Lisa's Meeting with Gunston Adminstrators 01/12/05

Hi All:

I had a meeting with Gunston staff on Thursday on the Culture Club. They have asked us to work with a group of 23 students that is a mixture of 2 classes: one is a "HILT X" class (which means basically advanced ESL students, almost ready to be in the "general" stream), and a group that needs a little boost to pass the Standards of Learning in Language Arts. If these latter students pass the test (in May) they can retain their elective classes, instead of having to spend class time in remediation.

The SOL system is punitive and problematic in a gazillion ways, but if we can give them this agency we will help a lot. At the same time my idea -- and one wholly supported by Gunston -- is to provide the group as a whole with a chance to learn about and critique different cultural texts as a way of achieving critical literacy, or social agency with reading and writing.

Regarding logistics: the Club will meet Monday and Wednesday from 2:10-4:25 with a break in between. We will divide the group into three sections each to be facilitated by two GMU students. (Because Molly can only go Monday one person will be running one section on Wednesday.) (Btw one section will be composed of bilingual Spanish speakers, who can do activities in Spanish and English. ) The club will begin the second week of our classes.

So our job now is to come up with a syllabus that has content (hip-hop, piropos, movies) you all are happy with and that will integrate SOL literacy strategies of summarizing, finding the main idea, vocabulary, and more we will talk fully of on Thursday. Do not worry about achieving the moon with these skills; they merely need to be on the radar screen, so that, for example, if you are dealing with hip-hop lyrics you can "sneak in" some SOL stuff and have the children comment on vocabulary and the main idea as they discuss things.

I will send you all a sample syllabus of activities I came up with that may be tweaked and changed in any way.