SED 407 Literacy Profile: My Knitting Literacy

I started knitting after college, during a significant period of transition in my life. I had just left New York City where I had been in school and where all my friends remained. I was living with my parents, had an internship, and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. This was also the early 2000s and the crafting/DIY movement was just getting started – all the cool kids were knitting. I have always been a crafty person and knitting appealed to me. I wanted to make beautiful knit garments that I could wear or give to friends and family. And, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t a student – no homework, no exams to study for, more time for hobbies. I also had this sense, which is funny to me now, that my real adult life was beginning. I was thinking a lot about what I wanted that life to be like, what kind of an adult I wanted to be, and part of how I envisioned myself was as a maker or a crafter – a knitter.

My knitting education began with me buying a skein of yarn, a pair of single-pointed knitting needles, and a how-to knitting book for beginners. I remember sitting on my bed at my parent’s house, teaching myself to knit. I think I successfully managed to cast-on, knit, and purl, but I quickly realized that if I wanted to do more, I’d need some help. So I signed up for a knitting class through the local continuing education program.  The teacher structured the class around knitting a sweater because she said a common mistake made by beginning knitters is that their first project is usually a long scarf in simple stockinette stitch – most people get bored with this, put the project down, and never pick it up again. Knitting a sweater is more interesting and demands that a knitter learn more than just simple stitches. I never finished the sweater I started in this class, but I’ve never stopped knitting. Taking that class, working through the mistakes and awkwardness of my first project with the instructor and my classmates, initiated me into the culture of knitting. I was no longer an outsider, with no clue what knitting was all about – I was knitting literate, at least on a basic level. I didn’t learn everything about knitting in that class, but I developed confidence in my ability to knit, allowing me to move forward and learn more on my own. I was officially a knitter.

Though now I am at the point where I can teach someone else how to knit, I still continue to learn about knitting every time I start a new project. When I need help, I turn to books, magazines, online videos, and other knitters. The community of knitters is rich and lively, both online and in real life. Knitters love to get together to share projects, talk about knitting, and help each other out. No matter what strange town I might find myself in, I know I could go into the local knitting shop and ask for help with a project (after fondling all the beautiful yarn, of course). The knitting community was particularly important to me in the year after I lost my father, when I joined a local Stitch & Bitch group. The weekly act of knitting with others, building new friendships over a shared interest, was healing. I’m inspired by the beautiful and creative things that other knitters make – from complicated Fair Isle sweaters to silly stuffed dinosaurs. I’m especially impressed by knitters who can create their own patterns, a level of knitting literacy that I have yet to achieve. I mean, check out this brilliant anatomically correct knit brain! And beyond learning more and more about how and what to knit, I love learning about the history and evolution of knitting. I love art inspired by or involving knitting, such as Dave Cole’s Knitting Machine or the giant knit rabbit made by Italian art collective Gelitin. I love the political side of knitting culture as well; that knitters are yarn bombing trees and army tanks and sending knit uteri to congress.

I have never thought about knitting in the context of literacy before, but as I do now, I realize how much of a specialized language knitting requires. There are the terms I’ve mentioned already, such as knit, purl, stockinette, casting on. But that’s just the beginning. There are many other types of stitches and techniques – garter stitch, seed stitch, ribbing, cables, binding off, increasing and decreasing, intarsia. There are needles of all sizes and they’re double-pointed or circular or used especially to make cables. Yarn comes in bundles called skeins, in numerous materials and weights, such as fingering and worsted and sport. You must learn how to read knitting patterns, in which everything is abbreviated – to know, for example, that “ssk” means “slip, slip, knit” (and what does that even mean?). And when you’re ready to try lace knitting, there’s the daunting challenge of reading lace charts. And now you want to crochet? That’s a whole new language. I’ve loved learning the language of knitting and being a part of the “knitting literate.” I also love the math and spatial reasoning of knitting, the problem solving. I’m a better knitter than I was when I bought that first skein of yarn, but knitting continues to be a pleasurable challenge.

