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

Reading Lives Chapter 1
The author spills her readings of literature and philosophy and transcribes them into concerns of the ways students intertwine with literacy form socio economic backgrounds. The big question is could relations of feeling and valuing therefore be included in the ways in which literacy educators shape their practices and theories? She focuses on looking back on two students experiences growing up in the working classes.
As working class children entering a school system Laurie and Jake wanted desperately to find a "we of me" in school. Realizing they didn’t fit in they turned to other values and practices as points of identity and connection. This chapter conveys the difficulties of the poor white working class students who try so desperately to fit in to the school setting regardless of gender, race, or class. In order to write one must live and experience real life situations. In order to imagine and use their creativity a student must feel welcome and at ease with peers and teachers. As her research study progressed, she found that as a researcher she focused on language practices, mediating social becoming and knowing and later expanded here field of socio-cultural psychology. Vgotsky, work was implemented by Hicks attributing to studies of language. Hicks believe that to write in ways that are richly situated can help critique the developmental stories that are so importantly connected to educational politics and policies. That the writing of eduacational theory and research can help to change things is a powerful reason to risk taking on education and psychology is mutually shaping practices and ideologies.

Reading Lives Chapter 2
I like the way Hicks uses narrative texts writing literacy researches part of an effort to situate individualism amid the richness and complexity of feeling, knowing and valuing with others. After reading the research at hand in chapter 2, I found myself wondering well with all the testing, free lunch, and multicultural classrooms, how do we as teachers and peers not label students into categories such as gender, ethnic background, and class. I am from the working class as a single mother whose children were once on assisted living and can remember not wanting my children to be treated any differently than other children who may have been middle to upper class. Sad but true, society does look at these situations and society does react differently depending on socio economic background. So how do we as educators keep classrooms clean form stereotyping? Better yet, how do we keep other students in line with reality and alleviate clicks which leave some students feeling unaccepted and afraid to communicate feelings like middle class students. I guess one thing I can do as a kindergarten teacher is since I am the foundation of the nation, social skills starts here with me in my classroom. Social skills are a huge part of kindergarten only the curriculum is so tight in other areas that if it were not for centers there would be no time for socialism. I think the younger we can expose our students to other cultures the better we will all get along in the future. I don’t know how to alleviate the middle vs. working class issue.
Another point in Hick’s research was her empirical research was combined with advocacy, talking collaboratively with teachers to create more culturally responsive pedagogies. She helped young students juxtapose community language practices with school illiteracies as students learned to articulate language differences and move between cultural worlds. This was like code switching. With all this in mind somewhere teachers had to confront their own racism and classisms before they could see the richness of children’s culturally saturated lives.
Robin Hand.