The Summer 2019 Marginal Syllabus: “Connected Learning in Teacher Education”

Welcome to “Connected Learning in Teacher Education,” the fourth iteration of the Marginal Syllabus. This syllabus is designed to support the professional learning of teacher educators who are interested in discussing and enacting connected learning.

This summer’s Marginal Syllabus programming starts Tuesday, May 28th with pre-readings and introductory conversations about connected learning. Thanks to a partnership with the journal Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE), four featured articles from a 2018 special issue titled “From Connected Learning to Connected Teaching” will structure participants’ annotation conversation from June 3rd through August 11th. After discussing connected learning throughout the summer, participants will also be supported in enacting connected learning through collaborative annotation activities during the Fall 2019 semester.

Stay up-to-date with the latest Summer 2019 Marginal Syllabus announcements by completing this very short form.

This post includes:

Introductory Information

Since 2016, the Marginal Syllabus has convened and sustained online conversations with educators about equity in education through open and collaborative web annotation. Throughout the summer of 2019, teacher educators are invited to read, annotate, and discuss four articles about connected learning so as to support their own connected teaching with pre-service and in-service educators.

In partnership with the journal Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE), the four featured articles in this syllabus have been selected from a special issue of CITE titled “From Connected Learning to Connected Teaching.” CITE is an open-access, peer-reviewed publication of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education and is co-sponsored by four teacher education associations. The Marginal Syllabus has previously partnered with the National Writing Project and the National Council of Teachers of English to organize the 2017-18 syllabus and 2018-19 syllabus, and uses the open-source technology Hypothesis to mediate open and collaborative annotation conversation.As a summer reading group for teacher educators, “Connected Learning in Teacher Education” will begin with introductory connected learning texts followed by the four articles scheduled from June through August.

This syllabus will be facilitated by Kira Baker-Doyle, Program Director of the Transformative Teacher-Educator Fellowship and organizer of the Connected Learning in Teacher Education network, and Remi Kalir, Co-founder of the Marginal Syllabus.

Summer Reading Calendar

Click the following links to access all syllabus readings as PDFs. The web annotation tool Hypothesis will automatically open atop the PDF.

May 28-June 2

Introduction to connected learning (pre-reading):

June 3-23

Connected Teaching and Learning in K-16+ Contexts: An Annotated Bibliography, Sarah Lohnes Watulak, Rebecca Woodard, Anna Smith, Lindy Johnson, Nathan Phillips, & Katalin Wargo

June 24-July 7

This Is How We Do It: Authentic and Strategic Technology Use by Novice English Teachers, Betina Hsieh

July 8-July 21

The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and the Pursuit of Radical Possibility, Stephanie West-Puckett, Anna Smith, Christina Cantrill, & Mia Zamora

July 22-August 4

I, Pseudocoder: Reflections of a Literacy Teacher-Educator on Teaching Coding as Critical Literacy, Kira J. Baker-Doyle

August 5-11

Debrief discussions, planning for fall teaching, and CLinTE virtual retreat

Fall 2019 Activities

In addition to summer reading and discussion, participating teacher educators will be encouraged to incorporate these same articles into their teacher education coursework throughout the Fall 2019 semester. Technical and facilitation supports will be provided to teacher educators who participate in the summer reading group so as to encourage social reading and collaborative annotation among their courses during the fall.

To help enact connected learning activities, the following reading calendar is intended to support teacher educators as they incorporate articles discussed during the summer into their fall semester syllabi and coursework for collaborative annotation discussion across multiple teacher education courses.

September reading and discussion: Connected Teaching and Learning in K-16+ Contexts: An Annotated Bibliography (Lohnes Watulak et al., 2018)

October reading and discussion: This Is How We Do It: Authentic and Strategic Technology Use by Novice English Teachers (Hsieh, 2018)

November reading and discussion: The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and the Pursuit of Radical Possibility (West-Puckett et al., 2018)

December reading and discussion: I, Pseudocoder: Reflections of a Literacy Teacher-Educator on Teaching Coding as Critical Literacy (Baker-Doyle et al., 2018)

Annotation Conversation with Hypothesis

Annotation is the addition of a note to a text. Digital annotation tools afford the opportunity to comment upon, mark up, link to and from, and hold conversation about and atop online texts.

