Reading the Word...Reflection on GoodReads

Above you will find my "book montage" of covers from some of the books that I have read and reported on www.GoodReads.com.  This website which is a place to record and rate your reading life was new to me this year.  The process of tracking, publicizing, and quantifying my reading has changed the way that I think about my reading.  This is partly because it has made my reading visible (especially in a montage of all of the covers of the books that I have read).  I have chosen to include it because it provides a catalogue of much of my "word reading" this semester.  But this is more than a list of the books I have read, the practice of making the list has had an impact on me.  This internet application has changed my perception and process by capitalizing on the social aspect of literacy.  Even if the act of posting a book as "read" in my "virtual bookshelf" was social.  As I decided how many stars to give it or marked something as "to read" I did this in the context of my social environment.  As I read the reviews of my friends or my mom asks about the new book I'm reading that she saw in my "feed," these interactions validates my literacy.  Bloome and Solsken (1998) describe that, “Literacy is not a noun or an adjective but a verb…Literacy is an action whereby people use texts to structure relationships with other people and with social institutions.”  I found that the public social sphere helped incentivize my by making it relational.

Another transformational aspect of my GoodReads.com profile was my complex identity that it exposed.  I decided that I wanted to report all of the books that I was reading.  This spring this has been almost entirely comprised of professional texts and children's books.  Yet there are some lingering artifacts on my profile from my winter break beach reading from Thailand like Bangkok 8 and Prep.  My multiple identities and multiple literacies are present in my reading of a diverse cross section of texts.  Even though this virtual "book shelf" displays some diversity in my reading selections, it also paints an interesting picture of who I am.  Literacy and African American adolescent literature are heavily featured as of late.  In the same way that we may be able to make some inferences about a student who is obsessed with fantasy series after fantasy series, I am from this montage some inferences can be made about me.  In the past few months my reading of the word has been deeply intertwined with my desire to soak up as much as I could during my graduate study.

Reading the World: SuperBowl Advertisement Deconstruction

The advertisement that caught my attention...


Some key excerpts from my "Critical Reading Paper" which analyzed this advertisement:

• In deconstructing the advertisement with a critical eye, some of the representation of racial identities and gender roles seems a bit limited. It is implied that the woman in the advertisement is a single mother, and is dressed in a somewhat provocative way. The man, Kyle, is treating his date with what are regarded as “typical” heterosexual dating norms by dressing up, bringing flowers, and then objectifying her when she was walking away by looking at her. None of this is stated explicitly in the text of the commercial because it is understood by the viewer as part of a cultural norm.
• The son in the ad challenges the norm in some senses by “stepping up” and asserts his authority over his mother’s suitor.  This re-positions the male figure, however young, as needing to defend the woman in his life, his mother.  The Kyle character even refers to Jaylen as “little man” which is a term often used to refer to African American boys.  In many ways Jaylen is the protagonist of this narrative, in which viewers are positioned to praise the 4-year-old African American boy for his strength, assertiveness, and “manhood.”  
• As a side note, the little boy and the man are discussing video games, which also plays off assumptions about what recreational activities African American boys and men engage in and discuss.  Van Dijk reminds us that racism is perpetuated in subtle, symbolic, and discursive ways (In Rogers & Mosley, 2006, p. 467).  I think it is important to recognize the racial assumptions that are largely reinforced by this text that at first seems representative and perhaps even empowering to African Americans.
• hooks (1994) asserts that the poor are rarely portrayed in contemporary culture, so while this ad was representing a racial minority it continued to adhere to a more defined societal norm of ignoring class.  
• As in all critical interpretations, there is not one neat and specific way to read and classify a text. Humor can often serve as a tool to reveal or conceal some of our cultural assumptions and beliefs. Another way to approach this ad is to ask, why did it make so many Americans laugh? What does this tell about who we are and what we believe? Rosaldo (1993) asserts that there are not discrete cultures but instead, “boundaries that crisscross over a field at once fluid and saturated with power” (p. 45). This Doritos commercial managed to cross over in terms of racial representation and interesting power dynamics, yet some of the more familiar past narratives seemed to reemerge. Jones (2006) states that, “positioning of people could not happen without someone exercising power – both power used to dominate and power used to liberate” (p. 79). The view of African American women as sexy single mothers, young boys as violent protectors, and men as only interested in women as objects is not a completely liberating view.

