RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2009)

These two articles have identified something that I have often thought to be true. Writing has to be connected to more than just content in order for it to become meaningful in an adolescent’s life.

The first article showed how a small group of African Caribbean girls learned to express themselves when confronted, through literature, with many of the problems they face in their own lives. The girls were able to make meaningful connections to literature in both speech and writing. They were able to think critically about what they were reading and how it connected to their own lives or what they saw in the world around them. These girls had not previously had the opportunity to express themselves this way in class, and therefore had been left voiceless in much of their educational experience. As teachers, we cannot create an environment where we take out seven girls and do an intensive literature experiment with them, but we can be conscientious about the literature we choose to have our students read. We can also create small, safe, student peer groups that allow students to express themselves in a way they may not be comfortable doing in a whole class setting.

I took particular interest in Henry’s statement that “it took those first few weeks to convince them that there is never only one “right answer”” (241). I find that many students have their voice stifled by the way reading is assessed in schools. They are often taught to find the one right answer and are not encouraged to form a personal response to their reading. By the time students get to high school some of them are so programmed to find the one right answer that it is a challenge to get them to think more deeply than that.

In Noll’s article she did research on two Native American teenagers. Neither of these teenagers experienced a great amount of success in literacy in the school sense. They were not seen as particularly successful students, but they both identified a personal connection with some form of literacy in their personal lives. So, my question as a teacher is how do we tap into these other literacy’s that children experience in their own lives. By tapping into these alternative ways of student expression, teachers would be able to more fully understand a student’s ability.
Teachers need to make a conscious effort to engage students in learning that feeds into their need for a sense of identity. Students must be allowed to discover who they are as they learn in school. They should be discovering things about themselves as they learn content information and not “be doing school work to be preparation for the following year” (226).

Shannon Keough