As an open-source and free tool, the open web annotation technology Hypothesis adds a new dimension to online reading – making reading public, social, and collaborative. Hypothesis is not a social network, however, and creating a Hypothesis account takes about a minute and only requires an email. You retain the intellectual property of annotations authored using Hypothesis, public annotations are attributed with a Creative Commons license to help build a more robust and open intellectual commons, and the organization’s principles are worth a read, too. It is for these and other reasons that the Marginal Syllabus has partnered with Hypothesis in every iteration of the syllabus since 2016.

Eager to read, annotate, and discuss? First, create your Hypothesis account. Then click on any of the reading links (above) and Hypothesis will automatically open atop the linked PDF. Once the reading is open in your browser, you’ll be able to easily read and respond to all public annotations authored by other participants. And if you’re really geeking out about annotation conversation, check out these resources for educators and consider how to incorporate similar social and collaborative reading practices into future learning environments and activities.

Questions about the “Connected Learning in Teacher Education” Marginal Syllabus may be directed to Kira Baker-Doyle and Remi Kalir.

Marginal Syllabus Author Partnerships

This post first appeared on Remi Kalir’s blog.


“I was thrilled to do it. It gave me a ton of perspective on how to look at these things and how to think about it. And fortunately, it [participants’ annotations] will all still be there the next time I go there [the text].”

“That’s the thing with putting your work out in public. I mean, often you’re not face-to-face with them [readers] in the way you would be in Hypothes.is [web annotation].”

– Chris Gilliard (Marginal Syllabus partner author, August, 2016)


This post discusses the importance of partner authors to the Marginal Syllabus. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains educators’ interest-driven learning about equity in teaching and learning. Organized around open and collaborative web annotation conversations, this experimental approach to educator learning is rooted in public discussions that mark up and comment upon openly accessible online texts. Marginal Syllabus conversations transform digital texts into discursive contexts. In order for that transformation (and subsequent collaborative learning) to happen, a source text is needed. And a provocative source text – that is, a text generative of meaningful conversation about educational equity – doesn’t just appear out of the digital ether. It is partner authors and their texts that center a project committed to engaging ideas that are contrary to dominant education discourse (i.e. marginal counter-narratives) through participatory web annotation (i.e. commentary in the margins of texts).

Were it not for the generosity of Marginal Syllabus partner authors – authors who graciously contribute their writing for the purpose of public conversation – this so-called geeky book club would not be possible. The 2016-17 Marginal Syllabus featured 10 partner authors, such as Chris Gilliard, whose reflective quotes about his Marginal Syllabus participation opened this post. The current 2017-18 syllabus, hosted by the National Writing Project and organized to explore the theme Writing Our Civic Futures, features 12 partner authors. All 22 authors are a mix of K-12 classroom teachers, higher education faculty, educational researchers, critics, and teacher educators. Whether with a blog post or book chapter, scholarly article or critical commentary, all of the authors agreed to have their writing opened up as a forum situating public discussion via collaborative web annotation.

Before sharing the perspectives of a few partner authors, I’d like to briefly note why author partnerships matter to the Marginal Syllabus. Here are three compelling reasons why partner authors are essential for an educator learning effort whose social and technological backbone is open web annotation.

