With help from my colleagues, I would like to get a group of 3 or 4 high school students willing to work with me to complete a "Short Story Workshop" over a matter of 3-4 weeks with twice a week check-ins. We would communicate through email and blogging (unless another method like IM or SecondLife was agreed upon).
During this workshop, I would like to discuss the form of the short story, creating one's own short stories, and the idea of scaffolded or unscaffolded learning.
I believe learning to write short stories has value for any student. Short stories are a lot of fun once the potential writer gets comfortable with writing and expectations. They are also a great form of self-expression with many fewer limits than the typical essay.
I would also like to discuss the teaching methold called "scaffolding". Scaffolding in teaching is when you build an informational and experiential support structure that students can use to climb to new academic heights. The principle is the same as a house painter that builds a lower level, then a middle level and finally the hightest level of scaffolding to help him reach his goal of painting the top area of the house. Academic teachers often use scaffolding to help students learn complicated information and new paradigms.
I want to relate scaffolded academic learning to learning out in the real world, like for a job. In school, teachers go out of their way to scaffold new academic projects for students. But, in a job, it is more likely to be here's a set of directions (complete or not) and get me the product by such and such time. Thinking about scaffolding is slight shift in perspective and strategy for students that may help them recognize and succeed in both academia and the real world.
A WebQuest format for the student directions/teacher view of project would be a great start!
Good news, Shannon. I happen to know a high school English teacher who teaches a creative writing class and I bet he'd have 3 or 4 students interested in a project writing short stories. He loves integrating technology, too, so I bet he'd appreciate the idea of a WebQuest or some similar tech strategy to scaffold short story writing.
ReplyDeleteHere's how I think you could structure the project so that you'd both focus on your interest in short story writing and YA lit. There are some amazing short story collections in the YA genre. Black Juice by Margo Lanagan won a Printz Honor a few years ago -- the only short story book that I know of to win this honor -- http://www.amazon.com/Black-Juice-Margo-Lanagan/dp/0060743905 You'll see Frances Bradburn's review here. So cool because she was the chair of the first Printz Committee and will be our guest speaker in a few weeks.
What if you created a Web experience in which you scaffolded a study of the elements of a successful short story using a model short story and then students wrote their own? You could actually use a wiki for the Web experience/scaffolding. For the writing, Springnote is an appealing tool for creating a group notebook -- http://www.springnote.com/en -- or individual ones.
Just let me know what you think and we can make the teacher connection so you'll be able to tailor the project to the needs/interests of the students.
I'm excited!