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

My personality is defiantly one of yes or no. I mean, there is no in-between for me. Because I love the concrete tangible facts, I love to see data. It tells me at a quick glance the truth of a matter. Well, so that is what I always felt, until reading this report. I had not ever taken the time to see how the data presupposed my thinking on any given topic. Once looking at data, I guess I attacked the situation as the “glass half empty” rather than “half full.” Meaning, I saw the negative rather than the positive. How true for what was stated in the research; “…often find that their children are viewed and defined by sets of numbers rather than by the experiences and activities of their daily lives.” Reflecting on my own teaching practices, I tend to view my ELL students as a percentage, rather than unique individuals with wants and needs just like everyone else. Why didn’t I recognize the ability they had to be bilingual as a plus and actually made them more “gifted” than others in my room? We tend to see their diversity as a hindrance. Literacy learning is built on meaningful, social, and collaborative engagements. However, what would make meaning for an ELL student is viewed as unusable material in the classroom. As public educators we “neutralize” our classrooms to make everyone feel welcome. Maybe we have gone too far, but not allowing enough of the culture backgrounds to drive the instruction in our rooms. I speak for myself with this as well. I never truly tapped in to the rich background my students had to attach meaning to their learning. I always allowed more time for many of my ELL students to talk, knowing they needed to build their language skills, but did I allow enough collaboration time? I fell I didn’t. Many of my interactions with them were simply “sit and get”, not “we’re all in this together.” Through reading, one can develop a sense of direction. Both students in the study could have benefited from being guided to see that reading could provide them with such direction. They both were struggling with culture identities and reading could have been used to bridge a gap for them and make connections not found elsewhere. I also felt that both students were crying out for what they needed as readers, and yet the teachers just silenced them or ignored them. Again, I reflect on my own practices and wonder how many students I have unknowingly ignored while they were giving me the tools I needed to grab their attention. Do we try and make our jobs too complicated by exhausting all forms of motivation? Daniel told the story how he longed for his teacher to read his story, and she continued to pass him over. There was an easy way to motivate him and the teacher glossed over him, and I am sure his ethnicity played a role. While the data can give us the cold hard facts of the current reality, the numbers don’t give us a look at who they represent and the personalities of the individuals.

Michael Lemke