When I first sat down to read the Dervin article, I picked it up, read the first two pages, laughed about how the article about sense-making didn’t make any sense, put it down, and walked away. But the next day I remembered a strategy I used in college to finish all of my readings. I majored in political science and history so there was a lot of reading! I have always been an auditory learner and in high school I read Shakespeare out loud to help make sense of it. So I decided to read my college assignments out loud as well. Not only did reading out loud help me to stay focused and awake, but it also helped me to better comprehend what I was reading. So I decided to apply the same method to reading the Dervin article. And again I found that reading it out loud helped me to make sense of the dense, but fascinating writing.
I would like to use my own experience reading this article as an explanation of Dervin’s main points in the article. At the beginning of the article Dervin discusses how people interact with the world in unique ways because every person is unique. This means that data doesn't tell us about humans or what is real to them. So we should focus on how humans interact with the world, and the decisions they make when faced with challenges. Darvin proposes that humans, while unique, benefit from similar strategies when faced with similar problems. She then describes the experience of facing a challenge by explaining that experience in three parts. The first part of the experience is the event which is the situation that presents a challenge. In my circumstance the event was that the article was difficult to read. The next part of the experience is the gap. The gap is the strategy that a person uses to help them overcome the event. Reading the article out loud to myself was my gap. Finally there is the use, which is the reason why a person needed to overcome the event. For me the use was needing to be able to summarize and reflect on the article. The main takeaway I have from Dervin’s article is that we, as educators need to focus on providing our students with a variety of strategies for them to overcome their challenges. In order to teach this lesson to a group of high schoolers I would first show them different short video clips demonstrating how similar hand gestures have very different meanings in different cultures. This would demonstrate how we all perceive information differently and according to our backgrounds. I would then show them an image of a woman next to a wall. The wall has a rope attached to the top of it , and there is an ice cream cone on the other side of the wall. I would explain to the students that this woman loves ice cream. The wall is the event because it is the challenge she faces in order to get what she wants. The rope is the gap because it's the strategy she can use to overcome the event. And finally the ice cream is the use, because it is the reason she wants to get over the wall. And finally I would explain to the students that no matter what background a person came from , they would all use the rope to get over the wall. So we are united when we are placed in similar situations or are facing similar challenges.
3 Comments
Teresa Barron
2/11/2018 10:20:55 pm
I found your blog entry quite enjoyable! I laughed as I read your comment about how the reading on sense-making did not make any sense because those were my exact words to my husband as I attempted to read it the first time. I particularly liked how you used your own experience when reading the article to explain the parts of the sense-making metaphor figure. I also liked the way you gave specific examples of how you would teach this to students in High School.
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Helen
2/12/2018 05:05:05 pm
Well written Maddy, I too thought the article was ironic. Your examples are clear, I too liked the perspective of the actor as the most important. I liked the way Dervin talked about discovering what the actor was doing that was making him/her partially successful? What barriers, (the wall) the actor was facing?, What will the actor try next, what tools will he/she use? And If the lady reaches the Ice Cream what helped her? I am looking forward to exploring how to incorporate these questions to my students and figure out how they can be more interactive with their own learning.
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mayra cindy De la Torre
2/13/2018 07:55:18 pm
Wow! I think you totally nailed it. Reading your summary makes the article clear to me now. Your woman, wall, and ice cream metaphor was perfect. It was a perfect way to explain the challenge, the gap, and the use. I was stumped and had no idea how I would teach it to high school students if I didn't understand it myself.
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