Reflecting across readings
As I look back over my blog entries, I am struck how my most salient posts concern the relationship between literacy, language, and identity. Particularly during the last half of the course, I have grown in my understanding of this complex relationship, which I find difficult articulating. But I will try offering a few examples.
Language is part of one’s identity – When students are denied access to their language when acquiring academic literacy in school, then there’s going to be some tensions. We see this tension in the EEL readings, where the degree to which students draw upon duel languages in the acquisition of academic English is contested, often at the expense of abstracting the cultural identities of the student from the curriculum. But –as the Hip Hop group demonstrated, when literacy learning is situated within students’ lived experiences through different genres and modalities, we may find that students transform themselves and others through the literacies they bring – if we value them enough to create the space, and take the time to use these as entry points into the official curriculum.
Another profound moment for me this semester was a deeper understanding that a text – any text – whether it be a policy document, a children’s book, or a student’s piece of writing is an artifact produced within a larger set of literacy practices that are particular to different discourse communities. And texts are imbued with particular discourses and ideologies. For instance, the Stephanie Jones chapter makes it clear that certain children’s books are classed, and normalized a world-view that mismatched the economic realities of her students and the ways they performed social class. That was an example of how children’s literature can reproduce norms that do not match the diversity of our students. Her encouragement to “read for finding difference” is a move toward stepping back and critiquing the power structures and discourses imbued in a text. In addition, the WJ articles we read provided striking examples of how policy documents evolve and elicit ideologies and discourses of those who are in power.
Finally, the RTI articles got me thinking how the discourses around the practice of diagnosing children’s reading difficulties are evident in policy documents and emerging research; consequently, these discourses are being taken up in the language reading professionals use — the language of a profession, set-forth in textbooks, disciplines, policy documents, and acquired in the situated action of a profession, is part of what constructs a professional identity.
So in sum I think many of the trends we’ve studied show (at least broadly) a relationship between literacy, language, and identity —
(feeling like I am) Grossly over-simplifying,
Treavor
Tensions in Bilingual Ed
A child testing in Spanish will receive the majority of instruction in Spanish until they test successfully, allowing them little time and support for the challenging transition into English instruction. Meanwhile, a child testing in English will receive that same instruction in English with little of the primary language support they need to help them succeed.
I felt this quote encapsulated the tensions the educators voiced in the Palmer and Lynch article. Rather than transition students into English instruction based on signs of readiness, teachers acknowledged that the TAKS test dates dictated when the transition occurred. Other pressures I noted were:
-Strict divisions of who gets taught in English, and who gets taught in their native language, creating little room for hybrid language practices that may actually support students’ acquisition of English.
-Strict time requirements for switching instruction to English, despite students’ readiness level
-English is positioned as the superior language, and casts the students’ native language in a deficit or subordinate position, thus marginalizing students identities
It’s wonderful when students acquire two languages. You would think schools would support this process, and allow kids more opportunities to use both languages when learning to acquire English. After all, if you have two resources at your disposal, why not be allowed to draw upon them both? But EELs are often marginalized in schools. After 5th grade, they have no support managing instruction that is entirely English based.
As a high school teacher, I had a few students mainstreamed into my classes who spoke only Spanish. I didn’t know how to support their learning because I am not a Spanish speaker, and wasn’t trained in supporting EELs. I still feel it is an area where I need growth. These students had a tiny classroom in worst part of the school (a weather-beaten portable) they could go to for support, but it lacked resources. Even the most intelligent kids must find it extremely difficult navigating a curriculum that’s not in their native language when there is little support. While I agree acquisition of the English language is the goal, it can be achieved without stampeding the native language, or impinging the cultural identities and diverse linguistic abilities of students.
The readings this week inspired me even more to learn Spanish (a long-time goal I’ve had) –both to get a sense of what it feels like to face the challenges of learning a second language and to better support the education of EELs.
Reading for Difference
My apologies for this (too) late posting. Our class today snuck up on me. I really enjoyed the readings this week. Stephanie Jones’ chapter got me thinking about the importance of reading for difference—or, as she puts it, teaching kids to “find the disconnection” between the self and the Other.
