media teacher

Saturday Symposium on Literacy, Media, and the Arts

High school literacy teachers from around Florida gathered in the College of Education Terrace Room on Saturday, June 3 to discuss issues related to adolescent literacy, media, and the arts. During the six-hour workshop teachers, university faculty, and graduate students from UF and FSU discussed research on literacy and the links between reading proficiency and use of media and the arts in schools.

Dr. Barbara G. Pace, English Education faculty at UF, developed the Saturday Symposium concept as a way to make connections with teachers, to share research, and to provide a dialogue on salient issues surrounding literacy development. Each faculty member in attendance gave a presentation. Dr. Pace began the day by discussing media education, the process of teaching and learning about media texts. She then presented information on how movie stills could be used to help students attend to textual details and to relate those details to narrative development. She discussed research that demonstrates the relationship between media literacy and growth in traditional forms of literacy, such as those measured by state assessments. Teachers were invited to experiment by considering how they might film the opening sequence of a short story.

Dr. Susan Nelson Wood, a UF graduate who is now an associate professor in English Education at FSU, followed with a presentation of her research with eighth-graders in a low performing middle-school in the Tallahassee area. In this work she has been using Visual Thinking Skills (VTS) to help students who struggle with reading to develop metacognitive skills and to identify visual elements. During her presentation, participants were led through the process of applying VTS to a series of visual images. Dr. Wood’s research in the school (Wood, & Youngblood, forthcoming), indicates a positive relationship between VTS and growth in reading comprehension.

Dr. Jane Townsend, English Education faculty at UF, and UF graduate students Robbie Ergle and Patrick Ryan discussed how they have used the visual and performing arts with prospective literacy teachers. Ergle who works with prospective literacy teachers at UCF shared multimedia projects that her students developed as responses to adolescent literature. Ryan, who taught in the English Proteach program last fall, discussed his use of music and fine art in teaching the writing methods class. He used examples from students to illustrate the powerful connections that students were able to make. Dr. Townsend concluded by inviting participants to consider the opportunities for learning offered by engagement with the non-print and performative arts.

In addition to university faculty presentations, a teacher panel was also organized. During the panel Marty Mayer, UF graduate student, and Jennifer Conwell, English Proteach (2005), shared their work with film and narrative in high school English classes. Two years ago, Mayer worked with Dr. Pace to develop a high-school course, Literature in the Media. She presented it to the Clay County School Board, and it was submitted to the state. It is now an approved DOE English course. This year Mayer taught the course for the first time at Middleburg High School. She shared those experiences during the panel discussion. Conwell also described how she had used film in twelfth-grade classes in Alachua County. She applied some of the strategies suggested in the English Proteach program to teach film genre. She reported on the successes of this work and on students’ increased motivation.

Educators interested in future Saturday Symposiums, in learning more about the online specialization in Media Education or about the Literacy and the Arts degree program should visit the STL webpage and click on English Education.