Session Descriptions & Materials - Pomona

Kenneth Burke’s pentad—Act, Agent, Scene, Agency, Purpose—is a flexible rhetorical heuristic that leads to useful insights about arguments and issues. Many people learn how to identify these elements in a particular rhetorical situation. However, the real power of the pentad comes in the combinations, what Burke calls the “ratios.” In this session we will apply these ratios first to the origins of ERWC and then to current political issues and texts. Then we will apply this “ratio thinking” in small groups to selected texts and think about how to teach students to use them.

To combat the devaluation of students’ cultural resources and identities in traditional educational models, participants will explore strategies to implement autoethnographic writing in the Language, Culture, and Gender ERWC module. Autoethnographic writing can humanize students by honoring their cultural differences and creating opportunities for them to express their lived experiences. Participants will leave this session equipped with the tools to implement an autoethnographic assignment that meets the Language, Culture, and Gender module outcomes; empowers students to explore their own intersections of language, gender, and identity; and allows students to practice adapting their message to a variety of rhetorical situations.

According to the Smarter Balanced Argumentative Performance Task Writing Rubric (Grades 6-12), in order to earn a score of 4, students are expected to provide “thorough and convincing elaboration.” But what does that kind of elaboration look like? And how can we, as teachers, enable students of all language proficiency levels to produce that quality of elaboration purposefully, confidently, and enthusiastically? Participants will explore answers to these questions while engaging in lively collaboration activities designed to prompt the discovery of 19 elaboration techniques that facilitate student self-expression.

In this session, led by the writer of a new module for ERWC-ELD, participants will experience firsthand how ERWC-ELD helps teachers implement culturally sustaining integrated and designated ELD. The session presents excerpts from the new module, for which the core text is the anthology Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America, edited by Margarita Longoria (2021). Participants will do a deep dive into some of the module's key ELA and ELD standards; engage in some of the module's innovative activities; and view classroom video footage, student work, and student interviews collected during a workshop of the module last fall at a Fresno Unified middle school. The presenter, Dr. Christine Snyder, is a Research Associate on the WestEd Joyful School team. The team is led by Dr. Pam Spycher, a member of the ERWC-ELD leadership team and a primary author of the ELD Standards and ELA/ELD Framework.

We generally believe that logically minded people will follow the lines of reasoning we set forth and come to conclusions generally similar to our own. What's perhaps less intuitive, but equally important for those teaching and learning about public argumentation, however, is that reasonable people often disagree in fundamentally important ways and that more than likely such disagreements stem not from lapses in reason or fallacious logic but from authentic differences in beliefs, worldviews, and assumptions that are easily dismissed as irrationality by the other side of the question. In order address this significant rhetorical concern, this session will feature guided readings of two historical texts (written by environmentalist John Muir and city engineer Marsden Manson) vital to the debate over water rights and the preservation of the natural world in California.

This fall, CDE is releasing the new Interim ELPAC, which teachers will be able to administer flexibly throughout the year and for formative assessment purposes. But what will it look like? How can teachers prepare for it? And how can it be used to improve teaching and learning for EL students? This session engages these questions, using examples from a new ERWC-ELD module for middle school. It is led by Dr. Christine Snyder, both the module author and a co-developer of CDE's forthcoming Interim ELPAC Webinar training. Dr. Snyder is a Research Associate on the WestEd team led by Dr. Pam Spycher, a primary author of the ELD Standards and ELA/ELD Framework. Using illustrations from her new ERWC-ELD module, "Growing Up Is...", Dr. Snyder will share with participants insights into Interim ELPAC preparation and how to embed preparation in culturally sustaining, engaging, and Standards-aligned instruction.

Academic writing continues to be a barrier for K-12 and higher education students. Students rarely, if ever, identify themselves as writers, and the written word becomes something unattainable and something to fear. At the California State University, Bakersfield Writing Program and Writing Resource Center, we believe all of our students are writers. Through a process of discussion and focused interventions, we find what makes our students a writer already and build from that as a starting point. We shift the narrative of “I am not a writer” (which is based in an inadequacy for “proper academic writing”) to “I am already a writer, and this is my path to writing academically.” In this presentation, we aim to discuss the ways ERWC modules can be used to help our students “do language” by focusing on their current writing, allow the students to create their own bridge to collegiate academic writing.