Creative Teaching for Today's Young People

Borghild Dahl

I apologize for my 10-day "pause in the day's occupations", but I have been busy moving from Texas to Minnesota, where I spend the next six months. (If you're interested, the Love Of My Life just wrote about some of our Adventure Together on his blog, www.blogofages.net, which is more popular than my blog and definitely worth a looksee.)

Since returning to Minneapolis, I have worked on a new OxCart production about the Minnesota author Borghild Dahl, since I had trouble with the slides in Austin and want to finish the project because people have already sent in orders.

Let me tell you a bit about what I'm doing before I return to creative planning for teaching and learning...........

“Borghild Dahl: She Wanted To See” is a biography of the Norwegian-American author and award-winning educator who was almost totally blind.

It is 27 minutes long and for ages 12-adult. It is available from OxCart's website on DVD and also as a CD.

Borghild’s life story is truly one of the most inspiring biographies young people and adults can imagine. From childhood, she was encouraged by her Norwegian-American immigrant parents to participate in activities others would have considered too difficult or dangerous for a person with limited eyesight.

A university professor told her she should abandon a degree in education because she would never be able to become a teacher due to her disability. Yet, as a teacher in Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota, she taught as many as seven subjects at a time, memorized each night what she needed to know for her students the next day, and once read Gone With the Wind – through the “open window” of 4/60th sight in her left eye -- in one night in order to review it on the radio.

She was the first woman ever granted a fellowship by the American Scandinavian Foundation to study in Norway, where she was the only woman in her class at the University of Oslo and the first foreign-born student to be admitted under oath as aNorsk Akademiker or formal student. Toward the end of her life, she was recognized as an Outstanding Alumni of the University of Minnesota -- the very institution that had advised her not to become a teacher.

At age 69, she moved to New York, where for 17 years she was one of the few white residents in the predominantly black community of Harlem. Her neighbors and friends celebrated the publication of her book Good News, one of the earliest novels for young adults that dealt with race relations in the United States. Her publisher gave a party for everyone at her apartment building, and a photo of the event in The New York Times was taped up in shopkeepers’ windows as an example of racial harmony during tense days of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s.

Dahl wrote a variety of books – novels for young women, folklore, historical fiction, biography, and three autobiographies – the most famous of which,  I Wanted To See, was an inspiration to servicemen who returned from World War II with sight impairments. The title of her last book indicated the undaunted spirit of this remarkable woman – Happy All My Life.

Original research and an introduction to her books make this account of her life especially interesting to writers, the blind and visually impaired, senior citizens, and students ofintergenerational studies, women’s studies, and American immigration, especially Norwegian-Americans. 

The production is available (as soon as I finish it) as an OxCart DVD with many photographs of Dahl’s family, professional memorabilia, and book illustrations, or as a CD audio book (without reference to visuals on the screen.) OxCart also has a DVD production of Dahl’s fairy tale, “The Cloud Shoes: or How We Got Skis”.

   

3-D: Media Reporting Strategy 4

Learners expressively or scientifically assemble and display information or ideas in three dimensions, creating visual media such as the following:

• Art: make a collage, mosaic, sculpture, stitchery; use found objects and experimental art processes.
• Book with special features: make pop-up pages, peek flaps, wheels (see below).
• Environment: transform the classroom into interactive museum, gallery, zoo or store.
• Experiment: follow directions of diagram to put something together.
• Junk: analyze obsolete or common items as unsightly waste, recycled resource or art; implement an ad hocism exhibit that shows objects used in unusual ways.
• Miniature: make a clay figure, puppet, paper doll, shoebox diorama, origami.
• Object: collect micro-cultural or historical items for a game, ritual, meal, storytelling, party, parade, play; may be aromatic, flavored, tactile; may have articulated designs (parts are shown) or closed (parts are hidden); may be standardized or individualized.
• Promotional material: convey ideas or decorations on a class button, T-shirt, etc.

Pop-up books have long been a fun type of nontraditional picture book. In recent years, many well-respected authors and illustrators have increasingly experimented with special movable features in their books. By their very nature, books with special features meet many youngsters' needs to manipulate things, to be surprised, to have multisensory experiences, and to analyze dimensionality and movement first hand and close up.

For many children a most effective way to interest them in early reading is to put a book with special features in their hands. Older children in middle school and high school can also enjoy these books when they are presented as examples of paper engineering and nonlinear thinking. The fact that mechanical paper can create effects similar to that of animated cartoons makes it especially fun for young people.

So children's own experimentation with nontraditional book production offers them exciting interdisciplinary exercises in creative planning and problem-solving in science, math, and visual discrimination as well as language arts. In general paper engineering for a mechanical books results in four basic types of what is called paper performance:

• "Popping out" in three dimensions from the page, usually using a fold, hinge or spring, makes figures go either in or out.
• "Popping up" toward the top of the page, usually using a fold, pull tab, sliding strip, or turning wheel, makes figures go either up or down.
• "Popping over", using a fold, pull tabs or flaps, makes figures go to left and right or diagonally.

• "Popping around", using a turning wheel, sliding slats, or a window, makes figures go around.

Popping out creates three-dimensionality. The other actions generally offer the creator opportunities to include surprises, answers, and changes of all kinds. To help students make pop-up pages, do an Internet search for pop-up card and book instructions or find a copy of Joan Irvine's easy-to-use books about How to Make Pop-Ups.