Where do we go now?

"...what counts as authentic work in an English classroom depends in part on what kind of space you take the classroom to be and how you see its relationship to the rest of the world."
~Whitney, In Search

"Our generation of English teachers, as others before us, must reevaluate what we do, how we do it, and why it is all still necessary. In a world where we are told the book is a dying relic and that the word is giving way to the image some of our pressing questions include: Why do we insist on teaching the novels, poems, and plays of people who are long since perished; works of fiction and drama written by people who may have held problematic and politically incorrect worldviews that implicitly demeaned the students who are now asked to read and cherish them?"
~Morell, (Re) Inventing the Future of English

"In other words, our students need to be ready for college and/or career, as so many standards movements would have them be, but they also need to be ready to participate in communities well beyond those."
~Bomer, p. 8

"English language arts, as a discipline and as a class in secondary schools, should be a home to students' curiosity above all these forms of participation as well as some we haven't even thought of yet."
~Bomer, p.9

A common theme I have found among these readings is said perfectly by a line from one of my favorite movies, "Where do we go now?" I feel that this quote sums up my feelings about English perfectly, and it very appropriate way to wrap up my final blog of this semester. Everything I have learned in this course has been very unexpected; the kind of topics we have talked about, and the way we have approached them, were nothing like I thought they would be. I imagined learning more about teaching students to read, specifically mental development and process of reading.

By no means, though, am I complaining. I have learned a great deal, rethinking the very definition of literature. All I know now is how much I don't know (which I believe is the purpose of education?). I think in context, adolescent literacy to me is less about the development of students as readers and more more about the perceptions students have towards reading by the time they are adolescents. In addition to that, I think is important for teachers to understand the ways in which students interact with and are influenced by literacy.

I have found many answers to the kind of questions I asked in the beginning of the semester about myself as a reader. But all I have learned culminates into such questions like, "What is worth teaching anymore?" Do our students need to have that core knowledge as Hirsch suggests to be able to have a sense of belonging? Is that why we continue to push a canon of certain books onto our students?

As the future changes, what is going to be relevant to our students? Will knowing about the books of celebrated authors be worth the reading of pulp fiction? Will pulp fiction be so looked down on in the future? And what are we supposed to do for our students in a world of changing digital literacy, where books are becoming less popular? If we try so hard to get students to read books written 100 or 200 years ago, how much will it truly benefit our students? And how are we supposed to benefit our students most? I haven't even begun to think about socioeconomic issues related to adolescent literacy...

Where do we go now? I think the most important thing from here is knowing the myriad options I have before me and a greater awareness of the complexity of issues at hand.

Also, this trailer is relevant to recent religious tensions. Enjoy. I need to see this movie again soon.

Dear blog world,

The readings this week focus on developing students.

I would have to say that, as someone who considers himself to be a better writer than a reader, I am very excited to get involved in this unit.

But we face a problem... just how do we teach students how to write?


The readings this week talked about the ways in which we teach students how to write. Though the one question I have after these readings is this: is teaching high-schoolers the same as teaching younger students? I noticed the readings seemed heavily focused on teaching elementary. What do we do about high schoolers? How do we develop their own writing further? Do I model it after what I learned?



I am currently in a high school class of freshman teaching them the skills necessary to create expository essays. Though I can create lessons that are good, not every student is engaged with the lesson. What does this mean for me? How can I make them more engaging?

"When teachers give students a simple way to write something, not only are they not true to the product, they aren’t true to the process either." Ray, Exploring Inquiry

This is a very interesting statement that I think can be applied to any level of teaching. I definitely agree that there isn't any particular way in which we should teach students to write. In my own experiences as a youngster, I was presented with many different options to construct thoughts and ideas, but I do not recall being forced into any particular style. These sentence constructions seemed simple enough, but there was great complexity in choosing which ones we would use, where. We had to learn how to vary our style, our sentences, and our words. My teaching will reflect this.

Ray's "Study Driven" article also talks about the need for students to see teachers as writers and writer models. How we chose to do so will be crucial for our students. I hope to show students that writing is a process. Maybe I can teach students how to write by modeling my own writing for them, present them with my writing, and ask them to help me edit it. We all know how much they [the students] love fixing our [the teacher's] mistakes.