Consent: Marginal Syllabus partner authors consent to have their writing publicly annotated. The proliferation of web annotation platforms has, over the past few years, witnessed parallel and robust debate about what online texts can (and should) be annotated, how such tools are ethically used, who has the power to annotate or block annotation, and the ways in which annotation may be exercised as a form of personal abuse or political resistance. Esther Dyson’s keynote at last spring’s I Annotate conference masterfully examined tensions and opportunities associated with the relationships among annotation, ownership of content, freedom of speech, and the organizations (or, as she suggested, “moderating entities”) that are shaping these sociotechnical practices (here’s my reflection on Esther’s keynote, and I highly recommend you watch it, too). Author permission is not a requirement of web annotation and, in fact, crucial fact-checking efforts Climate Feedback and Digipo might be stymied if all web annotation required author or publisher consent. However, in our case, the consent of partner authors is a prerequisite of all Marginal Syllabus annotation conversation.

Democratizing Inquiry: Now in its second year, the Marginal Syllabus is an emergent “social design experiment.” As described by Kris Gutierrez and Shirin Vossoughi, social design experiments are design-based approaches to teacher education oriented toward both inquiry and change. In this case, the Marginal Syllabus is part public experiment in educators’ open learning and part research into how educators learn via collaborative web annotation. Multiple stakeholders are often needed to grow social design experiments as a “democratizing form of inquiry.” For the Marginal Syllabus, our multi-stakeholder partnership includes university researchers, K-12 educators and administrators, the web annotation organization Hypothes.is, the National Writing Project, and – of course – partner authors. As Francisco Perez and I detail in a forthcoming book chapter about the Marginal Syllabus mediating educator learning across sociopolitical texts and contexts, author partnerships are critical to this social design experiment: “The Marginal Syllabus is predicated upon the need to create and maintain open learning contexts within which educators can exercise political agency through dialogue, question dominant schooling narratives, and critique inequitable educational practices.” The efforts of partner authors – both their texts and their consent – make that possible.

Open Access: Partner authors have helped to facilitate important inroads with publishers of academic content, expanding open access to both information (i.e. original texts) and conversation (i.e. annotated texts). As I noted following our recent November conversation:
The article, published earlier this year, appears in the journal Review of Research in Education; as such, openly accessing, sharing, and annotating this text meant that Marginal Syllabus organizers had to partner not only with Nicole and Antero but also with Sage Publishing, the journal’s publisher. This multi-tiered partnership (i.e. scholars as partner authors, publishers of academic content, and Marginal Syllabus organizers) is a new and exciting aspect of the Marginal Syllabus that suggests important inroads for curating public learning opportunities that open access to knowledge.

To date, author partnerships have helped the Marginal Syllabus open up for public annotation scholarship published by Corwin, NYU Press, Teachers College Press, Sage, the National Council of Teachers of English, WW Norton, and Heinemann. While facilitating more open access to academic content wasn’t an intended goal of the Marginal Syllabus, such outcomes are very promising and we are most appreciative of these publishers’ flexibility and commitments to accessibility.

Even when already published, obtaining consent to annotate scholarship – and, in particular, scholarship related to educational equity – matters. Moreover, creating democratizing forms of inquiry about educator learning – and doing so in partnership with scholars vested in fostering transformative approaches to teacher education – matters. And opening access to annotatable scholarship – scholarship previously published behind a paywall, or scholarship published in a digital form preventing annotation – also matters for creating a more equitable and participatory intellectual commons. For the Marginal Syllabus, author partnerships help to make all of this happen.


Having sketched out a few reasons why author partnerships are critical to the Marginal Syllabus, let’s hear from a few partner authors. The following three perspectives are presented chronologically, include a bit of context, and are followed by a thank you to all Marginal Syllabus partner authors who have contributed to this project.

