Community Exploration

1. Where/What will you visit? Why did you choose to go there?
We initially chose places we wanted to visit in search of finding evidences of math. But since we also wanted to be connected to the community--Novi, which has a culturally diverse student body--we sought out a way to look for that same cultural diversity in the community as well as other important things. We planned to check out a variety of different restaurants (looking for the multicultural aspect), paradise park (our students talk about this all the time), and the newly renovated public library (all of the teachers said we've got to see it. We may decide to check out more areas in the community tomorrow since we weren't thinking too much about literacy just yet. I think a return trip to the library is definitely in order. It would also be way cool to check out a sporting event of our students if possible.

2. What do you expect to see, hear, learn?
I hope to see kids at the library. Many kids. Kids with their parents or kids there alone. Often when I pop into my local library I see maybe two kids in the children area but mostly its just adults. So I hope to see lots of kids taking advantage of all the different things that their library has to offer them.
I expect to learn that there are maaaaaaaany different places and ways that literacy is connected our students. Because we are so used to them, it's easy to just pass over things that could be helpful to our students learning literacy, like signs and video games and symbols (men and women bathroom pictures). I expect that once we're out and actively searching for them we will find many.

3. How do your visits confirm or disconfirm your expectations?
Our visits will tell us this. Later, our detailed notes will help.

4. Relate 1,2, and 3 about specifically to literacy.
Whoops, guess I was kinda doing that all along.

The library was way cool. I was glad to see students when I went there after school and I was also happy to see so many different forms of learning taking place. I think that I was slightly (and happily) surprised to see this because I had a sulking feeling that perhaps this would not be the case. But there were kids with books, on computers, on computers with head phones, and checking out the interactive map.
At Paradise Park I felt like a little kid. What a cool place. Its educational value may not have been apparent at first, but I think that it can actually serve as a powerful tool and linking inside-the-classroom work with outside-the-classroom experience, making that work feel real and authentic. It was surprising how at Paradise Park and overall there was so much literacy and so many different kinds present, but you really had to look for it.
The volume of different kinds of restaurants available in Novi was one thing that wasn’t surprising. The cultural diversity in our classrooms is reflected in the community and that leads to different pallets and different cuisines. I’ve noticed, more so during lunch trips than community visits, that while the culture of the restaurant is the same as patrons who dominate its tables, there are always people from different cultures present too.
I see my students as “multi-learners”. Due to both their community around them, but more so the global era we find ourselves in today, my students absorb information in a multitude of ways. The strong parental support of Novi families greatly supports this. Knowing this about my students will help me to teach them because I understand that to be as effective as I can be I will need to use a variety of instruction and learning methods.
It’s like the Learning to Change video. The outro of it shocked me: “it’s the death of education, but the dawn of learning.” As an educator I wasn’t sure how I felt about that at first, but I think I understand what it’s getting at now. The old ways are diminishing (and good riddance), today’s education—a different kind of learning—is accomplished so differently, that we need to rethink our schema of education as a whole. Novi is a community where this is happening. Deerfield is one of the schools talked about in the video, where new things are being tried all over the world. To reach my students as literacy users I will try to match that and try new things.