Episode 7: The Teacher As Change Agent with Angela Stockman

How to contact Angela:

Angela’s website: angelastockman.com

Angela’s Facebook Group: Building Better Writers

Twitter: @AngelaStockman

*Make sure to check out my blog post this week about Make Writing.

Transcript

(transcribed by kayla.r.fainer@gmail.com)

Melissa Milner 00:09

Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... will highlight uncommon parallels to teaching, as well as share practical ideas for the classroom. 

In this episode, I interview Angela Stockman. Angela is the author of Make Writing, Hacking the Writing Workshop, and Creating Inclusive Writing Environments in the K-12 Classroom. Angela also co-authored Hacking School Culture. After reading Hacking the Writing Workshop, I was so jazzed about this idea of Make Writing. 

Angela was offering a one day workshop in the Buffalo, New York area. I live in the Boston area. So I said, I'm gonna drive out there. And I'm going to go to this one day workshop. People thought I was crazy to make a drive like that for a one day workshop. I was not crazy. It was one of the best investments of time that I could have made towards this year's writing instruction. 

My students really benefited from making their stories bit by bit. And it was easier for them to find the heart of their story. It was easier for them to describe, and it really opened up and made writing so much more accessible to my students. Angela, in this interview, talks about documenting learning to better our practice, as well as allowing for multi-modal expression, which creates a more equitable writing experience. Here is my interview with the amazing Angela Stockman. Welcome, Angela Stockman.

Angela Stockman 01:55

I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me to visit with you, Melissa.

Melissa Milner 01:59

My pleasure. What do you want The Teacher As... podcast listeners to know about you and your work?

Angela Stockman 02:07

I am really very passionate about action research and documenting learning. And that's because the most important things that I've learned as an educator have come out of that process. So I'm really passionate about teaching writing and, particularly, multi-modal composition, integrating different modes of expression and not just relying on the written word. And I don't think that I would have made those discoveries had I not done a lot of action research in my own work with young writers and with teachers, too. So I think that's what I'd want people to know most about me is that that's where the best of my learning came from.

Melissa Milner 02:51

Could you give us an example of action research?

Angela Stockman 02:54

Oh, sure. There are different ways to do action research. I very much value a process called grounded theory, which I'm a novice at. But I'm trying to get better every single year. Grounded theory is different than what we commonly understand research to be inside the field of education in that it does not begin with a review of the professional literature that's already been written. And it doesn't typically begin with questions either. 

Instead, researchers choose a topic that they want to investigate. And they try to document all that they can on that topic without allowing questions or previously published research to narrow the potential findings. And so one example of action research might be wanting to know more about resistance and reluctance with young writers and going into the field and studying the lived experiences of the people that you hope to serve. 

And in my case, that was children. And rather than judging or rushing to fast conclusions, simply documenting everything that we can relevant to that topic in the form of annotated records, interviews, we might audio record, video record, take photographs, collect student work samples and try to gather as many diverse perspectives as we can around that. 

And then we typically code that data, because it's qualitative. And those codes help us discover things that we might not have otherwise. And that's really where some of my biggest realizations around my own biases, and even to a large degree, the elitism in the field of English education and around writing instruction in particular, really came to the surface as a result of doing that work. So that's an example of what it can look like.

Melissa Milner 05:12

How did you even hear about grounded research?

Angela Stockman 05:16

Grounded theory is the approach that Brene Brown used. And those who are fans of her work might know this about her. I stumbled upon that approach early on in my academic career when I was getting my teaching certification and then working on my master's degree.

Although I didn't do anything with it at the time, I joined a professional learning community at one point in my career almost 15 years ago now. And part of the expectation inside of that community is that we would do our own research and our own work and that we would disseminate the findings to the field, that we would give them back and we would be generous with the things that we discovered. 

And the research that I wanted to do, typical research approaches that I had been exposed to in the past, they didn't seem to fit. I really wanted to engage in some rich inquiry. And I was reading one of Brene Brown's books, and there was a section in that book where she spoke to her research method. 

And I just happened upon it. And as I started reading it, I really lit up, because I realized that that's exactly the approach that I wanted to use. And also, it reminded me of my first exposure to it when I was a far younger and inexperienced teacher. 