Liana Gamber-Thompson (April, 2017)

Last April, Liana Gamber-Thompson helped to broker a connection with the team of researchers responsible for co-authoring By any media necessary: The new youth activism (including Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Arely Zimmerman, and Liana). Our Marginal Syllabus conversation focused upon Sangita’s chapter “Between storytelling and surveillance: The precarious public of American Muslim youth.” Then this past August, and in anticipation of launching the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus, Liana subsequently participated in a National Writing Project Radio podcast and shared the following (from the 28-minute mark, and lightly edited for clarity):

“As a co-author, you don’t always know how people are going to react to your book outside of formal book reviews or in academic journals or elsewhere. So it was really fascinating and wonderful to see people’s first impressions and thinking as they read the chapter. And also to really engage with them, to read and think with and alongside readers… it was such a valuable experience for us. And it’s been a few years since we did the research, so it enabled us to really come back to it with fresh sets of eyes and think about how the current context applies, apply current events to the topic, too. I feel like it was such a valuable experience for me as a co-author, but also to see all of the learnings that emerged full from the annotation… how it pulled out findings that were really unexpected but really valuable moving forward.”
Nicole Mirra (November, 2017)
In November, we read and annotated Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia’s article Civic participation reimagined: Youth interrogation and innovation in the multimodal public sphere.” In addition to sharing her scholarship and participating in a related webinar, Nicole also wrote a blog post for DML Central titled “Fostering democratic dialogue with digital annotation.” Among Nicole’s reflective observations, she shares a number of key insights about her participation as a partner author:
  • “I was struck by the ease with which annotation fostered productive conversations between individuals who soon became collaborators.”
  • “I enjoyed the experience of seeing my work challenged because it helped me to clarify my arguments and consider how I might present my claims differently moving forward.”
  • “This experience makes me long for a future (one I hope is not too far off) in which annotation becomes more prevalent across the academic community as a catalyst for public conversation. I see this process as teaching and learning made visible.”
Linda Christensen (December, 2017)
The recent December conversation occurred in the margins of Linda Christensen’s article “Critical literacy and our students’ lives.” Whereas both Liana and Nicole used various public media (i.e. podcast, blog post) to reflect upon their involvement as partner authors, Linda has been distinctively present in the ongoing annotation conversation of her article. To date, Linda has contributed 16 replies (among the 139 total annotations) to nine different text-participants (of the 19 total participants). Some of Linda’s replies are pithy and humorous (“When I grow up, I want to learn to add these cool images” and “Tonight’s homework“), others are paragraphs in length and discuss exploding the literacy canon because of excluded voices, #MeToo and breaking codes of silence through literacy education, and the importance of students as intellectuals. Linda’s annotations have also included linked resources and, in one reply that expands upon a “read around” activity discussed in her article, an additional example of student writing.

 

And prior to our public annotation conversation, Linda also participated in a related webinar which featured a great exchange about the challenges of “writing in silence” and how public web annotation is a means of providing feedback to such “resounding silence” in order to improve effective communication – watch her response here.

Thank You

Marginal Syllabus organizers are thankful for the involvement of the following partner authors (listed in order of their participation). Your texts have created expansive and experimental contexts for educator professional learning grounded in both the sociopolitical complexities of education and new expressions of media practice.

2016-17 Marginal Syllabus: Chris Gilliard, Mia Zamora, Antero Garcia, Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, Helen Beetham, Dawn Reed, Troy Hicks, Christopher Emdin, Sangita Shresthova (and the entire By any media necessary team), and Bronwyn Clare LaMay.

2017-18 Marginal Syllabus: Henry Jenkins, Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia, Linda Christensen, Danielle Allen, Joseph Kahne, Benjamin Bowyer, April Baker-Bell, Raven Jones Stanbrough, Sakeena Everett, Erica Hodgin, and Steven Zemelman.

Marginal Syllabus at the National Writing Project Resource Development Retreat

During the week of July 10th, we – Joe Dillon and Remi Kalir – are attending the National Writing Project’s Resource Development Retreat (RDR; and check out #NWPRDR17 on Twitter) in Denver, Colorado. Throughout the 2016-17 academic school year, we played key roles in organizing and facilitating the Marginal Syllabus, an openly networked experiment in educator professional learning that leverages web annotation, social reading practices, and author partnerships to advance conversations about educational equity. Part geeky book club, part digital learning resource, the Marginal Syllabus embraces an intentional double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal – or contrary to – dominant education norms, and our online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts by using the web annotation platform Hypothesis.

