My Text Set... for now

I’m still grappling with identifying a clear social issue for my literacy map.  It all seems loosely connected right now.  I chose the book, Celebrating Ramadan (Hoyt-Goldsmith & Migdale), because of a great map  it has of the Islamic world.  I will definitely use it as an image (if I can ever hammer out a clear social issue).   It made me think of all the racial profiling and stereotyping that occurs in this country, particularly with the social/political climate since 9/11.   Many Americans make sweeping generalizations about the vast Islamic world without taking responsibility for their negative sentiments.  In addition to a very comprehensive description of the customs around celebrating this holiday, the book provides Arabic translation of important religious and cultural vocabulary as well as general religious practices.

I will use the Islamic Center of Washington for my local public monument.  It serves as both mosque and cultural center for many Muslims in the DC area.   My students could benefit from fieldwork to this site beyond enriching their reading of Celebrating Ramadan.  The Islamic Center of Washington sits on Embassy Row, which holds a lot of social/political importance in the nation’s capital.

The book also had a beautiful photograph of a Muslim girl displaying her hands decorated with henna designs.  I thought it would be a fun activity to do with students.  Despite its Islamic ties, henna has become popularized in the United States.  This mainstream trend has further implications about American sentiments regarding Islamic culture.  Does the mainstream accept this aspect of Islamic culture or are they just ignorant of its cultural association? 

Self as Informant

My fondest memory of literacy involves road trips with my sister and her godmother. My sister and I memorized Shel Silverstein poems to pass the time… and earn money!  My sister’s godmother was very generous and I still have Tree House memorized. Now I recite it to my students.  I’ve illustrated a large chart with this poem for my class and use it to model fluency as well as track long e sound and spelling patterns.  I also share this memory with my students about to model making connections with literature and hopefully connecting with them a little too.  Just today, Simon told me he “used my idea.”  He has now memorized Tree House as well as a poem he wrote himself. Of course, he earned some money too.   I love it.  This is what teaching is about. 

I feel like I started learning to read with an edition of Cinderella.  I read it so many times I only remember its pink hard cover as old and beat-up with worn and yellowed pages.  It was that book I made my parents read to me over and over until I had it memorized and could read it myself.  Now I have students whose parents say they aren’t really reading yet because they’ve just figured out the rhyme or pattern or memorized the book from so much repeat reading.  I tell them that all of that is reading.  The majority of my students learn to read in first grade and it can seem like a pretty magical thing.  Parents take for granted all the pre-literacy skills required for reading.  Beyond knowing the alphabet and having the range of phonics skills for decoding, students need to have a concept of directionality and one-to-one correspondence. Even still, they need to understand what they read.  That’s the really tricky thing.

  Finding books about real people and the real world made reading meaningful for me. I have read quite a few biographies (Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, George Jackson).  I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in eighth grade.  I definitely need to read it again.  I understood the basic social problem at play in the book, but imagine I will engage more critically on a second read.  Real issues.

  The book Billy by Albert French brought me to tears.  I’m pretty sure it’s based on a true story.  If not, I’m sure it’s someone’s true story.  It takes place in the South (US) during the 1940s or 50s.  Overt racism runs rampant. A couple of white girls taunt and beat up a black boy.  He kills one of them in self-defense.  I always feel like I’m ruining the story when I say this, but the author includes it in his summary on the back of the book.  They story ends horrifically. They convict Billy of murder and executed him.  Unbelievable.  No way, I thought.  No way could this actually happen. No happy ending.  Real life.  

Reflection Point 2.6: David

Whenever people discuss inequity, I am always struck by the inevitable intersection of class, gender, and race. Although I have not picked up my own copy of The Hockey Story, I found David's focus of class interesting. Immediately I think of race and gender when I think of hockey. It's a sport that typically excludes black people and women. I thought David could push students to think about multiple inequities at play... even beyond class, gender, and race. Age discrimination is a very empowering example of inequity when discussed among young people. It would also fit into their discussion of child labor.