Reflection
My reading of this advertisement awakened a deconstructive lens that had been dormant for some time.  My freshman year of college, at 18 years old, I took a 4000 level honors class called:  "Discourse Analysis and Cultural Criticism."  I had no idea what I was getting into but signed up because I was intrigued by the professor.  It was possibly the most challenging reading and thinking that I have ever been asked to do.  The two authors that we read that stretched me the most were Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida.  I was in way above my head and spent hours just trying to comprehend the words on the page.  However, through the support and patience of the professor and the amazingly rich conversations in the seminar, I began to see the possibilities of seeing things differently.  Throughout college this critical mindset stayed with me, but the process of thinking in this way almost felt like a game.  When I began teaching this framework of questioning text and the world did not leave me, but it definitely took a back seat to "pragmatism."  I felt so responsible and so much pressure to help my students achieve, that "deconstruction" became the last thing on my mind.  Even this year as I began this masters program, I remember saying after one of the first classes, “I don’t care about questions, I need to walk away from this year with some answers about the best ways to teach literacy.” It is ironic that one of the “answers” that I am walking away from the program with is an investment in inquiry and questioning everything.  

This assignment to critically read a text brought back and expanded upon this type of thinking.  What was new about doing this type of critical reading now is that I can see how it fits into literacy and my teaching.  What was once a thought provoking academic exercise, has new meaning in my work as a professional.  I believe that as readers (of the world and the word) it is a great asset if we are able to examine power, positioning, and cultural assumptions within texts.  The reading of the Dorritos advertisement helped me connect and see the relevance of this type of reading in my own life and the lives of students.

Reading the Word: Literacy Practices as Social Acts

Reflection: 

The process of reading Lewis' text and deconstructing and then reconstructing the meaning as a group was one of my more memorable experiences from the class.  I first read the text on my own interpreting the meaning, reconciling it with my own practice, and trying to find applications for other teachers.  Then, I met with my four other group members and found that they had gone through their own interpretive process and were bringing that along with all of their prior experience to their readings of the text.  What was especially noteworthy about this was that much of the tension and confusion that we were balancing in our desire to create a cohesive and productive professional development experience from this book, was mentioned in the text of Lewis' book itself.  Gee (1991) states, “The practices of such social groups are never just literacy practices. They also involve ways of talking, interacting, thinking, valuing, and believing” (p. 43).  I was aware in my reading of this text that I was juggling many different priorities as a reader.  Here are some of the questions that came up in my processing and the group discussion of this text:

• Do I agree with the way that Julia (the teacher who is the subject of the ethnography) structures her classroom?  
• How does this compare with my classroom?
• If their are differences what does this say about me as a teacher?
• What is the major "takeaway" of Lewis' text?  What can we learn from her?
• If there is not a concrete takeaway then can this book still have value for me?
• Can a takeaway be less concrete and more of a mindset?
• How involved/structured should peer-led book conversations be?  
• What do I believe the "best practices" are for creating completely independently run student clubs?  

These are only a few of the questions that arose in my reading and processing of this text. This is not to say that at the end of the reading I threw up my hands and was content with just generating questions.  I do feel that my group and I were able to come to some shared conclusions.  My biggest learning came from the idea that transformational critical literacy practice starts with reflection.  I will go into more depth about how this idea changed my teaching in the "Implications for Teaching" section. 