Our passion project has grown, and the NWP RDR is a welcome opportunity to reflect, design, receive feedback, and plan for next year. As an entry point into the week’s collaborative work, we began by clarifying some of the core values that have guided our organization and facilitation of the Marginal Syllabus. These values include:

  • Fostering transparency and openness;
  • Designing experiments via technology;
  • Inquiring through partnership; and
  • Sustaining critical conversations about equity.

We’ve also been tasked with two broad responsibilities for our work during the RDR.

First, our retrospective activities will include the development of resources for educators that summarize what happened during the first year, curate information about our conversations, and make the entire syllabus accessible as an open educational resource (or OER; also, read more the Marginal Syllabus as OER). One example of this curation includes our recently published The 2016-17 Syllabus, a summary of author partnerships, nine annotated texts, and some educator takeaways (thanks to our many partner authors and participants!).

Second, our forward-looking efforts are all about design – sketching out a plan, sustaining and growing partnerships, and detailing concrete next steps for Marginal Syllabus activities during the 2017-18 academic year. Last year, Marginal Syllabus programming concluded on a notable high thanks to an emergent partnership with the NWP’s Educator Innovator initiative. While we welcome and are very thankful for this emergent partnering, we’re now eager to more proactively shape future collaborative activities.

The purpose of this blog post is to address – provisionally and formatively – one aspect of our retrospective work that, most simply, boils down to this question: What did we learn from the first year of Marginal Syllabus activities? As reflective educators who are both active in the world of digital media and learning, engaging a question about our own learning is a welcome opportunity for introspection, iterative design, and strengthened collaboration. We also approach this question from different yet complementary perspectives: Joe is a K-12 educator, Remi is a professor; Joe has a history of collaboration with the NWP and the Denver Writing Project, and has facilitated the Young Writers Camp, whereas Remi is a newcomer to NWP activities and communities. We’re engaging with the RDR – and, more specifically, this question about what we’ve learned – from both varied experiences and also shared commitments.

So, what have we learned? On the RDR’s second morning, we sketched out a poster that introduced the Marginal Syllabus to other RDR participants. As a part of this poster session, we literally spent five minutes detailing provisional inquiry prompts that have consequently helped us to answer our “what did we learn” question. What resulted were three writing prompts which suggest broad lessons related to partnerships, the design of professional learning, the emergence of a community of practice, and research.

Here are some of those prompts; we’ve each responded individually to highlight our personal experience, useful divergence in our thinking, and some common insights.

1. How has partnership defined activities, and how will partnership sustain activities?

JD: For Remi and I, our different vantage points – he’s from higher ed and I’m from K12 – have resulted in a diverse set of texts that frame marginality differently. Our different personal connections have also helped this work intersect with the work of organizations like Virtually Connecting and Educator Innovator. As we experiment with emergent design and seek to form a community of practice, we’ve had to think about the interests of partners and participants, and reflect on their reactions to social annotation and equity issues. In a couple of instances, a partner’s idea led us to include synchronous Google Hangout discussions as part of the monthly reading and response. Partnering with authors and publishers moving forward will allow us to continually surface new texts about equity issues and responses to the processes we use to facilitate social online annotation. Partnering will also surface emergent interests in the annotation technology.

RK: We launched the Marginal Syllabus with a core commitment to author partnership. It was important that authors consented to have their writing annotated – and annotated publicly as a means of conversation and professionally-relevant learning. Accordingly, we set clear expectations with authors about how to access, mark up, and talk about their texts. In some cases, we also consulted with authors about how to annotate texts published according to copyright standards. Partnership also meant establishing participation expectations, such as how authors would engage during live annotation activities and, eventually, Educator Innovator-hosted webinars (as we did last April and May). The lessons we’ve learned about author partnership indicate opportunities to improve how these partners develop and/or leverage their technical fluency (especially with web annotation), share their public participation, and continue to reference their annotated texts as learning resources.