Getting the thoughts to flow...

Dear space internet,

The readings this week have been focusing on ways to encourage student thinking and learning. In chapter 8 of Bomer's "Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's Classroom", he talks about using purposeful conversation to help students learn.

His argument is that almost all learning is done through a communication of thoughts and ideas (whether it be a transmission or collaborative communication). As I was reading through this chapter I was thinking of the kind of communications I have seen or used in my classrooms, both as a student and as a teacher. There certainly was a lot of collaborative work done when I was a student. But I went to a more traditional school. From what I remember, a lot of what I learned was done in a lecture format. However, we would often have time to work together on in-class exercises and collaboratively learn there.

In my teaching classes, though, there seems to be an emphasis on more collaborative learning. While I will agree that I can be good, I have also seen instances where it completely backfires. It's very possible that you could end up with students teaching/talking about the wrong thing. If this happens, then it becomes very counter-productive. I believe, if anything, collaboration needs to be carefully monitored and teachers need to know when to step in. It can become very risky if you let someone learning a task go off and try to do that task on their own without any supervision. I'm just not sure how to manage such a task like that.


Chapter 9 focuses on using writing to generate thinking. Writing can be used as a way to help students think about thinking (metacognition), prepare for a discussion, enhance their reading, strengthen their skills in writing, and much more. The most difficult thing about this that I do not yet know is how to do is implement it into a classroom. I would like to do more writing exercises in the classroom I am interning at, but they begin every class with a 20 minute "books or blogs" activity. While here they are getting 20 minutes to do some kind of writing, I have noticed that a lot of my students don't use this time to read or write. With their smartphones they will  get onto social media sites like facebook, twitter, etc. and use this 20 minute chunk of time in a way that probably wasn't intended to be used.

I believe that activities like this need to be focused as well... maybe I am worried about letting students have their own freedom (especially the younger students, for they seem to shirk responsibility). How do I implement these very new ideas into a classroom, especially classes that are not academically motivated? I want to have collaborative learning, and I want to teach students writing, but even when I try these suggested ideas in my own classes, I get maybe a 50% success rate...

Dear Fandom,

So the topic of this week is on developing readers.

But it isn't just about teaching students to read.


It covered a topic that I hadn't much thought about before... As teachers, we have a responsibility to teach students more than just how to read.

Consider this: A student reads a very complex text aloud to you, but when you ask her what the text is about, she has absolutely no clue; then we keep handing her complex books and having her read them with absolutely no understanding. Teaching students more than just reciting lines on a page is part of our responsibility. It was a difficult concept for me to imagine about because I generally am able to understand what I read. What is it like for students who are not? I can't imagine how hard this is for students.

The readings talked about our role in helping students develop their own interpretations as well. I think of this as being important because before they can generate their own interpretations, they must be able to understand what they are trying to interpret. In this case, it's a related issue.


If we are to do all of this, we need to teach kids a complex series of skills in order to learn about what they are doing.
The girls colored their room red, white and blue.
1.) How to think (What does this all mean)
2.) How to understand what they are reading (Colors, Girls, paint, action)
3.) What does it mean [interpretation]? (Did the girls paint their room red with white and blue colors together? Three separate colors? How can this sentence be interpreted?)

Reading is much more complicated than I have given thought too. I need more time to brood on this.

The need to create lifelong readers...

Dear sentient internet space being,

The topic of this week is on creating lifelong readers. I myself am not a typical avid, enthusiastic reading English teacher. In fact, I quite rarely do any real reading of books. It's unfortunate, because as a child, I read all the time. I have great memories of reading as a kid. My mother would read to me before bed time. I would read exciting stories on the bus. I would read at home. My mom commented to me how much I used to read.

Until she said that comment, I never really considered how much I wasn't reading anymore.

Consider this quote:
"Adolescents are quick to judge things in school as related or unrelated to their lives. Often things associated with school literacy are not seen as relevant by adolescents. As a consequence, teens are more likely to reject school tasks and reading along with them. Our youths need to see literacy as personally relevant and having substance for their lives" (Kasten and Wilfong 657).

I've studied literature for high school teachers of English in quite a bit of depth, and my class then was very critical of the type of stuff we were reading. Everything we read in the "classical canon" was written by dead white men. Now I don't mean to dismiss them for their merit. I certainly appreciate reading them and am glad I did, but only years later in hindsight.