Reading the World: Where I'm From Poem

*Click on poem to enlarge and open in a new window

Reflection:

Writing this poem at the beginning of this semester affected how I view my identity and culture.  I have identified my culture in the past largely based on less personal metrics.  White, female, upper middle class socioeconomic status, or possibly Jewish, Hungarian, Catholic, or Irish.  This assignment brought out a more subtle and personal depiction of my familial and cultural identity.  This poem feels personal in a way that "white" does not.  It also paints one picture of my complex identity.  I think that my poem describes my "way of life" or way of interacting, which parallels Fiske's (1989) definition of culture.  There are many different versions of the "Where I'm From" poem that we all could write; this speaks to our multiple identities and the complexity of classifying who we are.  I think that it is often an American value to believe that we are self-made individuals who are products of our own ambition.  This poem made me feel extremely lucky.  What I chose to include about the California upbringing and the New Orleans more recent past made me recognize how fortunate I feel to have had such rich experiences.  As Geertz (1973) culture may be defined as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.  There are many narratives that we all have about who we are and where we come from.  This class and this assignment have helped me highlight that we all possess a culture and the recognition of this can be a powerful tool in the analysis of power, text, and everyday interactions.     

Reading the World: Map of Social Geographies

Reflection:

As a follow up to the "Where I'm From" poem, creating this map of my social geographies helped me gain even more depth on my postionality.  Yet unlike the poem, this map asked me to place my competing and complimentary identities on the map in current time.  In doing this I added even more layers to my culture.  I accounted for age, sexuality, gender, race, style, hometown, socioeconomic status, and profession.  This identity work served as a precursor for some of the critical reading that I did later in the semester.  

It is interesting to note that on this map I included that I identify (when forced to label myself) as a bisexual.  In the course of the semester I never felt that we really dealt with the topic of sexuality other then to throw it in the list of other identifiers.  I believe that this may be in part because as educators it is confusing to figure out to what extent our sexuality and personal relationships should be shared with our students and their families.  I do think that this is an important ongoing conversation because when aspects of our identities are silenced it is usually not healthy.  I think that it is important that conversations about all aspects of identity become more commonplace in settings like graduate school and amongst the faculties of our schools.  Even the act of including this on my map and writing about my sexuality in this reflection is my attempt to try and embody the honesty and straightforwardness that I believe is necessary.  I was prepared to share this element of my identity with the class, but felt that there was never a moment that it was relevant to our conversation.  This is reflective of both the culture and norms of our class and my own perceptions of what is appropriate to share.      

Reading the Word: Copper Sun

 

    

Reflection:

This semester in my "Literature for Older Children" class I asked the professor if I could read a text that was not listed on the syllabus for our historical fiction book clubs, Copper Sun.  Liz (another student in the class) and I asked to read this text because it was by an urban realistic fiction author that many of our students enjoyed, Sharon Draper.  I have included some of the reading notebook pages that I created in response to the book above.  I chose to include my reading of this text in my portfolio for many reasons.  For one, reading this text had a profound impact on my perspective on slavery in this country.  In the story, Amari is captured from her village in Africa and brought to South Carolina and sold into slavery.  I had not previously read such a detailed personal slave narrative (although it was fictional).  I chose to include my notebook pages to show what I was thinking about as I read: tracking characters, noticing changes in character relationships, and creating a visual representation of how it felt to move from the familiar territory of her village, Ziavi, into the unknown.  This young adult book depicts brutality, murder, and rape.  There are many middle schools that would not include this text in 7th/8th grade libraries because of some of the content.  In addition to the more standard reading response and comprehension work that I did while reading this text, I had a critical response as well.  In my reflections on what made this text so powerful for me many questions arose:

• Who decides what types of violence are acceptable to include in young adult texts?
• If this were a war story with soldiers being killed would it be as heavily censored?
• What impact does the legacy of slavery continue to have on people of African descent?
• Why have I never been exposed to this type of vivid personal account of slavery until this point in my education?  
• What sides of the story are neglected to be presented in this particular narrative?
• Why hasn't the US government formally taken responsibility for slavery as a part of its history as a nation?  
• Who is included when Americans talk about "our" nation?  
• What impact does slavery and language acquisition in slavery have on African American Dialect? 

Through a more critical reading of this text, current-day implications emerged.  I was able to view an issue that I was already familiar with, slavery, from a new perspective.

