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

I really liked the quotation from Hicks’ 3rd chapter, last paragraph: “Teaching, like research, involves situated readings of students. We read students’ lives in ways that draw on our own histories as learners.” I hadn’t really thought of it in that way, but, as I read and considered Laurie’s story, I can see the validity of this statement. My childhood was safe and secure, centered in activities at our Southern Baptist Church. My earliest memories are of Vacation Bible School, similar to the memories of Deborah Hicks, and of listening to the music at Sunday services. Although we moved several times as I was growing up, my parents provided a loving and a literate home, and I always felt secure in my “place”. I was a good student, probably motivated as much by the fact that my parents expected me to be one as by my own intrinsic expectations. I could not conceive of anyone NOT wanting to be able to read – it was my favorite thing to do!

As I have mentioned before, teaching in the small, working-class town where I taught for many years was an eye-opening experience for me. For the first time I “ran up against” the Lauries of the world – students who lived with Grandma because Daddy was in jail, students whose fathers were not even in the picture at all, students who lived in a hotel (WHICH hotel was determined by which street-corner Mom worked the night before), and students who spoke little or no English. On several occasions I helped a fellow teacher pack a child’s bookbag with snacks before sending him home, knowing that he and his siblings might or might not have dinner that night. I worked with a student who had severe emotional problems because he had witnessed his father being brutally – and wrongfully – arrested. When I began working there, I had no idea how to relate to those family situations. I only know that my middle-class background was light years away from that of the children with whom I was working...and, knowing that their situations were not going to change, I had to develop some understanding of their lives and learn how to work with these children. I remember thinking to myself “It is no wonder these kids cannot focus on learning their ABC’s – they don’t even know if they will get to eat tonight!” Surviving had to be their priority. They, like Laurie, wanted that safety and security for their own lives, and, again like Laurie, they created those worlds for themselves in center time, particularly housekeeping, and in their writing. Often their writing, particularly around holiday times, did not reflect at all the realities of their actual holiday situations. Some of my students were open to building relationships with adults in our school. Those students were usually more successful, academically. Others were angry and/or resentful. It was difficult to help those students succeed with the academic requirements imposed by the state. I would like to think that my instructional leadership had a positive impact on my students, but as I have grown as a teacher, I know there were times when I could have done so much more.

Hicks states “The paths to creating negotiated movements between cultures and classes are, however, never simple – never reducible to a single method of teaching or theory of learning.” (p. 96) We, as teachers, need to learn to look past our own backgrounds, or discourses, and to respond to the needs of our students as those needs manifest themselves. Easier said than done, right? As Hicks also notes, “With classes that are too large to manage and increasingly stiff curriculum mandates, it has become difficult for teachers to come to know children with the kind of depth that engenders successful change.” (p. 96) However, if we are to become master teachers – “highly qualified” in truth, as well as in name – we must make it happen.

Marlee Wright