My Weary Query

I recently visited my sister and her boyfriend, and they showed me this lovely little video. Its apparently been circulating the net for some time. I think it’s so cute, and from a pedagogical perspective, useful for thinking about language acquisition. Next time I teach literacy acquisition, I may have my students analyze it in terms of how language and dialect is acquired in our environment.  I love it! 

My virtual presence, at least on this blog, has been null. I regret my neglect when I see so many insightful others. Stephanie Jones’ blog (http://engagedintellectual.wordpress.com/), for instance, compels me to write about educational research I’m doing and my field experiences in classrooms. Much of her research in schools takes a social class perspective, underlying structures that perpetuate differences in education and literacy along class lines, and how this impacts education. She goes far beyond superficial notions of poverty that are perpetrated by Ruby Payne which have infiltrated public schools. I feel, along with many others, Payne’s work limits the way teachers think about and respond to children who are low SES (see Rethinking Schools, http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/fram212.shtml). We need more research like Stephanie’s that provides a more nuanced perspective of poverty and its effect on children’s dispositions. 

I’m prepping for doctoral candidacy exams this semester, so a lot of my free time is pointed there. Even with that looming, it’s scary how easily distracted I can be.  I’ve a little voice that says “Study! Study!” — and another that says “Play! Play!”   Then there’s a reoccurring dream of not attending a class (I’m strangely back in high school facing Ms Carter), and there’s no way I can pass, get credit, and graduate. Could this be pointing toward a growing ambivalence toward certain institutional requirements? The test itself is a necessary evil spread over three weeks–Part A & B are written and timed. Part C is an oral exam, where my committee members grill me on particular concepts. While I’m concerned, and want to do well, I’m not too worried. I want to jump through this hoop, get started on my dissertation proposal, and hopefully write more regular posts here.   

Warmly,
Treavor  

In yo face praise for teachers. I love it!

I admire Gaughan’s willingness to tackle sensitive issues like sexism, racism, censorship, and sexuality in the classroom. He’s brave asking his students to make their tacit prejudices explicit. Honestly, I’d be uncomfortable facilitating discussion around such provocative issues. This isn’t to say that I’d ignore them, but I’d want to think about how they can be addressed in much less an “us vs. them” mentality. Annamary had such an excellent point in class. It seemed like some of these issues can be explored through literature throughout the year. Maybe they don’t necessitate compartmentalized units of study, but rather, we might develop a heuristic that helps students read all texts (e.g., movies, books, pop media, and the news) critically, especially in regard to how people are positioned and represented by others who have the power to determine what we consume. The questions Randy provided in class seem powerful for helping students read texts with a critical eye.

Gaugan’s book also got me thinking of how I’d respond to students’ off-color and offensive remarks regarding race, class, and sexuality. Certainly they need to be addressed. We often ask students to share their inner thoughts, and to write about their worlds, but what do we do when these are chock full of ignorance and hate? In this regard, I think Gaughan is a fine example of a teacher who questions the assumptions laden in students’ talk and writing. He saw both as essential for developing more sophisticated understandings of others. Here again, literature plays an important role in complicating prior understandings of those unlike ourselves. I like the idea of reading stories that challenge prejudice and that counters speech pregnant with innuendo.

I especially liked the idea of having multiple texts for students to pick from, and forming “book clubs” around those texts. Other activities like role-playing characters from books seem worthwhile for considering multiple points of view. I heartedly agree with Gaughan that we should reconsider how we teach English, and give students experiences that prepare them for the plurality of people and cultures they will likely encounter. I’m not sure, however, that bundling up sensitive issues in units of study is the best or only way to get this done, but I’m grateful for his account, and admire his stance in addressing these issues head-on. After all, they are always present in every classroom. They are always felt, if not necessarily spoken. It is a matter of making them a visible part of the curriculum.

Gee’s chapter on self-fashioning revealed some interesting differences in how teenagers narrate their lived experiences. The rich kids tended to distance themselves from their narratives. They often narrated experiences as if they were an outside observer, and often spoke of personal experiences in terms of how they might pay off later in their lives. Their narratives had a sense of trajectory, and revealed how they leverage experience for future opportunity.

The low SES kids foreground themselves in their narratives. Their accounts were more interactional. They conveyed what they and others said or did without taking a step back to interpret their experience, or frame it in ways that would provide them greater status.

I’m not sure if these youth are conscious of the positions they enact when narrating, though I suspect that the rich kids are probably more aware of how they need to talk and know when to take-up certain positions to gain status among the researchers.

Reading this chapter, it becomes apparent, yet again, that the divide between rich and poor is intertwined with language, culture, and identity.

Why does this matter? Gee helps me think about why these differences are important. In the new economy, were people have many jobs and acquire a diverse set of skills across a lifetime, it is necessary that we narrate our experiences in such a way they they emphasize the skills and identities required for new markets. So often a new job is just a stopping ground for gaining new skills. A job, in this respect, might be considered the quality school that situates learning in a context where skills and knowledge are acquired in doing authentic tasks that have social and economic returns. The repertoire of experiences we build over time allows us to “cut and paste” experiences, or to interpret them in ways that fit the diverse and changing needs of today’s workplace.