Reading the World: Men of Color and Education Panel

Reflection:

While I sat in Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center listening to the above panel, my mind kept drifting back to the ideas and themes that we were discussing in 5037.  I was also reading the world and attuned to the organizational culture of Teach For America.  This is an organization that I have been a part of since 2004, but have not been active in since I was a corps member in 2006, and never outside of New Orleans.  This gap in time and the new knowledge and perspective that graduate school has added, allowed me to "make the familiar strange" in my analysis of TFA.  I was struck by the professionalism and corporate feel of the event, it was very high profile.  The sponsorship of the event by large corporations, State Farm and FedEx was overt.  This caused me to reflect on what views and assumptions about public education and capitalism were hidden in the discourse of this event.  

The sold out crowd filled the seats with predominantly young educators of color (I was able to tell they were educators by their conversations).  All moderators and participants in the panel were individuals of color as well. There was an energy in the room that was palpable as we began.  When the panel finally began, the moderator asked the crowd to repeat back (and made us do it twice because our energy wasn't high enough the first time) "IT'S ON TONIGHT!"  I thought back to the panel that I had attended at Teachers College with Arne Duncan earlier this year, and how different it had felt.    

Much of the content of the panel was fascinating; Dr. Pedro Noguera exposed that black males are often read by the public as "repositories of violence."  There was a discussion of how easy it is to leave a school, but how difficult it is to get in.  This was in reference to the metal detectors and security at the entrance, but the ease of cutting class and dropping out.  Dr. Marc Lamont Hill spoke about some of the practices that he believes are most effective with African American boys.  He recommended a discipline style of the "warm demander" and said that a multi-voice classroom which allowed for more "calling out" had been showed to be promising.  

I chose to include some of my thoughts from this evening at Lincoln Center for two reasons.  First, I think that this was one of my first experiences in which I was consciously "reading the world" in the moment that it was occurring.  I was using critical analysis to help me make visible some of the organizational and cultural nuances of the event.  Secondly, the content of what was shared caused me to ask, given my positionality, how I can I be the best teacher of African American boys possible.  The evening brought to light the reality for me that there are certain things that I simply cannot provide for the boys of color in my classes.  I made a commitment to try and help facilitate relationships with more role models for my boys with men of color in the community.  In this case, it took seeing myself, my culture, my limitations to be able to more fully provide for the needs of my students.     

Implications for Teaching

The conversations, readings, and thinking that this course provided have impacted my teaching in many ways.  The most profound implications are more in a mindset shift than in a list of new practices that I will take on.  However, this critical mindset has led me to re-examine and plan for my future in new ways.  I will explain a few of the specific directions that I see this thinking impacting my work with students and teachers.

Code-Switching

One of the concrete changes to my teaching that I would like to implement is in regard to dialect and code switching practices in my classroom and school.  In the past, the teachers at my school have tried different strategies when working with students regarding formal and informal language.  At first we introduced the students using the acronym “SAVE” Standard American Vernacular English, we then decided that we did not like the power implications of the acronym and collectively came up with the new acronym “TAP.”  This stood for time and place, which we decided was a way to discuss code switching with students.  Although I think that the intention behind these ideas was good, we got too lost in the other work of the school year to prioritize making this this work thoughtful.  The residual effect of not taking the study of dialects on fully was that we reverted from the “code switching” principle to more of a corrective mentality.  One quote from the article by Rebecca Wheeler and Rachel Swords (2004) that particularly resonated with me was their caution against correction.  They wrote, “As the teacher seeks to eradicate vernacular language and culture, not only does she remove a link that could bring relevance to the classroom, but she assails the child’s family and home community, thus contributing between a barrier between the values of home and school” (p. 471).  I believe that it is critical to make sure that conversations and instructional practices around dialect are integrative and not alienating of students' home cultures.  When I return to my school I want to take on this work with both students and teachers.  Here are some of my new considerations that I will bring to this work:

·      Discussion of labels of the types of language with students/teachers (i.e. whether we refer to it as formal/informal

·      Conduct “contrastive analysis” with the students about the rules and usage of the different types of language (Wheeler & Swords, 2004)

·      Include read aloud and classroom texts that reflect a variety of dialects

·      Explicitly build in even-handedness between which direction we are switching from and to, to value both varieties

Overall, I feel recharged to take on code switching and language variety both as a staff and with students.  I am looking forward to co-constructing our approach this topic through conversations and honest dialogue. 