2. How has this experiment in professional learning changed based upon structure and supports?

JD: We made a structural shift when we changed the time window for annotation from a one-hour “flash-mob” format to a week-long “annotathon” format. This may not have changed participation drastically, but it did change the way our invitations sounded – we created more opportunity – and increased potential participation.

Another structural consideration that arose was the technical barrier to entry, which snuck up on me as an issue because the first few authors and groups of participants picked up Hypothes.is readily. It wasn’t until the last month when Bronwyn LaMay, our participating author asked a few good clarifying questions in the lead up to our synchronous annotation and the webinar to discuss the chapter that I realized how much we’d asked of her technically. She needed to create a Hypothes.is account and familiarize herself with the tool at the same time we asked her to read over the planning document for the Educator Innovator webinar. The addition of the Google Hangout as a structure made the monthly reading increasingly social and also raised a technical hurdle.

RK: As I wrote about last January, our early annotation conversations were structured around the idea of a “flash mob,” though that organizing metaphor failed to capture people’s sustained participation in annotation over longer periods of time. Accordingly, one of the first major changes to the Marginal Syllabus structure was a shift toward week-long “annotathons.” This change in conversation format coincided with our Educator Innovator partnership, and was a new means of supporting and scaling how educators might access, learn about, and contribute to conversation activities. Among these changes to structure to support, we were reminded that web annotation aligns well with a broader media ecology; participating educators were not only using Hypothesis to mark up texts, they were also sharing publicly via Twitter and blogging to reflect on their distinct efforts. We’ve learned that it’s important to be flexible about the structures that support open and collaborative annotation, to welcome a broad range of complementary social media practices, and to amplify participant experiences.

3. What have we heard from our participants, including partner authors, and how does this help us inquire about what’s happened during our first year?

JD: Participants in social annotation comment about their reading process, which is notable. They sometimes reflect that the annotations pull them away from the text to engage in a discussion thread in the margins. Repeat participants have remarked to me that they prefer to read a text one time through before they annotate and consider the annotations of others. Why is this important? Increasingly, I’m familiar with definitive claims about the way people read in online spaces. It seems generally accepted that people read more closely on paper while they are more likely to skim digital texts. Still, If reading on paper is superior for close reading, research is needed about the potential for digitally-enabled reading and its capacity to support extended cognition. The reading people do using annotation software and encountering other readers’ thoughts, might prove to be closer reads because they consider different viewpoints and questions they otherwise wouldn’t while reading.

As for what we hear from authors, everyone we have asked for permission to read and mark up their work so far has granted permission. It bears noting that Bronwyn LaMay remarked that the conversation we had with her online was an uplifting experience, probably because it was the end of a school year and she appreciated us considering her work so carefully.

RK: As someone who regularly wears a researcher hat, I’ll keep my response here brief. First, it’s important to remind people that by using Hypothesis publicly, annotators agree to license their annotation content according to a Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication (check out Hypothesis’ Terms of Service). Second, my research about educator participation in open and collaborative annotation as professionally-relevant activity is summarized and publicly available here. And third, I’m quite thankful to have begun collaborating with amazing doctoral students, professors, Hypothesis staff, and others who are committed to inquiry about the ways in which (digital) annotation is changing reading, learning, scholarship, and publication. From a research perspective, the Marginal Syllabus embraces a design-based research methodology, and my retrospective analysis about the first year – as an initial iteration – is a focus of forthcoming presentations and publications.

Though these “lessons learned” read as somewhat declarative and definitive, we reiterate that these are rough draft thoughts and, as such, we welcome your responses, questions, and criticisms (and, it should go without saying, you’re very welcome to engage via Hypothesis annotation!). Moreover, we would be thrilled to hear responses from Marginal Syllabus participants, partner authors, or our colleagues at the NWP RDR.

