Reflections on a Course

On any given day during the school year, when I am walking to or from the subway, I encounter elementary students enjoying recess.  Young girls donned in red and gray school uniforms jump rope.  Some of the boys yell at each other as they throw a basketball down the street. I do not know any of them personally, but I wonder about them in the context of what I have studied in this course this semester.

I wonder if their parents read to them. I wonder if some of them are bilingual.  I wonder what socio-cultural factors influence how they are learning English. I wonder if they have caring teachers who are tuned in to their social and cultural needs.  I cannot help but wonder about them because I am more aware now than ever of how literacy is the foundation of everything that we do as individuals and as collective members of society. 

Certainly, it is apparent that many of the factors that influence language and literacy learning are directly related to the attitudes, beliefs, and values of parents and families.  I am reminded of Donny—in ethnographer Victoria Purcell-Gates’ In Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy,”—who sees little to no value in reading because his father does not read. 

Growing up in a family where books are readily available can change the trajectory of a child’s life. For this reason, I feel that literacy is a collective responsibility.  As I have said before, if we really want to give poor and minority children a real opportunity to break the cycle of poverty, policymakers, communities, businesses all need to invest in universal Pre-K and other early childhood programs.

Although it is important to recognize the socio-cultural factors involved in language and literacy learning, I feel that an ideological framework in which to view them is essential in order to promote social and political change.  Thus, Freire’s social justice view of literacy as a call to action is paramount to addressing the material, spiritual, and humanistic needs of oppressed groups.  In that sense, every teacher might be compelled to conduct a mini-ethnographic study to learn more about the unique needs of their students and to customize a curriculum to fit their needs.  Of course, this step would require to teachers to become learners—something that Shirley Brice Heath recommends in her book, Ways with Words.  If anything, we need more ethnographic studies of diverse communities by objective scholars so that we can learn more about the how literacy is exercised in the everyday lives of people.

Even though the gravitational pull towards a banking concept of education is forever present, we must resist it at every turn, for our society is in dire need of students who can think creatively, challenge systemic oppression and forge new ways of being in the world. Language and literacy certainly has a key role to play in that process.

           

In Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy

     “In Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy,” ethnographer Victoria Purcell-Gates presents a case study of a woman named Jenny who was functionally illiterate.  She wants to learn how to read so that she can break the intergenerational cycle of illiteracy that plagues her family.  For example, her son Donny manages to pass the first grade despite the fact that he cannot read at all. Jenny is really alarmed by this situation and consequently she asks the school system to make her son repeat the first grade, but they refuse.  He goes on to the first grade where he ends up lagging farther behind his classmates.

          Indeed it is Purcell-Gates who becomes a literacy sponsor for Jenny and her son, for she provides them with personal tutoring sessions at the local literacy center.  Jenny quickly picks up some words that reflect her environment. In other words, she can read signs and labels that she encounters in everyday life.

          On the other hand, Donny does not embrace reading in the same way that his mother does.  Thus, it is his father, not his mother, who is the bigger influence on his literacy practices.  Since Donny’s father does not read, his son sees little to no value in reader either.  Basically, reading does not fit into their Appalachian lifestyle.  Eventually, through a difficult path, Purcell-Gates is able to change Donny’s attitude about reading.

          Purcell-Gates study fits in with the larger concept of how socio-cultural factors influence language learning.  Her study fits in nicely with the other ethnographic study we have read this semester: Shirley Brice Heath’s “Ways with Words.”  Yet, Purcell-Gates indicts the public school system for allowing children like Donny to slip through the cracks.  Social promotion is a huge problem, and I know that policy-makers have responded to it by using more standardized testing and teacher evaluation as a way to address the fact that some students, particularly low-income, disadvantages, and minority children are low literacy students.  Purcell-Gates writes:

Jenny, Big Donny, Donny, and Timmy are representative of the urban Appalachians who live in poverty in the inner cities. They are members of a cultural minority that has brought its ways of being and of viewing the world from the mountains, where this culture has evolved over many generations. Outside of the mountains, however, their ways have been derided, scorned, and ridiculed. Their mountaineer dialect and accent invite contempt and/or derision from other urban dwellers. They fail to prosper or succeed. They suffer from familial breakdowns, poor health, tragic accidents, and unfulfilled dreams. They are poorly educated and alienated from the school system. They cling to their notion of home in the mountains: there they are real, not caricatures of failure. Along with their kin networks and friends they live in a world apart within their inner city. Escape down the interstate from an unfriendly, non-accepting urban community is essential and near at hand. City life makes no more sense to Jenny than she does to its urban mainstream. (38-39)

Purcell-Gates’ passage speaks to the social and cultural isolation that Jenny and her family have from the larger urban community in which they reside.  Just like today certain segments of the urban population are derided and marginalized, Jenny and her family are part of the white poor which are almost invisible to the mainstream media.

          When you get down to it, we cannot assume that students from these backgrounds come to school with the kind of exposure to language, words, and print that students from middle and upper-class families do.  Children from families with a higher socioeconomic status begin school with an advantage.  The question is how to even the playing field so that every child can have a chance to prosper in our country.  Some states and localities are moving towards universal-Pre K, but it has met resistance from some circles because of the cost associated with funding such programs. Others argue that some educators use the myth of helplessness instead of being accountable for the academic performance of disadvantaged children. 

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Transformative Learning and Critical Consciousness

            Reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is probably one of the most important works that I have read so far in the Language and Literacy program, for it provides an ideological framework for the kind of transformative learning that is necessary to help liberate students and teachers from oppressive power structures. Freire's claims are not for the faint at heart. He is a revolutionary and fearless. For anyone who is really interested in the liberatory aspects of education, Freire is a must-read. 

When you get down to it, learning to read and write, and thus raising the consciousness of illiterate students is really important work.  It’s political work. It’s subversive in that it helps foster “an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one’s context” (49).  In other words, literacy provides a mechanism for students to find the wherewithal within themselves to change their circumstances.  In that sense, Freire’s approach is conservative.  It relies on a kind of spiritual consciousness-raising that does not emanate from “the top down, but only from the inside out” (49).  Perhaps, this awakening is exemplified in Sherman Alexie’s “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me.”  In this short story, Alexie writes about his life as Indian boy and how learning to read shaped his entire world.  Living on an Indian reservation, Alexie was expected to fail and remain uneducated.  He writes, “A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indian and non-Indians alike.  I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children expected to be stupid” (17). Freire, in what I think is one of the most important points in his essay, discusses the need of the oppressor to silence others.  He says, “Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection” (88).  That’s why dialogue is so important. Teachers need to help students to find their voice, to call a spade a spade, and to help them to develop vocabulary that they can use to express their condition.

Yet, although Alexie grows up on an Indian reservation and is pressured to ignore school and learning, Alexie still strives to succeed, to save his own life.  Many of his fellow classmates flunk out and try to force him to do the same.  His classmates are dull and monosyllabic in class, while they are very lively and great storytellers once home.  Sherman Alexie tells of how he kept reading no matter where he was, and his only goal, his only motivation, was to save his life.  In this sense, Alexie’s fight to save his own life is in a sense an example of what Freire’s calls “problem-posing education”—a coming to terms with the effects of racism, poverty and annihilation and a willingness to fight vestiges of them.

In concluding his story, Alexie admits that he is surprised he became a writer.  He had never learned about writing novels or poetry, but merely read.  When he goes back to his reservation, he sees many children trying to be like him, trying to save their own lives, but also many of the same children ignoring learning. Near the end of the essay, he says that “I was trying to save my life” (Alexie 18).   Alexie’s theme of saving his life through reading and writing is so powerful. It is one of the “generative themes” in his essay which is essentially a reflection on what it means to be an Indian in today’s America.

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Teachers as Learners

If Shirley Brice Health’s mission was to understand how children’s language development is affected by the cultural communities they grow up in, she certainly has achieved her goal.  I mean she handles a potentially sensitive topic about how to increase the success of minority and working-class students in school by conducting an ethnographic study that records and interprets the language learning habits of two communities, one white and the other black. I think she deserves praise. 