For me knitting is more than a hobby, it’s something of a mindfulness practice. It’s simultaneously stimulating and relaxing, almost meditative. It can be a social activity, connecting me to others, or a solitary one, connecting me to myself. When I’m feeling down, the act of knitting can pull me up – on a bad day, if I accomplish nothing else, at least I can say, “I knit an inch of a sock today.” It feels good to have made something with my own hands. It’s interesting to think of the impact knitting has had on my life through the lens of literacy and in considering my future as a teacher. It’s helped me to recognize my knitting abilities as literacy, literacy that has helped me develop valuable skills and allowed me entrance into a rich community. As a teacher, sharing this experience with my students may be a way to model motivation for learning. I had an interest, set a personal challenge, and reached out for the help I needed to accomplish my goal. Furthermore, I want to be a teacher that recognizes and values the non-traditional literacies of my students and helps them use those skills and interests for academic success. I want to send the message that it is not only the traditional academic subjects that have value in our lives. Knitting could easily be brushed off as simply a fun hobby, but it has enriched my life and expanded my mind. And the world is full of other such seemingly unimportant pursuits for all of us to explore.

This is me (years ago) with an octopus I knit.

SED 407 Reading Response: Wilhelm – ‘Strategic Reading’ Chapters 1 & 2

While reading these chapters by Wilhelm, I kept thinking of that question that has come up in every education class I’ve taken so far (as it should): What kind of teacher do you want to be? Wilhelm essentially begins this book by asking that question. Specifically he is asking, ‘As a teacher, what will guide what happens in your classroom?’ Will you be a teacher who sees their role solely as content-deliverer, following a curriculum dictated by a textbook? Or will you be a teacher guided by a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning?

Though my enrollment in the RITE program is the beginning of my formal training as a teacher, I have taught in various contexts throughout my professional career and I have always thought of myself as a “naturally” good teacher. However, when I think of this now, I wonder if what I really mean is that I am simply good at explaining things so that people can understand them – not a bad thing, but there is clearly more to teaching than that. Though I think there is more going on when I teach then simple direct transmission of content (as in the curriculum-centered model that Wilhelm writes about), I have never really thought about what I am doing when I teach and why I think what I am doing will work or not. As Wilhelm points out, a teacher’s most important job is to teach students how to get and process information, to read and write, to master literacy and problem solving skills and strategies that they can carry out of the classroom and apply in a wide variety of contexts – to teach them “the rules so they can play the game.” Though I think the way I teach gets at this kind of learning in some ways, I have never been clear in setting such objectives. And now, when I think about explicitly teaching literacy, I admit that I feel unprepared and a little overwhelmed. I appreciate that even as a science teacher, I will be teaching literacy – both general and content-specific – and I am eager to learn more about how I can do so successfully. I want to be a “wide awake” teacher with a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning that, while it may (and should) evolve over time, guides what happens in my classroom – I agree with Wilhelm that to have such a theory, to teach to it, makes one a better teacher. (As Wilhelm points out, most teachers hold implicit theories about teaching and learning that inform what they do without their being aware of it – I think this is dangerous teaching.) I found these chapters by Wilhelm to be an excellent starting point for developing my own theory of teaching and learning, as he puts forth a model that makes a lot of sense to me.

I enjoyed the scenario ranking activity in the first chapter, and find the question that it raises very interesting – ‘Can learning usefully be separated from the teaching that engenders that learning?’ This question threw me off at first, but as I read the scenarios, I began to see what Wilhelm was getting at by asking it. For example, in scenario 4 where Tom learns to play his piano piece “exactly the way his teacher did” – his teacher was teaching, but did Tom really learn? His behavior changed, but did his understanding? And if Tom didn’t really learn, I guess this begs the question, did his teacher really teach? In scenario 5, with Jude in the student-centered classroom in which her teacher did very little actual teaching, was she really learning if she couldn’t articulate what she felt she had learned? Could she not have learned a lot more if her teacher had actually taught? Complicated questions, but important to think about.