When I read this, I thought of the drama kids in my study (I can’t help but to process everything I read through what I am learning about their literacies). Like the kids’ in Jones’ chapter, much of the identity work they undergo occurs in the space between the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’. From a critical literacy perspective, finding the disconnections between the self and the text seems important for critiquing dominant storylines and representations. The drama kids do this when they reconcile differences between the self and the characters they embody.
The notion of reading for difference seems like a powerful pedagogical space for acknowledging how we humans are always reading and writing within competing discourses. The girls in Jones’ chapter appeared to be negotiating competing discourses of social class, and attempting to locate themselves within them. The boys in the drama companies I studied were negotiating competing discourses of masculinity as they engaged highly embodied composing practices that were constructed as ‘so gay.’
So within almost any literacy practice there are discourses and ideologies revealed in the texts students read and write. I appreciated how Jones called the girl’s attention to these tensions and possibilities that emerge when we help make these explicit for students.
Oh… one more thing. The statement – “use literacy in ways that relate to [students’] interests and needs” –struck me as being a nice way of capturing what researchers often mean by making instruction authentic, which is hard to define, really, because any instruction good or bad is authentic.
Performance as a Tool for Social Action
This week’s readings evoked strong feelings I have regarding the potential of performance for representing and constructing knowledge, gaining visibility, staging identity, thinking through cultural differences, as well as social and political issues. I agree with Geneva Gay who argues that through performance “diverse peoples can claim their voices, choose how they wish to speak and what they want to say, and have a great deal of freedom to employ multiple voices to exemplify the multi-dimensionalities of their cultures and experiences (1999)” I think it’s great when educators find ways to engender these outcomes by connecting the official curriculum with the literacies and pop culture youth engage out of school such as hip hop.
When reading the Alexander-Smith article, Feeling the Rhythm of the Critically Conscious Mind, I was reminded of Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. In this production, nine slam poets voice their worries, hopes, and criticisms through poetry, which they perform in a diversity of hip-hop styles and rhythms.
I was frankly surprised that hip-hop found an audience on Broadway since this venue has historically catered to the experiences of white upper class Americans, but Def Poetry Jam brought more diverse audiences who wouldn’t ordinarily attend live theatre, and shined a light on the real-time struggle and talents of marginalized Americans whose modes of expression– orality, poetics, mixed media, and a hybridity of performance styles & genres– have been historically subjugated within schools as being unacademic.
Theater critic Ben Brantley reported in his New York Times review: “The poets . . . exude self-created styles, which are as distinctive as fingerprints. Rhyme and rhythm define character . . . they are tools for extracting a shape out of social, ethnic, and physical forces that make human identity. . . There’s a thrill in seeing young people actually work up steam about the sorry state of the world.”
In my own viewing of slam poets on HBO’s incarnation of Def Poetry Jam, it was clear that the poets use their art not just to entertain, but to speak to the current times. They devise new ways to be heard and represent knowledge through performance in a hip-hop style that resonates, captivates, and above all, gets their story told.
In the Alexander-Smith piece, students who previously resisted schooling connected with the study of hip hop and connected its themes, tone, and style with canonized literature. The themes they explored via hip hop and poetry exposed social inequities. This reminded me that performance, if only fleetingly, capture people’s emotions, unite them in a vision of a better world, and harness them toward social change. I believe that bridging academic literaies with the arts and pop culture can help students delve deeper into problems, contemplate consequences of policies, tragedy, and their own life situations and ask: Where do I stand in all this? What can I do? What are the consequences of my decisions?
Through performance, be it classical or contemporary, I believe people can be stirred, perhaps even compelled to work toward a better future and are invigorated with a new sense of purpose. Whether its purpose is to educate or entertain, the possibility exists for performance to catapult people to new positions that offer a vantage point from which to interpret situations differently, to examine issues from multiple points of view, and see clearly beyond the surface of things. When this happens, people exercise their own individuality and find authority and value within the self.
RTI: Pathologizing Readers?
