John Avery

822198735
December 10
th
, 2009

EDUC340 Case Study

Like thousands of teachers around the nation, Brad Avery will be teaching a visually impaired
student during the spring of two thousand and ten. During the time he has to prepare, Brad will be
required to relearn everything he knows about teaching to adapt to a new form a literacy. For so long
teachers take for granted that students are homogenous in their capabilities that we regard literacy as a
function by which to plug in variables. When one of those variables simply disappears however, such
as the ability to present visual content, our world is thrown upside down. Mr. Avery will be finding
methods to teach College Algebra to a student who learns solely through tactile and audio input. One
can imagine that Mr. Avery had no idea that as a high school teacher he would be teaching literacy to a
student, nor would one realize that Mr. Avery has been teaching literacy his whole career, and that this
is simply a different form. Literacy is not simply the ability to read and write, rather the encompassing
approach that our class uses, the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate,
compute, and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. One might assume
that the importance of this sentence lies in the former list, though that would be furthest from the truth.
We teach students these listed skills early in life and continue throughout their childhood into adulthood
without variation. What does change is the context. As teachers, we strive to impose content literacy
on each and every one of our pupils. What then, are the methods that we impart content and literacy
onto our learners? Are they content specific? Are they all encompassing? These are the questions that
EDUC340 has begun to answer for us, the future teachers of the world.
Technology Education is a changing topic in today's world. Fifty years ago it consisted of the
Industrial Arts such as carpentry, welding, machining, and auto maintenance. Today it broadens itself
to the use of computers in regards to the creation of goods and the aid of design. There are a few
however, who are hoping to broaden it even more, to do away with Technology Education and induct
the world to a new form of education: STEM. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics education. The idea of STEM is that no longer will there be teachers of Auto
Maintenance, Pre-Engineering, Woodshop, or Computer Literacy, but rather teachers of a whole
different approach that recognize STEM as a literacy of its own that all interact together and never
separate. Neither is STEM education simply a replacement for elective technology courses at the High
School. Far from that, STEM is a corollary and often a replacement for all former science education in
K-12. To quote the National High School Alliance,
STEM education removes the traditional barriers erected between the four disciplines, by integrating the four
subjects into one cohesive means of teaching and learning. The engineering component puts emphasis on the process and
design of solutions instead of the solutions themselves. This approach allows students to explore math and science in a more
personalized context, while helping them to develop the critical thinking skills that can be applied to all facets of their work
and academic lives. Engineering is the method that students utilize for discovery, exploration, and problem-solving.
Thus it becomes apparent that the goal of STEM education is to promote a new type of literacy
different from those that schools have promoted for years.
Both through inquiry and experience, it has become apparent that the current mode of teaching
leads teachers towards lecturing first while providing time for practice last. STEM education takes the
approach of Dialogical Pedagogy as championed by Juan-Miguel Fernandez-Balboa and James P.
Marshall of the University of Colorado. The notion that students guide the education with gentle
prodding by educators in order to promote discovery, while providing the key lessons during, and often
after the exploration phase. To that end, provided below will be samples to adapt existing education
methods to promote literacy and create STEM appropriate education.
The KWL Method taught in this course is an excellent mode of inquiry even when not related to
guided reading. The idea of this process is that students determine what they already know, what they
want to learn, and what they have learned. This would be an excellent method to present a new, and
often dangerous, machine tool to students. Take for an example a metalsmith's lathe; with up to two
dozen different dials, a gearbox, headstock, tailstock, and toolrest; there is simply a bevy of content
specific terms that students must be or become aware of. For safety reasons, we cannot let students
explore this machine on their own, but through guided demonstration in small groups, students can be
made aware of the intricacies of such a machine.
When related to the historical context of STEM arts, Character Mapping becomes integral.
Whether discussing Einstein (Physics), Curie (Chemistry), Earhart (Flight), or Leibniz (Mathematics),
the character map can be an essential tool to realize that above average scientists were rather average
children themselves. Ultimately, by having our students fill these character maps, they'll come to
understand these scientists achieved greatness to use them as both a historical lesson and a role model.
