Sunday, September 30th, 2012
When & Where: I discovered this word/concept in the Friendly Texts and Text-Friendly Teachers article by Mariam Jean Dreher and Harry Singer (2001). Although I have encountered the word discourse in multiple texts, particularly those texts relating to my graduate literacy classes, I have not seen these two words grouped together. With only 4 classes left in my graduate program of Literacy, I was very intrigued to find a concept that was unfamiliar to me.
Definition: "A uniform style of presenting information is referred to as discourse consistency" (Dreher & Singer, 2001, p.99). Specifically, this concept relates to how an author organizes his/her text and whether or not it's format provides for a consistent, predictable order.
Level of Familiarity: Like I mentioned previously, I have knowledge of the word "discourse." I have even used this word in speaking and writing. My level of familiary of this word is based on my background knowledge from the course LTED 609. In that course, we explored the defintion of "Discourse" (with a capital D) and little "d" discourse, both of which were defined by James Paul Gee (prominent literacy/language researcher). Based on the context of the article Friendly Texts and Text-Friendly Teachers, the idea of discourse consistency pertains to James Paul Gee's (1990) idea of little "d" - discourse- which means one's language-in- use.
Reflective Commentary: This concept, discourse consistency, really struck a chord for me in terms of my teaching experience. I believe that texts come in multiple formats. The idea of text can include movies, games, music, profiles, powerpoints, and even podcasts. Although the article focused on traditional written texts, I believe there is something to be said of the idea of discourse consistency among all types of texts. This year, I have decided to make an iMovie at the end of each unit to share on my webpage but to also summarize our monthly unit. I decided to stick with one multimedia format for consistency and to also faciliate more learning. Additionally, the layout/organization of the iMovie will be similar each month. I will seek to define tier 2 vocabulary words that pertain to our unit in each iMovie. Last month, our theme was on school rules so the entire movie sought to define the words: respectful, responsible, and productive. As opposed to images I found on google, I used real pictures of the kids being respectful, responsible, and productive. I then had the kids record their voices to the criterion of being respectful, responsible and productive. What I found most promising about this activity was that the process we used facilitated learning.
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