Elise Strongin

ELED 434
Reading Response Week 3
Ann Trauxs article, Inner and Outer Worlds: Building Community through Art
and Poetry, tells the story of her time teaching a group of twenty-two academically
challenged fifth and sixth graders in a five-week summer writing improvement course.
She explains that between varying levels of English spoken, races, genders, and
ethnicities, the class is extremely diverse. The course is focused on writing improvement
(grammar, sentence structure, use of similes and metaphors, spelling, etc.) but the
necessary first step to teaching her class is to build a community. Through the building of
the class community, lessons of writing come along. Traux does a days-long activity with
the students where they create self-portraits that are made up of symbols, word lists,
drawings of themselves, inner and outer words describing themselves with metaphors
and verb phrases, and a gallery walk with comments from each student about the other
students work. There was sharing all throughout both from Traux herself, the students
with partners, in small groups, and to the entire class.
Making such an effort to build a classroom community can and should be
implemented in all classrooms, regardless of age, subject, or any other factor. Children,
especially ones in Trauxs example who struggle academically, typically do not learn
most effectively by simply reading out of a textbook. Every classroom has diversitysome more than others- but a necessary first step to a classroom with successful teaching
and learning is by building a community where the students feel accepted, involved, and
valued. Traux displayed multiple practices that can be applied to any classroom for
inclusion and community building: sharing information about herself, having the students
work with partners, small groups, and the entire class, having the students observe and
comment on each others portraits and only allowing positive feedback, choral reading to
allow English practice for ELL students and struggling readers in a low-pressure
environment, and encouraging students to simply let ideas flow when coming up with
word listsno idea is a bad one. All of these can and should be applied to any and all
classes in order to build a community to allow the most effective learning.