Examination of Teacher Involvement in Book Clubs

One of the greatest takeaways from the presentation on the Lewis book was what I learned through the reflection on my own teaching.  I analyzed the video below from a book club discussion group.

* Click on the transcripts above enlarge in a new window

At the beginning of this video I had established that I was not going to talk.  In fact, at the beginning I stepped in by holding up the sign that says, "can you say more about that?" just so that my voice was not inserted into their conversation.  By then end of the conversation I was not able to stop myself from getting involved in the conversation.  I can remember feeling like the students were drowning and that I had to step in to help them focus on the important idea that Juan hinted at. After looking more closely at what they were saying I see that the students were hitting on very important parts before I became involved. For example, Angel says, "Maybe the thought of Daniel's grandma...why are they helping us" He is picking up on the thoughts about race and envisioning what Phil might be picturing in his mind. Similarly, as I am interrupting, Juan asks if Phil would have grabbed Daniel like that if he were white. After I respond to Juan's comment, the students begin to respond one by one to me, in a format that is, "teacher, student, teacher, student" in the transcript.  I can see that when a teacher steps into a conversation especially in a way that positions the students as responders, it changes the dynamics of the conversation.  In this particular instance I definitely feel that the way that I got involved wasn't supportive of independence.  I think that I was trying to support the comprehension determining importance work that we had begun with my comments.  In retrospect, I would have let the conversation play out (maybe using my "can you say more about that sign" if I got desperate) and then analyzed the transcript later to see what teaching points I could draw from it.

I see my reflections on my involvement in peer led discussion as part of my growth in critical literacy because it helped me consider how my role can affect the power and agency that the students feel they possess.  In my future planning, I want to be more intentional about what time is peer-led and what time is teacher-led and make sure that I have a rationale and purpose for when those times occur.  I found the chart of different ways at looking at this along a continuum in Daniels (2002) text. I think that one specific take-away could be labeling my lesson plans with student directed (SD) or teacher directed (TD) as a starting point, and continue to reflect from there. If independence is the goal, I need to be very intentional about carving that time out in my day or period with the students, otherwise I can see that my tendency is to intervene.  The level of teacher involvement and intervention in student learning is deeply intertwined with the process of fostering student independence. I want to continue to critically evaluate the unspoken premises of my words and actions as I try to become increasingly mindful and skilled literacy teacher.

Strategies for Integrating Critical Literacy into Planning

At my school all teachers are asked to use a unit planning template that we are able to modify based on the principles of backwards planning in Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.  One of the tools that I found the most helpful this semester was the list of questions from the handout “Reading Critically: Is Henry and Mudge just an innocent children’s book? …and other critical questions to ponder.”  One idea that I have to incorporate these questions into instruction is to include some of these questions on the unit planning template, so that all teachers consider what they are teaching through a more critical lens as they are setting out to teach it.  I realize that this is limited, and that critical literacy cannot be limited to a box of questions on a unit plan, but it is a start.  I think that having this box will help teachers keep these questions in mind which will support this type of work more genuinely emerging in response to students. 

I also think that it will be helpful to have a one page brightly colored sheet that teachers can use as a reference when planning read-alouds.  I have modified the Henry and Mudge handout and just included the questions for readers in the document for teachers below.  I often find that something needs to be accessible and simple for it to actually make its way into my bag on the way to the coffee shop to lesson plan for the week.  My aim was to create a user-friendly document that teachers could easily access when planning turn and talks and think alouds for read aloud and shared reading. 

Final Conclusions

 All of the suggestions above will be transformational if they are given the proper space and time to be integrated into my thinking and curriculum.  Anything that is just “fit in” normally feels like it is an appendix.  I have found that the greatest learning has always stemmed from self-reflection and conversation.  My most solid plan for integrating critical literacy into my teaching and coaching is to ensure that I prioritize reflection and conversation.     

References