Category Archives: Reading Response

The Disconnect Between School and Community

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I believe one of the major issues facing our nation’s schools at this time is the outstanding disconnect between schools and the communities in which they exist.  Educators too often ignore the fact that a major portions of a students learning occurs outside of the classroom, in the home and in the community.  In order for teachers to succeed in fully educating students who are not simply products of their schools, they need to understand and engage with the effects that communities have on education.  Jessica Singer and Ruth Shagoury presented a spectacular way to engage students with their community in their article.  By viewing education and learning as political acts that are affected by issues of equality and social justice, students are able to partake in learning that focuses on their own homes and the spaces where they live.  In this way the school is connected to the community and learning that occurs in the community compliments what occurs in school.

In addition to bringing together the school and the community, learning that focuses on issues of social justice, allows students to make a choice as to what to study while still mastering the necessary literacy skills.  In this way students are more positive about the learning experienced and are much more engaged.  Focusing on social justice allows all students to deeply involve themselves in the world around them and begins to close the gap between the school and the community.

Treating a second language as a second language

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While reading the Harper and Jong article on Misconceptions about English Language Learners, the overall idea of treating a second language learner as a first really resonated with me. Of course it does not make sense to treat both the same, but what is the solution here? As Calvin noted in an earlier post, the article does not offer much in this respect. However, on a basic level, why is it that when a non-English speaker is trying to learn English in school, we treat it so differently from an English speaker trying to learn, say, French or Spanish? I guess the easy answer is that there is more pressure in the former situation. There is an urgency around getting ELLs up to grade level in all courses, and up to testing level. But if we disregard pressure as a culprit, is there perhaps another idea present–the idea that English is the norm, and that the onus is on ELL’s to meet that norm. This is not intended as a negative generalization; there are many wonderful educators who do not take this view. But it is certainly something I have seen in classrooms where “ENGLISH!”  is the frequent command to students chatting in any other language.

On that note, I wonder if there is a way we could treat English more like any other second language. When middle schoolers learn French or Spanish, they are not taught at their grade level in that language, even if they have had some slight prior exposure. Nor are all their other classes taught in that language. They begin with the basics and progress towards fluency. I realize this model does not work for foreign language speakers in an English speaking world. However, I’m thinking about an experience one of my friends had at a later age, when she studied in Germany last year. While there, she took all her classes in German at a German university. But before she reached that point, she had several weeks of a daily intensive language course, meant to boost her fluency level in German so that she would not fall behind once her real courses, in different disciplines, started. Could we come up with a system that had ELLs spend their first year as English learners taking courses at their grade level in their native language, while doing an intensive English course?* The students could integrate English into other disciplines at a more gradual rate this way. There are potential problems here, of course–students might work at different rates and come out at the end of the year with different fluency levels. But surely treating English as the second language it is will have more a success rate than expecting exposure to do the job. Or perhaps this idea is still too limiting, and something that incorporates English and native languages into the “mainstream” curriculum is of greater value. This idea certainly doesn’t fit into the testing system–the system itself would have to change for something like this to work. Sorry, I’m sort of brainstorming into the blog post at this point. But I just think that a school system that allowed students to take the time to really focus on English as a second language, rather than as an expectation, could be worth the year “behind” for the amount it would put students ahead. Students could maintain grade level knowledge while really working toward English fluency. And, of course, they could continue to expand literacy skills in their native language, working ultimately towards a bilingual education–as stated towards the end of Rubenstein-Avila’s article, “educators at all levels ought to realize that alllanguages are assets to be built upon, often simultaneously, in an additive—not subtractive—manner. Once students are becoming more proficient in English, their native language should not just be dropped–it should still be a part of the curriculum, so that they can learn to express themselves in two equally valid ways. We do not assume that teaching native English speakers another language will damage or hold back their performance in English, so why should we assume that working with speakers of other languages in their native tongue will prevent them from learning English?

I’m not saying any of what I’ve outlined above is perfect. I think it’s actually innately flawed, because I’m sort of trying to fit it into a system that is flawed–to truly make a change, I think more of an overhaul would be necessary. But I hope it’s a step in the right direction.

Understanding Language and Culture

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Something that really resonated with me was an idea that Candace Harper brought up in her article, “Misconceptions about Teaching English-language Learners”. Harper brings forth a problem that teachers have with their ELL students and that is that they have trouble understanding the common struggles ELL students have when learning. She says, “Teachers need to be aware of common writing errors for ELLs, such as problems with verb tenses, plural and possessive forms of nouns, subject/verb agreement, and the use of articles, and they should realize that many of these errors are developmental and/or influenced by the student’s native language and are not equally responsive (or impervious) to correction” (Harper 3).

