Chris Andresen

Literacy Inquiry Project

TE 843
February 2022

PART ONE: CONTEXT

This is my seventh year of teaching, and my fifth at Grand Blanc High School,

where I teach social studies. Grand Blanc is about 10 miles southeast of Flint, MI.

Historically, GB was a commuter town for General Motors employees, both line workers

and executives. I still have dozens of students with familial connections to automotive

manufacturing in some capacity. It has always been a large public high school, but over

the last two decades it has grown into one of the top five largest high schools in the

state in terms of enrollment. Several factors play into this, but the most significant is the

closures of all but one of the public high schools in Flint. We have dozens, if not

hundreds, of students commuting south to attend Grand Blanc via school of choice.

We’re now at 2,051 students attending traditional in person classes, a number about

600 lower than in pre-COVID times. We have several hundred students taking classes

via Grand Blanc’s online learning platform, Bobcat Virtual. Our student population is

diverse, but the majority of our students are white. About 23% of students at GB identify

as black or mixed race, and about 8% of the population identifies as Asian. In short:

Grand Blanc High School is a large, diverse public school in an area of the state

undergoing some serious economic and demographic change.

For the past three years, I taught economics, both team-taught with a special

education teacher in the room co-teaching with me, and a more traditional course with

approximately 30 students. These classes are a core requirement for juniors in order to
graduate from GBHS, and it is typically the final required social studies course before

they can choose more electives when they create their schedules for their senior year.

Economics is a semester-long course (approximately 4 months, with various

breaks/modified days built into the school schedule). My students do their writing (and

almost all of their schoolwork) on google chromebooks, which I am also writing this

paper on. They are given out to each student in the summer, and my juniors are

typically on their second generation of chromebook, having traded in their antiquated

2017 versions into the school for a snazzy, touch screen, high definition 2021 version.

They’re a big upgrade, and they make both my and my students' lives easier. This is the

single biggest difference between these kids’ high school experience compared to mine:

ALL of their writing is done on a computer and turned in via google classroom. I spent

my high school years writing everything by hand in classrooms, with occasional trips to

the computer lab or library to type papers up and print things. I do not miss the chaos of

late-aughts era printers.

The student I’ll be focusing on took my regular economics class during our first

semester, which ended in late January. It took a little bit of time for me to find a student

willing to help me out with this endeavor, but I am glad that I found one that was so

helpful and dedicated. His name is Andy, and he is currently in the second semester of

his junior year at GBHS. First off, Andy is a curious young man. I noticed it in the first

week of class back in September. His hand typically shot up to answer questions, and

he almost always had something to ask in relation to my question. As a teacher, this

can be an annoyance at times, but Andy always asked thoughtful, interesting questions

and added to the class discussion. Something I’ve noticed amongst the high school
students of this era is that many of them will never raise their hand unless called upon.

There are many reasons for this, be it anxiety about sounding “dumb” in front of their

peers, apathy towards school in general, or genuinely not understanding the content.

Andy does not have this problem, to put it lightly. I could reliably call on him,

unprompted, to answer things, and he usually adds something in to further the

discussion.

In discussion with his other teachers, he is like this in all of his classes. He’s a

tremendous student, a hard worker, and a boon for us teachers trying to get a

classroom discussion going. He was great working with me for this project. As for my

approach with Andy for this project, I wanted to know the types of writing and reading he

did outside of the school environment. He is extremely prim and proper with his

language, and I was curious to find out if that extended to his day-to-day conversations

with friends, his parents, and his time spent in extracurriculars. The task I gave Andy

was to take two typical days in a school week and jot down the various ways he writes

and reads. Where are you doing these things? What are you reading? How different is

the diction you use in school versus the diction you use with your parents? With your

friends? How do you tend to communicate with your buddies? I had him keep a dynamic

google document that listed the various things he read during the day, and the ways he

communicated, either written or verbal, with his peers and adults. I also had him use the

Screen Time application on his iPhone to measure the amount of time he spent

reading/writing on his phone.

 PART TWO: ANALYZING THE DATA

What I found from Andy’s notes and report back to me were simultaneously eye-

opening and unsurprising. The biggest overall takeaway is that the huge majority of his

time reading/writing is via his phone. I’d argue that the smartphone is the majority of

America's main window into “literacy” in most capacities--people look at their phones at

all times of the day, and they typically are reading something on them when they’re on

their phones. What surprised me were the amounts of time he spent on apps he used to

communicate with his friends. He doesn’t use traditional text messaging apps nearly as

much as I do. In fact, his screen time report said that he spent less than 10 minutes on

iMessage per day. When I asked why he doesn’t use iMessage, he told me that he only

uses it to text his parents. His friends don’t talk to one another via iMessage, and more

interestingly, it’s rare that Andy writes with just one other person. He is involved in a few

large group chats (“gcs”, as the kids call them), which are constantly running throughout

the day.

The huge majority (more than 75%) of his screen time spent writing/reading were

in two apps: Discord and Snapchat. Discord is an app that essentially functions as a

message board; people are invited into “servers” where they can post messages to

each other in real time. Snapchat works much the same as Discord: Andy is in a couple

big group chats with his friends, who message each other with pictures and messages

throughout the day. His Discord usage mostly related to his biggest passion: video

games, specifically his favorite, Valorant. According to Andy, the majority of his

communications throughout the day (at least after school) is done on his gaming
computer. He is constantly chatting with his buddies on the game’s chat function, or

typing into their dedicated Valorant Discord server. When I asked Andy if his writing on

his group chats is similar to the stuff he turns into me as classwork, he laughed and told

me it’s not even close. He uses tons of shorthand, inside jokes, acronyms, and other

pieces of language he wouldn’t ever use in something for school. This didn’t surprise

me all that much; many of my students allow their Gen-Z language leak into their

communications with me, much to my chagrin. It’s not too rare for me to receive an “ok

thx” in response to an email I send with instructions for my students at home under

quarantine protocols.

