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

In her efforts to explore the concept of “coming to voice” for African Caribbean girls, Henry wanted to provide students an opportunity to read and write about issues that were relevant to their own lives. To use Noll’s terminology, she wanted to create a curriculum that was culturally relevant. This was extremely important for Henry because, historically, black students and other minorities have been denied the opportunity to learn about their own culture from a critical or their own informed perspectives (Joseph, 1988). According to teacher Beverly McElroy-Johnson, we have ignored the issues in the lives of these children and have essentially left them “voiceless.”

As educators it is our responsibility and obligation to help these students find their “voice.” We must take steps to ensure that we are providing a curriculum that is relevant to their own personal experiences. Also, just as Delpit and Dowdy point out, Henry also asserts that we must have an awareness of the language and dialect interferences of these students so that we can avoid assuming that their cognitive capabilities are inferior. By accepting students’ linguistic differences and creating a curriculum that includes issues relevant to their own lives, educators can encourage students to participate in discussions and help them understand that their thoughts and ideas are important. We can help them to find their “voice.”

I found myself agreeing with Henry’s decision to ignore “errors” in the students’ writing. By doing this, she found that the students could express their feelings through writing. This is also true in my classroom. I have found that when my students respond to literature or write in their journals, they often ask, “Are you grading this? Are you going to count off if we misspell words?” They always sigh with relief when I answer no. I just want them to get their thoughts down on paper and they do this more freely when they know that I am not going to “grade” it. In this way we afford our students the opportunity to “speak up” and “speak out”.

Henry states that this is especially important for black girls who have been consistently shortchanged in the school setting. She asserts that “[b]lack females need a space for authentically reproducing themselves…” (p. 150). I associated this notion with Staples concept of “re-authoring.” “Re-authoring” is described as the self-reflective processes of naming and ascribing personhood (p. 380).

Staples referred to students who were named “disengaged,” “off-task,” “slow,” “struggling,” and “troublemaker” when they were within the confines of the classroom. Outside of the classroom these students were able to “re-author” or rename themselves. I think that teachers should really examine this concept “re-authoring.” Instead of focusing on our students’ weaknesses, we should focus on their strengths and “re-author” our own representations of our students.

These are our students, like Daniel and Zonnie, whose “school literacies belie their otherwise literacy-rich lives” (p. 379). As Staples points out, opportunities for our students to “re-author” are often missed by us as educators because we fail to see them as relevant to their literacy education (p. 380).

Again, teachers have the responsibility to help our students discover their ability to use their literacies to re-author themselves or find their voices. In order to do this, we (or at least I) need to provide our students with culturally relevant topics which allow them to "speak up" and "speak out" (Henry) and “the possibilities of new names in [their] dynamic literate lives” (Staples, p. 389).

Leslie Rothenberger