Finally, a brief note of thanks: Throughout our experiences at the RDR, we’ve been deftly and graciously supported by NWP staff, most especially Tanya Baker, Christina Cantrill, and Liana Gamber-Thompson. We’re grateful for their support and critique in helping us to advance open and interest-driven educator learning about educational equity via the Marginal Syllabus.

Marginal Syllabus Announces New Conversation Format and Partnership

Three Major Announcements

The Marginal Syllabus is pleased to announce a new conversation format and partnership. First, the final three conversations of the 2016-17 academic year (during March, April, and May) will occur via annotathon, whereby participants are invited to read, annotate, and discuss a given text for a week. Second, the Marginal Syllabus’ March conversation will feature Dr. Christopher Emdin, Associate Professor of Science Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. And third, starting in April the Marginal Syllabus will launch a partnership with the National Writing Project’s Educator Innovator to provide robust open learning opportunities for educators via author partnerships, annotathons, webinars, and other online resources. Suffice to say, we’re really excited!

A Bit of Context

Given these notable announcements, it’s likely that some people reading this post may be unfamiliar with the Marginal Syllabus. If so, here’s a brief bit of context. The Marginal Syllabus is an informal educator professional learning effort that convenes monthly annotation conversations about issues of educational equity. Marginal Syllabus organizers partner with education experts whose scholarly perspectives may be considered marginal to dominant conventions of schooling and education. The openly accessible texts of partner authors – whether book chapters or blog posts – are selected as online forums for conversation among K-12 and postsecondary educators via the open educational practices of web annotation (conversations that occur in a text’s margins). Selected texts have examined digital redlining and information accessibility, critical literacy education, the politics of educational technology, and curricular design. Monthly annotation conversations seek to amplify collaborative discourse among authors, their texts, and a participatory readership. Both the individual texts where monthly dialogue occurs – and the syllabus as a cohesive, growing document – represent a dynamic, dialogical, and intertextual conversation that seeks to open texts as contexts for educators’ interest-driven learning.

From Annotation Flash Mobs to Annotathons

Since August of 2016, Marginal Syllabus conversations have been described using a flash mob metaphor. While flash mobs convey excitement and spontaneity, the metaphor fails on multiple fronts. First, flash mobs are quick bursts of activity. While the first six Marginal Syllabus conversations were scheduled for a given hour on a specific day, the resulting dialogue has often lasted many days. It is not uncommon for multiple participants to respond to other annotators for days on end, spanning nearly a week of sustained activity. Second, flash mobs are quite sophisticated, but they can also model collective uniformity (many people doing the same thing at the same time). While it’s accurate to note that Marginal Syllabus participants are all engaging in the social and collaborative practices of web annotation, annotation content is frequently divergent, sparking debate and evidencing critical thinking that uniquely conveys participant’s voices. Third, flash mobs are distinctive precisely because they orchestrate something improvisational among the mundane everyday. Yet the traces of such dissonant creativity are often fleeting, and the casual observer might never know that a flash mob occurred in that location just over there about an hour ago. Alternatively, web annotation affords searchable curation and descriptive tagging, creating an indelible and sharable record that can be referenced and joined by others who stumble across a recorded conversation even months later.

Given the limitations of the flash mob metaphor, as well as feedback from K-12 partners indicating that week-long annotathons are far more accommodating for educators’ busy schedules, it is necessary that we shift both our root metaphor and our conversation format. Where does the annotathon model originate? We’re inspired by Maha Bali, an early advocate and convener of annotathons; her model was recently adapted by learning scientists to discuss the need for a political theory of learning. The annotathon, as Marginal Syllabus’ new conversation format, will span a week, and we’re excited to see how partner authors and participants adapt this new discussion model to meet their interest-driven learning needs. Flash mobs were a useful pilot structure, and we anticipate annotathons will be a meaningful second iteration structuring Marginal Syllabus conversations.

