Borderland

Paul Allision, on Teachers Teaching Teachers, posed a key question about what blogs can do, and what we want them to do for our students. The question is whether blogging is a means to achieve skill or content goals in school, or… “Does blogging have a set of intellectual habits and skills that are worth learning for themselves?” Tom Hoffman says that “Both” is the obvious answer. And he goes on to suggest that blogging is closely related to “reader response with an emphasis on intertextuality manifested as hyperlinking.” Tom’s analysis of blogging practices as a form of intertextual reader response is right on the mark with a thought that I’ve had brewing.

An intertextual stance – linking texts to experience, and to other texts, is the mark of a proficient reader. Conventional reading lessons involve comprehension of single text passages, whereas strategy approaches to reading instruction advocate, among other things, teaching kids to make intertextual links. But how do we teach someone to think this way? The process of making text-to-text connections requires us to first select and organize content from a variety of sources before creating new meanings. It’s a purpose-driven process that follows from a person’s participation in a discourse. Helping kids learn how to be responsive readers is the key here.

I’m wondering if making hyperlinks might encourage my students to adopt an intertextual stance toward their reading and writing on the web. I showed them how to do that the other day by asking them to read another student’s post and comment in one of their own. I figured that keeping the exercise “in house” would ensure that the content they had to work with was on-level for them, and not require them to find and process information they weren’t familiar with. My instinct there was correct, because this was a leap.

Our classroom site doesn’t give them a user-friendly wysiwyg editor to help them link with the click of a button. I taught them a little bit of HTML, and left the instructions on the site. That was the technical part, and relatively simple. Even still, not everyone was happy doing it.

There are a lot of other problems for them to overcome to make this work, and it’s going to be interesting. They had a hard time figuring out the “why” of this assignment. One obvious thing that I could do is to blog on the site myself, and demonstrate what I want the kids to do. I haven’t done much of that, though, and I didn’t want to point to a single example of mine and simply tell them to do the same. I need to start writing about their writing – for them. A New Year’s resolution.

Beach’s model for defining the phases of making intertextual links helps to understand the complexity of this process.

Beach, Appleman, & Dorsey’s model for defining intertextual links, p. 702.

Most of the comments the kids made were not elaborated. But on the whole, they did a pretty good job, considering. There were a few that seemed to ‘get it.’

One student evaluated a story and predicted we’d see more like it.

Someone made a personal connection with a story about losing a pet, and another about sibling rivalry.

There was a text-to-game connection.

There’s a bit of criticism. And a bit more. And there’s even some commentary about the whole class.

My personal favorite doesn’t have any hyperlinks. But it clearly references outside sources. Government cover-ups, anyone?

Still, this was only an assigned exercise. I’ll know that it’s really happening when I see them start to link on their own. Until then, it may just be business as usual.

Source:
Beach, R., Appleman, D., & Dorsey, S. (1994). Adolescents’ Uses of Intertextual Links to Understand Literature. In R.B. Ruddell, M.R. Ruddell, & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (4th ed., pp. 695-714). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.