17. What Do We Mean by Literacy Now? *Multiple Literacies (Different Cultures/Different Literacies) (Multiple Ways of Knowing) *Critical Literacies (Literacy as Social Practice) (Methods as Social Practice) *Changing Times: Changing Definitions
21. Journal Examples (Center for Inquiry) “ I want to be a golfer when I grow up. They get $116,000.00 a game!!” --Mike, 2 nd Grade “ Last night was my birthday. We went to Ice Kapades. It costed $46 a ticket.” -- Tanya, 1 st Grade
28. Jean Anne Clyde’s Subtext Strategy Art Piece: Henri Matisse: “ The Music Lesson
29. Subtext Strategy: Teacher Pupil Parent Administrator or other teachers What would they say? What would they really think?
30. Collin Lankshear “ Truth in government and education no longer exists as we have known it. Since Bush, “truth” is simply a matter of what narrative you can spin.”
31. . Lingering in Text (Sumara 2002) “ The King’s son decided to have a party. He invited anybody who was anybody in the kingdom to come.” --from Cinderella Critical Literacy Study Group Washington, DC (Vasquez)
32. Begun to focus our study of language on issues of discourse
33. Metaphors & Frames “ Wars erupted frequently in North America in the 1600s and 1700s as rival groups clashed with each other and with the resident Indians.” -- Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” special exhibit.
40. What thing(s) do you find somewhat problematic about this book and the story being told? How did the author use language to get us to accept a simple solutions to a complex problem? How else might this have been handled more honestly?
49. How might schools be improved to enhance learning? What are schools that are trying to make a difference doing? What constitutes a good education in parents’ eyes?
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52. “ Results don’t really matter, just the appearance of holding someone accountable.” Rober C. Koehler Chicago Tribune Reporter “ Schools in Orange Jumpsuits ”
So, what do we mean by literacy now? Two of the major insights into literacy and literacy learning that has come about in the last 10 years has been the notion of multiple literacies and what has been called critical literacy. By multiple literacies what researcher have found is that different cultures have different definitions of what it means to be literate. They even induct their children into literacy differently. The second dimension of multiple literacies is what I prefer to call multiple ways of knowing. Literacy involves much more than just reading and writing. It involves orchestrating a whole variety of sign systems in a effort to make and share meaning. The multimodal nature of literate is evident everywhere but probably most obvious when one goes on the web. Pictures, text, music, and all too often, some very aggravating pop-ups, accompany any reading event. There are researchers like Leu & Kinzer who argue that some very different cognitive processing is necessary to read materials on the Internet than is used in reading texts as we have commonly thought of them. What is important about the concept of “multiple literacies” is that there is no one universal model of how literacy is learned nor only definition of what it means to be literate; this varies by community and culture. The second major breakthrough in our understanding of literacy came from critical theorists. They argue that definitions of literacy aren’t as important as are the social practices that surround literacy; it is, in fact, these social practices that maintain and privilege certain forms of literacy. They argue that there are larger social forces at work….and these social forces are what makes sure that inner-city schools always under-perform suburban schools. Research by Anton and Finn document that as a result of these forces schools in different settings are different. Teachers talk to kids differently in the inner-city than in the suburbs. The kids in inner-city schools are given tasks that prepare them for working on the production line while the kids in elite schools are taught to be creative, invited to make decisions, and expected to be inquirers. Its is no wonder then that what these schools produce are our college professors, teachers, doctors, and other professionals. These larger forces can be thought of social practices with a capital S. They trump what individual teachers may do. All this, of course, is pretty fatalistic. Changing these larger systems of meaning is difficult, although it can be done – the women’s movement, our eating habits (from meat and potatoes to ground turkey and vegetables, from living it up on Saturday night to a designated driver, are all major changes in our society. Because it takes individuals to trip up the system, what we do in our individual classrooms does make a difference. While many critical theorists don’t think methods make a difference, I do. I see methods as little ‘s’ social practices. By changing how we teach we can encourage the students we teach to disrupt the commonplace, interrogate multiple viewpoints, focus on the socio-political, and take social action. The net result of these insights is that we are once more changing our minds about what constitutes literacy.