Does that mean it was successful? Well, I certainly did have realized the value of it, but I am no longer a frequent bookworm. Is it possible that in being forced to read these texts in middle school and high school I lost my interest in picking up a book?

The arguments in favor of the classic canon of books read in school say that the books are important for establishing a national "American" culture, and "for people to be able to engage in important common cultural conversations (Hirsch, 1988)."

There was a study conducted by Ivey and Johnston that gave students flexibility on what they wanted to read, rather than just have collective, whole group reading assignments. The study had them intensively engage with the reading they selected. Studies found that even though students were reading different books most students eventually read books their peers had read, even when there were only 2 or 3 copies of a book. Students just not reading the books at the same time. They did, however, engage in those important common cultural conversations over the books they read (272).

^^I'm really intrigued by this idea. Imagine that a classmate is reading a book and you hear just how good or bad it is from a personal account. The ability to tell you how excited it made you might drive other students to read that same book just to be able to catch up with their peers. Imagine the options that are available to you when you hear about seven or eight different books being read by your peers, and what it means to have a kind of knowledge that others in the class may not yet have. This is a unit lesson that I really want to try implementing my own classroom.

There is an important need to not kill the love of reading in our students.
Now, READ!

On critical literacy...

Dear everyone,

The definition of critical literacy has been a bit unclear to me. My friend and I came to the conclusion that critical literacy was applying social justice to what we read. But Bomer and Bomer point do a fine job of defining what critical literacy is.
"When we notice something about particular values like fairness, social justice, and power relationships in something we read, we are applying knowledge gained from other reading we've done, from conversations we've had, and from the media to which we've been exposed. We also are testing the book's assumptions agains the concepts, discourses, and communities of our experiences."

I quite like the definition provided above as it shows how readers, students and teachers alike, bring their own values into the reading. Because people have different experiences, they bring different things to the book.

Part of our readings also discuss interpretations and critiques of text. "Interpretations draw on a bundle of moral, social, and emotional concepts (Bomer and Bomer 27)." The only thing I might question is: when are interpretations stretched too far? Is there a point where an interpretation can be wrong if it is so far out "there." Is there a limit to how much a student can interpret something? From a social justice standpoint, all experiences would be valid and worth measure. But what about the text itself? My belief is that so long as there is evidence within the text to support it, an interpretation can be valid. If there is no evidence, the interpretation is "weak." Various critiques claim only the author's interpretation matters. Others state that only the reader's interpretation matters. There is a third group yet (of which you will find me a part of) that says it's somewhere in between-- that both the reader's and the author's interpretations are equally important.

Reading text through a social justice lens:
Much of the reading talked about the kind of topics that will come up when critically reading and evaluating the text. Representation. Gender. Justice. Power. Silence. Diversity. Class. Language. Culture. The kind of topics that will be discussed will largely have to do with what you are reading. It is important to diversify the kind of texts being read in a classroom in order to model a variety of discussions within the social justice framework. Can you really expect to talk about LGBTQ sexuality in a text where sexual identity is not even mentioned? Diversity is the key to developing students' critical literacy.

RE: FŪN

As promised, here are the photos of a signature I have found throughout West Campus and Guadalupe. It's interesting because you really can track where this person has been.
I've found this signature in 10 different locations so far.

Ain nobody sing like Tina.

Hi everyone!

This week's reading covered Black English and Spanglish as forms of literacy. I actually just got finished with a class that covered this very topic and you can see some of what I learned in last week's blog post. I'd like to start my discussion with this quote:

"By identifying connections between students’ everyday use of Spanglish and specific skills highlighted in the English Language Arts Content Standards for California Public Schools (California Department of Education, 1998), I do not wish to reify these standards, nor do I mean to suggest that I view academic literacy as a neutral form of literacy or the only form of literacy that students should aspire to cultivate. On the contrary, these standards, like similar standards in other states, reflect the socially constructed—and socially situated—nature of academic language and literacy."

All three articles touched on the nature of prejudice with alternate forms of English other than academic English, the rules and organized structure of African American Vernacular English, and the use of Spanish-English code switching in academic settings. (See Zuidema's "Linguistic Prejudice," Jordan's "Nobody Mean More," and Martínez's "Spanglish" article for the full readings).