While I am not an ELL student, I have come across this problem in my Chinese class. Last year, my Chinese professor was abroad and my class had a visiting professor who had come straight from China. She had never had any experience in teaching native English speakers and had a difficult time communicating with us and understanding our common errors. My Chinese professors in the past had all been aware of the common mistakes English speakers make and addressed these problems as we were taught new grammar structures. Since the visiting professor had trouble understanding the roots of these errors that my classmates and I were frequently making, she did not know how to address it and struggled to teach the curriculum.

Another serious problem Harper addresses in this same argument is that often times, “Errors are seen as deviations from target language forms and may be interpreted as cognitive disorders instead of evidence of a learner’s interlanguage,” (Harper 3). If teachers are unaware of the cultural and linguistic background of their students, they may falsely identify these students with disorders when they are actually just struggling to adapt to a new and unfamiliar learning culture. Due to these reasons, it is essential that teachers are aware of a wide range of different ethnic learning styles, cultures, and languages in order to better understand their students and how to teach them.

An Oppressive Environment for ELL Students

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Reading all of the pieces regarding English Language Learners I began to reflect on an experience I had with such students this summer that seems to contradict all of the positive strategies that the readings espoused.  This past summer I worked on the residential staff at a summer boarding school with a student body of roughly 200.  A large number of these students were ELL.  I had three ELL students under my direct supervision, one from China and two from South Korea.  Additionally there were massive Arabic and Spanish speaking populations among the students at this school.  Looking back on that experience what really strikes me is how oppressive the school was of these students using their first language among themselves in conversation.  As a member of the residential staff I was told to both monitor and stop any and all conversations taking place in any language other than English.  The idea was that these students were here to learn English and speaking their native language was nothing but detrimental.  It seems that the school felt a greater responsibility to the parents’ paid tuitions than to the students themselves.

Unlike what was suggested in the readings, these students were not able to use their primary language as a scaffold for learning English.  They were discouraged from speaking in a language that made them comfortable when many of them were thousands of miles from home in a strange place.  How alienated they must have felt and the school’s policy of oppressing primary language use did nothing but enforce this alienation.  Following these readings I am frankly disgusted and very concerned by the oppressive policies I was tasked with enforcing.  Why not allow a student to use any tool at their disposal when trying to learn an unfamiliar language?  This response may have become more of a rant but I believe it gets to the point that there is absolutely no reason to discourage primary language use by ELL students, as literacy arises from any language not only from English.

Two Birds, One Stone

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I found Harvey Daniels’s chapter on letter exchanges between teachers and students to be extremely and surprisingly thought-provoking. It’s really such a simple idea, yet as Daniels cautions, it requires a lot of time and dedication. Nevertheless, Daniels provides a number of examples and explanations that demonstrate just how powerful a strategy letter writing and correspondence could really be.
From what I gathered from Daniels’s argument, the benefits of letter exchange for both teachers and students is twofold.
This form of communication between student and teacher is important for several academic-related reasons. First, it has the potential to teach what strong writing should look like. While it’s important that teachers use less formal, and therefore less distant, language to effectively communicate to their students through their notes, their writing style will ultimately convey to the students what forms of writing are appropriate within an academic setting/correspondence. Second, letter exchanges provide a means by which students could discuss what they understand, don’t understand, like or dislike about the content they are learning. While this shouldn’t replace extra face-to-face help from the teacher, this strategy would certainly illuminate the problems that individual students–or perhaps a group of them–may have in the classroom, thus making it possible for teachers to take further measures to ensure that their students are fully grasping what they need to know.
I guess that in high school, some of my teachers presented me with opportunities for written communication with them via weekly journals. But the emphasis was based primarily on the week’s content and not so much on open-ended musings. Furthermore, the teachers would clearly read through my entries–as I could tell from their markings–but would not provide constructive or particularly valuable comments. I didn’t find this particularly noteworthy then, but I can now see how my teachers may have missed an opportunity to develop a more academically and personally fulfilling relationship with my peers and myself.
That being said, what I found to be Daniels’s most compelling argument for the note-exchanging process is the more personal implication of letter correspondence: the connection that is allowed to develop between a teacher and his/her students. This form of communication allows for personal attention that can enhance a student’s–particularly a shy student’s–level of comfort and confidence. This would be especially important for ELL students who find it difficult to find a voice in the classroom!
Of course, this whole process requires a ton of time and dedication on the part of the teacher. And reading and writing letters will be especially hard when you’re teaching up to five classes a day. Unless an efficient system could be worked out, letter-writing could become extremely taxing. But it is of the utmost importance for teachers to know who they are teaching, what strengths and weaknesses could be focused upon, and what personal issues may require further attention. Daniels concludes with a powerful thought: “Could any teaching act ever be more important” than connecting with a kid who’s in trouble?

