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

When I first began reading about Daniel I honestly thought that these were going to be two completely different stories. I thought that Daniel was the student who faced racism throughout school and I thought Zonnie's story would be different. I thought she would be the student who may look different to the "white" people but still fit in and school was a breeze for her. Since I work at an inner city Title One school there are many different ethnic groups that we teach. A lot of the students who "do not make the grade" are students of different ethnicity backgrounds. It seems so easy to just say the students are lazy and education is not important to them. I am guilty of this and I am also guilty of blaming the parents for how their children perform in school. The problem here is that as teachers we should not just assume this. There may be reasons why these students are not performing up to par and it is not something that is so easy that we should blame the parents. As Noll notes in her article, "a seeming disinterest in education could be a reflection of parents' discomfort resulting from their own negative school experiences." This could not be further from the truth. Last semester I heard this in Dr. Gill's class and now I have seen it as being true. The question here is why did their parents not have an interest in school?

It goes back to the parents feelings as if they do not fit in either and facing the pressures of trying to staying connected with their culture, but attuning to the "white" culture as well. In this qualitative research study we see two young American Indians who face these same struggles. However, is it okay to blame their parents? Well clearly it is evident that education is important in their household and both Daniel and Zonnie's parents read to them and spoke to them of the importance of education while they were growing up. We should honestly be glad that these parents do care about their child's education and want to be involved. Both of these young adolescents faced trying to succeed in the classroom, but also did not want to forget where they came from. As teachers we should not expect them to. They should be able to embrace their culture and background and teach others about it. As teachers our goal should be to make school interesting for ALL students. Obviously this is very difficult because every child that we teach is different. But when we are aware that there are children in our classroom who were not brought up the "white" way then we should bring in lessons they can connect to so they will feel comfortable speaking out in the class and then they will start to feel proud of where they came from. Just like with Zonnie - she felt so excited when her friends were amazed about her beadwork. Obviously Zonnie had it a little bit easier than Daniel because she had more friends, but in her journal writing you can still tell that she struggles with her identity and people laughing at her because she is different. They both felt as if no one understood them.

Overall I think this was a very interesting article. After listening to the podcast it made even more sense to me. Pretty much we read about two different, but coincidentally similar, stories of two American Indian adolescents and their struggle in school. In qualitative research a phenomenon is described and then a solution is proposed. Elizabeth Noll says it perfectly when she says "the literary strengths that exist in the lives of Indian youth outside of school might be more clearly revealed within school." Our goal is bring connections from inside the household of students to inside the classroom!

Katy Dellinger