This event connects to the following NCTE Standards for English Language Arts:
- Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
- Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
- Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and non-print texts.
- Students develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.
- Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
This event connects to the following best-practice elements of the NCTE's Position on the Teaching of English: Assumptions and Practices:
Assumptions about Learners and Teachers
Every person is a learner. It is the nature of everyone to learn: to grow and change through interacting with others and responding to experiences. Learning is not confined to school times. It is ongoing and limited only by the sensory and reflective powers of the learner.
Teachers and students are a community of learners. Learning is a collaborative effort. Teachers are learners--from self and others. Learners are teachers of self and others. Through genuine interaction, teacher-learners grow and change. Students and teachers build predictable yet fluid structures for interaction. Teachers listen to and observe students, collecting data from and about them, and use a variety of strategies to engage them in learning.
Learners are aware of the uniqueness of each other's backgrounds, and value this uniqueness. Learners have diverse backgrounds, which reflect a mosaic of cultural heritages. They bring to their classrooms their different language proficiencies, their learning styles, and their own authority and expertise. The community of learners appreciates these diversities of cultural heritage and socioeconomic background, validating and challenging learners' representations of the world. Every language, culture, and experience is a resource in the classroom.
The community of learners values experience as the stimulus for growth and change. Learning comes from active response, evaluation of ideas and events, interactions with texts, discussion with others, and construction of knowledge. In a learning environment, students are given time to articulate and revise what they know. Teachers structure classrooms so that experiences address their as well as students' interests. They orchestrate experiences within or outside the classroom so that students can call upon these as sources of language use.
Assumptions about Knowledge
Knowing is active and ongoing, a process of interactive learning. The classroom is a place where knowledge is socially constructed through interaction among teachers, students, and materials. Knowledge is not neutral, but political, enabling the knower to make choices among conflicting sources.
Assumptions about Language
Language is a vital medium for creating individual and social identities. Through language, students make meaning and come to understand and define themselves. Through language, they communicate their sense of the world, function with others, and get things done. Through language, they exercise power over the world.
Literacy has a wide range of genres and functions, which are important to teachers and learners.
English/Language Arts Practices
In the English/language arts curriculum, students should have guidance and frequent opportunities to:
- bring their own cultural values, languages, and knowledge to their classroom reading and writing
- collaborate in writing many whole texts, not answers to exercises
- work with teachers and other students as a community of learners, observing their teachers as readers and writers
- have their own work shared, displayed, or published
