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.
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