YALIT/Crit

The ELA Imposition

First off, I'd like to apologize for not getting my mini-reflection up here yesterday.  I didn't have internet access over the weekend.  But, I've read all the reflections on the main page, and I'm impressed with my classmates, per usual.  Many of the questions are so ambiguous and open-ended that I don't even know how I would begin to respond to them as a future teacher who can literally count his hours spent teaching on two hands.  But, these questions are important, and I'm guessing that we are going to struggle with them for the duration of our careers in the field.  Ray reiterated Yagelski's question, "What, ultimately, are we educating our students for?"  And I know that the 50,000 (or however many) members of the NCTE would all possibly have different answers to that question.  Many of those answers would be getting at ELA teachers' ideals and fantastical utopias in which a love of literature is imbued in every student, every year.  And this passion and intention, I think, is largely why I initially decided to become an ELA teacher.   But, now that I've received some more education, I've realized that this intention/goal does not really jive with anything I stand for.  In his post, Jerry asserts that "Some books are better than others, and more worth knowing.  Literacy should be an aspect of a liberal education--not defined by a list of great books or personal taste in and of themselves, but through the interaction of both canons and choice."   This statement is a contradiction if I've ever seen one.  The traditionally snobbish assertion that reading "literature" is "better" than reading other types of books dictates that if you have your students best interest in mind and believe this statement, how could you give them any choice?  They are going to choose inferior texts; they must be told what to read; they have bad taste; they don't know what is best for them; they don't yet know that they all want to be English majors.  This is all a bunch of bullshit, and frankly, I am starting to have problems with the idea of teaching the canonical texts at all, unless my students decide they would like to read them to suit their own purposes. 

I don't want to be part of the institutionalization of books, whether they be "good" or "bad."  Sato wisely states that as ELA teachers, "We have the power to make changes in ourselves and in our classrooms by viewing the students beyond the blink."  I don't understand how any teacher could look at his or her students for longer than a blink and think that imposing canons of taste in books, both reading and writing, is a tailored fit for every student.  Over the weekend I spent some time with a kid that I grew up with.  He is a High School dropout who struggled to even get a GED, and now he works as an auto mechanic.  To this day, he has poor reading skills, but he is a great conversationalist and has great personality.  He also was intrigued as to why I wanted to become an English teacher.  One year ago, I probably would've told him, "Well, I've read so many fucking books that I think it would be a waste if I didn't teach kids about them."  But, now I realize that what I've read means nothing to my future students or my friends who are auto mechanics.  I asked my friend whether or not he would've been interested if his ELA teacher would've let him read an auto manual or an auto magazine with car and part reviews and used those texts to teach him about reading, writing, genre, etc., and found stories that he would be interested in.  He said in so many words that he would've actually attended that class.   I've learned well enough from my girlfriend that I can't impose my liking for avant-garde musical compositions on her; she still likes mostly pop music.  And I think as most of us younger people who have just recently become or are still becoming politically minded and globally conscious in the past few years are learning with the sad state our world is in, apathy is difficult to eradicate, cynicism is sometimes hard to fight off, and change is slow and hard-won stuff.  But, I don't think that the beginnings of change lie in imposing my taste in literature on my future students.  Even President Bush professes to have "read some Shakespeares" on one of his exorbitant amount of vacations last year, and look at what a thinker that guy is.  The burgeoning youth has multifarious interests that are viable, important, and worth exploring with them in order to work towards developing thoughtful individuals, and they already have many things that they could teach me as teacher, cause the one thing I've always been sure of is that I don't know a damn thing, and I don't plan on keeping that a secret.

Yagelski

Yagelski notes that we should be teaching in context of "a design for a future society," always keeping in mind the "kind of society we hope to create." None of us would argue against critical literacy; we know the value of teaching our students to use writing/reading as a means to think for one's self about the issues present in one's society. But I'm not sure I've heard anything that speaks to the actual issue of "how do we really get students to become persons of action?"

