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Assignment On Character Journal Analysis

Decent Essays
'Character Journal' Assignment: Re-understanding through Rosenblatt and Britton
Context of the Challenging Situation One aspect of my student-teaching experience involved working with my mentor teacher on pre-existing plans for her grade 8 English language arts (ELA) class. Her reason for incorporating me rather than allowing me to direct the planning for this group was twofold. First, the group consisted primarily of students with learning disabilities and students with behaviours issues therefore consistency was crucial. Second, and in keeping with a consistent delivery, she found that project-based learning was particularly successful in the past with certain students returning from the previous year. Thus, she created an activity called
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1-2). Poetic language, according to Britton, is on a continuum with "transactional language" being on the far left, which is used as a mean to inform and/or perused, "expressive language" in the middle, which can be understood as common forms of language, and poetic language on the right used for the purpose of art and reflection (2015, Talbot, p. 1-2). If this was part of the situation, then this group may have had little or no point of reference to base their character development on, nor would they have a foundation of literature to build-on when approaching the story writing aspect of the assignment. As Write reveals, regarding reading aloud to students, (2005) "listening to a novel may be as close as some of your pupils get to the enhancing experience of being in a theatre audience. . ." (p. 111). Granted this quote is an indirect correlation to the topic at hand; however, Write's observation does show that as teachers we must never make assumptions about what our student's experiences in relationship to literature. In the 'Character Journal" assignment, as teachers we asked students to make a large leap and move from expressive language towards producing work in poetic language, without providing any preliminary literature for the…show more content…
Moreover, as a project-based activity, it offers flexibility with time and instructional support both of which are crucial factors for students with learning disabilities. Despite the fact that this assignment was successful in previous years, it seems important to keep in mind that each group will have a unique set of skills. It is possible that certain skills are more or, at times, less developed depending on the group and as teachers acknowledging this factor is
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