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

Reading what Deborah Hicks had to say about Jake in Chapter 5 of Reading Lives reminded me of a student I had during this past school year named “Cal.” Cal was an older pre-kindergartner (a September birthday) and he would have been in kindergarten this year if the cut-off date for entry into kindergarten had not been changed from mid-October to the end of August. Cal’s dad was an auto mechanic and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. During the home visit at the beginning of the school year, Cal showed my assistant and me his room and all the toys he had. His mom told us that he loved building things with blocks. He loved playing with cars, trucks, and dinosaurs. She said they read quite frequently at home and that his favorite book was one by David Shannon entitled No, David! (In case you’re not familiar with the book, a little boy named David runs around and gets into various kinds of mischief, always followed by the admonition, “No, David!,” but it ends with the mother’s voice telling him she loves him.) She said that they often read the book at home, but they liked to substitute Cal’s name for David’s.

Because of Cal’s age and the literate environment in which he seemed to be raised, I expected that Cal would be one of my top students in that he would do well with letter recognition, letter-sound awareness, etc. When I assessed him during the first couple of weeks of school on such items, he did not do well at all. He didn’t know any letters or any of the things that I thought he might know. (Yes, we have to assess them on such things in pre-K!) What I did notice about him during those first weeks of school, however, was that during center time, he gravitated toward blocks and other manipulative items. He was able to build elaborate buildings to make a city and he would make roads for the cars to travel on. Occasionally, he would crash the cars into one another and make horrifying sound effects to accompany the crash, while also jolting his head and body in such a way that I’m surprised he didn’t give himself whiplash. Very rarely would he enter a center that was more “academic” in nature without some serious coaxing on my part. When I was able to coax him into another center such as writing, he would want to write about planets and spaceships, Spiderman, or Transformers. He found value in learning to write his own name so that he could label his creations.

While all of Cal’s actions were certainly acceptable in the pre-kindergarten classroom, I often wondered why it was such a struggle to get him to move beyond his areas of comfort (blocks, manipulatives, etc.). Hicks provided an answer in Reading Lives when she stated that “Because of the open-ended nature of many kindergarten practices, Jake was able to construct connections with school on his own terms” (p. 100). She goes on further to say, “He [Jake] often chose to work with three-dimensional tasks . . . Jake resisted activities that involved two-dimensional texts, such as reading or pretend-reading; writing, drawing, and dictating stories; or using numbers” (p. 100). This sounded so much like Cal that I felt like she was describing him.

As academics are getting “pushed down” into the primary grades, I am increasingly convinced that there are going to be more and more students, especially boys, who feel that the discourses of their school and home lives do not mesh with one another. Even though Hicks finds that Jake has a connection with his kindergarten environment due to a similarity with his home environment, I believe that this has increasingly become the exception rather than the norm. One of the reasons I moved out of kindergarten was that I felt the school district was requiring that too many paper-and-pencil assessments be used with kindergartners. I did not feel this was the best use of my time or my students’ time. When I look at the kindergarten classes at my current school today, none of them have dramatic play centers, block areas, sand tables, etc. that I had when I left kindergarten eight years ago. It makes me wonder how much longer it will be before the same thing happens in pre-kindergarten. If this does happen, I believe increasing numbers of students will be “faced with the challenge of appropriating language practices and values that may seem unfamiliar or unwanted” (p. 113) and this reluctance will “be seen as forms of resistance” (p. 113). With this in mind, I could not agree more with the assertion by Hicks on page 135 that “schools need to change if students such as Laurie and Jake are to experience the sense of belonging in school that they experience with loved ones at home. How devastating it must be for the reverse to occur – for children to feel themselves to be outsiders in their own classrooms.”

One connection I made in Chapter 6 on page 142 was in the description of how Rose “was able to shape new identities, new possibilities for living, in response to literacies.” When reading this particular section, I thought of the movie Dead Poets Society and how Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) inspired within his students a newfound love for learning and applying literature to their own lives and purposes. To his students, poems were no longer just words printed on a page with a literary merit to be determined by some mathematical formula. To them, literary text became a living and breathing thing that provoked within them a desire to “seize the day” and experience life in a new way, much like Rose describes the teaching of MacFarland on pages 143 and 144. Oh, if it were such that all teachers could make this connection with their students!

Lastly, one quote I found especially compelling is found on page 148: “Particularly as children leave the intimacy of home and family, the constitution of identity from other subject locations can be limiting or damaging” (p. 148). Since my students come to me as a result of having been labeled “at-risk” based on information gathered on them from the parents and assessments, I believe it is imperative that I do all that is within my power to erase that label, which can definitely be damaging, as they begin down the road of their academic career. There will be plenty of other labels imposed upon them to constitute their identities as the years go by – ELL, OT, F/RL, PT, EC, AG – but if I can do what is within my power to take my kids where they are and use what they know to make early connections to the world of schooling, perhaps “at-risk” will not be a label that is used in "pigeon-holing" their identity to a certain set of letters.

Clyde Rice