For my reflection, I'd like to take a look at the books we've talked about this term in book clubs, lit circles and large group discussion and address the question: "Using this book, how would we tailor activities/discussions in our class to spurn our students on toward social justice? How will we use the text to build Yagelski's 'just and sustainable communities' ?"

In one of my book clubs, we talked about the voyeuristic qualities of some of these novels. It's easy to simply look at the plot lines and characters with a "48 Hours" sense of horror/sadness, then go on our way without making any changes in our life or in the life of others.

Henry David Thoreau said, "A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." How can we create action in our ELA classrooms?

My Reflection is that we need vision

   

~"Without a vision the people perish" (from someplace in the Bible).~

I haven't had time to check all the reflection posts, so I am sorry if there are redundancies here. One of the first things addressed by the Yagelski chapter, is our need to develop our own statement of purpose as educators. One of my biggest questions as a student was "what the hell do we need this for?" Yagelski says the reason and the answer will come from our deepest beliefs about the teaching of English. It is my belief (in collaboration with Yagelski) that:

• We need to question ideologies and trouble concepts in every aspect of society, especially where our own pedagogy is concerned.

• There is, and always will be more than one right answer.

• Theory informs practice and classroom dialogue informs purpose.

• English is a "subject forming discourse," the primordial soup which constructs and fosters the utopian ideals of a future society.

• We need to celebrate the creative mind of the individual.

• Not about knowledge, but knowing.

• We are not museum guides teaching for the past goal of filling the labor market. We need change, for Christ sake, change! We need to foster social change by embracing a pedagogy of the possible.

Perhaps more unsettling to our understanding of the place of the Language Arts as a discipline than either article we are considering is Dr. Stearns' statement that teaching literature is not teaching literacy.  I have thought a great deal about the implications of this statement.  Is the kind of liberal education I value no longer applicable to our modern student?  Is the nature of that value such that Dr. Yagelski would refer to it as "indoctrination?"  I am very troubled by these considerations.

What is literacy?  To have the ability to read?  Is it perhaps a love of reading, or having read a lot of books?  Is a person literate because he or she has read every novel by Tamora Pierce, and then every novel that is like a Tamora Pierce novel (I'm not picking on one writer here- I'm just remembering the young lady who read seventeen Tamora Pierce novels)?  Does that love translate into what we think of as literate?

I am thinking less of Yagelski's article here than his speech at the DATE conference back in March.  He admonished the audience to continue learning, inquiring, growing intellectually.  He spoke at length of the necessity to live a life of the mind, a life of scholarly pursuits.  I wonder what we wish for our students.  In his essay, Yagelski writes "I understand English education--and English studies more generally--as primarily subject-forming enterprises that should be structured around a vision of a certain kind of literate subject."  In other words, the goal of an education in the humanities (because that is what we are really discussing) is self-awareness or, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Greenblatt, self-fashioning.  Being literate is equatable to being able to conceive your identity as a unique "subject."  Of course, readers of Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning will recognize the origins of this idea.  What I perhaps disagree with Yagelski is in his last statement, that this act of self-fashioning be directed toward a particular, defined idea of what the "literate subject" is.  (Readers of Greenblatt will also recognize this contradiction in the structure of self-fashioning--that the self is ultimately defined by dominant ideologies, fictionalized as an individual's creation).  While we would ideally see a generation of culturally sensative, critical, and articulate subjects, we are doing nothing but reversing the conservatism that ran through mainstream English studies under the domination of the New Critics.

Perhaps here is where I have a problem with the student that has read seventeen novels by Tamora Pierce--what has she learned?  Or, think of it another way.  As a student of James Fenimore Cooper's writings and nineteenth-century American romanticism, I have read eighteen of Cooper's thirty-two novels, plus his two major political treatises, and selections from his letters, notebooks, and travel writings.  Does that make me literate?  It is certainly a body of literary knowledge.  But what value does this knowledge have?

