Purpose of Literacy

Last semester, I took a rhetoric course here at UT. The main concept for the course that our professor reminded us of throughout the semester was that the purpose of rhetoric is for individuals to contribute to a democratic society. I'll never forget this important concept because as soon as I heard it, it began to shape who I was as a teacher and continues to shape my opinions about teaching strategies and theories.

Keeping this purpose in mind as usual, I read Bomer&Bomer's "For a Better World," Chapter 2. One of the most important lines I appreciated while reading is the idea that "discourse creates thinking." Bomer&Bomer list some very useful concepts for critical reading that I believe come out in discourse after reading:

• Groups
• Power
• Taking things for granted (Naturalization) 
• Fairness/Justice
• Voice/Silence
• Multiple perspectives (different sides of stories)
• Representation (showing what people are like)
• Race
• Class
• Money
• Labor
• Language
• Intimate relationships and families
• Relationships to nature
• Violence and Peace
• Individualism/Collectivism

As I continue teaching in a local classroom and when I venture out into the world to become a teacher on my own, I want to remember these categories to help my students think about what they're reading in a way that I hope will help them gain empathy. Through discourse about these topics-- discourse I believe also including reading-- I hope that their empathy will one day persuade them to think and write and act in the most compassionate way towards other people and benefit our democratic society as a whole.

I think the meaning of being "American" is tossed around a lot and is the subject of controversy that often leads to hatred. I imagine, ideally, that America should be just what School House Rock sings, "The Great American Melting Pot!" I think if we can grow empathy in our students then sound them out into the world to make persuasive discourse, America could truly one day be a happy little song's optimistic view of it as a diverse but harmonious country, all working together to make one delicious soup.

Practical language

"Myth 1: English must obey the rules of grammar" Zuidema - Linguistic Prejudice

If we're going to teach our students that their vernacular of English is "correct English," we should also teach them the importance of establishing an academic language. I agree with Zuidema's debunked myths, including one of them which evokes the question: What even is "Standard English?" Rather than trying to teach students what the district's board of education or a teacher thinks "Standard English" is, for my own class experience I would like to teach them "Academic English." Their own personal vernaculars should be shown value, though not at the expense of their academic literacy.

I would like to see my students do a project on comparing media-portrayed vernaculars and regional dialects to people they know in real life who speak that way. I'd like the results of their projects to be an understanding that the media often portrays accents to be associated with certain values or qualities in a person, but that's not necessarily true all the time. People also don't always speak the same way in every situation, and that should be something they discover in their research as well. I'd also be interested in their opinions about why certain accents were chosen for certain characters in films and critique that choice.



Even though we want our students to become aware of linguistic prejudice, I think we also need to continue teaching them an academic literacy for practical purposes. However, I wonder to what extent we can realistically teach them that their vernacular is "okay" while enforcing an academic language in essays that can erase their individual voices.

Feel good teaching

Most of the UTeach program here at UT seems to be geared towards a "feel good" teaching methodology, which is just a term I use to refer to the importance of making students feel good about themselves. It is very important that students feel comfortable in their learning environments in order to grow academically and it is also important that students are confident in their skills. However, I think there is a certain extent to which we need to push students (gently) out of their comfort zones in the appropriate context and with appropriate guidance in order to succeed academically.

If we focus too much on letting our students be comfortable with their skills, I have to wonder how they'll have the opportunities to learn new skills. Gloria Ladinson-Billings addresses this in her article, But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. She says if culturally relevant teaching is the goal, teachers should "attend to students' academic needs, not merly making them 'feel good'" and can challenge students by "drawing on issues and ideas they [find] to be meaningful." I think that it's possible to make give students opportunities to "feel good" with more simple warm-ups (like my cooperating teacher does), while fostering a progressive learning environment during the majority of class time.

Teachers and Authors are Perfect Writers

For many students, it seems like their teachers and the authors of the novels read in class are perfect writers and readers. How could they believe any differently, when teachers only present their own reading interpretations cultivated over the years and authors only publish their works edited by professional editors? 

In "Conversing with Miguel" by Elaine Rubenstein-Avila, a young Mexican-American student retells his enjoyment of a writing workshop. Miguel tells Rubenstein he learned that, "even my teacher don't write all pretty the first time" as they struggled through the writing process together in the workshop. That process included writing another draft, showing it to the other students in class for corrections, then turning it in to the teacher for feedback, according to Miguel. 

Going through the writing process with his teacher in the workshop is an important way for Miguel and students like him to feel more comfortable with making mistakes and becoming a better writer. In another class of mine, Teaching Secondary School, we're reading "The Literature Workshop" by Sheridan Blau. Blau makes a point alongside the one Rubenstein discovered through Miguel, in that teachers demonstrating their struggles and failures in the writing and reading process encourage students to work through writing and reading as a process. 

"When do students see their teachers struggling to make sense of a 

difficult text or producing a reading that proceeds gradually, moving 

from mere confusion, to a sense of gist, to a reading that is tentatively complete 

but that will still give way to a more perceptive and adequate interpretation?" 

Not only is demonstrating the process important for literacy development, but Blau also recommends working with other students in groups is effective in reaching more "pretty" interpretations of text. Students like Miguel who struggle with certain English words would be able to receive help from native English speakers in groups. Group work can also be an opportunity for Moll(et. all)'s "funds for knowledge" to be useful depending on the text being discussed. Blau calls for diversity in groups in order to get different interpretations from a text and be able to thoughtfully discuss it until an appropriate interpretation is reached. Even on a lower reading level and for more superficial meanings of texts, group work can be especially helpful for struggling learners of English to do what Vygotsky calls the "zone of proximal development," where, according to Blau, is "where they are able to together more than any of them can do by themselves." 

"New" Literacy

When we first talked about literacy in this class, I was skeptical to believe that literacy could refer to anything other than "general" reading and writing. We learned that activities like tagging, blogging, or even tweeting could be vessels of literacy. I think "art" had been swept into the list our table made of means of literacy for adolescents, which gave me a possibly inaccurate image of what we were changing our concept of literacy to be.

While I'm still learning what literacy is in today's classrooms, I had assumed that first day that literacy was now supposed to mean any form of expression, even without reading or writing. I'll talk more on this in my literacy inquiry paper, but the interview I conducted helped to better define what this new literacy could be. My interviewee is a Korean native speaker and English learner. After asking how he bests expresses himself, he responded that he does so with music. I felt disappointed at first, since I wanted him to say something better related to writing and reading. Of course, one reads music in order to play it, but is it the same thing? Does it count as literacy?

This excerpt from our class textbook by Randy Bomer, Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms at first clarified whether or not music would count, then just ended up confusing me.

I said: "This is English class, so you know this class is about reading and writing-- let's call it literacy. English class, you knwo from your experience in school, is all about literacy. But you use literacy in other places besides English class, too. For one thing, you know you use literacy in other classes. You read and write stuff in social studies. In biology, you might read a diagram that shows how a plant uses sunlight, how energy and nutrients flow through the plant. In algebra, even if all you're doing is getting ready to solve an equation, you read it-- you see what patterns you recognize in it, how it's similar or different to other problems you have seen. That's literacy, too, looking at something and making meaning of it." 

If looking at something and making meaning of it is literacy, then playing music should qualify as literacy if the "meaning" is interpreted as notes to play on the instrument. However, when reading sheet music to discover meaning, is what notes to play good enough to qualify music for literacy? Should music count as literacy if it does? Should anything without words, like algebra in the above example, be able to qualify for literacy? I understand the point of it is to make students feel valuable and knowledgable in the classroom, but is it productive enough towards the purpose of achieving a standard of academic literacy?