Peer Over the Walls and See the Horizon

Morrell discusses in this week's readings how literacy education today has taken the form of literature analysis (89) and procedural approaches to writing (84-5). The literature to be analyzed must be "sanctioned as meritorious" by those in power (89), and writing must follow a prescribed method of pre-writing, writing, and rewriting (85), where even free-form thinking takes on prescribed methodologies such as thought-clouds and brainstorming. Morrell discusses how these practices need to be enlarged to include other media, such as film, television, music and the Internet (90), and include other methods for creating media such as apprenticeship (86). The students need to look within to find forms of literature to study, instead of looking on teachers to provide it: "Their non-school lives [are] saturated with sophisticated literary practices ... students d[on't] just consume popular culture; they also produce popular culture" (92).

Morrell also discusses the value various elements of literacy have taken in our schools: "reading has taken the primary role, writing has a much smaller secondary role ... and the art of public speaking has virtually vanished" (104). Morrell tells us that we need to balance this out, and encourage students to talk and write about issues that they confront daily but have few opportunities to discuss. (109) These activities should be more about production rather than consumption (115).

Mathematics education has easily fallen into the same traps that literacy education has fallen into. Instead of sanctioned literature, we have sanctioned mathematical concepts. Instead of prescribed writing methods, we have prescribed ways to solve word problems. Math students are learning processes, and not concepts. They know how to solve problems in geometry and algebra, but they do not know how to use geometry and algebra to aid in removing the roadblocks they come to in their lives.

Consider these two math problems:

Question 1: A family of 4 goes on vacation. Airfare per person is $300. Tax on airfare is 17%. Food will cost $13 per person per meal per day. Lodging costs $200 per night. How much will the family vacation cost if they go for 7 days?

Question 2: A family has a limited budget to go on vacation. Plan out a vacation for the family and show how it can stay within a budget.

Question 1 makes so many assumptions: the size of the family, the fact that they have enough money to travel by plane, the fact that they are willing to go far for vacation, the time they have devoted to vacationing. There are racial, gender, social, cultural, and economic implications to the seemingly innocent "facts" given. Question one embodies the status-quo, and presents life as a simple package.

Consider question 2. THIS is real life! One can talk about a single working mom with 13 children. One can talk about how they take the bus to the beach for the day, instead of a plane trip across country. One can incorporate the need to tend to pets while away. One can discuss the potential lost income of hourly workers in the family while away. Question 2 removes implications. Question 2 challenges the concepts of family, vacation, budget, and cost. It does not present a problem where some students will say "Must be nice to have money!". Instead, it allows the student to come up with their own restrictions to fit THEIR lifestyle.

Rather than presenting the students with information, data, and pre-conceived notions of what it means to be a family and go on vacation, question 2 allows the student to use their own concept of family and vacation to solve the problem. In addition, instead of providing a neat list of items to consider which would yield a single answer for all students, the question allows the students to critically consider all of the elements involved in their taking of a vacation under their particular circumstances.

To help balance out the literacy components of writing and presenting, an entire project can be made out of this question. Students can present their budgets and trips to the class. They can be formal about it, or make a home-movie of the proposed trip, showing how the budget was spent. They can write an essay "How I spent my summer vacation?" They can produce a cost breakdown structure. Literacy extends beyond history and literature. It can exist in the math class as well.

Considering Freire in this discussion, while question 1 can potentially detach the student from their personal reality, question 2 connects to their reality (52). Question 1 poses the student as "spectator"; question 2 as "re-creator" (56). Question 2 allows the student to teach herself, "mediated by the world" (61). The response to the challenge of question 2 "evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings" (62).

This post will bring this blog to a close. From the first post, the exploration of Delpit and Hirsch showed the importance of finding meaningful topics for discovery not based on some third-party's determination, but our own. We then discussed the importance of language and culture, not only in terms of foreign languages, but dialects as well. We took a view of the political realm of literacy through neoliberalism and neoconservatism. We challenged our traditional views of assessment and testing. We explored race and economics in the classroom, and how despite "equitable" measures from our government, inequalities prevail. We discussed the literacy surrounding our students in their own cultures, from video games to hip-hop. We explored gender, gender identity, and the no-so-black-and-white nature of a seemingly bipolar issue. In this final post, we are tying these elements together, challenging the "top-down" structure of most classrooms today, and allowing students to take greater responsibility in their own education, which will thereby incorporate more of all of the above angles.

In general, we need to give our students more credit. They deal with racism, sexism, classism, and every other -ism you can imagine on a daily basis. Pretending these -isms do not exist in the classroom is not fooling anybody. Exposing these -isms, and allowing them to become a part of our children's education, we can create an environment which is more in line with what they see every day, enriching them with the skills to challenge the status quo and in the process, challenge themselves.

Go forth and question ... everything.

Finding Your Voice

I was very interested to see Moses' piece "Algebra and Civil Rights" in our selection of readings this week. Obtaining my teaching certification in grades 7-12 mathematics, I did not expect to see the word "algebra" appear in the title of anything we would read in a literacy class. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in Moses' piece.

Although I am striving to become a math teacher, it never occurred to me that a course in literacy would ever be a waste. Being critically literate in a language allows one to "powerfully navigate socially sanctioned language systems as they also attempt to speak the truth to power" (7) and "is essential to the redefining of the self and the transformation of oppressive social structures and relations of production" (5) according to Morrell. In my opinion, this applies to any topic, be it literature, science, history, economics, health, or mathematics.