I think that this is the line of questioning that has problematized our thinking of literary canons and their use in the classroom.  I would ask, as a final question in this seminar, that we define literacy and question how canons create the literate subject that Yagelski speaks of (and don't mistake our project of expanding the canon as anything other than another kind of canon building).  I think that these are questions that we need to define in relation to our individual practices and goals.  But, since this is my dog and pony show, and you can't interrupt me, captive reader, I'll make some general statements toward my own sense of these problems.

Shirley Brice Heath makes a case for "literate behaviors" in her essay "The Fourth Vision: Literate Language at Work" (The Right to Literacy, ed. Lansford, et al., MLA 1990).  These include the ability to understand and intellegently discuss texts, contextualize them within one's experience, argue with and make predictions from texts, compare, evaluate, and predict from related situations, and understand the practicality of these practices.  I would adopt her broad understanding of being literate, but I would also temper her literate behaviors with the primary motive behind a liberal education; that is, a certain breadth and depth of knowledges that structure those literate behaviors.  I have no idea what Tamora Pierce has to say in her novels; but, from my own experience, I can say that there is no great value to reading so deeply into Cooper (or Hawthorne, or Melville--maybe Emerson) for its own sake.  Emerson, slightly tongue in cheek, tells us that there is nothing we can learn from books that we can't learn from experience.  Living in a hole and inch wide and a mile deep is no way to experience anything.  I'm not sure I would find Cooper so interesting if I didn't see in his conception of America persistant questions that trouble me about our own nation and identity.  What I'm saying is that reading Cooper for his own sake is fine, but it does not foster literate behaviors because it is a practice of self-indulgence, not self-awareness.  It can lead to the questions that allow for self-awareness, but only if you can frame those questions--and there is nothing in Cooper's writing that suggests you should do so.

How does this reflect my experience in this course?  Well, it's complicated.  It's a complicated problem.  Let me return to Dr. Stearns' comment about literature and literacy.  I don't see how we can create a literate population if we do not expose students to the kind of writing that demands the questions we ask Yagelski's literate subject to answer.  Stephen King is a fine writer for students to read.  In certain situations, his writings are something we can all learn from.  But, let us not kid ourselves by saying that King demands his readers reconceive their world the way that Faulkner does.  Does this make Faulkner a better writer.  Yes.  Absolutely.  If you disagree, then you should seriously reconsider the career choice you are about to make.  But that doesn't make King bad; it just makes Faulkner great.  Students need both--just as they need A Northern Light and Sold and Octavian Nothing--just as they need Hamlet and Moby Dick and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I think students do need literature to be literate--I think its our responsibility to have them ask the right questions of literature, to understand how it intersects with their lives, worlds, what have you.  Some books are better than others, and more worth knowing.  Literacy should be an aspect of a liberal education--not defined by a list of great books or personal taste in and of themselves, but through the interaction of both canons and choice.

Sato's Address Redux

I like what Jenn was saying about keying in on Dr. Comer's 6 "Developmental Pathways":
1.)  Emotional
2.)  Psychological
3.)  Physical
4.) Cognitive
5.)  Ethical
6.)  Linguistic

but, like Jenn, it seems like an overwhelming ideal without some concrete framwork or starting point.  What does education in all of these 6 pathways look like in the real world of school?

She mentions how "specifically, he brings together parents, staff, and students to correct the frequent sociocultural misalignments between the home and the school" 

This sounds great, but still we can ask...How?...How exactly does he do that?  What does it look like?
I'd like to spend some time brainstorming ways of doing this.  Or maybe sharing experiences that sought to do this and how they worked. 

PS She cites this quote as from "(K. Beers, personal communication, October 30, 2006)" but no explanation of this citation appears in the Notes or anything.  I guess we can't really get a discussion of that anywehre on the web or anything, it was just a "personal discussion."   I dunno.   

A thought...