So I gave it a try. And I must say, it's complex work. It's difficult, and I am by no means an expert in that. And so whenever I share my findings and what's emerging from my learning and my work, I always speak about it as pretty experimental, because it is.

Melissa Milner 07:04

What is your proudest moment in your work so far?

Angela Stockman 07:08

My proudest moment in my work so far would probably be the last couple of years, because I just came through an incredibly overwhelming but also richly rewarding research process that I wanted to give up on a couple of times, because I felt so far in over my head. And also, it was an incredibly humbling experience. And it's left me feeling all sorts of uncomfortable and really uncertain about where I fit inside of the field, the difference that I might have made in the past and the impact that I might have had in the past and where I want to go in the future. 

There's a lot that I've learned over the last several years. My first experience with action research, as I explained, grounded me in the lived experiences of my students. And so I made a very deep study that was very much influenced by my students. I followed where they were leading me. And where they led me was around the integration of making and writing. And I learned that many of my students were able to produce high quality alphabetic text and print as long as that process was steeped in opportunities for making and using other modes of expression. 

Once I started sharing those findings inside of the field, other teachers started experimenting with them, and they discovered more. And it enriched and deepened the work and led to new questions and my second book based on all of those discoveries as well. My third book, though, and that phase of my research process took me back to the literature of the field. And when I returned to that place, I was intentional about not reading the books and relying on the work that I had in the past. 

I felt that as a teacher of writing, it was pretty commonplace for me to read what everyone else was reading. And it was really common for me to listen to who everyone else was listening to. And I've stood on the shoulders of many great teachers of writing and experts in the field. And it isn't my intention to take anything away from them or to diminish the learning that I've been privileged enough to experience because of them. 

But I wanted to move outside of that small bubble that I kept myself in. And so I started reading more in the field of anthropology, and learning more from linguistics and historians and dipping a toe into other fields that offered very diverse perspectives on what it meant to be a writer on the history and the evolution of the written word, on the use of the writing process and how we define that and most importantly, how writing instruction came to be inside of our schools. 

And that was incredibly disruptive learning for me. And it illuminated a lot about my own privilege and my biases, and that was really uncomfortable. I'm proud of myself for sinking into that. And I'm proud of myself for being willing to continue the conversations that I started in an open forum. But I think that I'm far more humbled than I am proud. And so that's a word that I think is a better fit for all of that.

Melissa Milner 11:14

Right. What structures in this work that you did, this more recent research into anthropology and history, what structures related to writing did you find not equitable?

Angela Stockman 11:27

Well, I think it is wholly inequitable that we privilege prints inside of our schools. And by print, I mean, the use of the alphabetic written word. We put that on a pedestal inside of our schools. I think that graphocentrism runs rampant inside of our schools. 

And graphocentrism is a bias wherein there's a perception that those who know how to produce the written word are smarter than those who do not. And I think that there is an unspoken and even spoken perception that that's the case. And so I find this incredibly inequitable. 

We have a lot of work to do when we reconsider congruence, even in our assessments. Because when we're requiring the use of alphabetic text and print on high stakes assessments that are measuring standards that have nothing to do with the production of alphabetic text and print, and success on those assessments is determining who does or does not graduate from high school, or earn scholarships or placement in certain programs, I think that that's incredibly inequitable. It's glaring. And writing is important in that particular mode.

But what's even more worthy of our consideration is the fact that once we step out of schools, print isn't king. All of these other modes of expression, our ability to express ourselves visually, spatially. Haptics are incredibly important in our world, and that has everything to do with the way that certain apps create a physical sensation. 

Our phones vibrate and buzz. When we are using products, like shampoo even in the shower, if we get soap in our eyes, and we have to feel for the conditioner bottle because it's different than the shampoo bottle. And we can recognize it by touch, we cited people gain an awareness of something that people who have difficulty with vision grapple with every day. And the use of haptic expression is incredibly important and makes us valuable inside of multiple industries. 

The fact is that these other modes of expression are essential if we hope to be of influence inside every single field. And we overlook them, we make them peripheral inside of our schools. We create specials like music and art and physical education when the fact is that what is learned inside of those special areas is absolutely central once we leave school. And so there's an inequity to be addressed there in that we are graduating children who are unprepared to express themselves to their fullest potential and be of influence in the world, because we have privileged print over all other modes of expression. And it's a tremendous imbalance.