March Annotation Conversation with Dr. Christopher Emdin

Starting on Monday, March 27, the Marginal Syllabus is excited to welcome Dr. Christopher Emdin as a partner author. Dr. Emdin is an Associate Professor of Science Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author most recently of the highly acclaimed book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Beacon Press, 2016). If you’re not familiar with Dr. Emdin, he was recently featured on PBS Newshour:

Throughout the week of March 27, the Marginal Syllabus will convene a conversation with Dr. Emdin via an excerpt of his book posted on Colorlines titled How Can White Teachers Do Better by Urban Kids of Color?

How can you join Dr. Emdin in an annotation conversation? Here’s the plan:

  1. When: Monday, March 27th through Friday, March 31st. As noted, we’ll adopt a multi-day annotathon model and invite educators to participate in a public conversation via the web annotation platform Hypothesis.
  2. Where: Visit How Can White Teachers Do Better by Urban Kids of Color? in order to access both the source text and the Hypothesis annotation layer.
  3. Who: K-12 educators, pre-service and in-service teachers, school administrators, and others interested in dialogue about “how White teachers at urban schools can overcome their class and race privilege and truly connect with their students.” Dr. Emdin will participate using the Hypothesis handle chrisemdin, and Marginal Syllabus organizers will include Remi Kalir (remikalir), Joe Dillon (onewheeljoe), and Jeremy Dean (jeremydean).
  4. How: We will use the web annotation platform Hypothesis for public conversation. If you are new to either open web annotation or the platform Hypothesis, follow these steps:
  • It is recommended that you use Google Chrome as your browser
  • Visit Hypothesis and select the red “Install” button (mid-page)
  • When prompted, select “Add Extension”
  • Follow instructions in the newly opened tab – create a username, enter your email address and a password, and that’s it!
  • Also, at hypothes.is/welcome note how to toggle the annotation menu via a button in Chrome’s location bar, as well as the different types of annotation you can add to a text – including page notes, highlights, comments, and replies to annotations.

The Marginal Syllabus & Educator Innovator Partnership

Starting in April, the Marginal Syllabus is humbled and honored to launch a partnership with the National Writing Project’s Educator Innovator initiative. Educator Innovator is “both a blog and a network of networks devoted to creative and connected learning.” In late February, leaders with Educator Innovator and the NWP, alongside Marginal Syllabus organizers, began a series of conversations about how to creatively support educators as they pursue professionally-relevant, openly networked, and interest-driven learning. The NWP and Educator Innovator have an established track record of distinctive accomplishments organizing and facilitating educator learning at the intersection of digital media and new literacies. Moreover, leaders at both the NWP and Educator Innovator are familiar with Hypothesis and the potential of collaborative web annotation to support transformative teaching and learning practices. Collectively, we’re excited to explore open learning opportunities for educators via author partnerships, annotathons, webinars, and other online resources.

April’s programming will feature the book By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (NYU Press, 2016) authored by Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson (who is Program Associate at the NWP), Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely Zimmerman. The Marginal Syllabus annotathon will feature Sangita Shresthova and her chapter “Between Storytelling and Surveillance: The Precarious Public of American Muslim Youth.” The annotathon will occur from Monday, April 24th through Sunday, April 30th. In addition to the annotathon, Marginal Syllabus organizers Joe and Remi will join Sangita and Liana for a Connected Learning TV webinar at 7p ET/4p PT on Tuesday, April 25th (broadcast details announced soon!).

And in May, please join author Bronwyn Clare Lamay as we read and discuss Personal Narratives Revised: Writing Love and Agency in the High School Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2016). The annotathon with Bronwyn will occur from Monday, May 29th through Sunday, June 4th. And while the annotathon’s focal chapter will be announced soon, in the meantime listen to Bronwyn discuss her book on NWP Radio. Similar to programming in April, a Connected Learning TV webinar will be streamed at 7p ET/4p PT on Tuesday, May 30th featuring a discussion with Bronwyn about her book, and blog posts and related resources will be featured via various online venues.

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