I ranked scenario 6, in which Arlene learned about electricity in a real-world context with the guidance of her uncle, as the scenario in which the best teaching and learning was happening. It seemed like such an ideal situation to me that I didn’t even notice at first what was said about Arlene being burnt-out by the experience. (I can see how such burnout is something of a downside, but I think despite it, Arlene learned things that will stay with her and be applicable in other contexts, even if she steps away from the topic of electricity.) Arlene’s scenario exemplifies the Vygotskian perspective of teaching and learning and George Hillocks’ model of environmental teaching, both the basis for the model put forth by Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube in their book. (Side note: I was really glad to see Vygotsky in a deeper context, beyond just the passing knowledge I gained about his theories in Ed Psych last semester.) This “community of learners”, teaching/learning-centered model sits well with me, as opposed to the teacher/curriculum-centered or student-centered models it is compared with. While I do see a teacher as “a more capable other” with a responsibility to share their knowledge and experience with their students, I don’t think teaching and learning should be passive as they are in the curriculum-centered model in which teachers lecture and students memorize. Also, while I see value in giving students opportunities to naturally explore and guide their own learning experiences, as they do in the student-centered model, I don’t think this is enough on its own for real learning. The teaching/learning-centered model is exciting to me as it proposes that teaching and learning is a two-sided collaborative process through which both the student and teacher can be transformed. In this model, teachers work, play, and problem solve alongside their students, letting students make mistakes and discoveries, and giving them support when they need it. Learning begins with modeling, continues with guided practice during which support scaffolding is gradually removed, and ends with students working independently, having mastered or internalized the skills initially modeled by their teacher. The concept of scaffolding was made much clearer to me by Wilhelm than it was when I first encountered it in Ed Psych – I have this clear image now of a student building their cognitive abilities from the ground up, with the teacher supporting their cognitive structure as it grows. Scaffolding is gradually removed as one set of skills is internalized (becomes part of the student’s zone of actual development) and new scaffolding is built when the student is ready to take on a new skill set (work in their zone of proximal development). An excellent concept, but I am now eager to see scaffolding in action. While I appreciate the specific literacy and reading strategies Wilhelm outlines – guided reading, the Inquiry Square, Tharp and Gallimore’s six methods for teaching reading strategies – it’s difficult just reading about them to really understand how they pay out in the classroom. I hope to get to observe these strategies in action.

I think one of the most powerful things about the Vygotskian perspective and the model proposed by Wilhelm is that it encourages teachers to approach teaching by first recognizing their students’ current strengths and abilities and building on them, versus the more common approach of seeing students as having weaknesses that need to be remedied. Such a simple change in perspective, but so powerful in shaping the kind of teacher one can be. However, I recognize the significant challenge it must be to identify the ZPD of each student you encounter as they will each be at different levels in different cognitive areas. The goal is to recognize each student’s current skill set and provide a structure in which they can successfully build to the next level, to keep each student challenged and engaged, but not frustrated by being asked to do something they are not yet ready for – not easy to do when you will likely be working with something like 100 students a day.

There’s so much more in Wilhelm’s chapters that I could respond to … the major theories about learning to read and their parallel literary theories – the idea that “all reading and writing begin with inquiry” and how this can shape a teacher’s approach to teaching literacy – how teaching reading is especially challenging because the processes are internal or abstract – how reading support usually ends after elementary school even though middle and high school students need support as they encounter more varied and complex texts – the idea that what is learned must be taught (and subsequently why it is so important for pre-service teachers to think about the literacy skills that we have internalized and take for granted) – the idea that language is “the tool of tools” – the challenge of putting content into a real-world context and making learning “play that does work” … but this blog post is already so long that no one will want to read it, so I’ll stop here and save the rest of it for class – looking forward to the discussion!