When reading these articles about RTI, I noticed how teachers got positioned as professionals who diagnose and intervene with a treatment plan. RTI method shifts discourses of teaching toward discourses of the medical profession, and makes reading instruction something like a pathology. The notion of teachers as designers of interventions and treatments for an individual child contrasts the conception of teachers as designers and implementers of a whole class curriculum.
Perhaps the the conception of teacher as diagnostician and intervention specialist is gaining momentum, and if so, it tends to further redefine and compartmentalize the role of the teacher and further specializes their knowledge. On one hand, I see this being a potential benefit for the training of educators who can design instruction that meet individual needs of their students, who take proactive measures identifying and addressing problem areas before students fail. Perhaps, as the authors claim, RTI can interrupt a cycle that shifts young bodies into already over-populated special education programs, but usually not before they develop negative perceptions of school learning, perform the identity of poor student, and develop the disposition of disinterested, unable student.
On the other hand, the form these interventions take or how teachers apply them isn’t clear. Even if teachers know the specific area a student can improve, there’s very little documentation of expert decision making in determining what interventions to apply. So I am left wondering how teachers carry out an intervention once a need is identified. How do teachers get trained to become not only diagnosticians, but also effective implementers of interventions? The articles specify the procedural steps in identifying a struggling reader— that, no doubt, is the easy part. The hard part, the actual interventions teachers apply when a student performs below benchmarks are missing. It is the intervention strategies that are more complex and variable from student to student, depending on the nature of difficulty they are encountering.
This hints at the growing need for case studies of individual children who overcome reading difficulties in the context of their classrooms. We need thick descriptions of the interventions teachers have applied with a struggling reader—not as some magical solution, but thick, detailed accounts of trail and error, or how multiple interventions interacted in the progress of the reader over time.
Why couldn’t such cases be the object of study in teacher education or professional development? After all, it is not uncommon that lawyers and medical students get taught through the study of influential cases in their profession. They are usually cases that have posed a significant problem, or altered the usual course of practices in their field. The careful study of cases of particular children whose difficulties were addressed through one or multiple interventions would provide a sense of how they are complicated, highly contextualized, and not a one-shot thing.
Although I am generally optimistic about RTI, one problem I have is that it implies that students who perform at or above a benchmark do not encounter difficulties at their level. Therefore, they are not targets of interventions addressing the challenges they encounter. I am not sure it is good that RTI is famed only in terms of those students who are identified “at risk” – those who perform below benchmarks—as this implies a deficit thinking model. Also, I fear that the more reading difficulties become pathologized, the more potential there is to label students, which may result in the formation of identities that carry all the baggage, weight, and preconceptions that may ultimately interfere with their progress as readers—both in terms of their sense of self and how educators perceive them.
Need for hybrid approaches in the teaching of reading
Our middle school student, left to Reading First’s definition of decoding 120 words per minute, can “read” all of these websites. How might this tally of orally pronounced words help this student to situate particular websites in specific contexts and engage in critical question about validity, voice, power, and purpose? Obviously, it would not.
This anecdote gets at the heart of Lisa Steven’s argument: NCLB and Reading First narrow the definition of reading to speed and accuracy, marginalizing conceptions of the reader as meaning-maker, text user, and text critic. In the wake of NCLB, and its emphasis on scientifically proven reading programs, definitions of reading become so narrow one wonders if it’s only to make research more easily controlled, with speed and accuracy the foremost variables indicating proficiently. I think this creates a dualism between systematic and isolated instruction on one hand and more holistic approaches on the other. Can’t we have both? Isn’t there room for hybridity of instructional approaches in the teaching of reading? I think this is what our authors are arguing for, but are no doubt constrained by constrictive conceptions of reading instruction.
If Reading First conceptions of reading fall to the right of a continuum, and position the reader as decoder, then holistic approaches such as the reading workshop fall on the left of the continuum, and take into account the reader has a whole person, emphasizing the construction of meaning and identities around texts. I once heard Literacy scholar Gerald Harste say that a curriculum should be about “the kind of people we want to be and the kind of people we want to become.” I always recall his conception of curriculum whenever I contemplate reading workshop. With that model it is hard not to think about teaching to the whole person since there’s emphasis on choosing books that fit ability & interest, matching texts with emerging identities, being critical consumers of texts, and forging connections between reading and student writing. Over time, students develop a sense of themselves as readers and writers, and do so for getting things done, making change, writing/reading for purposes that align with their social aims, purposes, and growing identities.
