PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2017). Disrupting thinking: why how we read matters.
All children in every school deserve an education that inspires curiosity, encourages creativity, requires critical thinking, urges collaboration, and nurtures compassion.
All children deserve robust school and classroom libraries.
All children deserve a curriculum filled with fine arts.
All deserve science labs, engineering labs, coding labs, and language labs.
All deserve history classes that explore the past so that we understand the present and can perhaps avoid pitfalls in the future, and they deserve math classes that develop their ability to reason as well as compute.
All deserve language arts classes filled with purposeful writing, choice reading, and compelling talk.
All deserve physical education classes that let children run, play, and develop strong bodies.
All deserve buildings that all too often only our wealthiest enjoy.
We need to recognize that reading ought to change us.
Reading ought to lead to thinking that is disrupting, that shakes us up, that makes us wonder, that challenges us.
Such thinking sets us on a path to change, if not the world, then at least ourselves.
Fletcher, J. (2015). Teaching arguments: rhetorical comprehension, critique, and response. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
For the many low-income, underrepresented, and multilingual students for whom higher education is an alien world, the study and practice of rhetoric offers essential training in the imaginative and empathic capacities that enable writers to write for diverse audiences, purposes, and occasions. Rhetoric helps us inhabit other social worlds and identities.
Fletcher, J. (2018). Teaching literature rhetorically: transferable literacy skills for 21st century students. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers.
Teaching for transfer prepares twenty-first-century learners for a changing world. To be clear, transfer of learning doesn’t mean a wholesale carryover of knowledge and skills from one place to another, like transferring funds between bank accounts.
Rather, the theoretical model of transfer is much closer to the idea of transformation. Think about the transformations effected by successful film adaptations. As San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle writes on the adaption of stage plays into movies, “You can’t just take one thing from one place and slap it into something else” (2017, 15).
Whatever is being carried from one context to the next undergoes significant redesign and repurposing before it can be put to effective use. P. XVI
"Fiction invites us into the writer's imagined world; nonfiction intrudes into ours and purports to tell us something about it" (p. 39).
"If nonfiction intrudes into our lives, these signposts help us examine that intrusion" (p. 113).