Epistolary Bonds with Students

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Harvey Daniels’s article on exchanging weekly letters with his students really resonated with me.  Although the concept of reading and writing letters to 50 – 100 students is daunting, I was able to imagine myself undertaking this task even before I had finished reading the article. As I work towards my teaching certification, I frequently encounter new concerns about engaging my future students, but it is not often that I read about a strategy that I immediately want to try. Because my educational background and funds of knowledge derive from a white upper-middle class upbringing and private schools, one of my primary concerns as a future teacher is that I will not be able to connect with students from a variety of different backgrounds. The idea of forging bounds through writing letters seems like a viable solution to this concern because I can connect with my students by demonstrating genuine and sustained interest in their lives rather than through superficial similarities that may not exist.

As put forth by Daniels, other positive outcomes of this student-teacher correspondence are it “allows the teacher to model good writing, to create a just-right text for each child to read, [and] to see and assess each student’s writing skills” (Daniels 128). I imagine myself as a teacher being a stickler for grammar, so I see these letters as an opportunity to demonstrate proper grammar and punctuation while not having to edit the students writing. I also appreciated Daniels’s advice to “write informally” and allow students to see crossed out and misspelled words. I think that allowing the student to see the teacher’s thought process makes the teacher seem more human and less like a knowledge dispenser.

The final aspect of Daniels’s article that I appreciated was the strategies for giving students both positive and critical feedback within the letters. He makes the point that when students receive feedback in this private manner, “it is less likely the kid will react defensively or feel a need to act defiant in front of peers” (Daniels 140).  This also allows the student to reflect on his or her behavior and devise a strategy for improvement. In this way, the teacher gives a student agency over his or her classroom conduct; an individual’s behavior can consequently improve as a result of his or her own choices, not the reprimands of the teacher. I realize that implementing this program on a large scale may overwhelm teachers, but I definitely want to try it when I teach because I think that the rewarding relationships that emerge from these letters far exceeds the effort.

Looking for a More Creative Vocabulary…

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I was honestly underwhelmed by the chapter we read on building vocabulary. Allen made a lot of great points, especially those about helping kids learn new words by drawing on their prior knowledge with her example of the word-of-the-day activity and strategies for committing words to permanent memory with the word walls. What struck me was how worksheet and text-based the learning remained, particularly since this chapter came after one about very creative forms of YA Lit. Written words need only be decoded in books and on assignments for a relatively small amount of a student’s day. The rest of the time they’re talking and listening (in school and out).

I think one of the best ways to make new vocabulary words more meaningful to kids is to have them speak them. That way the words can literally jump off the page and acquire meaning and value outside of academic settings. Most importantly, they are more readily experimented with when spoken. I remember a teacher I had in elementary school who literally transformed a dull vocab workbook into an amazingly fun and interactive word-meaning experiment. After the usual copying definitions, we did a section of the workbook that involved matching each vocab word to a list of potential synonyms and other words that had to do with its meaning or connotation. But the best part was that the teacher didn’t ask us to do this part on paper, she asked us to argue (amongst ourselves and with her) for why each of the possible words was or wasn’t related to the meaning of the vocab word. It was great because it gave us a chance to use the new words in several spoken sentences (not just one on a worksheet) and really clarify their exact meanings for our whole class. I also remember that when I was a kid I learned the most new words from listening to adults say them and trying my best to mimic their usage of them. It just seemed like my teacher’s approach mirrored real life–using the words by trial and error until their meanings in multiple contexts became clear. My tutoring at VAST has greatly reinforced this belief because I so often hit stumbling blocks with kids who don’t want to change vocab sentences that don’t make sense once they’ve written them down. To them the assignment is done, immutable.

I am positive there is still a need for written vocab building work, but I’m also positive there is a much bigger place for spoken vocabulary improvements and innovations besides just listening to audiobooks.

