Teaching Language Arts In Secondary Schools I

Catalog description

Exploration of language, literacy, and culture and development of curricular designs for teaching language arts in secondary schools. LL ED 411 is designed to provide pre-service secondary English and communications teachers with the foundational experiences for inquiry into the relationships between language, literacy, and culture. Participants reflect upon personal experiences with language and school, examine secondary education perspectives in pedagogical and philosophical terms, build supportive relationships with colleagues to develop the best curricular and instructional decisions, explore the social, psychological, political, and economic aspects of language use and literacy practices in a country with diverse cultures, explore the construction of meaning and knowledge by the use of language and other symbolic systems of representing and sharing experience. A strong emphasis is placed upon the teacher as collaborator, risk-taker, and researcher, who tries new ideas, documents the classroom experience that results, and shares reflections with colleagues to help construct the best understanding for teaching language arts in secondary schools. Course work involves extensive reading, the production of artifacts of a variety of types (written, performed, multi-media) such as journals, reviews, viewpoints, and original research, all done by both individuals and small groups to pursue the course objectives.