Heath gives teachers and other educators an opportunity to become more intimately connected with how cultural differences affect language and literacy.  She demonstrates in her study “how the ethnographies of communication in Roadville and Trackton became instrumental for teachers and students bringing language and culture differences and discovering how to recognize and use language as power” (266). Basically Heath is suggesting that teachers bring their own biases into the classroom and that they often perpetuate the values and standards of institutional and corporate interests. 

I think it is really interesting how Heath places the onus on teachers to use her research findings as a basis for change their attitudes and expectations about the relevance of teaching reading and writing to Trackton and Roadville students who were not college-bound, but who instead were on a vocational track.  I think Health wants her readers to realize that language learning does not exist in a vacuum, that there are socio-cultural determinants for how people read and write. Her point is that teachers need to realize that students bring a history and a background to the classroom that needs to be respected, rather than shunned and denigrated. 

The folks in Trackton and Roadville instinctively know that if they want to one day leave Trackton and Roadville that literacy is a potential way to reach some semblance of economic and mainstream acceptance by the townspeople and the mill owners.  Yet, the sad reality is that Heath says neither children from Trackton nor Roadville are ready for school in the same way that the townspeople children.  She writes, “Thus it is the kind of talk, not the quantity of talk that sets townspeople children on their way in school.  They come with the skills of labelling, naming features, and providing narratives on items out of their contexts.” (352)  Reading Heath’s study, I am more convinced than ever that we as a society should be advocating for pre-school and universal pre-kindergarten.  If we want to really give poor, working-class, and disadvantaged children a leg-up, we need to fund these initiatives and respect their culture and backgrounds at the same time.

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Learning to Read: The Great Debate" & "The Shape of the Book

In Learning to Read: The Great Debate, Jeanne Chall argues that it is critically important to teach children phonics as a first step on their path to becoming good readers.  Chall’s stance is in opposition to the whole language approach to literacy which advocated teaching reading primarily through immersion and contextual clues rather than alphabetic decoding.  Instead, Chall claimed that phonics, not only produced better word recognition and spelling, but also made it easier for the child eventually to read with understanding. 

Another claim that Chall made is that phonics was especially effective for disadvantaged and poor children, who were not likely to live in homes surrounded with books or adults or with adults who could help them to learn to read.  Basically Chall is saying that knowing the alphabet and the awareness of the sounds that make up words are powerful predictors of reading success. 

I learned to read in the mid-1970s, and I was taught to read using phonics, along with vocabulary and lots of spelling drills. Before reading Chall’s article, I did not realize that teaching phonics had been so controversial.  Chall spends a great deal of time defending her advocacy for phonics because I think she saw the writing on the wall: the movement towards the whole language approach to literacy.

On the other hand, I can see why whole language advocates might have difficulties with accepting phonics instruction as desirable.  Phonics offers a piecemeal approach to literacy instead of placing reading and writing in some kind of socio-cultural context.  To me, phonics is a tool that can eventually get the emergent reader to a place where they can interpret and gain meaning from texts in various forms and contexts.

Yet, another way to books in context is by studying the shapes of them.  In “The Shape of the Book,” Manguel discusses how the changing shapes of books brought them from inside the library to the outside world where they became traveling companions.   To Manguel’s point, I cannot help but think about how technology, specifically tablets, has allowed readers to carry an almost a limitless amount of books with them no matter where they go.  This “outside world” that Manguel touts is a world of cloud storage and digital texts.  In a sense, these digital texts are amporphous—existing in the ethers of a cyberworld that is virtually unlimited and formless.

Manguel suggests that “publishers were producing books meant to be taken out into the open, books made specifically to travel. In nineteenth century England, the newly leisured bourgeoisie and the expansion of the railway combined to create a sudden urge for long journeys, and literate travelers found that they required reading material of specific content and size.” (141)  Basically, Manguel demonstrates how the socio-cultural context in which literacy is situated influences the shape, size, and form of the books and texts that we read, study, and analyze.