I want to touch on a couple of thoughts regarding the articles, the first one being linguistic prejudice. Zuidema talks about linguistic prejudice and of how deeply it is ingrained in our society. The article attacks notions of "What is correct grammar." The emphasis here is that we should not be so quick to try and define correctness on the standards of academic language, because many other forms of English have their own correct rules. Nor should we believe the idea that just because the language is changing means it is getting worse. This is an easy idea to grasp when you take into consideration how English uses a hodgepodge of other languages' rules: Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes, words borrowed from other languages. If anything, these two proofs showcase how fluid language is.

Second, I want to address code-switching- This definition can be applied by anytime there is a synthesis of two different languages to express a single thought. We as teachers of English should be able to recognize this and understand the intent and purpose for it. Perhaps it should be asked, can this be used as a strength when teaching English language learners new rules?

When it comes to teaching students about grammar and academic English, how do we go about teaching students this without wiping out their own native languages? Are we supposed to teach students when and where certain languages are called for (this is my opinion, but I want to hear what others have to say).

All the best,

~E

Here's some quotes from the some of the readings I've done this week:
-->"Native American educator Cornet Pewewardy (1993) asserts that one of the reasons Indian children experience difficulty in schools is that educators traditionally have attempted to insert culture into the education, instead of inserting education into the culture."

-->"In their widely cited article, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) point to a phenomenon called "acting White," where African American students fear being ostracized by their peers for demonstrating interest in and succeeding in academic and other school related tasks. Other scholars (Hollins, 1994; King, 1994) have provided alternate explanations... that for too many African American students, the school remains an alien and hostile place... in the "styling" and "posturing" (Majors & Billson, 1992) that the school rejects. Thus, the African American student wearing a hat in class or baggy pants may be sanctioned for clothing choices rather than specific behaviors."
I just read an autobiographical essay for another class called "Indian Education" by Sherman Alexie. It very much touches on the quotes mentioned above. The writer was teased and ostracized as a child for "acting white" aka being intelligent on his Indian Reservation school. He eventually transferred to an all-white school to seek a better education." I find this attitude to be deeply troubling and an example of how elite education seems to be. How did it come to be this way? Are minority populations really this hopeless in their attitude toward education?

-->"These sociolinguists have suggested that if students' home language is incorporated into the classroom, students are more likely to experience academic success."
These quotes also reminded me of a class I took recently called "English language and its social context."We studied African American Vernacular English (AAVE), both as a language and as a culture and I learned much in that course. I believe that it is important to keep up with the languages of the students and use it in the classroom. We as teachers are working with students every day. There should be no reason we aren't fluent in their language.

-->"The trick of culturally relevant teaching is to get students to "choose" academic excellence."
-->"Culturally relevant teachers utilize students' culture as a vehicle for learning."
In order to know what is relevant to the students, what culture they have, it is important to interact with students in a setting outside the classroom. Get out in the community. Live in it. Learn the culture of the students. Use it as a vehicle to teach from.

_______________________________________________________________________________
-->"After having completed the story [creative writing assignment], I discovered it was a masterpiece... Unfortunately Mrs. Brakett didn't share in my enthusiasm. She praised the story, but said that the language was unsatisfactory because of the word "ain't"... It think it took me a good 3 years to finally put that behind me and start taking creative risks again."
Look, I'm going to often bring in stuff I'm learning from other classes because it's relevant to the discussion. So, um... sorry. My professor of "Rhetoric for Teachers of English" often makes note of how English teachers destroy students' voices, so by the time they graduate, they all end up writing exactly the same way as one another with a set list of explicit rules. It's quite haunting to think that I could end up doing this to my students as well. I fear this. In my view teaching students rhetoric is about teaching them to participate in civil discussion. It's about teaching them to know when use specific language and where. In this case, the teacher of this student failed to recognize that using "ain't" in a creative writing assignment, was in fact, quite creative. Weaving vernacular into a story brings out the students unique voice. We tend to squander away our students voice. That's why learning culture, the literacy of the people, is so important: it's relevant to the students now.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Fun facts on AAVE:

Habitual Be: A study was conducted on AAVE where white and black children observed a scene such as this. In this video, the child observed Elmo eating a cookie while the Cookie Monster did not. The child was then asked, "Who be eating cookies?" The white children pointed to Elmo, and the black children pointed to the Cookie Monster. Were the black children inherently wrong? No. The simple solution is that the use of be in the sentence exemplifies how different cultures interpret be. In this case, the white children interpreted "be" as who is eating cookies now and the black children who interpreted "be" as who usually/always/habitually eats cookies. We must be aware that our students have the potential to use languages in ways that we may not understand and we should not always automatically mark as wrong.

