Strangman Interview

Strangman: Interview
Literary and Visual Literacy for All: A Fourth-Grade Study of Alice in Wonderland by Nicole Strangman.

After I browsed through many of the readings assigned for this course, I took a special interest in this interview. I found this particular interview to be relevant and useful in my future. As a future teacher in early childhood education, reading is one of the most important and vital concepts to learn and excel in. Many children, just like myself, either love or despise reading from a young age. As a future teacher, it is my job to find various methods and different ways to get my students interested in reading. I think that this interview is a great example of how a teacher utilized something from her childhood experiences and incorporated it in her classroom. She used a simple fantasy story and turned it into a very useful tool to help her students read at a higher level. I think that Miss Edinger was a very effective teacher because she was able to reach out to her students by being creative and making reading fun and letting the children brainstorm their own ideas for the story. She was able to take one childhood story and use it in so many different ways.

I'm still not too clear about genre expectations, but in my opinion this was an active interview with a dialogue between the interviewer and the interviewee. It seemed very straight forward with open-ended questions and greatly detailed answers. The interviewer transitioned very well from one question to another. The enitre interview was organized, clear, and very easy to understand. It was great to read about a teacher who was enthusiastic about helping her students learn new things!

In my opinion, the interview was written in the same form Moreno's essay, "The Politics of Location": Text As Opposition. It began with a brief introdution, where Strangman introduced the teacher, Miss Edinger and gave a good amount of background information about her, so readers would know a little about the person the interview was about. The introduction also included the author's main focus and introduced the topics such as the Toy Theater that she would discuss throughout the interview. The body or context of the interview is a series of questions already mentioned in the introduction, but in greater detail. One question that the interviewer asked was, " The last two years the student illustrations took a new form- Toy Theater productions. What was the motivation behind that?" The topic of the Toy Theater was already brought up in the introduction, but in the body Miss Edinger talks a lot about the purpose of the program and her students feelings and attitudes towards it.  In the final part of the interview, which I considered to be the conclusion, Strangman asked Miss Edinger if she had any final words. I particularly liked this question because it gave the teacher a chance to speak freely about her own opinions about her students and how other teachers viewed  her method of fantasy in the classroom.

I think this interview was written for not only eduactors, but parents of young children as well. Many times parents have a hard time getting their kids to read at home, but if they were aware of other creatives ideas like the ones Miss Edinger came up with I bet they would be able to get their children interested in reading outside of the classroom.