As an idealist, I am drawn to this argument. Although I am glad we have research testifying to the efficacy of reading workshop in helping children develop a love for reading (and increasing test scores), I’m left wondering about how teachers are managing the tensions between its holistic approach and the types of systematic, direct instruction that many argue separate the reader from the text through focusing on isolated bits of sound. I found myself musing over Lane’s comment last week in class: How do educators address the needs of emerging readers in a workshop where children are expected to have meaningful transactions with text that spur lots of talk? I am referring here to readers who do not have concepts of print, or phonemic awareness, or cannot yet associate sounds to symbols. How do emerging readers acquire these skills in the context of more experienced readers around them? Reading workshop models stress that students become socialized or “apprenticed” into becoming proficient readers and writers just as one might naturally acquire a language in their cultural context. It assumes that literacy acquisition will happen if a literacy rich environment is provided in conjunction with more experienced others within a community of practices.
Such a stance does seem a bit passive, though I would hardly characterize the teachers in this article as passive. To the contrary, they got their students loving reading and excelling at it. Most these children came from low income and racially diverse areas, suggesting that workshop approaches that steer away from the systematic, isolated, decoding models can work well for them. Yet there are compelling arguments for integrating highly explicit, systematic instruction. Most notably, Lisa Delpit criticized process approaches that are advocated in literacy workshops for being indirect in helping children from marginalized sociocultural backgrounds acquire codes of power that enable them to code switch between home and academic discourse. I was left wondering how the teachers in this article integrated the direct, explicit instruction in the process of teaching reading. I think we need more examples of how beginning readers are served by holistic workshop approaches, so we can understand better the hybridity of reading instruction that ranges from the very explicit decoding of text to highly artful conversations around them.
Is there Room for Prosody when Assessing for Fluency?
When examining the NRP report on fluency, I was surprised how fluency got constructed mostly around producing readers who “read words accurately, rapidly, and efficiently.” While this aspect of fluency is important, I think it’s concerning that the dominant conception of fluency set forth by the NRP does not emphasize reading with expression or with prosody, or consider how emphasis on reading quickly may occur at the cost of attending to patterns of stress or intonations that convey meaning to the listener.
No doubt this would bother the late Bill Martin, an influential educator who emphasized playfulness around sounds and structures of language as an integral aspect of reading instruction. Martin wrote many well-known children’s books such as “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” Lots of his books are simple predictable texts. Some are more complicated, but they each share an emphasis on oral expression, language play, attention to the sound and structure of language in learning to read.
As a child, teachers and relatives supported my foray into independent reading largely through reading aloud stories that held me captive in suspense. Part of this was due to the author’s design of text — its narrative structure and plot. But a lot of my being taking in by the story was owed to the people who read those texts aloud, who took the clues provided in the text for conveying character voices and incorporating inflection and pacing with dramatic effect. They were not just decoding words quickly and accurately–they were attending to aspects of the text (the punctuation, the sentence structure, the language) to design the delivery the lines that could produce an emotional affect on the listener.
I recall how my 2nd grade teacher read aloud with great expression; I recall with fondness her reading of “Charlotte’s Web.” I was so taken in by the story, I insisted that my parents buy me that book. I carried it around proudly. My 5th grade teacher read aloud “Where the Read Fern Grows” and “Summer of the Monkeys”. Her masterful reading kept us at the edge of our seats, and we were always disappointed when the read aloud time was over. I believe a good storyteller can be just as enticing for children as the lure of video games. We might do well to emphasize the design of voice, sound, and movement in the teaching of reading, at least occasionally through the integration of reader’s theatre.
Given my nostalgia for expressive reading as a child, it was with some disappointment that the only measures of fluency I found in the NRP report were reading inventories, miscue analysis, running records, and reading speed calculations. None of these assessments measure reading with expression or an aesthetic stance. The appreciation of the sound and structure of the text, and how this might be conveyed through expressive oral reading expression are missing in accounts of reading fluency. Have such skills been regulated to disciplines such as drama, speech, and oral interpretation? If so, I find it quite sad, since it are these types of transactions with text that can turn children on to reading.