The only physical literature Andy deals with on a daily basis are the novels he is

assigned to read in his English class. In the two days he spent logging his time

reading/writing, he said he spent about 45 minutes each day reading his assigned book:

Catcher in the Rye. He mentioned that English is his least favorite subject, and he said

much of the 45 minutes reading Catcher were spent rereading passages he had trouble

parsing. I knew this about Andy just from casual conversations from the semester with

him in class. It surprised me to hear that he struggles reading his English assignments,

however. Most of the content in my economics course came to him very easily, and his

math and computer class grades were both above 100%. He told me that his parents,

from Romania and Greece respectively, don’t speak or write English very well. Although

he was born in Michigan, and speaks English as his first language, reading for his

English classes doesn’t come as naturally to him as things like coding or calculus.
 PART THREE: REFLECTION ON CURRICULUM/GOALS

Our pacing guide and overall layout of our semester follows the Michigan High

School standards fairly closely, down to using much of the same vocabulary for things

like our units. We have a unit for “understanding markets”, “supply and demand”, and so

on and so forth. I think that almost every high school economics classroom in the state

follows much of the same patterns with how units are laid out, and how content is

sequenced. What I particularly love about teaching economics is how genuine and

relevant I can make the material for these kids--the basics of economics has to do with

decision making and allocating resources. These are things that students do during

every waking hour; it’s rewarding seeing students realize how much of their daily lives

tie into our class.

Beyond following the content guidelines to make sure standards are met, my

main goals for literacy in my classroom have to do with practicality. As a social studies

teacher, the content we teach is secondary to how the kids learn it, in my opinion. I want

my students to leave my room feeling comfortable breaking down the basics in a news

article, for example. I want them to be able to have a baseline knowledge of geography.

If I show them a map of population density, I want my students to be able to pick out a

few major metropolises, and then tell me why they sprung up where they did. Chicago?

It’s situated on a river that flows into a high traffic part of Lake Michigan--this allows for

commerce to flow in and out of the city, leading to a population boom. I remember

learning in my senior year of college that part of the goal of a social studies classroom is

to mold effective, participatory citizens. At the time, I found that to be kind of unrealistic:
how am I supposed to turn apathetic teenagers into world citizens in an hour-long

required class? But as I enter into that vague “veteran teacher” stage of my career, I

realize more and more that creating citizens is the main goal, at least for me. I

absolutely do not want to spew jingoistic talking points to these kids; I want to help them

to understand the world by better understanding the how/what/where/why of things. This

is a type of literacy in itself, I believe. My main goal is to give these students a baseline

level for them to do their own discovery of the world. Use the tools that I showed them in

order for them to effectively and responsibly explore the world.

PART FOUR: TYING IT TOGETHER

I think that my literacy goals for my classroom are, if anything, more realistic

given what I learned from Andy’s two day study. He is a naturally inquisitive young man,

and wants to figure out how stuff works, so he was the perfect example for me. He

spends the majority of his day online--either on his phone or on his computer. This is

like almost ALL of his colleagues. These kids live their lives online. It is unrealistic to

outright ban technology in the classroom, be it phone usage or computer usage. In fact,

I believe that educators should encourage their students to make use of the technology

at their fingertips. As I mentioned in my section on my goals/outlook: I want my students

to be responsible citizens of the world. A major, major part of this is the ability to

effectively parse out legitimate information online. This current generation has a hefty

amount of skepticism about them regarding things they see online--rightfully so. I’d

argue that much of the current bleak reality of our world has to do with misinformation

found online, be it malicious or genuinely ignorant.

 My role as an educator in 2022, then, should be to help my students teach

themselves how to be responsible online citizens. They need to know how to suss out

whether or not a source is trustworthy. They should be able to synthesize this legitimate

information into their own thoughts in some capacity. I believe that teachers should

allow their students to use their skills with technology to help with this.
 Rubric for Christopher’s Literacy Inquiry Project

Limited Proficiency Some Proficiency Proficiency High Proficiency

Organizationally Organization is Organization is Organization is Organization is fully

(6 points) missing partially visible adequately visible visible

Mechanically Mechanics are Mechanics are Mechanics are Mechanics are fully
6 points) missing partially used adequately used used

Logically Logic is missing Logic is partially Logic is adequately Logic is fully

(6 points) evident evident evident

Substance is Substance is Substance is Substance is

Substantively
missing partially rigorous adequately rigorous intellectual and
(7 points)
and interesting and interesting creative

25/25 points - TOTAL

Project 1 Evaluation

Christopher,
Your Literacy Inquiry Project on Andy is first rate. It represents outstanding work. You integrated
readings, viewings, experiences, and data to inform the project’s design. Your report meets all the
requirements of the project. It's thoughtful. It provides relevant information. And the mechanics reflect
conventional usage. In all, the quality meets the Proficiency or High Proficiency ratings for each
criteria in the rubric above.