Learning: A Verb

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To me, rushing an assignment seems to come very naturally.  Every night, I (along with everyone else) have hundreds of pages of reading, and I’m expected to internalize the themes and ideas being explored by these texts.  Fortunately, I like reading, so I am capable of doing so—but I’m almost always held back by an anxiety (physical and abstract) about having to rush myself through the process.  I feel this anxiety every time I crack open even the most seemingly dull or antiquated text; it’s not that I don’t want to read Chaucer, it’s just that I want to be able to take my time and process his words.  At the end of the day, I’m unwilling—or unable—to compromise, so I end up staying up late to get my work done, reaffirming for myself that I am a person, not a scanner.

Janet Allen’s chapter on effective vocabulary instruction was refreshing, due to the fact that it undertook the task of re-approaching an  area of school that even she herself considered challenging.  One of the most irritating things about a policy like NCLB is that it fails to appreciate that learning is a process, not a product: that in order to be able to read, a person has to understand the words.  In the section that asks, “How can we use vocabulary instruction to increase content knowledge?” Allen outlines a process for approaching complicated texts through the vocabulary words themselves, understanding that knowledge cannot be imposed onto students, that it has to be built.  Particularly for students today, who apparently have difficulty with print literacy, the words themselves are the place to begin.  She notes that, after reading an introductory text that uses some of the difficult language and then assigning a fill-in-the-blank activity, students can “bring enough background knowledge to do a Possible Sentences activity” (99).  Knowledge isn’t imposed onto the students; it is built, stacked, layered, and also connected to new and different ideas.  The Possible Sentences activity takes a small, but well-built, foundation of understanding, and then allows the students to exercise some agency in continuing to create connections between the words and concepts at hand.  Only then do they undergo the process of reading the actual textbook.

This chapter in particular directed my attention towards something that I try to keep in mind any time I am helping someone who wants to learn: the only way to do it is to be patient.  Each page in each textbook is made of individual words, each of which are paths to knowledge in and of themselves.  There’s no good reason to ignore the fact that someone may not understand one, or any, of them.

Textual Lineages

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The part of this week’s readings that resonated with me the most was the “Interlude” between chapters 6 and 7 by Alfred Tatum, “Building the Textual Lineages of African American Male Adolescents.” I love the idea of building your own “textual lineage” of books that you have strongly identified with that give you a direction for your future. It reminded me about how literacy is both profoundly personal and also very empowering. When I was in middle school, I loved reading novels and I built up a handful of favorite books that I read over and over again. The books in my arsenal were usually about strong female characters that I identified with and that I wanted to become. I was very lucky because, as a middle class white girl (who is able-bodied and heterosexual), it was very easy to find books with characters that reminded me of myself.

I never thought about how much harder it must be for more marginalized people to find books that address problems in their own lives. For example, African American male students face so many unfair stereotypes (as impoverished criminals who don’t have academic potential) that they are usually not targeted as “readers,” so there are much fewer novels available that might appeal to them. That makes it even more necessary that teachers provide them with texts that teach them the history of racial inequality and inspire them to understand it and rise above it, like the texts in the example that Tatum provides.  This also would apply to students with different sexual orientations or gender identities. Overall, the Tatum “Interlude” reminded me about how passionate I was about reading as a middle schooler and prompted me to think about which books I identified with and why. Teachers need to find these “hooks” that get students interested in reading to make literacy an empowering skill for all students.

-Rachel

Censoring youth perspective

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“As educators, we face new responsibilities to facilitate a process whereby young producers project five, ten, even twenty years down the line to determine what it will mean for something they say in their teens to follow them into perpetuity, leaving them very little control over who sees it and how it is used.” –Drop That Knowledge, p. 112

I am intrigued by this ethical dilemma over how kids’ present day opinions will affect them in the future. While I realize that anything on the Internet can be accessed at anytime by future employers, admissions officers, or acquaintances, I think it is counter-intuitive for kids to compromise their current voices and opinions in hopes of securing a good job in twenty years. Our society has so many psychologists, educators, and politicians out there telling us how kids think and feel, but it is not the same as having youth themselves express their opinions and experiences. If students feel too much pressure to publish the “right” kind of attitude, they will inevitably censor the very important youth perspective. I can understand a student feeling apprehensive in admitting her struggle with peer pressure or her first experience with drugs or alcohol, but at the same time, if we encourage her to censor her story, it will be harder for adults to understand and appreciate the youth experience. If the purpose of Youth Radio and other young people’s publishing companies is to promote the perspective of youth, the last thing they should do is make kids feel so anxious about their future employers and dates that they can’t appropriately convey their experiences.