Melissa Milner 14:45

Absolutely. What are you zooming in on right now with your work?

[ZOOMING IN SOUNDBITE]

Angela Stockman 14:52

Right now, my work is interesting because I accepted a position with a local college as an instructional designer. And it has been a brand new education for me, and I'm supporting a lot of professors and adjuncts who are moving to remote very rapidly. I'm learning a great deal about accessibility. And this isn't a conversation that we've had in K-12. And I'm grateful to my teammates, especially Eric Hill, who's taught me a lot, by example, as well, but also through his own work with the faculty and staff at my college, around what it means to create an accessible learning experience for students online. 

This hasn't been a conversation in K-12, because it hasn't been our preferred way to teach or even a common one. But it's been an ongoing conversation in higher education, and there are civil rights issues here that we need to consider. There are important things that we need to know about site navigation, and the navigation of materials, and using alt text for images and creating reading experiences for students that are accessible to the readers that some of them may need to use, using and making available closed captioning and I could go on. 

Some have the perception that this is only about being able to engage and serve students who have very special needs. But the fact is that accessibility serves all of us very well. And I did not know nearly as much as I should have about this until fairly recently. So I think that's where I'm learning the most right now. 

I'm also continuing my work around multi-modal composition and supporting a lot of teachers in K-12 who are eager to begin incorporating that more in their curriculum, and shifting their instructional practices so that children can be using other modes of expression and also leveraging them to make their print and the text they put down even better, too. So those are the things that I'm kind of circling around right now.

Melissa Milner 17:06

Yes, our district has been working on that since we closed in March. And it is amazing to make sure that everybody has a laptop, make sure that everybody has WiFi.

Angela Stockman 17:18

Beyond the devices and the connectivity issues, the questions are built around the content. And how accessible is the content once they're on WiFi, and on the device and accessing a document, or an app, or a website that's been created?

Melissa Milner 17:36

Could you walk us through a little bit about Make Writing? Because it's made a big difference in my teaching of writing. If you could just let the listeners know a little bit more about what Make Writing really is?

Angela Stockman 17:48

Yeah. Making Writing involves multi-modal composition. It involves shifting our mindset and our practice to invite children to use more than pencil, pen, keyboard, letters and the written word to express themselves. Instead, we invite children to build things using loose parts like blocks, or even sticks, or stones or leaves. 

We might also invite children to express themselves orally, to act things out gesturally, to use their spatial literacy skills and their visual literacy skills to create highly graphic texts that are rich with image instead of print alone. And what I find is that when I am not quick to rush children to pencil, pen or keyboard, the complexity of their ideas is protected by the use of those other modalities. 

Oftentimes, my research has shown that writers will lower the complexity of their ideas. They will choose simpler things to write about once they know that they're going to have to produce alphabetic text and print. So why we need to invoke multi-modal composition in service to students is to allow them and give them a way and a means to scale print barriers in order to express their very best ideas with as much sophistication as possible. 

We also want to help writers use multi-modal composition and Make Writing so that they're able to express their ideas in the best way possible so that they have the strongest influence on their audience. We really want to hit people where they live. I think of the street artist, Banksy, and use his work as an example as often as I can. I think of one of my favorite poets, Rudy Francisco, and how so much of what makes his work powerful and slam poetry, in general, is gesture. I think of some of the choreographed dance pieces that I've seen performances and how the way that dancers move their bodies communicate something that print cannot. 

So this isn't just about finessing kids who present as resistant or reluctant writers. It is also about empowering students to use the mode of expression that's going to have the strongest and most powerful influence on their audiences. It's also about recognizing that there are cultural differences, and that we need to decenter ourselves as teachers. And when we focus on structure first, it offers a lot of opportunity for choice. 

So for instance, if I know that a story has a beginning with a character, and a middle with a problem and an end with a solution, and of course, it's a very simple structure, but I'm using it for illustrative purposes only. But if I know that a story has those three parts - beginning, middle, end, character, problem and solution - rather than putting a pen or a pencil or a keyboard in front of kids, I can give them playdough or blocks or ask them to go outside and fill a bag full of natural elements like rocks, or sticks or stones, cuttings from pine trees or even flower petals. I can ask them to use those materials to rapidly build me the beginning, the middle and the end of their story. 

