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Papercraft Sisyphus by Karakuri Workshop. Available for purchase here.
Makerspaces, Paper, and the Reading Process
The following quotation informs a lot of what we do, especially through the sentence I’ve bolded:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
We’re as interested in metacognition as critical thinking. We’re as interested in why we do what we do as our actual actions. Explanatory posts like this are part of that philosophy. It’s also why we preface everything we read — every novel, essay, poem, etc. — with these:
- The Reading Process
- What Is Literature For?
- John Holt – How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading (PDF)
- The Language of Composition, Chapter 2: Close Reading (PDF)
- Well, Why Read?
The first link is to a post that contains the rest of the material. The Lifehacker article and video invite us to discuss how literature helps us; the excerpt from John Holt’s book invites us to discuss how to teach reading; the textbook chapter offers some practical advice for reading; and the instructional post ties it together with a look at types of reading, types of readers, and how it all connects to 21st-century skills.
Fittingly, these prefatory texts also let us talk about why we are a “paperless” classroom. The operative word, paperless, is in quotation marks because it isn’t a strict rule: The intention is to lessen the amount of paper we use and to make much more deliberate use of that resource, not to eliminate paper entirely.
For instance, we need printed copies of Holt’s essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” because we’ll use it to practice close reading. That is once again about how we learn — the kinesthetic aspect of annotating and interacting — as much as the subject matter. With only a few exceptions, this is also true of all of our central essays, short stories, novels, etc., because of the need to practice close reading.
The video on the importance of literature can’t be printed, of course. The Lifehacker post introducing it could be printed, but there isn’t much benefit to that; watching the video is a screen-dependent activity, and even annotation would start with what we see online.
The idea of going paperless helps us most with instructional posts, like the organizational one for the reading process and, more critically, the post on adopting a new approach to reading. Printing either of those would require you to go back online to click links and fill in the required contextual information while reading. That isn’t to say that there’s no point in printing. I almost always need a printed copy of what I read to mark up. That’s the habit I’ve developed. Anyone who benefits from a physical copy should print whatever they want to print. As a rule for the general student, however, printing an instructional post is unnecessary. These are interstitial and interactive posts.
It would be like printing the New York Times article included in “Well, Why Read?” That article has a half-dozen necessary hyperlinks. You’ll get the central idea of the article, of course, and be able to respond to it just fine; but you will be missing critical information, and you will have created a series of extra steps. You’ll have to go back online to click on those links. That can be done, but it needs to be done deliberately, not as our default.
As another example, consider the course syllabi. As of 2018, instead of a paper document, each syllabus is an interstitial and interactive post that invites students to revisit its ideas throughout the first few weeks and even months of the course. Printing those syllabi would require us either to strip out a lot of important information, print dozens of extra pages from those hyperlinks, or require students to go online, anyway, to click on related links and videos and so on.
The most important reason to go paperless is to allow us to update documents quickly and easily. Changes to a calendar, for instance, can create confusion if there is a printed version out there already, which is what happened in the first few weeks of 2018. I printed the calendars for all students to give them something to put in their notebooks. Less than 24 hours later, an opportunity arose that required us to begin our first novel in 10th grade two weeks early. My co-teacher and I shifted a couple of units around, but that printed calendar was made immediately irrelevant.
A paperless approach encourages students to keep their own calendars. It encourages planners and digital to-do lists and all sorts of other techniques for personalized organization. That independence is a necessary step, too.
Another example of the need to keep online content flexible takes us back to that post on the reading process:
That is meant to be used repeatedly in the future, but its first posted iteration was on September 18. I made photocopies then to help students transition to paperless instruction. By September 20, I saw the need to add an entire section to the post — the third section, “What to Read,” which details the value of Medium’s curated reading lists and the power of the network of sites in Gizmodo Media Group. That was a quick edit online; it would take a few days to reprint updated copies.
Going paperless has been a journey of sorts for me, and I would invite anyone interested in that to read here:
This is the way of the world, and it isn’t a step backward. There’s no need for a dire jeremiad. Online and offline reading create a balance, if we approach both metacognitively and purposefully. Nothing will ever replace the feeling and experience of flipping through a novel, and there isn’t anything quite like printing out an essay and interacting with it; the world now talks to itself, however, in interstitial and online ways. Students have to learn to engage with that world.
And, of course, it’s a process. I’ve been working toward a “paperless” classroom for years now, and I still have entire bookcases filled with handouts. I find a half-dozen copies left behind every day by students. I recycle reams of the stuff every quarter. The hope is that the need for a bit of conservation continues to dovetail with the 21st-century skills we know matter most. If that remains true, going paperless – or “paperless,“ with liberal use of air quotes – is a necessity.