I recall working in elementary classrooms as a TA for a field-based reading methods and class. In these classrooms, children were constantly being tested for fluency and comprehension. There was an incredible emphasis in monitoring the number of words they read per minute as a measure of reading improvement. At the time, I felt that the unspoken message being sent is that good readers are fast readers. I’m not sure I like that message.
We occasionally saw children who read aloud with expression, who experimented with character voices as they read, and who varied the pacing of their reading. Even though they comprehended the story, they were required to re-read the story until they read at a speed denoting an “independent reading level.” They occasionally resisted being held back, and I didn’t blame them: was requiring a certain rate instilling a love of reading? More likely it was building the identify deficit reader all on the account that they weren’t reading fast enough.
Of course, I do see advantages in repeated reading, especially when it done with the purpose of learning to read with expression. In my research concerning the literacy practices of drama companies, youth engage repeated reading constantly because it is part and parcel of the culture of drama. They engage repeated reading not only for memorizing lines, but more importantly for giving life and voice to characterizations. Youth who reported being labeled as struggling readers in their school read with increasing rate and expression over time through repeated reading. Repeated reading appeared to help them with understanding the subtext of the text, which informed their design of embodiments and voice for a character.
All this is to say that I think fluency should not overlook the importance of reading with prosody. Some of the greatest speakers of our time address the public reading speeches that are not necessary read quickly; they know how to vary the pacing and the voice—these are modal designs that extend the meaning of the text and engage listeners. If fluency is only about reading quickly and accurately, then we may just be producing a generation of monotone readers.
Is TAKS an Adequate Measure of TEKS?
When reading the Hoffman et al. piece, I was not surprised so many educators believed that excessive emphasis on standardized testing reduced the quality of their instruction and produced negative attitudes toward school among students and teachers. The report echoed many of the woes I’ve heard in conversations among teachers who feel their professional autonomy and love for teaching is diminished when they must administer test-prep curricula. While this may increase scores, higher scores do not necessarily indicate better teaching or reveal evidence of better learning. It may, however, produce ad nauseam instruction that addresses the lowest common denominator, so the argument goes.
The teachers’ accounts in this piece are powerful, but sadly underrepresented whenever policy decisions are made about standardized assessment and accountability. This closes down conversations about alternatives that may allow more varied and valid assessments of how well students master state standards. The articles got me questioning the efficacy of the TAKS for measuring state standards.. The issue of alignment kept creeping up in my mind. The TEKS definitely are an authority on what gets taught, but like many educators, I wonder how well the TAKS measures students’ attainment of these knowledge and skills. The authors do not consider whether teachers perceive the standards (i.e., the TEKS) as being helpful or overly constrictive, though it’s certainly clear they feel the test dictates what and how they teach.
The TEKS appear fairly specific regarding what to teach, but thankfully is less committed to addressing the how. This leaves room for addressing the TEKS through any number of teaching methods, including reading and writing workshop, methods for which I am a strong proponent. Conversations I’ve heard about TAKS suggests the test narrows what counts learning to a discrete set of knowledge and skills. However, I wouldn’t consider the 4th grade TEKS oppressively narrow. In my minds eye, it provided a comprehensive framework for organizing instruction. The teacher I spoke with uses grade level TEKS for guidance in planning lessons and units throughout the school year. She mentioned that textbooks are even revised to incorporate the TEKS, so they have consequences for what topics and activities appear in textbooks. Pre-service teachers I work with link lesson objectives with TEKS; this practice is intended to help them address how state mandated requirements are being implemented in the lesson. Some report getting so familiar with the TEKS from having done this that they can “rattle them off” during a job interviews. In theory, since most instruction is organized around the TEKS, then there should be no need for excessive test-prep. I realize it doesn’t play-out like this way, especially in lower-performing schools where there is such pressure to improve campus ratings
But is standardized testing really a good instrument for measuring the depth and breath of these standards? Considering the exasperated teachers in this article, one wonders.