The rich teens in this study are already oriented toward fashioning themselves as a certain kind of person—one who’s ivy league bound. They make sure their narratives capitalize on lived experience (in and out of school), which they fashion to suit certain purposes (e.g., impress the researcher who’s conducting the interview, get in a ivy league school, etc.).

The low SES kids do not have equal access to experiences or social groups that would might help socialize them into into the kinds of self-fashioning the rich kids perform. Although all people (regardless of social class) act and talk in certain ways to get things we want, the rich kids know what narrative positions will win them access to the best schools and the best jobs.

I don’t know much about the theory of self-fashioning, but Gee makes it clear that it has economic/social rewards. Companies today care about creating and selling an image as much as they do the product. They are all about fashioning a product that appeals to the diverse range of identities that are out there. Just today when visiting Amazon.com, I found myself browsing books that the Amazon website had recommended for me based off my previous purchases. The site fashions itself to the customer’s needs/wants–even the customer’s identity (in my case, it recommends books appeal to my identity as an educator).

Of course this is hardly new—many web sites do this. But what I think most interesting is simply this:  Just as these interfaces are adaptive to our needs/wants/identities, we (the worker) must fashion ourselves to the  needs/wants/identity of the companies we aspire to work for. People are required now more than ever to fashion themselves in ways that their skills meet the particular demands of a workforce.

Gee says that we are becoming “Shape Shifting Portfolio People”. I think his article is telling us that the rich kids are already learning how to fashion themselves for future experience, while the poor kids are (once again) are further removed from the resources and cultural capital that would socialize them into a way of narrating experience that might give them clout. Many are left only with the limited experiences that public schools provide. Unfortunately, the basic skills so many low-performing schools impart are not enough to help students become competitive in the workplace.

[This post was substantially revised and edited on 11/7/07]

We see in the Moje and Dillon chapter how students occupy multiple subject positions in the classroom. These identities aren’t stable, but fluid, constantly shifting. I find it interesting that these identity formations in the classroom might be based, in part, on the classroom structure (how school is done) and how teachers position (or perceive) their students as learners.

For example, it’s interesting to think that Heather’s enactment of “complacent student” may have been formed by her teacher’s orientation toward whole-class activity and recitation-based lecture. Had the course provided more authentic lab-based investigations where the outcomes were mostly unknown, she might have enacted the identity of inquiring scientist.

Yet even when students are given active-learning inquiries that require collaboration among peers during problem solving, enacting the identity of “scientist” is undermined when students take up other identities perhaps to fulfill more immediate, social purposes like maintaining status among peers. We see this in Carolyn’s case. Although she wanted to be a scientist, and valued the lab sessions, her enactment of other, non-scientific identities (some hyper feminine) during dissections, caused her teacher to view her as “an impetuous young lady who was afraid of her nails touching a grasshopper.” In these two examples, we see that classroom structure (in this case direct and inquiry based methods) can facilitate students’ enactment of certain identities while simultaneously restrict others.

The chapter makes me think about the interview I conducted this summer with youth who participated in local theatre groups. The open structure of a performance space allowed for the enactment of identities not typically valued in school or even at home. Both these latter spaces are tightly regulated by authorities–teachers and parents–who regulate who kids can be (for better or worse).

According to one Black girl, age 15, the theatre allows her a space where she can be herself without conforming to normalized ways of being that are required of her school and family. Here is a short expert from the interview.

Her: [In the theatre] You learn how to compromise what you think is normal. I mean what is normal anyway? Normalcy is overrated.

Me: What do you mean by that?

Her: Being normal to me just means like being like everyone else in the crowd. I don’t follow anybody in the crowd. Crowds scare me. I am more of a lone ranger. I am one who likes to walk alone, sit alone. But I also like being around people. And I prefer to be around [theatre people] than the people at my house. They are more accepting than your own family.

Me: That’s interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about that because other people have mentioned it, too. What do you mean?

Her: Okay, okay. Like, I am not the type of person to go and just sit quietly. I’m talkative. So [theatre] people come around me, they don’t really care that you are talkative. They don’t tell me “Hey, shut-up.” They tell you, “Hey, you talk a lot.” I’m like, “Yeah, I know.” They are like, “Cool.”

It’s more like that. People in your family are like “You need to learn when to talk. You need to learn when to shut-up.” My step-dad is 48, I love him, but I feel as if he doesn’t really get me because he is not really into the same stuff I am into.

You know being 14 and Black most people think “hey you are suppose to be into hip-hop and all that stuff.” I listen to a lot of heavy metal. I listen to a lot of rock. My best friend is gay. . .

Me: So in the theatre there is a sense you can be who you want to be?

Her: Yeah, without people judging you, critiquing you. Except for the director. They always do that!

We see in this excerpt a teenager who is allowed to enact identities in the theatre that she is unable to perform at school or her home.

So what?

I can think of a few reasons why this might be important. If we value learning environments that engage the mind and body, environments that foreground the social construction of knowledge and affirm multiple ways of being in the world, then perhaps we should examine the spaces youth occupy out of school. Perhaps we should investigate the types of literacy acquired within these spaces and the purposes for which students put these literacies to use. Maybe such an inquiry will help us determine if literacy and identity formations occurring in these spaces affect student achievement both in and out of school.

Do literacy practices situated within the communities students enter outside the schoolhouse prepare them for the “real world” in ways that are more affirming and relevant than the traditional classrooms ? I think it’s a question worth investigating. . .