And they are not worrying about the shape of the letters, or the words, or the sentences, or the paragraphs or passages. They're simply using the materials with intention to represent their very best and most sophisticated ideas. And if I can peek over their shoulder while they're rapidly building this, I can assess the degree to which they have a plan for that particular story. And it doesn't require a graphic organizer, and it doesn't require them creating an outline. It allows them to get their very best ideas down so that I can assess and intervene if necessary and help them create that plan. 

Once that is accomplished, I will often begin teaching into that form bit by bit, mini lesson by mini lesson, and learning target by learning target or teaching point if you're working with that richer construct, which is advocated for by Teachers College and a big part of the units of study. Every single day, children are invited, young writers are invited to build first and then better the build in response to feedback that they might receive from a peer or a teacher, and then share that part of their story aloud so that it can be recorded or spoken back to them. 

And that transcription along with, if necessary, labeling the things that they've built or labeling parts of their performance if it's something that they acted out and recorded or took a picture of, that helps them bridge from making to writing. And so every day, we build it, we better the build, we talk about it aloud and transcribe it. And then we get it down on paper or on the screen before we walk out the door. 

And so, in this way, making and writing is not an opportunity to evade the writing process. It actually ends up elevating the quality of the writing that's produced. And it happens one small bit at a time and in a way that is manageable for students, but also protects the complexity of their ideas.

Melissa Milner 23:59

Usually I have to work with kids for a week or so to even have them find the heart of their story. And this was the first build. They were getting to these deep feelings about whatever they were. One was just a girl sitting with her sister playing a video game. And I went to see the build, and she said, well, I don't get to spend a lot of time with her. So this was really special. I'm like, OMG, are you kidding me right now? It was amazing.

Angela Stockman 24:34

I'm so glad. Most teachers will say this, yeah.

Melissa Milner 24:37

So how can people reach you to find more about the work that you do?

Angela Stockman 24:42

I'm really active in my little Facebook group. It's called Building Better Writers with Angela Stockman. I love that group, because all of the people that are in it, for the most part, are people that I've worked with inside of schools, or I've met them at conferences. And it's a really warm community. And I think because I've managed to keep it kind of small, the quality of the conversations and what people share there is really meaningful. 

So I spend a lot of time there, and I'm also on Twitter. My handle there is @AngelaStockman. And you can find me in either of those places or my website is angelastockman.com.

Melissa Milner 25:25

My last question is what is your favorite movie, and why?

Angela Stockman 25:30

It was really hard for me to narrow it down to one. I'm someone who doesn't have a favorite song or a favorite color. And I don't have favorite movies, because the world is always giving us something new to consider. But I do love the movie Boyhood. It is one of my favorites. And I think I love it because it just offers this really candid peek into the reality of what it means to grow up and to grow old with people and the total catastrophe that life can be, and I really appreciated that. 

I'm a huge fan of more realistic fiction and biographical movies and autobiographical first hand accounts of things. I'm not a big fan of science fiction or fantasy. I'm not a Disney girl. I did not like Harry Potter. So that makes me kind of atypical as an English teacherly type. But that's kind of where I live.

Melissa Milner 26:36

I'm not a fan of Harry Potter either.

Angela Stockman 26:39

I never meet people who say that.

Melissa Milner 26:41

I'm not. I found it, number one, super derivative. But I'm not a big fantasy fan anyway, so I think that's part of it. But if there's a good story, I like fantasy. It's also hard for me to pick a favorite movie, because I have favorite movies in every genre. 

And then how do I choose which one's my ultimate favorite? But the thing with Boyhood that was fascinating was that's the one where they had the same actor and then they waited until he grew up a little bit, right?

Angela Stockman 27:11

Yeah, it's a brilliant film. It really is in 1,000 different ways.

Melissa Milner 27:17

Awesome. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking time out to be on The Teacher As... And thank you, Angela Stockman.

Angela Stockman 27:25

Of course. Thanks for having me here.

Melissa Milner 27:27

If you enjoyed this episode, and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for The Teacher As... podcast so you can get future episodes. I would love for you to leave a review and a rating, as well, if you have time. For my blog, transcripts of this episode and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner. And I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates. 

I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In soundbite. And my dad composed and performed the background music you are listening to right now. My intro music was "Upbeat Party" by Scott Holmes. 

So what are you zooming in on? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we are doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap!