Rosenblatt Redux

“One of the banes of educational systems today is the pressure on the teacher to work out neat outlines of the ideas about literature that his students are to acquire. Once such a plan is made, there is a great temptation to impose it arbitrarily. The teacher becomes impatient of the the trial-and-error groping of the students. It seems so much easier all around if the teacher cuts the Gordian knot and gives the students the tidy set of conclusions and labels he has worked out. Yet this does not necessarily give them new insights. Hence the emphasis throughout this book on the teacher’s role in initiating and guiding a process of inductive learning” (Rosenblatt 1995, p. 232).


It is easier to simply tell the students what I think. It is harder to listen to what the students are saying about the text and help them make the connections go a bit further. It is tempting to make their statements, force their statements, into forms which I saw before they started to talk about the text. I have discovered (originally through teaching “Twelfth Night” using performance) that if I allow the students to learn the text with me, rather than from me, then I will come to a better understanding of the text: a social construction if you will. Thereby we both gain in the extension of our knowledge about and around a text. Last Monday I suggested to my UTeach student that she watch what I did in second period, then make an attempt on her own during third. Yes, kind of a sink or swim method, but I provided lots of water wings, and I was there if she started to drown. What was interesting, and what relates to the quote from Rosenblatt, was rather than listen to what the students were saying, and letting/allowing them to go where their conversation about the poem led them, she tried to force them down the same path my second period students travelled. Not to say that my second period did not discover something about the poem, but third period were finding something else out. And that is hard to do; I think, like all humans, we get trapped by the first thought we have about something. We tend not to look for alternatives: why should we, we have an answer that works, which is why I think we are so easily trapped by our tacit ideologies. It is easier not to think. “The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for decades surely stands in a lonely place,” wrote Gary Zukav according to my daily quote calender a few days ago.

Read a "F- -ing" Book

Letting the students read widely books of their own choosing as oppossed to telling them what to read: what an idea! It is a shame that after 70 years this is still considered radical in the English classroom. “How can you tell if they’ve read the book?” Is the question I get from my peers. It is always about testing, not really assessement, but a way to prove that the students have done what they were told to do. When the focus becomes a matter of checking to see if they have actually read the book, the students find easy ways to get around it: Sparknotes. My current UTeach student (a kind of student teacher) confessed to me that she went through her AP English classes in high school without reading any of the required texts, she relied solely on Sparknotes. Stunning! That she would tell me this, and that after that kind of experience as a high school student she became an English major! Arrrrgh!

“To reject the routine treatement of literature as a body of knowledge and to conceive of it rather as a series of possible experiences only clears the ground. Once the unobstructed impact between reader and text has been make possible, extraordinary opportunites for a real educational process are open to the teacher.” (Rosenblatt 1995, p.70). Since I finally let go of the main texts in my class ( I still begin each class with a poem or a passage of prose, or exemplar essays when we are writing), and my students read what they want, I think I have lessened the amount of “cheating” that goes on in my class. Of course it can still happen, students will read sparknotes on a “classic” and then come in to talk to me about it. But for the most part it is easy to tell, they have a superficial grasp of simple plot lines and character. In a way I think they have to think harder in order to get out of reading a book, than if they had just read it. On the whole I think my students read more and get more out of my class because they encounter texts on a more visceral level than if we all read the same book together. They react on an emotional level, getting angry or happy depending upon the connection they make with the book. When a student will not stop talking about the book they finished, even after I try to move on to another student, I see that as a measure of success; the student wants to talk about the issues stirred up in them by the book. Additionally several of my students after finishing a book, when they discover there is a sequal or another book by the same author ( I am thinking specifically about Walter Dean Myers) they show a level of excitement that rarely happened back when I taught whole class novels. It is this excitement that will more likely lead the students into the world of literature and all of the attendant perks of that world, than any teacher reading and explicating a book at a classroom full of children.

Voices

Maybe it is just that I have been teaching through the emergence of the translation/critical literacy that much of what Myers talks about seems fairly obvious. Not to say it is not important. The conflict with the decoding/analytic literacy is that it is not dying very quickly. My students have had the idea that they cannot use “I” in their papers pressed so deeply into their brains that it often requires the persistence of a diamond miner to pull that idea out of their writing. Today a student who failed the exit level TAKS by two questions came to me (mainly because the admin is calling them in one at a time and telling them how far off they are and then telling them to go to their English teachers) he was worried about the essay portion. He wanted to make a three; he seemed to think that his writing sounded too much like his manner of talking. I found that disturbing since one of the things that is supposedly a highly valued quality on the TAKS is “voice.” Of course, what qualifies, as voice is not necessarily what the students see as voice. I am not sure myself what it is supposed to mean. I don’t think it is simply an awareness of audience, which seemed to be the definition at a workshop I attended recently. Maybe I am naïve, but I think that one can sound like the way they talk and still move from one speech event to another no matter how “formal” or “informal” the event may be. Yes, there are expectations of tone and diction, but the main personality that one projects can still be the voice of any type of writing, whether it be an academic essay, a poem or an email. “I yam what I yam,” Popeye said.

