Personal Narrative: My Socratic Seminar

My Socratic Seminar took place about a week ago on April 24. I always enjoy talking with my other English education majors because though we have lots of classes together we don’t often have many opportunities for open discussion between us. It was even better this time because we also had other language classes and journalism represented to add to our normal group of people. I was excited to see what knowledge they could bring to the table. Having read the questions beforehand, I was slightly nervous that we would actually find something to talk about. This class has been a slight struggle in just trying to differentiate between “teaching literacy,” which is something that all of the English students do all the time, and finding ways to “focus
on literacy.” The questions seemed to originally want to push us more towards how we would apply literacy topics into our classroom, but luckily we branched out into discussing more our opinions on the literacy that we have available for us to use in the class.
The longest period of time was spent discussing Shakespeare. Though this is a commonly debated item in the literary world, I think the reason that we focused on it so specifically during our circle was because the majority of us are in Block 2 observations in classrooms that are teaching a Shakespeare unit right now. Mac and I share a coordinating teacher, so we both have discussed Hamlet and ways to engage our students quite a bit recently. Other English education people have said similar things about Shakespeare in their classrooms and the way that their cooperative teacher is handling it. This is also an argument that has been somewhat ongoing in our methods courses. We want to find ways to make the material engaging without taking away its original value. That also causes problems of evaluation when deciding what that original value is and what authors deserve a place on our canonical shelves.
Another point that was brought up during our discussion was the use of bridge texts, a concept that we went over in class.
Someone argued that though using bridge texts is good, we may be using it simply as a way to make our “cannon lit” more palatable rather than truly support it. Something that I brought up during the discussion was how I find most of the value in that sort of traditional lit in the way that it is referenced in current culture. Though the text itself is important, I think what matters more for the students are the things in the real world that are references to the text and ideas/words that originated within them. As a teacher and through my observations this semester I think that the key to engaging students in reading literature written almost a hundred years ago is to find connections to their life and let them explore those connections. I do understand some of what the other people said about how teachers could teach those things without the text, but I think that there is a innate value in texts that keep being passed down to the next
generation.
I really appreciated the perspectives of our students, who were from Chile I believe.
They talked about how using a difficult text like Shakespeare in your classroom can make things even more difficult for a non-native speaker. If someone who speaks the language has trouble understanding the references and getting the meaning, someone who does not has almost no chance and will likely give up. They suggested always using pictures when describing something to a non-native speaker. I found their insights really helpful when thinking about how I am going to help the ELL students in my own classroom. Austin also had a cool perspective about how focusing on the historical significance of something that you give to the students will help give it more meaning for them, especially considering his students who will be primarily speaking another
language.
Overall, through our discussion I got to actually hear the perspectives from my classmates and discuss topics that are brought up in lots of our classes together. We all agree that something in education needs to be purposefully done if we are going to help our students love reading... or at least complete and understand the readings. Literacy is an integral part of the subject that we teach, but if we don’t purposefully focus on developing out student’s literacy skills it is easy to teach simply plots of novels and vocab. We have to focus on creating and using purposeful instruction and activities to enhance our students’ literacy in many different forms. This socratic circle helped me think through some applications for what I have learned during this class and encouraged me that other future educators feel the same way about how we want to impact the literacy of our students.