Take Home Final Essay

This final assignment provides an opportunity to reflect back on and to demonstrate what you have learned in English 4800 by analyzing and comparing what we have learned in our class with descriptions of other cutting edge methods courses described in the book Reclaiming English Language Arts Methods Courses: Critical Issues and Challenges for Teacher Education in Top-Down Times (2015). Read 3 chapters and extensively discuss 2 of them in relation to our course.

When you write your final exam, be careful to draw on and refer to the specific learning that took place in our class as you write the final essay, including justice/inquiry/action, traditional methods, discussion analysis, chapters from Teaching to Exceed readers workshop, and, of course, and perhaps especially the learning and experience of student-led instruction on justice, inquiry, and action literature teaching.

The goal of the exam is to reflect on and carefully analyze our course from a broader perspective, through the lens of other courses on the same topic taught elsewhere in the United States. What were the strengths of our version of this course? What strengths did you find in the other courses you looked at? How might our course be improved in future? (Minimum 5 pages.)

This book is available to you in full text online via the WMU Library access to Proquest. Here is the direct link: Reclaiming English Language Arts Methods Courses. There are three electronic copies available at any one time. Log in, study the Table of Contents, review the chapters, and download the three you want to read carefully. Then log out, so others can get in.

Of course, you can also buy the book!