Rookie is…
an independently run online magazine and book series founded in 2011 by Tavi Gevinson. They publish writing, photography, and other forms of artwork by and for teenagers (and their cohorts of any age!). Their contributors and readers are from all over the world.
by Kim Essenburg
“I was disappointed because when the librarian talked in class about this book, I thought it was fantasy, but it wasn’t,” complained a tenth-grade student several years ago in an independent reading conference. The book was Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, and his comment puzzled me, because I too had heard the librarian’s book talk and knew from it that the YA novel was historical fiction set in sixteenth-century Europe about a dwarf. Oh, a dwarf! The student didn’t know that dwarfism is an actual medical condition; being familiar only with the dwarves of Middle Earth, he assumed that wizards and dragons would show up sooner or later!
This incident dramatized for me what happens when limited knowledge of the world stymies reading comprehension. What can we do to facilitate the rich reading comprehension that comes from robust background knowledge, that ignites the imagination, and that leads to building new ideas through synthesizing and extending thinking?
On one side are the centuries old traditions, expectations, and practices of a system of education and schooling created for another time but still deeply rooted in our various cultural fabrics. On the other side is a fast-changing and expanding new story of learning in a globally networked world, one marked by new opportunities and complex challenges, driven by the increasingly ubiquitous technologies that connect us.
by Will Richardson and Bruce Dixon
For over two decades now, as technological, social, and environmental change in the world has continued to accelerate, we’ve been watching the growing disconnect between the old and the new of learning. It’s a disconnect that many in education have felt, and that some have tried to bridge. But despite some schools’ best efforts to keep apace by adding new devices and connectivity, and by adopting a more contemporary rhetoric about learning in classrooms, we’ve also watched little if anything change below the shiny surface of new technologies and trendy labels. The time-worn systems and structures that are at the core of the school experience persevere untouched.