When I was a high school teacher, I developed this method of writing called "Framing the Question." After teaching the five paragraph essay in 10th grade, students were accustomed to this frame so I simply tweaked it. The thesis statement was now a big question and the topic sentences were little questions branching off. I was teaching My Forbidden Face by Latifa and the big questions and little questions all came from active reading. We were just using the five paragraph structure to organize our questions. Also, students could use quotations from the page where their questions had emerged, so I was showing how to incorporate quotations into a paper. The reason why I developed this was that students did not know how to expand on good questions that come from flashes of insight. Therefore, we started with the little questions that were made while reading a very specific scene in a novel and tried to broaden these into bigger questions. I thought I had reversed the linear mode of planning an essay by starting with the small stuff and working outward. This is what most of us do in our research, but when it comes to writing an essay, teachers and educational rhetoric demand that we have a focal point to structure our ideas. I see the thesis statement as more of a conclusion that really should be worked up to in a text, and perhaps left open at the beginning, but this is not what the standard five paragraph essay demands.
In SI, we were asked to do an inquiry. We started with a book. I, myself, started with two books of seemingly unrelated topics: Make Me a Story: Teaching Writing through Digital Storytelling by Lisa C Miller and Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Miller's book was instructional, giving simple implementation advice for teaching digital storytelling in the classroom. However, in my demo, I primarily based my instruction on content from Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community by Joe Lambert. Miller is related to Lambert, Lambert is related to Heath. I could not decide which inquiry to do: to delve back into Digital Storytelling, an interest I have had for the past few year or: to explore new/old territory, ethnography. The later was old territory because my BA degree is in anthropology and it has re-emerged as ethnography for my classroom. Because of all the Demos and how they focused on ideas to implement in the classroom, my mind returned to my syllabus several times and I realized that I have a section on ethnography (discourse communities) and a section on literacy narratives (which could be made into digital stories as a final project). The Digital Story is a new genre: a documentary style mini-movie made by the self about the self. A version of the personal essay and personal narrative that explodes into multiple modes (with videos, pictures, and music). My inquiry began to focus on how to use this information in my classroom, not just juggling with the information itself. The last Demo asked us to consider my inquiry in research paper form, and the genre totally disrupted my exploration because I tried to fit all the categories together. Although they were connected, they could be explored throughout an entire semester linking genre, to discourse communities, to the self and narrative. However, I could not write a paper on all of these topics because they were seemingly too disparate; they could not be contained in a thesis statement, nor could they even be contained in a question. Let's say that inquiry started as a tree. A trunk and then the branches. In "Framing the Question" I tried to start with the branches and move toward a trunk, but not all questions can be unified. Actually inquiry is very much like a tree, but there are roots underground that expand as the branches do. My inquiry has been underground creating a base to support a syllabus and a semester of English 1101. In Teaching College English, I created the branches above, but the tree was not stable because I had yet to explore in depth the content of my course. While experiencing these topics as a student (learner) instead of a teacher ("expert"), I was able to move into the role of inquirer. The inquiry actually was stifled by the structures above ground, in this case, the idea of a final product: a paper or a presentation. Also, my inquiry happened a lot inside my head, which is why it was "underground." To come above ground it had to explore in private and also grow organically without being forced. It is my writing process to do a lot of thinking and finally write a whole lot at the end (very fast and seemingly without much effort). Actual revisions go on in my head as ideas are synthesized. I felt a little guilty at SI because I was unable to process the ideas at the speed of the course. Therefore, I was unable to blog about it. I needed time to let my questions sink in and really be absorbed. I am always the last to finish a test, the straggling student in the classroom; but it doesn't mean I am blocked. It just means I am percolating. A good way to percolate: plogging, otherwise known as day booking, otherwise known as journaling.
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