I was very much in support of Moses' method of social uprising around a cause, garnering "active participation of some critical mass" (16), getting young people to find "their voice instead of being spoken for" (19), and "getting people at the bottom to make demands, on themselves first, then on the system" (20). This is how our country broke away from Britain. This is how slavery ended. This is how women won the right to vote. This is how discrimination is being broken down. By focusing on mathematics, I believe Moses is breaking one the tenants of his own argument: "finding their voice instead of being spoken for". I understand that economic access is a difficulty for people of color (5), and the detriment technology has been on the Black community (10), but why is mathematics necessarily the answer? Why is it not education as a whole? After Brown vs. Board of Education, blacks have the same rights as white to attend school, but do they really have "equal" access? Is math really the problem? Moses discusses that Blacks are not "tinkering in the garage, with the ambition of designing something better than Microsoft Windows" (10). I argue that a lot more is needed than math for that. Intuition, innovation, social skills, psychology, human-computer interaction, business sense, marketing, economics ... the list is endless that one needs to start a business. Why does this innovation necessarily need to be mathematical in nature? Why can't it be social? historical? philosophical? Overall, a well-rounded education opens the door for advancement into ANY field. Why limit the opportunity to just scientific jobs?

I understand Moses' premise that the jobs of the future will be more scientific, but as Moses said himself, blacks need to find their own voice to fight for their own cause. Telling them to fight for mathematically literacy is not allowing them to find their own voice. Telling them to fight for equal access to education as a whole is not even allowing them to find their own voice. Showing the black community the trends in the industry and the skills they will need for tomorrow will pique their interest, but they need to decide for themselves what they need to fight for in order to get their fair share of tomorrow's jobs.

All Are Created Equally Different

In Gee's "Opportunity to Learn", we are exposed to the fact that not all students come to the classroom with the same background. Even though they all graduated from the same previous grade level, their knowledge level, and more importantly, their experience with that knowledge, is all different. Assessing all children on the same level, assuming they have had the same experiences to all of the same material, according to Gee, is "invalid and unethical" (28).

At the same time, we can not expect that all students will "want" to interact with material at the same level. All students have different interests. Some are fonder of math over literature, history over biology, Spanish over economics. Gee calls the different learning levels "active" and "critical" (32). Active learning allows you to experience something new, form new affiliations, and prepare to learn more on the topic (32). Critical learning allows you to innovate in the domain, and come up with something novel or unpredictable (33). Typically, critical learning will occur in those areas the student has a fondness for, but not always.

Critical learning was very evident in Mahiri's piece "Street Scripts". The pieces of work and art created by these low-income African American students were "powerful lenses" into their lives and their struggles in their community (24). Their focus was not on getting a better job, or buying a house, or participating in the stock market. These educational topics would be of little interest to them, since they are focusing on survival at the moment. Allowing the students to explore these topics by their own choosing allows us as educators to "step back" and let them express themselves, instead of us reinforcing negative stereotypes of their race and socioeconomic status (22). They know the situation they are in; they don't need us to lecture them about poverty and the importance of finding a good job in the hopes of "getting out". If we let them express their frustration and anxiety over their condition, only then will they begin to listen to us about topics such as buying a house or participating in the stock market, because only then will they see those things as potential opportunities for them in the future.

This was the focus of Tatum's work with Quincy in his piece "Toward a More Anatomically Complete Model of Literacy Instruction". Tatum tells us we need to "address both the literacy needs and life outcomes of African American male adolescents in order to improve the conditions of these young men in school and society" (156). These children need to experience "psychosocial membership" (160), feeling that "they are in the presence of an adult advocate who is not going to give up on them" (160). By finding texts that engage African American adolescents (163) that discuss the typically taboo topics of a social, cultural, political, spiritual and/or economic focus (164), we can create interest in the text. THIS is real life! Real life is not a clean slate where everyone is equal and has equal opportunities and equal value. If we stop pretending this is the case, and deliberate in the actual, the interest level of the students skyrockets. This was shown with Quincy in the texts Tatum assigned him.

Stanley, however, shows us that we also must be careful with texts that the students show interest in. In "Practicing for Romance", Stanley shows us that sometimes the texts chosen "had the effect of undermining their own interests, and of preserving the dominant ideology" (178). These texts can not be considered in a vacuum. They must be discussed and evaluated. In the case of romance novels, we need to question the character's actions, and have the readers wonder if they could do more, or if they could have taken the story into a different direction if they acted differently.

Maher and Hill's pieces show us just how differently the world can be viewed. Life is not A or B, black or white, yes or no. Feminists views in Maher's piece range from conservative to liberal-progressive, and "woman-centered" to social reconstructionist. Some believe schools should focus on academic achievement, but instead "have fallen victim to a series of foolish gender and culture wars (268). Others believe single-sex classrooms might be the answer (270). In Hill's piece, what would seem to some to be one of the most "basic" binary choices in life, sex and gender, involves a lot of "gray" area. Maher sums up these concepts very succinctly: "Teachers ought to engage with the whole child ... and confront societal inequalities" (270). As teachers, will we always say the right thing? Will we always do the right thing? Will we always value every difference displayed by our students in the classroom? If we answer yes, we are fooling ourselves. We have been brought up by society to conform, and when we struggle, that is the education we will fall back to. In our attempt to recognize that and combat it, that is where the true education of our children lies.