Take note of how AAVE often gets to the point faster than academic English and reduces unnecessary letters or simplifies complex exceptions to rules. 

LEARNED SOMETHING YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSS!!!!!

Blog response for September 10 reading assignments

From the Moll, et al article "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching"
"We have learned that it is feasible and useful to have teachers visit households for research purposes..."
Is this why we are being asked to go to a student's home and study their literacy for this class?

"...These are neither casual visits nor school-business visits, but visits in which the teachers assume the role of the learner, and it doing so, help establish a fundamentally new, more symmetrical relationship with the parents of the students."
I find this to be a particularly interesting thought. My first thought is, "Well duh, of course visiting with parents outside the school would establish a better relationship." Then I think about how none of my teachers ever visited my home, and how distant the relationship between my parents and my teachers was. As a highly self-driven student with a great interest in learning, this likely wasn't a huge issue, as my teachers never had to call my parents or rely on them for help in getting me to succeed. For struggling students this could make all the difference. Education of a child relies on the collaboration of teachers, students, and parents.

"It can also become, as illustrated above, the catalyst for forming research teams among the students to study topics of interest to them, or important to the teacher, or for achieving curricular goals."
My first thought on this was "student-driven" instruction. When you take all of this into account, it's really about learning what is important to the student and the parent without having to explicitly ask them. We've done a lot of talking in my classes about student-driven instruction, and while that's all fine and dandy, I often wondered how to create student-driven instruction without explicitly asking the students. This could be a way. I quite like this point though, because it again illustrates how instruction of students is a team effort.


From the Rubenstein article Conversing with Miguel:
Miguel's portrait may also serve as a reminder that "labels... carry with them the baggage, or connotations, that people ascribe to them"
Reading about intelligent students getting labeled as a troublemaker or a student with a disability really breaks my heart. It's concerning to think that even I, who has had a class on second-language acquisition, can still be blind to this issue at times. I try to do my best now and believe everyone has intelligence of some kind. From that perspective, I quit thinking someone is unintelligent. Even my value of intelligence as a worth has changed. Just because a student is three or four grade levels behind, it doesn't mean they aren't capable of learning. It just means that there is a lot of work to do.

"FŪN"

Re: Regarding my post about tagging...

Ever since I read that article about tagging last week, I started to notice tagging . Maybe having a certain awareness of it somehow brings more attention to it. Before I only thought it was some kind of illegible "art" (and I use that term loosely).You can see tagging everywhere on the Drag (also known as Guadalupe street), but I never paid much attention to it before.

I perceive names and peculiar symbols of the tags. The coolest part of today was seeing "FŪN" written in two different places on my walk home, and I instantly thought of the article and thought it might have a point. The two were exactly identical, and I realized that it was written by the same person. So cool. I'll try to upload pictures of them later.

Tagging as a social literacy practice:

I read an article this week that explained how the act of tagging was a social literacy practice, embedded with significance and meaning, as well as . I definitely learned something new about the practice, but I don’t know how much I support it. As a teacher fostering literacy, does that mean I should support any and all forms of literacy, even if it breaks the law? One could perhaps argue that such laws are targeted against the poor who use tagging as a way to express their own literacy, but why tag property that does not belong to them? I’m fine with tagging private property that one owns, but I just do not see the sense in tagging property that doesn’t belong you.

Of course I realize my opinion could be wrong, I was raised differently, so I don’t practice tagging myself. Am I supposed to support it? How far am I supposed to support something before I should no longer support it? Just because something has literacy value, does it make it automatically okay? Another article we read declares we should have social justice on the forefront of our minds. This is a class of class and privilege, and I don’t quite know where I stand on this. Perhaps the practice of tagging is an indicator in how much inequality there still is.