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

These articles gave more insight into the previous articles by Dowdy and Delpit. I work at a Title I school where we have a lot of low income families and students from bad areas of town. I have never really thought until I began this class about how students home language impacts their life and their language skills. The Baker article gave three forms of English language: "home" english, "formal" english, and "proffesional" english. I like the way that she broke down the way people use english. This helps me as a teacher to see what areas I should be teaching students in the classroom. I think that the using lessons to teach these different areas really will show students where they need to improve.
I think that one of the most important areas that we need to teach older students is the Proffesional form. We need to ready these students to either go onto college or go out into the workforce and be able to present themselves respectively. Many of the students in this article started to see that through the activites they participated in. One example were the presentations they made to their class in their technical fields. I liked that the students really began to understand that the way they present themselves is important.

I believe that like Baker learning formal grammar should be a choice of the student not a choice the teacher makes for the student, however I do think that they need to be shown why it is so important so that they make an informed choice. Baker used motivation as a key element in her classroom. I also think that motivating students is key to their success in learning through real life activites and events like language use in their home, at school, and professionally. One question I had when reading the article is what so you do if they still refuse to learn how to interchange these trilinual englishes. Do you continue to push it or is there another way that we could try to teach it.

The Landson-Billings article brought attention to some of the negative things that might go on in the classroom. I was shocked at the Shannon scenario. I as a teacher know that if a student refused to write that I would never be able to walk away and choose to let her loose out on her education. I bet that this does go on in some classrooms however maybe the way that the teacher did writing was not appropriate to her needs. Maybe the teacher was not giving her "permission to fail" maybe she was going to come back later on and work with her. We only see part of what was going on in this first grade classroom. I have seen students that take really struggle with writing and it might take another approach to really see the affects of what the students is capable of doing. I just don't know if what the author was presenting was the whole story.

I was however very inspired by what Carter did in his classroom to get his students interested in writing. I wondered thought what grade was he teaching? I assumed it was highschool but I don't think the article ever stated it. It would have helped me to more fully understand the students if I knew what age. I agree that like Carter when one thing does not work you have to find something else. I do not teach older children but it would have been hard for me to step out of the box and come up with the activity he did. I really liked that he started out with something they could connect to and then branched out from there. I don't even know if the students really knew he was getting them to do writing work like before because they really enjoyed it. I think breaking it down into different days and having students wokr with each other gave them more confidence in writing and helped them to see that they could come up with the final project.

I hope that in schools today that students are not given "permission to fail" but I do also think that there may be extenuationg cicrumstances to why some studnets may not be pushed as hard. We can never see the full picture just from reading a text. I would however would have liked to be in the classroom to observe what Carter did because I think comeing up with activities like that and seeing them unfold can bring new ideas to teachers.