We use Responsive Classroom for a social curriculum at my school and we have been (obnoxiously) trained to think, speak, and teach in positive ways. Traditionally, rules are often framed with "no" and "don't." Rather than create rules about how people should behave, they are told what not to do. At my school, we translate "no running" into "walk." "Don't talk while someone else is talking" changes to "listen while others are talking." It seems very simple, but it makes a huge difference. How can we expect students to know what they should actually do if we all we tell them is what they shouldn't do?

I thought of Responsive Classroom when I read about the anti-Nike posters and boycotts. How could David encourage his students to research and promote alternative brands that do not exploit children? I say research because (while I know about Nike, Hanes, Gap and a laundry list of other brand names that exploit children), I can't name many companies that I know for sure provide fair pay to their workers. In a way, negative attention is a promotion in itself. It's attention, whether negative or positive. David's class could focus their attention on the positive by making posters to inform people of the brands they should purchase. Rather than boycott companies like Nike, they could support the companies that do the right thing by purchasing a wearing those brands. Who knows, they could start a trend!

Critical Literacy- blog 1

I had two "Aha!" moments in chapter 1.  The first came with the explanation of the term children's literature used in throughout the book.  Vivian discusses the "tensions it creates" because of the misleading ownership suggested by the term.  There is not question about who creates children's art.  But the same assumption rarely holds true with children's literature.  Clarifying that this refers to literature for children rather than by children has a lot of implications.  I believe that children (and everyone, really) learn best if they have a model.  If children only read work by adults, they never have a true model of their own.  I think back to when I first starting writing.  In kindergarten, my  6th grade buddy would come down and scribe stories I would illustrate and dictate to her.  She would support me to write a sentence or two.  I don't have any of these stories, but I remember that they were often about princesses and maybe unicorns too.  I remember this because I modeled my own writing after all my favorite Disney romances: Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... all about  princesses getting rescued.  Even now, literature has been gendered.  Supposedly, girls want to read about princesses and playing dress-up and ponies (or unicorns!); boys read about sports and race cars and alligators (or maybe Even the types of animal books children read have been gendered,  falling into a passive/dominant dichotomy.  

My next "Aha!" moment came with the small section on rethinking balanced literacy (p. 16).  My school tends to take pride in utilizing the balanced literacy model as though it's the most progressive way to teach.  I have my own gripes with balanced literacy, but have never thought about the dangers of failing students with breadth and depth in their literacy instruction within this model.  Ultimately, this is what it comes down to.  I often feel like we don't do enough phonics with some students or comprehension work with others and find myself employing a differentiated approach to balanced literacy.  I don't characterize balanced literacy as doing "equal amounts of everything."  I see balanced literacy as giving students a variety of skills and strategies for accessing and interacting with texts.  But certainly, there lies a danger of only skimming the surface of everything and never digging deeper with anything.  It makes me think of the concept that a "jack-of-all-trades" is usually a master of none.

I have learned to teach in an expeditionary learn school.  So, even with the balanced literacy model, we definitely cover breadth and depth in our teaching.  Our approach to learning, in general, is multi-disciplinary.  We model making connections between subject areas and help them apply their learning to the real-world, rather than in an isolated and esoteric educational vacuum.  We believe in community action and using their learning to make a difference.  Service is a huge component of every expedition school-wide.  People at my school may never use the term critical literacy, but they do it everyday.  The main common thread between expeditionary learning and critical literacy is this notion of empowering students to become agents of their own learning.  We encourage students to investigate, interrogate, criticize, and cross-check what they read.  We also teach them to advocate for themselves and others and then take action to actually make a difference.

In the younger grades especially, students believe everything their teachers tell them.  You have to be so careful as a teacher because your students remember everything you say and hold it as the gospel truth.  But this happens with print too and continues through most people's adult life.  "Don't believe everything you read" has become cliche words of wisdom for a reason.