The Textmapping Project - Data Points: Interviews with educators about using scrolls and textmapping.

Kimberly Burke DeRose, 1/26/16
I met Kim by email in 2008. At the time, she was a Title 1 Reading Teacher at Little Mill Middle School in Cumming, GA. She had found my work with scrolls and textmapping on the web and wanted to know how she could get started using it in her classroom. I gave her a few ideas. Then off she went. A few weeks later, she emailed me again. She was hooked. Within a month, she was telling me stories about taping scrolls to the walls in the hallways -- YA fiction and textbook chapters -- and how she'd leave pens and stickie notes on a chair in the hallway; how the students would come by, between classes, and use the stickies to share their comments and their thinking; how conversations erupted and spread across the scrolls like interwoven trails of confetti; how the kids became energized by this playful work. Most important, she told me how much fun she and the kids were having, and how much they all were learning. Eight years later, Kim -- who now teaches 6th grade Remedial Reading, Language Arts, and Social Studies at Dawson County Middle School in Dawsonville, GA -- says that she uses scrolls and textmapping almost every day. I asked her to share some of her more recent classroom stories. As you will see, Kim had a lot to share.