Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (Summer 2011)

As I read about Jake I was reminded of many male students I have encountered over my career. For fifteen years I taught kindergarten and had many “Jakes” in my classroom – boys who resisted the two dimensional paper/pencil type activities that have become such a huge part of school literacy activities, even in kindergarten. I always viewed these students as my “concrete” or “kinesthetic” learners. These students, like Jake, were much more successful when working with manipulatives, blocks, puzzles and the like. I had never really thought about the home literacy experiences of children like this in the manner that Hicks describes them; as “apprenticeship learning” experiences. Looking back now, this is exactly the types of situations that these students came from. They had gone from learning by doing, building, and constructing to a more typical school discourse and it wasn’t working for them either. As Jake’s teacher stated they were also “on task; it just might not be [my] task” (p. 101). I can see why these types of students were and are resistant to typical school literacy experiences. While I tried to continue to incorporate as many of the concrete, hands-on types of activities into my lessons, the curriculum has been “pushed down” to the point that more and more of the two dimensional tasks were required. This created even more resistance in my students, and like Jake, they also began to struggle academically.

I also think that these students, like Jake, were greatly influenced by the views of other members of their families. As Hicks observes, “The stories voiced about us, by those whom we most love and value, shape our identities in ways more powerful than even the most authoritative institutional systems…” (p. 123). Just as Jake’s father asserted that Jake would take over the family business, many of my former students already had an idea for their future based on family members’ stated expectations for them. Like Jake, these students also practiced school literacies, but their family’s views of them were much more powerful in shaping their identities. School was just something they had to do.

I found Jake’s views on writing very interesting. I was also surprised to find that he was not overly excited about science, or rather writing about science. The fact that he enjoyed Writer’s Workshop so much was very telling for me. When given the option to write about a topic of his choice, Jake more freely participated in the writing activity. As educators, we need to remember this and offer students more choice in terms of writing assignments. The difference between these types of writing practices and those that are “assigned” is, according to Hicks, the possibility of “hybridity”. This hybridity allows Jake to write about things he values in his home life and still participate in a school literacy activity. This is an important concept for educators.

Creating classroom discourses that support this notion of “hybridity” is essential if we hope to reach children like Jake and Laurie. In order for us to accomplish this, “change also has to entail a moral shift, a willingness to open oneself up to the possibility of seeing those who differ from us” (p. 152). This is not an easy thing to do. I am often guilty of seeing things only from my perspective or discourse, no matter how hard I try to “see” things differently. When this happens, I fail to create a classroom in which my students feel that their home culture and discourses are valued. I have to keep working, and as Hicks so rightly observes, “This is very hard work, but work that lies at the heart of teaching” (p. 152).

Leslie Rothenberger