My Weary Query

[This post revised 11/07/07]

Back in June I ordered the texts for this class, and although I had intentions of reading some of them in advance, my busy summer ensured that the books remained neatly stacked. But by July I was drawn to this book specifically. I was TAing a course called Literacy Acquisition. Eleven of the 25 students were Black and members of the UT football team. Their admission to the university was made possible by a generous academic scholarship in exchange for their prowess on the field. While their performance on the field was amazing, their performance in class was poor, and their resistant attitude and speech made me feel uncomfortable because it deviated so far from the identity of “good student” so typical of most students here at UT.

Several of the Black students in this class displayed all the characteristics of the “cool pose” that Tatum describes on page 29:

This pose, a ritualized form of masculinity, uses certain behavior, scripts, physical posturing, and carefully crafted performance to convey a strong impression of pride, strength, and control. The cool pose is a coping mechanism to hide self-doubt, insecurity, and inner turmoil, and can be observed in such things as dress (for example, beltless pants hanging below the waist), manner of talk (signifying, rapping), and behavior (high fives, special handshakes, forms of greeting).

The pose these students enacted was so far removed from an academic stance that it seemed a deliberate attempt to undermine the very institution that offered them a “free” education. These students were resisting schooling and the academic discourse college requires, perhaps because adopting it would cast them White and undermine the (dis)position of being “Othered”.

My efforts to interact among many of these students during small group activities was met with varying reactions. Some appeared surprised that a TA would attempt to engage them in a conversation around course concepts during small group activities. Others refused to talk. Some were clearly annoyed that I even attempted a conversation. Frequently, the banter within these groups was street talk, a clear disregard for academic discourse, and most remained silent during whole group discussion. Why? What was behind this resistance? Would participating in a more scholarly way align them with Whiteness? Or if someone secretly wanted to perform an academic discourse, would doing so threaten his in-group status?

It was a challenge and always uncomfortable. There were small breakthroughs, though, especially when we used a Ruby Payne quote that perpetuated a stereotype of people in poverty we knew to be inaccurate, but thought might be useful for provoking discussion. The quote said something to the effect that people in poverty do not know that they have the choice to overcome it—-they need only know the “hidden rules” for escaping poverty’s devastating grip. Since some of these football players came from low SES communities, they took offense to Payne’s (lack of) analysis and spoke of the ways in which economic, transportation, and educational constraints kept their hard working loved ones in poverty. Essentially they expressed that even when people in poverty know the “hidden rules” of the middle and upper class, that knowledge does little for helping people overcome generational poverty and does nothing to fix a social system that perpetrates it.

I was struck how this quote provoked heated discussion among those students who’d previously been so aloof and resistant. It was (perhaps not surprisingly) a White woman who couldn’t speak accurately about an issue deeply embedded in their life experience that made them speak-up.

We needed literature that would help us talk about the underlying institutional and social structures that have oppressed certain groups and use it to reflect upon and name the situations some of these students faced. While I think English classes should use literature to address the issues important to particular populations, educators in other disciplines are somewhat constrained unless they re-conceptualize a course for the particular students who enter it. Should we do so at the undergrad level? If so, how?

My limited knowledge of the experiences of these Black students prevents me from understanding the resistant behavior I witnessed. I simply felt it was inappropriate, and shouldn’t be passed of as, “Oh, that is just their culture” (as if that makes all actions permissible in a classroom). But still I felt that these students needed experiences that could help them critique the structures that may have oppressed them, and help them envision themselves in a profession other than professional sports. These narrow depictions that the media feeds of Black adolescent males as mostly athletes are problematic since most will not obtain stardom in that capacity. More depictions of Black men as working professionals in medicine, engineering, law, and education are needed to offset the current overemphasis on sports as the most viable way to make something of oneself.

Soon after the course was finished, one of football players in the class was arrested. He wasn’t the first. There had already been a long list of felonies committed by members of the UT football team. This, too, was a topic of angry conversation I overheard in and outside of class since, apparently, many of their peers were hung-up in court proceedings. Attitudes toward law enforcement among these football players was overwhelmingly negative.

[Footnote: While the actions of some players have, indeed, been illegal and warrant prosecution, recent and unconfirmed accounts of racial profiling and the knee-jerk reactions among policemen in the APD should certainly be cause for alarm among all local citizens. This was, in fact, part of the conversation I overheard among some athletes -- it was a conversation that might have been more productive if we had dared help them connect it to the course content].

