Katy Jain's CEP Blogs: September 2011

Perception is vital to creating understanding. As described by Robert and Michele Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, “All knowledge begins in observation. We must be able to perceive our world accurately to be able to discern patterns of action, abstract their principles, make analogies between properties of things, create models of behaviors, and innovate fruitfully.” (30) We cannot make connections to the past, to our present, or to our future without observation and perception. Nor can we make connections from one discipline to another. Finally, we cannot foster true understanding without making observations in what we are doing, whether it be performing an experiment or reading a historical document.

A huge challenge that I face with my students in any of my Social Studies classes is reading comprehension, especially of primary documents. Though I have been working with students to improve their comprehension and vocabulary, they spend so much time trying to decipher and decode text, that they miss the important concepts within the text. They don’t take the time or perhaps never even get a chance to observe the connections and the patterns within the reading. Thus, when I started thinking about how the Bill of Rights might be perceived by my students, I started thinking about the important and repeated concepts that they might overlook trying to comprehend the text. In other words, they would be so intent on learning the vocabulary within the text, they might not observe the ideas and concepts that are continually repeated throughout.

That is why I decided to use Wordle to create a visual representation of the Bill of Rights. (There is a link to the Wordle I created in the previous post.)

Wordle generates word clouds from text that the user inputs. The more often a particular word is used in a passage of text, the larger it will appear in the word cloud. For my students that would mean being able to see all of the repeated words and concepts that they might not of observed while they were busy trying to define and understand the vocabulary. Showing this resource to students even just one time can be a valuable tool. Once you realize how often certain words might be used over and over again, you can think about why and what are the different connections to the word or concept within different parts of the text. You can even take it a step further and think about your understanding of the word and how it might be different now that you see how often it is used and how important it is to the document. Students can also be asked to predict what words will be the largest in the word cloud. Even if they are not able to accurately predict which words are the largest, knowing what words they think will be the largest can be a valuable tool for teachers to help assess misconceptions and correct them.

There are many different ways that I could have re-imaged the Bill of Rights. I had thought about creating a video with images that might represent the Bill of Rights. I had even thought of collecting sounds that might be associated with the Bill of Rights. However, I wanted to create something that would have the largest shock factor with my students and something that would connect with their struggles with comprehension. I plan on using it for a writing exercise this upcoming week and look forward to the outcomes.