TE 408: Crafting Teaching Practices, Secondary English
Spring 2024; Section 001
Date:
A brief summary of the excerpt you read for
the week (aim for 1-2 sentences) with the
page numbers
What themes and/or essential questions are
explored?
Two “pops,” or moments that stick with you
when you stop reading (moments that excite
you!) and why
Connections (to class discussions, to in-class
or outside-of-class readings, to personal
experiences)
Questions (did it make you wonder
something? do you wish something was
clarified?) and/or challenges (did it challenge
you to consider an idea from a new or
different perspective? how did this impact
you?)
Additional reflections, as you are moved
1/26
Funds of Feeling… is about interpreting
literature through feelings as opposed to
simply through “literary devices and culturally
dominant moral meanings.”
This article is centered on a specific approach
to feelings-based reading and interpretation
that the author calls up/down/both/why where
students are asked to respond how they feel
about a given character or piece of plot with
their thumb, and explain why.
For some reason nothing from this article
really jumped out at me. I felt I could predict
where it was going from the very first
paragraph. Its thesis is fairly straight-forward.
I’ve had boring ELA classes throughout my
schooling and I’ve had engaging ones. Boring
classes/teachers based discussion of “literary
devices and culturally dominant moral
meanings,” engaging classes asked me to
share what I really thought, not just what I
was “supposed to” interpret from a reading.
I wonder how these students in this article felt
about being used for research purposes.
While of course I understand the necessity of
research of all kinds, it does seem
dehumanizing in a way to be essentially
experimented upon in that the researchers
probably did not care about the actual
students so much as they cared about
proving a point/hypothesis based on how
these students responded before and after
the study.