RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2010)

As I read the two chapters in Reading Lives I found myself surprised by what I was reading. I am not sure why, I have grew up in the same area that I now teach in and I have gone to school with working-class children and now teach working class children, but yet I never viewed their culture as having much more of an effect on them, than mine did. I think I’m embarrassed to say that when I think about different cultures and socio-economic classes, I think of race, religion, different cultures, rich and poor, for some reason working class has never come into mind as a culture or that they would relate to situations any differently than someone who was considered middle class. After reading the first two chapters I realize how wrong I was. Looking back at my students and how they have related to each other and Literacy is now beginning to make sense. I loved when Hicks said in Chapter One, page 7, “Like most working class students in the United States, Jake and Laurie attended a school that embraced traditional values and teaching practices. Even though their individual teachers looked beyond that system to alternative educational practices, their teaching was framed within the constraints of an institution and wider system.” I think that this statement is true for many of us, whether we are talking about working class children or any children. I think as teacher’s we want to do our best and make connections with the students on levels that they can relate to, but so often we are bound by what we are told to teach. Too often do we succumb to keeping up with the test and the standard course of study that we forget that for our students to truly learn they need to feel a personal connection.
I was also very surprised by the interaction of Jake and his sister and his Mom. As I said earlier I never thought of work class as being different from middle class and it wasn’t until I was shown an example that I begin to understand. Looking back on my childhood I could relate to the very situation that Jake was in. I had an older brother and I could see him doing something to me and my running to tell my mom and then calling him a name and him pushing me. The big difference is that in my family I would have gotten into even more trouble than I was already in had gone up and “gotten my revenge”. My mom would have punished both my brother for pushing me and I for calling him names. After reading the situation with Jake’s family I began to see a number of my students and also to understand why they sometimes act the way they do. The reaction of Jake’s family also made more sense to me after I read what Hicks said on page 20, she said, “It is not just children’s preschool engagements with written text per se that make such a difference once they enter school nor even their engagements with stories and other types of oral literacy’s. Rather, it is an entire cultural web-a cat’s cradle, if you will-of language practices and identities that so importantly has an impact on school learning, including literacy learning.” Jake and his family were not doing anything wrong in terms of their culture, they were teaching their children to be self sufficient and strong in a way that made sense for them and their lives. After reading this statement many of the relationships that my students have had with literacy began to make sense. I naively looked at where they went to preschool or how much formal schooling their parents had when looking at why my working class students might be struggling. I never looked at their culture or language practices to try to better understand where they were coming from. Had I done this I think my results would have been much more successful, because instead of trying to fix a problem that wasn’t a problem I could have worked with what they have learned and the way they view the world and built on that.
Katie Templeton