Highlights from the Q & A session after the webinar Knowledge Building as the Foundation for Literacy Learning by Gina N. Cervetti and Elfrieda (Freddy) H. Hiebert.
In their ILA presentation (was well as their publications on the topic of knowledge building), Gina Cervetti and Freddy Hiebert answered questions such as:
- What is the relationship between knowledge building in ELA versus building knowledge in content area learning?
- How are narrative texts part of a knowledge building curriculum?
- What’s the relationship between texts and experience in a knowledge-building ELA curriculum?
- What is a way in which a text set can be used in a classroom?
Transcript:
Q: What is the relationship between knowledge building in ELA versus building knowledge in content area learning?
Gina Cervetti: One of my concerns about some of the new knowledge-oriented ELA curricula is that they’re being used to replace involvement in content area learning, and while text can be used to develop students conceptual understandings, that’s not the totality of what students learn about in content area instruction. They need to learn the skills and ways of thinking and ways of communicating that are part of the different content areas.
Freddy Hiebert: really agree with Gina that we don’t want to just put a superficial coating on it and say, now we’re teaching about, we’re teaching knowledge, we’re a knowledge-based curriculum, when we’re just kind of skimming over the surface of a whole bunch of different topics.
Q: How are narrative texts part of a knowledge building curriculum?
Freddy: I think we’ve said it, but maybe not directly, that when we talk about knowledge, it’s not just informational text. Gina was showing the theme about friendship and the thing about narrative texts is that’s where we have our record of human relations, of how humans solve problems over time.
You know, I can go to a novel that Jane Austen has written and see something about human relations. And I can read a novel that’s been written in the last year and I can see what’s consistent about human beings. So I want to really emphasize that when we’re talking about text sets, as I was showing, it can be different genres. And I think narrative is really important in there.
Question: What’s the relationship between texts and experience in a knowledge-building ELA curriculum?
Gina: There’s been many long standing programs of research that have shown time and time again that if you constrain the time devoted to English language arts and you involve students in experiential content area learning that also involves them in reading and writing and learning about the genres and ways of reading and writing that are important in that content area, they make more growth in reading and writing. So actually reducing the time devoted to ELA instruction can result in greater growth in literacy! So yes, what we what we really want is for students to be learning skills and strategies of literacy in a relatively constrained ELA period And then doing lots and lots of reading and writing and talk in the context of having experiential content area learning experiences.
Q: What is a way in which a text set can be used in a classroom?
Freddy: One of the things that I’m really a strong proponent of, is that kids have some choice when they see some of these texts, that kids actually can get expert at something that they can share with others. If everybody’s responsible for the same thing and then somebody’s checking to see whether I really read it, it’s kind of like interrogation. I would prefer, and that was what I was describing in the “article a day” perspective, where there’s a set of articles, a set of texts. We might all read one of them together, and then different groups of kids could read different texts in a text set. One of the text might be read aloud.
But I think it’s really important for kids to have some ownership. John Guthrie’s work on on knowledge building really does show that it helps to have some choice and that really influences engagement and learning.