RES 5530: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (Spring 2009)

How is it that we might forget to inform every pre-service and in-service student that all teachers are obliged to honor the many languages we speak? ~ (p. 212)

I always love when ‘live’ moments seemed to connect perfectly to my ‘reading’ moments. For the past few years I have struggled to put together classes that would be practical and full for the pre-service teachers that I have the pleasure to teach. The hardest part of developing the classes is getting everything in – there is an abundance of materials and knowledge that I want to share with them, but I never have enough time for it. I always have to cut something out or simply gloss over it. However, this week I had one of those moments that showed me I should no longer leave out or cut short discussions of language in the classroom. We were talking about giving the word recognition portion of an Informal Reading Inventory. As we played around with how to administer it and score it, I asked the students what they would do if a student read the word ‘wrestle’ as ‘wrastle’. This led into a student sharing a story about a piece of writing one of her students shared with her. I don’t remember what the student’s story said exactly but he had written it as if he were talking to his friends when the assignment was a report on soil so in his attempt to share the information that he had learned, there were instances of slang. I asked my student how she responded to his piece and she honestly shared that she had to ‘chuckle’ a little. So of course the rest of the class thought that the young student’s story was funny and they chuckled as well. In addition, before class started during their lunch break they watched a few you tube videos that poked fun at the uneducated in poor communities and their inability to speak correctly. While I know the program was meant to be funny and light-hearted, I just couldn’t help but think of all the implications and biases that are built from comedy skits. I realized from these moments that I needed to spend time talking to them about accepting, appreciating and respecting the languages that their students will bring to the classroom. So, I talked for just a little bit about the issues we have been discussing together. I didn’t want to ‘preach’ to them and I knew that I needed them to read a piece first before I could effectively engage them in the conversation. Needless to say, I’m assigning an article for them to read and react to this week. It’s my job to teach them how to accept the diversity in their classrooms, so these ‘missteps’ are really the best teachable moments I could ask for.

One other thing and I’ll try to keep this a little shorter! My favorite chapter from this week was chapter 12, so I apologize that my response focuses narrowly on it, but there was a passage that inspired me and I wanted to share it with all of you. It’s on page 215, 2nd paragraph. Tha paragraph itself is structures so perfectly that you feel the emotion that Wynne has brought to the piece. She questions how we can dare to leave out the voices of those who have brought our country through out most challenging times and deeply supports the notion that all of our children need to hear those stories and realize that we are all a part of that history. The lives we lead today, the lessons we teach and the lesson we learn all extend and add to the history that precedes us and our language, our stories are what make that history timeless. So, I’ll end with a part of that passage,

Those now grown-up activists who created the sit-ins of the ‘60’s, who walked in marches, who survived the jails, have told me about the power of the chants, the songs, the language to keep them alive, committed and unified in a struggle that no one thought they could win. That language and those stories belong in our children’s classroom (p.215).

Amie Snow