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

By the second page, I was in love with Staples.

Her line “Such a decision is politicized when it is coupled with active resistance to traditional tendencies in education policy and research to conceptualize literacy as being either a school or out-of-school based practice” nails my teaching career and its fire, thus far, on the head. We try to separate the inseparable because we cannot go against the traditional; actually, I stated that wrong, it is not that we cannot go against the traditional modalities; it is that we fear doing so.

I teach writing. I love writing. I am a writer. I am a rapper. I am a stupid kid in the back row whose lyrics are like cheap chronic/ it feels good but the beat don’t hit that shit/ I am a sound technetium/ mess wid’ it and it’ll blow your jack-it hand… this line comes from a lesson where I wrote a line, a student wrote a line, another student wrote a line… so on and so forth throughout the semester on my white board. All that was required was that students had to write what they felt, when they felt it. I had students coming into my room when they were in other classes so that they could express their thoughts. Technetium, by the way, is the lowest atom element that has no stable isotopes. It was truly authentic writing that was highly “politicized” at my school because many teachers felt that I should not allow students to use their authentic voice in writing; that instead I should have students pretend that they are nice, rich, white kids with all the proper church goin’ that comes from predominant families. But they forgot that our kids come from the hood, and that, we’ll call him Johnny so I don’t get sued, was beaten until his jaw locked for two months, and that, we’ll call her Sam, was given a home abortion with a clothes hanger and a lighter because her father was afraid that people would find out the child was his. They want/wanted me to teach my students with the traditions of decades of teaching that simply does not work with my students. They wanted me to bore them, then fail them, and then blame their parents.

If we continue to fight against what kids are doing with their literate lives, such as the authentic writing that comes from rapping in the streets, or the “beat-beat downs” that they “toung wrstel” over to see whom has the best skills, all that is going to happen is that students will continue to not be literate. When I told my kids that we had to learn SWE and write a perfect paper for the writing test, they looked at me like I had asked them to climb Everest, but when I spent the whole semester teaching them word choice through the rap they listen to every day and taught them proper phrasing through journals of students whom had gone through similar experiences that they had, they took to writing like a beaver to wood. Unimportantly, to them at least, the pass rate of my students was nearly 80 percent, an unheard of number at my school that usually averages 50 or below, but importantly they learned to write and learned to love it at the same time. When I say take out a pencil and paper, they all rush to do so, so that they can get their “words down, honestly Mr. B, it’s been killin’ me all weekend.” So my point here is that to effectively teach literacy, as Dr. Staples states, “the burden is on educators,” us, to do little of what’s been done before and to focus on what we can do to get rid of the “great divide” between in-school and out-of-school literacy.

Another great example of this is using cell phones in class. Many people see that as the destruction of English II and writing itself, but the truth is that we are enabling students to use their outside of school voice to approach an in school problem, literacy, by encouraging and teaching code switching through the mediums they are most comfortable with.

Also, to kill the “great divide” we must also work together and “design cooperative studies” of our children to discover the best ways to teach them. When I read the remainder of Staples arguments, I could not help but think about how everybody uses collected research to further their product, soldiers, and business leaders, yet, we teachers are afraid to do the same with our kids. And in reality, they are far more important than car reliabilities. I couldn’t help thinking that we need to avoid being Toyota.

I know I go too far into things, but I also read the Barton and Hamilton research, sighted in Staples argument, about discourse communities. I think that that is the heart of what we need, as the aforementioned things I have written in this post allude to, because we need to be able to utilize these communities to understand where it is our kids come from, how they speak, what they read, what they write if we ever hope to reach them and kill the divide that separates our instruction from students home life. Too, this is further represented by one of my favorite lines from Staples in her journal entry, “Inside of school, my students are called disengaged. They are known as slow and referred to as off task. In their classrooms, my students cannot read. But after school…my students are called lyricist, master surfer, gamer, poet, and even cultural critic.” I ran through the house yelling at my uncaring wife, you have got to hear this! The chill bumps of passion for what I do still linger on my arms, brought about by the chill of simple truth.

I also liked the “Speaking Up” and “Speaking Out” article, but it paled in comparison to the power and uniqueness that was “Hustle and Flow” and it was hard to “feel” it after such a powerful piece, but, as I said, I did like it as it brings the process approach of how to deal with one of the main issues also brought up in Staples argument, that we need to give our children a voice and help them re-author themselves as speakers and people worth hearing, especially our Black American students, whom often struggle with male identity and what it means to be black in America. WE NEED to give them more options than rapper, baller, or drug dealer.

William Byland