Sato's talk about the influx of non-English speakers, and the need for a more multilingual perspective in the future, and her call to begin foreign language instruction at an earlier age, especially with regard to Spanish got me thinking.  What do you folks think about the idea of an after-school "Learn how to speak ______!!!" Club...I was thinking that I really want to learn how to speak other languages and never have.  Especially now that I plan to teach, and will likely have to work with students who speak other languages more fluently than they speak English.

I could run the club as someone who didn't speak, say Spanish, either...and we would all learn together.  The best part I think would be if we could get native speakers from the school involved, we could have these students acting as instructors.  Very informal, for fun and enrichment...It seems like a cool way to make kids who feel isolated by a language barrier, feel welcomed and appreciated. 

Whaddya think?  Would kids ever go for something like that?

Sato and Kozol

This Kyoko Sato address got me thinking about a lot of different things. She hits on so many provocative topics in such a short span it's hard to keep track of everything.  But her "speech", particularly the sections where she was describing the level of inequity among and between school districts, the bussing, and the despicable resegregation of our American public schools, reminded me of one of my favorite social critics Jonathan Kozol, this is an excerpt from his book, The Shame of the Nation...he is talking about the issue of funding and its paramount importance and also the issue of preschool and whos actually getting it:

"Which of these children will receive the highest scores--- those who spent the years from two to four in lovely little Montessori schools and other pastel-painted settings in which tender and attentive grown-ups read to them from story books and introduced them for the first time to the world of numbers, and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and varieties of solid objects, and perhaps taught them to sort things into groups or to arrange them in a sequence or to do those many other interesting things that early-childhood specialists refer to as prenumeracy skills, or the ones who spent those years at home in front of a TV or sitting by the window of a slum apartment gazing into the street?  There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before. (54)

Reflecting on the Semester's Reading and Conversations

Please use this category for posting your question which must reference one of the two readings we will be discussing tomorrow afternoon/evening.

I left two copies of the Yagelski chapter in my mailbox in the Eng. office. You are welcome to pick one up early enough tomorrow to read it before class if you have misplaced yours.

The SATO speech is available online--as the NCTE Nov., 2006 Presidential "address." If you need to access it online and cannot call it up, email me and I will help.

Thanks!! KES

Reflections for Tuesday

Having read Arthur Applebee's article "Stability and Change in the High School Canon" from 1992, I find it interesting that little has changed in the past 15 years as far as canon is concerned (at least in the schools I've observed.) Applebee makes an excellent point: literature in the traditional canon neglects to acknowledge the voices of women and by non-white authors. What value is being placed on nurturing critical literacy in students, and how we effectively work toward fostering it in our departments and classrooms? How do both the traditional canon and YA lit work toward critical literacy?

Question for last class

Yagelski asks all educators:

To what end do we help students learn to write and read so that they can succeed in school, find jobs, enjoy reading, or acquire cultural knowledge? What ultimately are we educating our students for? What do we want students to be and do with the literate knowledge and abilities we hope they develop? Is our purpose exclusively to help students acquire literacy skills so that they can earn good grades and good salaries? 

After watching Sir Ken Robinson's speech that Steve posted, it is relevant to connect what he has to say to Yagelski's questions. Yagelski makes the point that it is the postmodern perspective to question the established paradigms and institutions of the conservative culture of the privileged. And, the ultimate source of authority is the "play" of discourse itself, with an openness to meaning and authority from unexpected places. With such a focus on standardized testing and grade point averages, and the push to get students to graduate and seek a college education, are we as educators just participating in the system that is designed after the "image of the university," as Robinson suggests? To what extent, consciously or unconsciously, do we as educators participate in maintaining the institutional status quo? And if we plan to be agents of change, what tools do we have or need to learn in order to persuade others to rethink the current perspective of intelligence?  Robinson suggests that we need to radically rethink intelligence so that we see it as diverse, dynamic, and distinct, so how can we as educators help/work to reshape that perspective?

So again-What ultimately are we educating our students for? And if it is our desire to help students nurture their creativity, rather than stunt it's growth, then where do we start?