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

I really enjoyed reading this chapter, I don’t know if it is because I share the same feelings of respect for the women in my family as Jane Miller, bell hooks, and Janet Frame. At the beginning of the chapter, Jane Miller wrote about the early attachments children have with their caretakers: “It is surely within those first conversations, those shared sightings and naming that the specificity, the material detail and concrete knowing of the world are learned as values within an actual, evolving culture” (page 37). This quote made me think about a chapter I read in Adolescent Literacy Instruction: Policies and Promising Practices edited by Jill Lewis and Gary Moorman. The authors of the chapter are David W. Moore and Karen A. Onofrey. I am reading this book for one of my other classes, and we actually discussed the chapter this week. The title of the chapter is “Fostering Literate Academic Indentities During the First Days of School”, within the text the authors define their ideas of what an identity is, and more specifically literate identities. I think the authors’ ideas/definition of the term “identity” are similar to the text we are reading in this class, it may be more like a combination of the terms discourses and identities. The reason the quote by Miller made me think about the chapter on fostering literate identities for students, is because Miller mentioned the importance of the first conversations between a caretaker and their child, and Moore and Onofrey mention the importance of creating an environment that fosters the literate identities of students within the first few days of school. I feel there is a connection between Miller’s feelings about the important connection that is made by a child and caretaker within the first “conversations and shared sightings” and Moore and Onofrey’s idea of the important connections teachers make on the first day.

Miller, hooks, and Frame described their identities or students identities outside of school and how they affected their experience with literature. In the text Miller argued: “Literacy learning is part of these histories, not something that children do as a cognitive task divorced from their lives”(page 37). I want to share some of the ideas in the chapter by Moore and Onofrey from Adolescent Literacy Instruction: Policies and Promising Practices so we can create cognitive tasks that ARE NOT divorced from students lives that help them develop literacy identities. (An identity that would be similar to Frame’s literacy identity she described in Reading Lives)

Moore and Onofrey suggested several instructional activities that would help students identify or develop an identity that relates to literature in school. These suggestions have the biggest impact when they are implemented the first days of school, I picked the two that I thought would be neat to use with students that are similar to those we read about in Reading Lives:

1. Literacy Resumes- “have students brainstorm all literary experiences from their early school years to present, considering all their actions inside and outside school as readers and writers...compiling such information helps students analyze their identities in general and their academically literate identities in particular” (Moore, Onofrey page 291).
2. Shoebox Autobiographies- “place minimal demands on the content of the boxes. Students fill a shoebox with objects or artifacts that best represent them as readers and writers. Shoebox autobiographies create opportunities for you to make personal connections with students and welcome them into a classroom community where multiple forms of reading and writing are valued”.

I have tried to connect two pieces of literature and provide suggestions of how to connect students identities outside school to the identity they are responsible for having in school, in fact I have tried to identify two activities that would help students develop hybrid identities that link their home life and school.