rain, the crop was abundant. But when drought struck in the 1930s, farmers continued to plow and plant. With no ground cover remaining, the winds whipped the soil skyward.

Now, more than 70 years later, a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration studying moisture and air patterns in the atmosphere believes he may have stumbled upon why the drought occurred in the first place. Siegfried Schubert, a meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wrote in a study published last month in Science magazine that slight changes in the surface temperatures of two oceans created atmospheric conditions that caused the Dust Bowl. "The 1930s drought was the major climatic event in the nation's history," Schubert said. "Just beginning to understand what occurred is really critical to understanding future droughts and the links to global climate-change issues we're experiencing today."


In the 1930s, tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures were cooler than normal and tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures were warmer than normal, producing a weakened low-level jet stream that sent it further south, he said. The variation in sea surface temperatures were only a few tenths of a degree centigrade. The jet stream normally moves westward over the Gulf of Mexico before turning northward, bringing moisture and rain to the Great Plains. The weakened jet stream in the 1930s also carried less moisture, and farmland on the Great Plains dried up. For the next nine years, yellow-brown dust blew on the southern plains; walls of black dust rolled across the northern plains. Breathing became a chore. Children donned dust masks to go to and from school, and wet sheets were used to try to stop dust from getting into homes. Farmers looked on in despair as crops blew away.

Schubert said his study was aimed at evaluating an atmospheric circulation model NASA devised using satellite observations. He and his colleagues used data taken from ship records to create starting atmospheric conditions for the model. They then let the model run on its own and used only observed monthly global sea surface temperatures. "Right now what we need to do is find out what caused those sea surfaces temperatures," Schubert said. "We need to understand the whole system, the ocean and the atmosphere." The study also found that droughts can be localized because of soil moisture levels, particularly during the summer. When rain is negligible, less evaporation occurs and that leads to even less rain.


John M. Wallace, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of those who reviewed the study for Science, called the findings invaluable — the first to make a persuasive case between rainfall on the Great Plains and the sea surface temperatures in the tropics. "It doesn't make any exceptional claims, but it just identifies one of the factors that can influence the summer rainfall over the southern United States," Wallace said. "Their paper is really quite modest in claiming what this will give us. It won't enable us to say, 'This is going to be a drought year.' But it will enable us to get a feeling for the odds, the probabilities. "Anything that can get a leg up on what's coming next summer is going to be useful." Jameson, who has written "Too Tough to Die — Too Poor to Leave,” fictional story about a Texas Panhandle family in the Dust Bowl era, also found the study interesting — but inconclusive. "I think it's good to think about it," she said. "I think it's one of many, many theories. Nobody really knows."

Oral Histories of the Dust Bowl From Hard Times (Terkel,1986):

Cesar Chavez (1927-1993):“Oh I remember having tomove out of our house. My father had brought in a team of horses and awagon. We had always lived in that house, and we couldn’t understand why

Cesar Chavez continued:

“we were moving out. That must have been around 1934. I was about six years old. It’s known as the North Gila Valley, about fifty miles north of Yuma. My dad was being turned out of his small plot of land. He had inherited this from his father, who had homesteaded it. I saw my two, three other uncles also moving out. And for the same reason.”

Cesar Chavez continued:“The bank had foreclosed on the loan. If the local bank approved, the Government would guarantee the loan and small farmers like my father would continue in business. It so happened the president of the bank was the guy who most wanted our land. We were surrounded by him: he owned all the land around us. Of course, he wouldn’t pass the loan.”

Cesar Chavez continued:“One morning a giant tractor came in, like we had never seen before. My daddy used to do all his work with horses. So this huge tractor came in and began to knock down this corral, this small corral where my father kept his horses. We didn’t understand why. In a matter of a week, the whole face of the land changed. We all of us climbed into an old Chevy that my dad had. And then we were in California, and migratory workers.”