Applebee Haiku

The present is a present
presented by the past
to present the future.





No this does not follow the syllable count. Oh, Well.

Taking Part in the Talk

“The most comprehensive curricular conversations occur when students discover interrelationships across all of the elements in the curriculum, so that the parallel but independent discussions of an episodic curriculum begin to echo back on one another.” (Applebee 1996, p. 77)


I love the idea of knowledge-in-action, as learning to take part in the conversation of a domain of knowledge, and ultimately in the conversations that occur across domains of knowledge. It reminded me of Heath’s (1984) ways of knowing that we all bring with us to school, or the conversation, from our cultural groups. In order to take part in the conversation of a group we must learn the discourse(s) which make up that conversation. Last night I attended a wine tasting party at a friend’s house. I have always liked wine (go ahead snicker), but have found the conversation that revolves around it to be silly and pretentious. There is a fairly stable terminology/metaphors one can use when talking about the wine. Everyone takes it very seriously, but I have often wondered why do we have to use those specific descriptions: chocolate, berry, apple, gooseberry (whatever those are). I read once that J. Mcinerneyay wrote a wine column where he described the wines he was reviewing using actresses rather than the traditional terminology. I thought at the time, why not? Yet, that idiosyncratic terminology would not allow one to become part of the larger discourse community.
In the same manner, integrating the curriculum, whether on a large scale across multiple conversational domains, or on a smaller scale within the conversational domain of a subject area, becomes a way for the student to become a part of a larger and longer ranging (in time) discourse community. This idea is similar to slowly becoming more adept personally with the discourse of doctoral language and literacy studies. When I started this two years ago, people in class were tossing words, and phrases about as if they were frisbees in the park. Much of the time I was befuddled by the language. When I went over the readings, I got it; but the conversations about the topic were obviously reaching back across other classes and other books that were not part of the required reading for that class, yet were pertinent to the discussion. I was hearing echoes of previous conversations which I was not a part. Over time I have become more comfortable in the discussions because I have learned to better take part in the conversation and to make the connections by becoming more conversant in the language of the domain.

So Say Us

“past literacy practices have served different national goals, different markets different contracts, different tools, and so forth. It is clear that the k-12 teachers of the United states are being asked to aim for a new standard of literacy for all students and that this new standard, like others from the past, results from a convergence of new insights into texts, new models of learning, and new national needs - - in this case, the new demands of contemporary economic problems and the workplace, the new demands of pluralism and diversity in our democracy and the new demands for new supports for personal growth.” (Myers, p.117)


New literacies emerge over time. I think that to insist upon a type of literacy (the internet, visual, print etc.) is to insist upon a literacy that is already past. I wonder, (without losing the importance of all of these qualities: “the new demands of pluralism and diversity in our democracy and the new demands for new supports for personal growth”), why we must impose our version of what we think it means to be literate. There are numerous ways of knowing/being literate. (Heath) When we as academic literates look about the world and demand that we know how to know better than others (now there is a word), we are making huge assumptions about our ability to predict what is coming down the road. When we do this, it is also to cooperate with and reinforce the demands of the hegemonic structures, which control and oppress all of “the new demands of pluralism and diversity in our democracy and the new demands for new supports for personal growth.” As I said in a comment on another classmate’s blog, I insist (yes, I am aware of the irony here) that there has to be an underlying literacy that is common to all of the literacies as they are elaborated in Myers and others. It is the underlying literacy, how we read anything (from books to people to the world), how we make meaning out of the barrage of symbols we are inundated with everyday, that should be what we try to help our students learn to manage. What that literacy entails, I do not know. I guess it goes back the question in our first class: what does it mean to be a better reader?

Changing My Mind

Ok, a bit more on Myers’ “Changing Our Minds.” Once I got used the “/” slashed categories of literacies he was using I began to enjoy him. I like the idea of as we move from one literacy to another we lose as well as gain. The proximity of a more oral culture, the immediacy of the engagement between the parties to communication are lost or at least tempered as a signature literacy culture becomes dominant. If I did not read him incorrectly, he also seemed to allow for the continuance of aspects of one literacy to continue and play out even as another literacy had become dominant. It seems that the problems between the analytic literacy and what he proposes as the new emergent literacy ( translational/critical or was it transactional? I like translational better), is that the new literacy has not become dominant or at lest not become part of the kind of literacy employed by the dominant class. It is not yet hegemonically embedded to seem natural. He does, as Anne wrote, seem to be a bit insistent about how the new literacy should be implemented, or perhaps he is just suggesting ideas. I could be conflating what I have been reading for my Curriculum theory class with Myers, but it seems that a reading/writing workshop approach lends itself quite well to the translational/critical literacy because of its foregrounding on the reader and writer as readers and writers, reading and writing as a process, and the importance of a wide ranging acceptance of divergent voices (as opposed to the monolithic academic writing voice).