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.

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-->"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.
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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.