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

Children do not come to school blank slates. They bring fives years of home training with them. They bring values important to their family. They have been named. They know their identity and the parents know their identity. If you teach K-2, you have parents calling and visiting before school begins to tell you how their child feels or relates to others. The parents give clues or complete scenarios of their child’s behaviors. The problem usually lies within the teachers. We have to learn to accept every child for who they are and put aside our bias views. As my first principal use say, “They are sending us the best they have. They are not hiding the best kids at home.”

I worked in a low socioeconomic school for seven years. We used Ruby Payne’s Framework for Understanding Poverty for a professional development series. Like Health, Payne described the importance for low socioeconomic students to shift between both worlds. Payne believed it was the role of the teacher to help instruct the student to learn when to shift between both worlds. Student need to be taught what is acceptable at home may not be acceptable at school. Yet, it has to been done in a manner that will not make the child feel inadequate. Working-class children have amazing survival skills. I would feel more comfortable leaving my former students home alone to take care of them selves before I left my son home alone.

Personally, I believe all of us are code shifters. We shift between formal language used at work and informal language used out to dinner with friends. Shifting between formal and informal language, behaviors or cultural expectations has been the common thread of all the articles we have read. The question becomes: how do we use this knowledge to better educate our students and make them successful within the classroom based in middle-class values and expectations?

Zandra Hunt