If we are to create conditions that may facilitate a change in attitude and identity among resistant students among all ethnicities, educators need to know more about the social ills that underlie so much of the anger and resistance among particular populations. Tatum’s book is an important beginning for thinking about how this might happen, and how we might (as Randy mentioned in class) make our classrooms centers for the study of the students who occupy them.

Unless we work to address address behavior that is anti-schooling, many Black adolescent males will continue to be constructed in statistics and other media as delinquent.

I’ve rarely put myself in the shoes of another to the extent I did when reading Push. It had to be the deeply honest, simple, and personal prose that made it impossible for me not to connect with the narrator, Precious. Her story reminded me of the power of personal narrative, that telling our stories can be a way of healing, developing voice, understanding the self, conveying self to others, and finding a community in which one’s voice matters. Many times throughout the text, I linked the power of personal narrative to Friere’s notion of conscientization, but mostly I was drawn into Precious’ story so completely I found that being cognizant of my reading process was a difficult undertaking.

To some degree, location and time mattered. When I began reading the book, I was at an elementary school in between observations of apprentice teachers. The coordinator for our cohort was also on site, so I found myself somewhat tense. Should he find me reading, I’d feel obligated to give an account of my time and my observations. I knew he’d rather me help the apprentice teachers monitor children during the reading times, which is what I normally do when I’m in between observations. So I felt uneasy while reading on-site, but then I’d think, “If he were in my place, he’ d be multitasking, too.” At the school, I found that I was concerned with pacing my reading. I’d be like, “Okay, I’ll read until the end of page such and such, then I’ll do something else on-site that makes me look productive.”

While reading, certain people in my life came to mind. Precious reminded me of a little Black girl, Tea’, who I’ve worked with the past few weeks. Both have spunk, and impatience for people who ask known-answer questions. Both respond to indirect speech acts with frustration, and are uncooperative when people don’t say what they mean. “Tea’’”, is like that,” I thought. “She has no patience for adults who don’t deal with her squarely.”

Sometimes the book made me reflect on my practices as a teacher—specifically, I thought, “In what ways am I like the teachers Precious is fed-up with? In what ways does my privilege cause me to be unresponsive or unsympathetic to underprivileged children?” So there was some sense of comparing myself with other educators portrayed in the book.

In general, I’d a hard time separating my educator-self from the reading, so issues in education were salient, and caught my attention. Some of the circumstances Precious faced at school stood out as possible topics for a class I’m teaching this semester. When Precious starts writing under Ms. Rain’s tutelage, I thought, “This is an excellent example of why we should value meaning over convention when children are learning to write” and I began wondering if an excerpt from this book might incite class discussion around invention vs. convention.

Other moments made me think of issues that some apprentice teachers are facing. For instance, when Precious shouted at her math teacher, I began thinking that discipline problems are often the result of deeper issues lurking beneath the surface. For example, Precious talks back to her math teacher because she doesn’t want to reveal that she can’t read. “What a strong teaching point for pre-service teachers,” I thought to myself. So being a teacher affected how I responded to the book; I found it hard to read without envisioning activities that could help me clarify concepts related to emergent literacy and student behavior.

After fifty pages or so, I became so immersed in the book that I just wanted to know what would happen next. The book became a deeply emotional experience. Sometimes short, simple sentence would make me cry: “Push, Precious, you are going to have to push.” Tears came whenever Precious relayed optimism and self-perseverance right after conveying accounts so horrible, I wondered how she could go on living. Then, I’d laugh at her frankness: “I pretend he [the math teacher] is my husband and we live together.” But mostly, this book made me feel terribly privileged, and made me understand that I will never know what is going on in a person’s life, so I better not be so quick to judge.

Overall, I’d an aesthetic stance when reading, particularly because the book evoked in me an emotional response, and got me contemplating the enormous power and responsibility adults have in raising and educating a child. It also helped me see beyond myself, and more clearly into the life of another. Precious reminded me that even in the darkest hour, in the midst of evil, there’s still good in the world. I found that comforting, and took strength from her ability to keep pushing even despite deep wounds, and a future that will no doubt be difficult, but at least endured with love for herself and others.

Most of my free time this summer was spent observing and interviewing actors involved in various productions around town. I was interested in literacy events occurring in theatre rehearsals, and teasing-out possible connections between identity and the production of a multi-modal text. I interviewed 18 people ranging in ages 14-48. Their stories are very compelling. They suggest that the modes of expression necessary for the production of a dramatic text often establish a space that suspends enforcement of gender and sexuality norms—norms that have traditionally been policed by school administration, teachers, and even peers. I’ve started wondering if such policing can infringe upon a more aesthetic orientation toward text and composition in classrooms.