I can imagine this article being useful for bringing teacher’s perspective to the policy-making table by revealing pitfalls in the high-stakes testing culture that’s so pervasive in our schools. That this research was performed in response to an oppressive political climate regulating teaching and learning suggests that research is not value neutral, but conducted with political aims and purposes for advancing an agenda, for getting one’s ideological stance heard. This research advances a conversation against reliance on standardized testing as the sole measure of learning. This reminds me how texts are used to advance social discourses and practices. By conducting more research in this vain, and referring back to a body of research often, people can make their political stance seem natural, a given, not up for debate.
This is probably why the authors call for more studies that employ the same quantitative methods being used to perpetuate a culture of standardized testing and learning. The formation of multiple texts of this nature welds greater voice and power to bring about change. On some level, the article works as a model for the type of research it recommends. At the very least, as far as immediate outcomes are concerned, it rallies educators to affect the here and now by being “creatively compliant and selectively defiant.” So keenly stated!
On the relationship between policy, research, & practice
When I was teaching secondary English and theatre arts, I thought myself something of a renegade. I didn’t get too wrapped-up in policy concerns. I felt a certain amount of latitude in doing things my way, and planned instruction with a great deal of freedom in most cases.
But the more I think about policy, particularly in light of this week’s reading, it appears I was affected by policy-makers without their crossing my mind. For one thing, all the commonsense things I did in my classroom — the textbooks I used, the TEKS I followed, the way I set-up my classroom, the instructional events I led — were all informed by someone’s idea of the types of practices that are worthy of occurring in a classroom.
As a teacher, I replicated practices I’d learned in schools of education, and adopted teaching methods espoused in books on course syllabi advocating the latest research and trends in education (I’m reminded here that even a course syllabus can reveal one’s political and ideological leanings, and that it’s hard for any practice not to be political on some level). My classroom practices, if I look at them closely, reveal ideological assumptions about how kids learn and what constitutes an educational experience. After reading Woodside-Jiron’s chapter, I’m convinced that policy has a profound impact on the formation of Discourses and social practices in education that, over time, can seem commonsense, and appear so natural they hardly seem up for debate.
Of course, there’s always policy that brings up heated debate, such as those still occurring around reading instruction. Being a secondary teacher, I never experienced what it felt like to be told precisely how to teach reading, but I have heard about the tensions resulting from prescriptive policies. Among many of my teacher friends, tensions were at an all-time high when they were not part of the conversation in determining policy, yet held accountable its implementation even though it ran counter to their beliefs about the teaching of reading. In the worst-case scenarios,the policy did not serve students’ needs, and an educators’ professional reputations were too narrowly constructed by how well their students performed under the policy’s implementation.
So what happens when the instructional approaches that policy recommends fails students we teach? In these circumstances, I fear the critical gaze is directed at the teacher, not the policy itself. Ideally, policy-making decisions are informed by research, but does this really make a policy more effective? History reveals how people use research findings to rally their own special interests. Woodside-Jiron’s chapter highlights how “the truth” regarding “the most effective way to teach reading” was constructed through the careful selection of studies that served the ideological assumptions and political interest of a few powerful people: “Increased control over issues of educational content and instruction are situated among a relatively small number of elected and appointed officials.”
This is a big reason I appreciated Woodside-Jiron’s explanation of the CDA approach to examining policy; CDA does not hold policy as being value neutral, but examines the Discourses, texts, and social practices that coalesce to make policy appear natural or commonsense. It examines whose voices get heard at the exclusion of others, and how special interests can make their ideological assumptions appear common sense through carefully chosen language, and strategically disseminated curriculum guides. As a plurality of voices and studies [including qualitative] are excluded, there is less opportunity for healthy debate at the policy-making level. I liked how the author mentioned this important point by James Gee:
“…we do not have a reading crisis on our hand. Rather, we have an affiliation crisis. To affiliate with particular people, practices, institutions methods, and so on is to ‘participate fully in the attitudes, values, and norms the practices requires.”
To me this implied that when making policy, multiple groups need to be represented, otherwise the group in power will only purport research and advocate practices that support the advancement of policy that reproduces its own ideological commitments.
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