A few weeks ago I participated in two workshops, back to back, neither of which was directly related to my teaching of ELL students, but, will, I hope, inform what I am going to try to do next fall in a new class for me: Academic Language Development (ALD). It is a course designed for long term Ell students, who need a focused curriculum on the language of school--academic literacy. More on that and what that means in time. For now I want to focus on the first workshop I took--Digital Storytelling. I took a 3 day course at the center for digital storytelling located in Berkeley, California. There were 10 participants from all the over the country--educators from elementary to college level. The focus was on creating a digital story using only the ipad technology. The focus of this organization is on the personal story, however I wanted to learn the form in order to see how I can use it with the ALD class next year. I came in to the workshop with the idea of telling a story about why telling the Odyssey every year to all of my students (both my drama students and ell students) is a singular focus for me. I, however, didn't know what shape that story would take. Using a variety of writing prompts and activities, an idea emerged, and then over the course of the 3 days I honed the script to under 300 words (not easy) and found images and music to support my script. The most interesting activity was walking around the neighborhood surrounding the offices of center where the workshop took place, with a checklist and our ipad or iphone as a camera. The checklist included many different things to look for but the one that propelled my somewhat dry topic of why I tell the Odyssey, into a personal journey of discovery, was to take a picture of something that reminded me of my childhood. Behind a chain linked fence, on a rock strewn field were a group of kids playing soccer. No adults around, just kids playing soccer. Many were latino kids I recognized from my school. It reminded me of my long ago Brooklyn days, playing stickball, baseball, football, whatever, in abandoned lots, strewn with rocks and garbage, without adults running drills or keeping tabs on us. Just kids playing. When I got back to the class and shared my image a story came up, that through questions from the group, brought up another story that formed the basis of my digital story. It was a story of my father and how, just before little league tryouts, took me to a nearby school and had me stand against a chain link fence. He told me to hold the bat on my shoulder, to get into a ready batting stance. I did as he said, and then he paced off the distance that a little league mound was from the batters box--45 feet as I recall. Then he yelled, just stand there--don't swing. And then he wound up (now it needs to be said at this point that my father was a pitcher during his youth in both a navy team during WWII, and had had tryouts for minor league affiliates of the NY Yankees in the late '40s)
and threw the ball straight at my head. Just in time I hurled myself to the ground. He said: Now your ready to play on a team. That was our practice. How that relates to why I tell the Odyssey you can see in the attached video. Next time I want to explore how to use digital storytelling in the classroom.