Graphic Organizers are an excellent way for enumerating the various ways that chemicals
interact in Chemistry. Whether by listing cations and anions for preferential electrical charge, or by
categorizing them by solubility, students can fill in these charts by experimentation. Students will
combine chemicals one by one to determine whether precipitates are formed or not. Upon completion,
a graphical chart can be formed showing which do and do not. From there, students can make
generalizations about not only chemicals, but chemical groups as well!
Even something as simple as reading guides are useful to the STEM teacher. At the younger
levels, when students are not as capable of forming individual thoughts yet, these become essential.
Take for instance the study of wind turbines. The science behind them is far too complicated for this
grade level, but through guided reading, students can fill in blanks on a pre-written handout,
discovering the key features of wind turbines, why they're eco-friendly, how much power they produce,
and so much more. In this way, the students are not bogged down by having to choose important
information yet so much as being guided towards to right information. This literacy strategy also
places importance on specific key words that students need to understand, often providing the
definition for a word they must find.
Three dimensional graphic organizers are even more important in the sciences. As opposed to
the Social Sciences and Language arts, Technical Science is a very hands on subject. Through methods
like cootie-catchers, students have the opportunity to create a fun tool for relational memory. For
example, when studying trigonometric functions, the student can be shown the relation between sine
and cosine, or more importantly, the relations between sine and cosecant, cosine and secant, tangent
and cotangent.
The final educational method that will be discussed is not one that is broadly found in
McKenna's text like KWL and graphic organizers. This educational method is more broad reaching,
and too important to forget. Motivation. Students need positive motivation to seek the educational
goals both pupil and teacher set. In all interactions I experienced this semester, I found that the most
natural tendency for my teaching was towards the punitive. If you don't do this, we can't do this.
The negative case is such a powerful tool for discord. As teachers we want to find positive ways to
encourage our kids to do positive acts. This reaches far beyond verbal acts, including reward
structures, from five extra minutes of play time to extra credit on a paper. As teachers, we need to
realize that we're not just teachers of literacy, but teachers of citizenry as well. Teachers of good
behavior, good penmanship, good speaking skills, good questioning, and good listening.
Mr Avery is not a math teacher. Yes, Brad Avery teaches math, but he is wholly prepared to
teach a blind student next semester because he knows his job is to teach literacy, not math. He will
ensure that this student understands algebra through whatever methods necessary. This is the heart of
STEM education. No teacher is a Chemistry Teacher, a Biology Teacher, a Physics Teacher, a
Technology teacher. Rather all of us in the Technical Sciences are STEM teachers focusing on specific
areas in order to introduce content literacy focused on student exploration.
It should become even more apparent that the methods shown above, though typically applied
to reading literacy, are similarly analogous to all content areas of the technical sciences, that, ultimately,
they are adaptable to all content fields. This should make sense, as literacy is ultimately the collected
ways in which humans use language and art to communicate, and that literacy methods are merely tools
to expand those ways to communicate.
If one student helped me understand this, it was Jayce Sidle of Ms. Anderson's 1
st
grade course.
So many of my classmates received what I originally, enviously, termed good students. True, Jayce
had attention issues, but at the same time, he made me realize so much more about myself than high
performing students who would put up with my inadequacies. Jayce made me realize every one of
them, forcing me to alternate my teaching skills a little each time to adapt. If it weren't for him, I
would be negligent of the role of positive/negative motivation.
In that same vein, if it weren't for having one blind student, Brad Avery would be blind to the
ways in which he needs to change his teaching. As teachers, we are perpetually imperfect, consistently
striving to be more perfect educators. We should be thankful for the culturally, physically, emotionally,
mentally diverse, and the ways in which they make us better teachers of literacy. Certainly they are
tough, sometimes frustrating, but only because we wish we could communicate better to help them
understand. It is the high performing students that can all too often make us complacent, but only if we
do not strive to improve our education methods for them as well.
Let it be said then that we are all teachers of literacy, with common methods of teaching that are
ever changing, ever broadening, ever refreshing, but never limiting.









Works Cited
McKenna, M. C., Robinson, R. D. (2009). Teaching through Text: Reading and Writing in the Content
Areas. Boston: Pearson Education.
National High School Alliance. (2009). STEM: Science Technology, Engineering, and Math Education.
Retrieved from http://www.hsalliance.org/stem/FAQ.asp