Hey Everyone :)
The slides have already been posted for our presentation, so please give them a look if you would like further confirmation about any parts of the theory we covered.
Overall, we really enjoyed exploring this theory and giving the presentation. Reader-response seems like sort of an abstract theory, in regards to the fact that it is based on people and their responses rather than a set of beliefs or regulations. This makes it really easy for people to jump into it, because it's really about what they think and how the create responses, but it also makes the theory a bit difficult to explain and teach.
Giving the presentation and hearing everyone's responses definitely helped us learn some new things about the theory for ourselves. The responses people gave to the pictures were a great way to see the theory in motion. Before the presentation, we were only drawing on personal experience with our own past reading. However, getting to take part in the process of reader-response and watch people connect to and create text was really great. I found that I had personal biases and assumptions that others' responses caused me to reconsider and widen my gaze (ie. the picture of the legs and assuming that it was a girl; others' responses were not the same as mine, and I grew because of that).
I think the class as a whole did a great job of responding to all of our "text". All parts of the theory seemed to click well with people. I did notice that the beginning of the "Where the Wild Things Are" activity was a little rough, maybe because people were still unsure about what they were getting themselves into. If I could change it, I would have done a little more introduction in planning about the activity and the end goal of it.
Also, I think as a group we would have benefitted the class more by allowing more time for questions in between or at the end. We were excited to see students asking questions about some of the theories, but we would have liked to see more of that.
The powerpoint was a very helpful tool and as a group it kept us very directed. Our goal was to make sure we weren't clinging too tightly to it, and I think that went pretty well.
I also think as a group we could have been more helpful by creating a handout of the different types of reader-response theory, since there are five. I don't expect that everyone remembers what each theory was. Perhaps it would have been helpful to create a quick excel doc with the names of the theories and their main points.
Again, we had a great time overall and we really hope that reader-response theory is something you will find useful in your own reading as well as some of your classrooms. :)
Group- Anything else we'd like to add?
--Kristi & The Reader Response Group
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I believe that our presentation was definitely a success. The best part was that we ended up having quite a bit of class participation throughout our whole presentation which is always encouraging.
ReplyDeleteThe introduction seemed to be especially effective as a "hook" since Where The Wild Things Are is such a well known text and the movie seems to take such an interesting direction with it. Everyone seemed to get fairly involved right away because of it.
Using pictures as reader response examples before or after each sub-theory was probably the best idea we came up with (thanks to whomever did think of that!). It seemed to help cement the ideas in everyone's head in addition to helping them relate to the concept presented. I was also very interested to see how everyone reacted to certain pictures, especially the details that were debated in both the example Kristi brought up (the girl on the stairs) and the photo of the hands. That really opened my eyes to how readers really do respond differently to the same text.
Kristi's idea of printing off handouts about each reader-response concept is a good one. If we had had more time, that would have been something we could have done to benefit everybody more.
My main critique about myself is that I could have perhaps rehearsed what I was going to say during my part of the presentation because I stumbled a bit. Overall, I'm very happy with how the presentation went and I think everybody did a great job.
The main thing I'd really like to add is that contrast to Kristi, I thought the Where The Wild Things Are introduction actually went really well, and I thought it was a great way to get started with the theory. The participation was a bit slow to start, but that's to be expected, cause we hadn't got into the theories yet.
ReplyDeleteLike they each said, I thought the pictures were a great way to allow for deeper understanding from the class into each subtheory. All in all, it was a lot of fun, and I think it went really well!
I really agree with what my group members said. I thought that the pictures were a really great way to help the class achieve a deeper understanding of the theories by being able to practice each one. I also think it was helpful that we didn't put too much text in the powerpoint. We felt it would be more beneficial to let the class get a lot of practice with the theory before they had to use it in a critical response than to overwhelm the class with a lot of background information.
ReplyDeleteI was really happy to see the amount of class participation. Even though some of the reader-response theory were quite abstract it seemed like the class got a pretty good grasp on it.
Overall, I really enjoyed getting a really in depth understanding of this theory. It definitely exceeded my expectations!