The Seven Personae

By Author: Jodie
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So, what do English teachers do? How do we change our work, our classes, our style, our curriculum? Let me suggest a new direction inspired by Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future. Gardner suggests that to succeed in the future we need to cultivate five "minds": the disciplinary, synthesizing, creating, respectful, and the ethical. I like Gardner's ideas but they do not give me the guidance I seek as an English teacher when it comes to preparing students for the future. Instead, we need to cultivate in students seven personae, each of which is necessary to succeed as Cartier Pasha Replica students, employees, and citizens. Note that each of these personae has two sides: one devoted to comprehending, interpreting, and analyzing the text or content created by others; the other side dedicated to communicating one's own ideas and content through whichever means and media that person deems most appropriate to the task and occasion. In other words, each role involves both comprehension and composition. The following includes a brief description of each of these seven personae:

Storyteller: ...
... Whether a salesperson or politician, parent or teacher, everyone must be able to use a range of means and media to tell the story of an experience, an event, a situation or a problem and its proposed solutions; moreover, we must be equally able to understand and analyze the stories, in whatever form and format they are produced, others tell us. As Mark Turner says, "Narrative Imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought".

Philosopher: Whether in literary or expository, visual or written texts, students encounter increasingly complex ideas they must be able to understand and grapple with by posing questions and considering a subject from multiple angles; in addition, they must be able to convey their own perspective on and response to these ideas through words, images, numbers—or some mix of them all—when writing about or discussing the ideas they study through a range of texts.

Historian: All texts and ideas are situated in a larger historical context; thus, we must know how to gather, assess, and apply background knowledge relevant to the text or task at hand in order to comprehend its ideas and Tag Heuer Carrera Replica arguments. We must also know how to reason like the historian when assembling and communicating our ideas about trends, events, or texts. As we move into a more global, connected world where we not only read the texts but also confront the history of other countries, we must become more his topically adept readers and communicators.