In Rosenblatt’s view, “The reader who adopts the aesthetic stance can pay attention to all of the elements activated within him by the text, and can develop the fusion of thought and feeling, of cognitive and affective, that constitute the integrated sensibility.”

If teenage boys do indeed take an aesthetic stance toward a text in school, I wonder if prevailing gender norms may cause some of them to self-censor their response?

In my pilot study, which occurred outside of a school, informants described an aesthetic stance in their encounters with texts, whether it be with print or a dramatization. This stance was part and parcel of analyzing a script and interpreting a character, but few of them felt they experienced such engagement in language arts classrooms. Their aesthetic readings mostly occurred within a community that shared similar sensibilities, where the active construction of a character via the text was key for establishing in-group status and increased responsibilities within the community.

I asked one of the actors how he creates such believable and compelling characters that locals remember years after watching him perform. He said:

It comes from the text itself. I like to read the script several times. Just by reading it, I get my lines down, and all the other stuff can come through. But it is mostly the gut instincts I have with the initial reading. It is like when you are reading a novel. Each person has a certain sound, and when I read the script there will already be a way that person sounds in my head, and then I try to emulate what that was. That’s initially where the sound comes from. It is based on the initial feeling I had when reading.

Using the sounds and images inspired from a text to create a character requires an aesthetic stance, and to draw on Rosenblatt’s metaphor, is a process akin to playing the piano. When reading aesthetically, we are not unlike a musician who actively interprets notes, and who inserts something of her personality and artistic sensibility into the piece, even as she is bound to the notes on paper. Like the musician, the reader takes and active role attending to the personal and qualitative elements of the text, takes time to study and appreciate the sound of the language, the feeling a particular word conjures, and relates the work to life experience.

Yet so much of reading in classrooms is efferent reading. It is reading to gain specific knowledge from the text, usually for the intent of getting something done, when there’s immediacy to the task, like finding a correct answer. In this sense, the text is only useful insofar as it provides needed information. Once obtained, the reader tosses it aside like a dirty napkin—it serves a limited purpose for fulfilling an immediate need. Sadly, even great works of literature can be read this way if students are motivated only insofar as gaining just enough knowledge to pass the class.

What’s quality?

Last week we talked about what constitutes quality literature, which conversations matter, and who gets to decide. Maybe Rosenblatt helps us think deeper about these questions. Maybe she’d say quality literature is that which provides students transactions with text that produce an educative experience. This might involve gaining a clearer perspective of the self and others, finding one’s voice through identification with characters and situations, and making sense of one’s reality so that the self is strengthened and able to cope.

In this respect, I wonder if transactions with literature are akin to Vygostky’s zone of proximal development, which focuses on the role of talk in guiding a learner to a more advanced level of problem solving. Surely literature extends one’s thinking, and can help a learner articulate the inner-self to the outer world in ways that advance one’s state of being.

Maybe what constitutes “quality” literature is best determined by its potential to transform the reader into a more evolved state—either by understanding the self more clearly or expanding one’s empathy for persons and communities foreign to one’s experience.

Educative or un-educative?

Not all transactions with text are educative. I see so much narcissism whenever I watch TV (especially reality programming). Some characters on these shows are so superficial. I often wonder what effect certain TV shows, magazines, and books have in reinforcing shallowness: exterior over the interior beauty, form over substance, competition over collaboration. And yet even as I write this, I’m reminded how much I’m entertained by pop culture, and how much I appreciated MTV growing-up, and reading Stephen King & Dean R. Koontz novels, and other things some people would call trash.

Textual Influences

I think our transactions with various media create something of who we are. Some people oppose textual influences outside their world view and moral stance. The tendency is to sanction text that replicates the culture, and censor those that fragment it. People become fearful of alien influences to the culture. However, this may just be a neurotic tendency. When people encounter a text that doesn’t conform to their belief system, I’m not sure that they’re that easily brainwashed—they’re more likely to reject it (maybe this is even a biological principle…the body rejects certain foreign substances??)

My blog entry on 4/22: A Hyjacked Performance of “Invincible Summer” regards a high school group that protests a live performance because of the profanity it contained.

Perhaps we are most influenced by the texts we seek according to our own need and purpose—we are most influenced by literature that speaks to something inside us, that gets us seeking-out encounters with similar texts around issues relevant to us at the time. To draw on Applebee’s thesis, maybe we are even more influenced when literature is integrated around conversation.

