A key calling in Randy Bomer’s Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms that stuck out to me, especially in light of what I have failed to do in my classrooms in the past is to recognize, expose, and discuss the implications of a text’s incompleteness. I have done a few exercises with recognizing bias, usually based on visual advertisements, but rarely have I taught with a focus on what texts are actually saying when not saying. This involves an eye for critiquing social worlds and assumptions. Most of the time, I would focus on the themes that are in a book, and we would ruminate over them for 3 weeks to a month. As the English survey teacher, I have asked students not only to buy into the assumptions of the texts we read, but also into the assumptions of the classroom – without ever exposing and discussing them. It seems that I have an ethical responsibility to make this kind of awareness the dynamic center of talking about thought.
Over all, I see that what I present in class is not only my previously held attitude about building on skills and trying to never ask students to do something that would not benefit them later in the course, but the curriculum (environment, texts, all of it) “must reflect—and make the case for—the usefulness of books and other texts in and ordinary life” (77). With the critiquing of social worlds, I think that students do that on their own, at times, but it is rarely fostered or encouraged…at least it hasn’t been in my classes. The Continent of Literacy Purposes creates a visual for thinking about the use (therefore importance) of literacy in current and future life circles. Understandably, Bomer is coming from the viewpoint that academic literacies are used less than others, so he has positioned it visually as smaller and on the border of the continent rather than at the heart of it. The point, highlighted on 51, is that the system of school has become geared toward turning out college graduates when only ¼ of 9th graders will see that college diploma, effectively miseducating ¾ of the population. The cycle then becomes that the school discourse is created by a small, “distinguished” fraction of the original ¼, those who have gained cultural capital through education and with all their wealth have emphasized becoming like them or not deserving an education that meets the interests and current positions (academically, culturally, etc) of students. Bomer asserts that “school should be about becoming educated people” and what educated people should know, do, and have on page 49, and it shows that he values individual agency and education that provides individuals with the power to live a complete and connected live, rather than segmented and cut-off from other parts of self as well as other people. No matter the existing skill level or experience, one needs help to become more “thoughtful, critical, and powerful” in their literacy lives (31).
This whole year, student choice has been a valued theme in studying curriculum decisions, and it became most apparent to me that instruction and curriculum have been more an act of convenience rather than compulsory rituals. I see that mostly in challenging my experience with the class-wide novel. I am in the process of moving my thinking away from novels as the base texts for classes anyhow because of restraints of time and disillusionment with homework which presumes that the home is a safer and more work-conducive place than school, and the classroom is the place of the two that I have the most control over. On pages 10 through 12, Bomer discusses the organization of people at different levels within the classroom. The reading/writing workshop’s emphasis on choice is obviously part of his pedagogical history (knowing his wife and his time at The Teachers’ College). My understanding of the pendulum of the different groupings is that the fewer the people in the group, the more choice is available; and the more people that are in the group, the more that agendas (damaging?) compete with a singular and focused direction of inquiry or study.
As I was reading your second paragraph, I asked myself the question, who are we educating and why? Why do we create curriculum that fits only part of the population. You mentioned that this kind of curriculum brings power and privilege to some while ignoring others and also creates the reproduction of our society. I agree with you and also see the necessity of creating curriculum that helps students create reali lives apart from school.
ReplyDeleteI also taught what was in the novels rather than what was not explicitly said. I tried to get at some social critique in my classroom, but I now see how I could have gone further by exposing assumptions and discussing them, as you pointed out.
I agree with you also that teachers often do not give choice simply because of convenience. But I had not thought of the harmful implications in the way that Bomer describes in his book. I knew that my students struggled with whole-class novels like The Scarlet Letter and Grapes of Wrath, but I really didn't think about the harm I was doing to my students' reading lives.