AATE 'Novel Ideas' publication – Flipped Learning in the Middle Years Classroom – By Steven Kolber (3 pages)
“The child’s scribbling on the margin of his school-books is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them. To him the margin is the best part of all books, and he finds in it the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.” - From Seth Lerer, Devotion and defacement: reading children’s Marginalia For me, annotating has proven the single most important reading strategy in my learning, for fiction, I doodle, draw, circle and highlight in a free and creative response to the text. One of my favourite texts, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, beginning as a plain penguin classic, was transformed into a highly illuminated and scrawled upon volume. When reading academically, written annotations are numerous, aggressive, contrary, challenging and conversational. I was forever inserting myself into the text and at many points in opposition to the reader. I believe there is something innately human and compelling about marking, annotating and even defacing written text