Grand narratives

It’s interesting how literature can either uphold or dismantle conceptions of people; it can either crystallize or chip away at grand narratives that shape how we think about institutions and other people. For example, Rosenblatt explains how literature has reinforced the conceptions of women as subservient. It has even perpetrated notions of romantic love over the more callous reality that people often marry for practical reasons akin to survival: economic security, status, or having someone to help with work. In fact, the conflict between romantic love and social systems (i.e., class, race, culture, etc.) is still a plot device in many stories.

Perhaps not unlike TV and other media, literature can socialize the reader into dominant constructions of people and situations that become archetypes or story lines that replicate the culture. But when ideas or people represented therein are alien to the culture, literature can be controversial since it disrupts familiar ways of knowing and being.

Students as critics?

Maybe we should cultivate in students the ability to develop discriminating minds, and decide for themselves what to think about a work without telling them how to think, and help them to become critics of their encounters with texts.

I like Applebee’s thesis that we might design curriculum around domains for conversation, and then help students enter these conversations. Yet so many conversations about curriculum happen outside the classroom, apart from students.

In the classrooms I observe, learning is decontextualized and the conversation, if any, is tightly regulated. Mostly teachers explain how to complete a worksheet on isolated bits of knowledge—knowledge that’s removed from any purpose other than to satisfy institutional requirements. In learning “how to do school” students are not reading and writing to get things done in the world. They aren’t talking about the issues that may inspire them to read or write with their own social aims and purposes.

Ironically, children come into the literacy of their home and community quite naturally even before they enter school. This is mainly because they are learning to participate in the conversation of home and their social groups. Their literacy skills develop as they participate in self-sponsored literacy events. Schools, though well intended, can derail students’ natural progression into literacy by imposing something artificial like Bobbit’s list of objectives, which Applebee mentions several times.

Bobbit’s objectives are a list of tasks that students should be able to do in real-life. Although this sounds like a noble task, one problem is that these tasks are removed of their function, purpose, and context. I’ve read his list of objectives —there are several hundred of them. They’re classified by language activities, health activities, citizenship activities, social studies, spare-time activities, keeping mentally fit, religious activities, and parental activities.

They read like a manual of how to be in the world. And that’s the other big problem. Instead of valuing difference, it works toward achieving normality—which, of course, is defined by his (narrow) view of the world. My impression is that his objectives don’t reflect a plurality of experience, but assume all children should have the same set of experiences. Difference is pushed aside. And by today’s standards, his is a heteronormative perspective and projects experiences impossible for people of different cultures and orientations to achieve without loosing something of who they are.

Has much has really changed? I’m not sure. Deviating too far from curricular traditions is often contested. There’s always a tension between tradition and marginalized voices that desire representation within it.

A few days ago, there was a report on CNN concerning the appropriateness of an educational video about diversity in families. The video acknowledged the existence of same-sex parents, along side other representations of parents. Some were mixed-raced, some blind and deaf, and some were more typical representations of parents and families. The video sparked heated debate. Here is the initial report before CNN picked-up the story. It was broadcast several months ago on a local news station.

In some ways the debate is what’s important for learning because it ignites conversation. In Applebee’s view, curriculum isn’t a matter of telling students what they must believe, but should strive to “introduce students to diversity and multiple perspectives, seeking not consensus but understanding difference, the willingness to listen, and the ability to disagree.”

I recognize that some topics are not appropriate for young children, but does it follow that we deny that some children have two moms or dads, especially when they display pictures or talk about their families during class? The silence may teach the children something sinister, that there’s something to be ashamed of.

Certainly at the secondary levels, debate and conversation around what is included/excluded within the curriculum is healthy for learning. It may well be that everyone doesn’t agree, and that’s okay as long as students are willing to listen, talk, and read about others experiences. Doing so can be helpful in refining a fixed point of view. If the curriculum is integrated around domains of conversation, it’s possible to revisit issues over time, and see how attitudes and beliefs change through exposure to multiple texts and participation in conversations that allow for more sophisticated understandings of people and our world.

Jeesh, I’ve forgotten how much time it takes to prepare for teaching a 3hour class. I sit here looking outside with a severe case of the Sunday afternoon blahs, thinking I’d like to be at the Austin City Limits festival, or even swimming at the pool, or watching TV with friends (not that there’s ever much good on these days).

Instead I am putting the finishing touches on a Powerpoint, gathering up class materials, re-reading some book chapters, and thinking through the activities. The thing is, if I were doing all the things I said I’d like to be doing, then I’d want to be back inside preparing for school. But if I stay inside preparing for school all the time, I have few stories to connect with the lesson/or curriculum.

Now that I’m back teaching, I’m living life with a class in mind — it’s not unlike living life with a major paper in mind. Bravo to anyone who teaches full time, and goes to graduate school!