Oral Histories in Video: Surviving the Dust Bowl

“It looked like it was just a thing that would never end,” says Melt White, son of a Texas farmer. “So they abused the land; they abused it something terrible… we don’t even think what the end results might be.”

“When those dust storms blew and you were out in them, well, you spit out dirt,” recalls Imogene Glover of Kansas. “It looked like tobacco juice, but it was dirt.”

http://www.pbsorg/wgbh/americanexperience/films/dustbowl/player/

Documentary

“The Plow that Broke the Plains” (1937)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCwhjWNcH8

Children’s Books

•Hoping for Rain: The Dust Bowl Adventures of Patty and Earl Buckler

•Surviving the Dust Bowl

•Voices of the Dust Bowl

•Woody Guthrie: Poet of the People

Folk Music from the Dust Bowl: Woody Guthrie

So Long, It's Been Good To Know Yuh (Dusty Old Dust)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2YDK0GJaF8

I've sung this song, but I'll sing it again,Of the place that I lived on the wild windy plains,In the month called April, county called Gray,And here's what all of the people there say:

So long, it's been good to know yuh;So long, it's been good to know yuh;So long, it's been good to know yuh.This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home,And I got to be driftin' along.

A dust storm hit, an' it hit like thunder;It dusted us over, an' it covered us under;Blocked out the traffic an' blocked out the sun,Straight for home all the people did run,Singin':

We talked of the end of the world, and thenWe'd sing a song an' then sing it again.We'd sit for an hour an' not say a word,And then these words would be heard:

Children’s Picture Book/Song Lyrics:Woody Guthrie: Poet of the People

“This Land is Your Land”

This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York Island,

From the Redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream watersThis land was made for you and me.

When the sun come shining, then I was strollingIn wheat fields waving, and dust clouds rolling;The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting:

This land was made for you and me.One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple

By the Relief office I saw my people—As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if

This land was made for you and me.Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking my freedom highway.Nobody living can make me turn back.

This land was made for you and me.

Now, let’s go back to the first text we read about the Dust Bowl and imagine this text was our “target text,” the one from mandated curriculum we had to teach.

The Dust Bowl Text Revisited:For eight years dust blew on the southern plains. It came in a yellowish-

brown haze from the South and in rolling walls of black from the North. The simplest acts of life — breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk — were no longer simple. Children wore dust masks to and from school, women hung wet sheets over windows in a futile attempt to stop the dirt, farmers watched helplessly as their crops blew away. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted about a decade. Its primary area of impact was on the southern Plains. The northern Plains were not so badly effected, but nonetheless, the drought, windblown dust and agricultural decline were no strangers to the north. In fact the agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose effects were felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains was also profound. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the skys. The skys could darken for days, and even the most well sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads.

The Dust Bowl through Multiple Texts:Let’s examine the following:

• Scaffolding students’ ability as readers in terms of text readability/difficulty,

• Reading multiple texts leads to multiple perspectives on topics

• The effect primary source documents has on student understanding of a concept/topic, and

• The ways that taking a multiple genre approach towards reading instruction can address the theories cited in research for reasons why students “struggle” with reading.

Readability:

•What happens to the difficulty of text when students read multiple genres of text on the same topic?

Multiple Perspectives

•How does reading multiple texts foster critical literacy through the examination of multiple perspectives?

Primary Source Documents:

“Students who read primary documents on a fairly frequent basis, as often as at least once per week, have higher achievement scores than their peers who see these sources rarely” (Brozo & Simpson, 2007, p. 256).

Reasons Why Students “Struggle” With Reading:How does taking a multiple text approach to reading instruction address the following reasons why students “struggle” with reading?

•Cultural Mismatch Theories•Deprivation Theories•Difference Theories•Normative Theories

Final Thought About Teaching with Multiple Texts:

“If we want students to understand what they read in our courses, we must encourage them to read beyond what they are assigned to read in our classrooms” (Graves, 2004).

Education

Multiple texts 2014