Rayford's Song set us thinking about teaching and the power that goes with the profession. It elicited a strong emotional response from many of us, including me. By making the distinction between Rayford's discourse as deficient vs. the discourse of the powerful, the teacher effectively silences Rayford. Instead, she could have used it as a "teaching moment" or just casually modeled the Standard English pronunciation and let it be. The poem reminded me of a Harry Chapin song, Flowers are Red. Similarly, a student is punished for being creative instead of realistic, and is eventually crushed into submission by his teacher. It has the same sad poignancy to it as Rayford's Song.
The way that Rayford spoke also reminded me of a time, before I had children, when I actually had time to read. I noticed in several novels by Dickens that the poor, illiterate characters spoke in a way that was often very difficult to understand. I realized at that time that reading and speaking are intimately connected as well—if you don't read, you rely only on hearing for the pronunciation of words. When you read, however, you learn to adjust your misunderstandings of the words. Since, as the commercials go, you are judged by the words you use (verbally), reading becomes a vital tool to enter into the world of the powerful.
While we may not be tasked with teaching fundamental reading (decoding, phonics, etc.), we will need to mentor our students, showing them out to read within our content. To do so, we need to model our students, who are our reading apprentices. And to do so, we have to reveal to our students how we think about reading – metacognition. Speaking of which, I personally found the metacongnition exercise to be very difficult and distracting. Perhaps if I were to read something fresh, or from another content area, the experience would have been different.
Schoenbach's article contained a framework to understand how to model reading skills to students. It also had, hidden within it, several strategies for helping special education students and for those students who are not from the "culture of power," though it did not highlight them specifically. Creating "Social Stories" to help students cope with ambiguities within predictable events is a good strategy. Helping to identify the goal of a reading prior to giving the assignment will help students focus on the important details and to learn how to self-establish goals as well. Using a variety of text types (including visuals and manipulatives) can help all learners. Finally, active engagement in reading, whether it be note-taking, post-its, or strategies to build schematics, can help a diverse classroom of students.
I do wonder how we incorporate this into our daily lessons. Will we be able to structure our entire courses with literacy as a central tenant? Or will this take years of practice before much of what we are learning this semester to come into practice?
When we first start teaching, we may be concentrating on creating a classroom that is conducive to learning, with a focus on classroom management and just getting through each day. Hopefully we will be able to at least occasionally grasp at opportunities to use what we've learned to really enrich our students, to facilitate real understanding, and to create lifetime learners.
I nominate Al to be one of next week's Sherpa.
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5 comments:
Hi Jack - Great post. Here's Harry Chapin singing that song on You Tube. And explaining that he wrote it in response to a report card comment.
Anita
After reading Jack’s post, I thought of a story presented in another education course at Pace - ED 630 Human Development in the School Context. Written in the form of a fable, the story ilustrates how schools can impose academic standards that stifle, rather than cultivate creativity and learning among students. Here’s the link: http://www.janebluestein.com/handouts/animal.html
Oh, that's a funny little story, Al - I just sent it to three preschool teachers and a fellow school board member. Thanks, Anita
Al, Good story! Thanks for sharing.
On the ride home after last week's class I was thinking about thinking about reading, and decided to. lol
What I asked myself was: under what conditions am I a motivated reader and how do I know that I am motivated? In thinking about this I realized that becoming a Father has severely curtailed my motivation to read and has simultaneously provided impediments to reading. I now do virtually all of my work in the mornings and afternoons before my 5 year old gets home from kindergarten, while her sister is at daycare (3 days a week). I am generally well rested and can satisfy my own needs without being interrupted by my little charmers.
I also recognized that I am very clearly motivated to read when I am willing to pick up a dictionary to find definitions for unfamiliar words. I will often let the first word slide and try to glean the meaning from the rest of the sentence. I will sometimes get away with this for the second word, but from there on in I know that I'm motivated to read when I (grudgingly) grab the big, fat American Heritage Dictionary and start looking up definitions.
So what motivates you, and how can you tell that you are motivated to read/learn?
Jack and all - Thanks so much for the initial post here, Jack, that stimulated so much thinking. You did a great job carrying the load from last week to this week and beyond ... I appreciate the link to the Chapin song (with which I was unfamiliar) and Anita's video link. Always nice to hear the words, too. I am thinking about lask part of your question - I don't think that integrating literacy into content areas happens overnight. We introduce a lot of things here; my main goal here is to develop your attitudes, beliefs, and values towards seeing the ways excellent literacy integration connects on a fundamental level with understanding and expressing yourself well in your content areas and how all of that connects with fundamental issues about identity and power that are cross-cutting to all subject areas. My hope is to expose you to various theories and strategies but there is no expectation that all of these would be integrated in any one year - I think that would be way too much. Some will take an approach to do this very intentionally and utilize the types of strategies in the Stephens and Brown book on a regular basis; some will utilize those ideas and others on a more ad hoc basis. Still others will take the "big projects" approach (which is what the content literacy proposal is meant to address - more on that later). I think that all of those are important and acceptable. And I do think that it takes years of experience - it is a process and this is a start.
And start we must ... Paul reminds us here to start with ourselves so, in response, I think that what motivates me to read is certainly a connection with the purpose of the piece and probably some inherent confidence I have in my ability to figure it out. Like Paul and others here, reading for pleasure is a rarity these days ... but whenever I squeeze it in, it is a glorious thing. Several years ago, I read a book called "Mosaic of Thought: Teaching comprehension in a reader's workshop" by Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmermann. It was geared more towards elementary teachers but, as a high school teacher, I learned so much. What was particularly compelling was how it made me recognize some of the shortcomings in my own reading, some of the ways I am "less active" than I think am - it explained a lot, why I often found myself in conversations and less able to cite or refer specifically to things. It changed the way I started reading and thinking about reading. Thinking about what motivates me to read got me to reflect on that book.
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