I want to talk with you today about what I think a English Language Arts program for the 21 st Century needs to address and why. I’m going to begin by sharing what I see as new understandings about literacy and then share with you what I think this means for the English Language Arts curriculum. For the most part I’m going to share examples from the work we have been doing at the Center for Inquiry in Indianapolis, a school I started 10 years ago with a group of teachers from the Indianapolis Public School system. We see the curriculum in this school as focused on inquiry, multiple ways of knowing, and, more recently, critical literacy. First, let me talk about what I see as new insights into literacy.
We’ve begun to flood the curriculum with books that raise important social issues. Some people call these “risky tests.” They are risky because they deal with issues that children are facing in their everyday worlds – Voices in the Park is a book about discrimination based on socio-economic class; Willy and Hugh is a book that addresses bullying. These are just 2 titles. The url shown here gets you to my home page on the Internet and if you go to recent publications you will find 3 different chapters that annotate and review 50 books each. I should add the books range from picture books through young adult novels.
We, of course, continue to use Sketch to Stretch, asking groups of students to symbolize what they made of a story, typically in art, but in this instance clay. We then play Save the Last word for the artists by our guessing what they were trying to say. More Than Anything Else tells the story of Brooker T. Washington and his determination in learning to read. The group of students who made the top figure said that they were attempting to represent Booker as force to content with, as this block that was impossible to move, as a stable force to whatever else might be happening in the world. The group on the bottom said their art work represented all of the voices crying in the wilderness who were deprived of having access to literacy and hence a voice. Both interpretations extend the meaning of the book as well as address the larger social forces at work which position people and create for them an identity they may or may not want.
We, of course, continue to use Sketch to Stretch, asking groups of students to symbolize what they made of a story, typically in art, but in this instance clay. We then play Save the Last word for the artists by our guessing what they were trying to say. More Than Anything Else tells the story of Brooker T. Washington and his determination in learning to read. The group of students who made the top figure said that they were attempting to represent Booker as force to content with, as this block that was impossible to move, as a stable force to whatever else might be happening in the world. The group on the bottom said their art work represented all of the voices crying in the wilderness who were deprived of having access to literacy and hence a voice. Both interpretations extend the meaning of the book as well as address the larger social forces at work which position people and create for them an identity they may or may not want.
Linda Christensen’s Target-Perpetrator-Bystander-Ally Strategy is wonderful. While this story focuses on one little girl’s mistreatment by a group of whites, through discussion children come to see the target as being all African-Americans (or even more broadly anyone who is different), and that while the gang is the perpetrator in this story, the gang is really represented by them and a society that legitimizes such treatment.
We’ve also begun to use “the everyday” as texts in our classroom. In this invitation we simply provide children with 3 different texts and ask them to think about who wrote this text, why, for whom was it written, whose voices are not included, and how it could be otherwise.
We’ve also asked students to bring in print and visual materials from their neighborhoods. I’m particularly found of graffiti or at least a particular type of graffiti, what I call message graffiti. I see message graffiti as attempts by the common man or women to talk back. This one, for example, is my all time favorite, as it speaks to the unequal playing field in which we live. We encourage kids to “talk back” to injustices they see themselves and while they do this on cardboard boxes we have ripped up rather than on walls, they, like real graffiti artists, feel a real sense of agency.
The question, of course, is what do we do about this. One of the difficulties of being an English language arts teacher these days is that we are always being asked to set up curricular we never had the pleasure ourselves of enjoying, or as Louise Rosenblatt might say, having had “the lived-through experience” for ourselves. What I want to do today is share with you some of the ways that we have begun to open up new spaces in our English Language Arts classroom and in so doing suggest these are some ways you might begin too. Make no doubt about it, I think we need to create a very different kind of literate being for the 21 st Century, and I say that being perfectly pleased with many of things that we have done and are currently doing. So, here are some things that the teachers with whom I work are attempting to do:
