Making the Work Real to Students

By overview, the message I received from this week's readings is that we have to make the work of our students meaningful to themselves. I love reading, and I have ever since I was in first grade and I was so amazed at the fact that my teacher was telling us a beautiful, funny story about a kid like myself from a thin stack of paper with ink in them. The fact that she was using the same written words of an author from many years ago to take us on an literary adventure made me believe that books are powerful when we welcome them and incorporate them into our lives. That was first grade, and the stories we learned about back then were centered on child characters and animals who had a life we could relate to.

Now, having reached the 15th grade, I've had to read about mythical creatures, kings, wizards, and (I swear this is true) a talking orange and a little farm boy who would go on walks with the orange while still technically being on the branch for the ACT. We all have unique, individual lives and so we have to understand that there will always be more mediums through which we can use in our classrooms to make the material relatable to our students than we can possibly carry out. However, what we as educators can do is make the material as invigorating, educational, and reltable as we can so that they will make cognitive connections that will help make the material stick with them in the long run.
In "Modeling as a Multidimensional Cultural Space, Lee states "instruction must be based on curricula that capture what is important to know in the subject matter. In particular, curriculum designers and teacher must have detailed knowledge of the subject matter as well as detailed knowledge of the routine practices in which students engage with their families and peers, and insitutional settings outside of school, along with the belief systems inherent in such practices." We may be experts in our fields, but the students will always be the greatest expert in understanding how they work best. We must communicate with them in a way that it allows a more fluid transfer of knowledge and cognitive absobrtion. It is their mind, we are just helping it grow. This can be connected to the idea of teaching our students How to think and not What to think. It is up to them as to how they will feel toward a topic and use it in their lives, and it is our duty to help them understand the facts and different schools of thought on the lesson being taught that day.

Living Literacies-Social and Cultural Experiences

Since its inception, Chicago has always been a city of diversity. Chicago has been a place for migrants to congregate and live together. Due to this, the city has always been a place filled with different cultures and languages that inadvertently mix with one another. It is this mixture that has helped the people living in Chicago created their own identities. Living Literacies-Social and Cultural Experiences focuses on entholinguistic research in Chicago. The work is rather new and still ongoing according to Farr, and primarily focus on how people living in Chicago create their own identities through the use of language, speech and other wise, and their literacy practices.

            According to the U.S Census Bureau, of all non-English languages spoken in Chicago, 70% is Spanish followed by Polish at 6%. Spanish is by far the most common non-English language spoken by Chicago residents and about two thirds of those Spanish speakers come from Mexican origins. However, a myriad of other countries also speak Spanish, all different from the popular Mexican version of Spanish usually spoken in Chicago. Even those from Mexican origins have their own forms of Spanish. An example given in the text is the ranchero version of Spanish, which is an older more rural version of Spanish with distinct characteristics to those of popular Spanish. Ranchero Spanish and those who speak it are characterized as independent individuals with a frank and down to earth style of speaking. Even within the same language people are creating their personal and communal identities through the nuances in their speaking of the language. This can been seen in other languages as well, particularly within the Chinese communities. There are different groups of people who use the traditional Chinese writing, and those who use the “new” simplified version created by the government in the 1950s. Those who use the traditional version believe that the simplified version is an attempt to erase their culture as well as thousands of years of tradition. Those who use the traditional version also use it as a way to separate themselves politically from others.

            It is very clear that identity can be formed by the way you speak, and can work to separate ones self from a group of people. Different literacy practices within a language, however, can also help create class mobility for those who follow them. Farr gives an example of two families who are demographically similar. One family uses mostly Spanish literacy for political and religious discourse, and the other uses English but does not use literacy outside of leisure practices, like reading magazines. The family who focuses their literacy practices on political and religious discourse is the one who is more likely to experience class mobility and the one who focuses on leisure seems unable to move from their place in the economic ladder. It seems that regardless of the language spoken within their home, what is most important is the literacy practices they use within their households.

          I think this is where the two ideas of communal identity and literacy practices that create upward mobility clash with one another. The ideas of communal identity sometimes put a person in a tough place between what you’re supposed to be doing as a member of a community and what is helpful for mobility. If you act a certain way that contradicts or goes against the traditions of a community a person can become ostracized. An example would be a person who speaks a certain way being told that they’re not “______” enough or that they are “acting white”. Though there is separation between speakers of the same language, further separation from the community, in terms of different literacy practices, can be seen as turning your back against that community

Ideology and it's relation to reading

After reading all four readings this week, I realized that all of them really focus on culture and its role in literacy. With that being said, in this post, I am going to focus on one reading in particular, which is Books Like Clothes: Engaging Young Black Men With Reading by David E. Kirkland. 

            In the beginning of the reading, Kirkland says “This line of inquiry either implicitly or explicitly vilifies Black males for not reading: ‘What was wrong with Derrick? Was he lazy or barely literate?’ It is not without suspicion that such questions foment in the shadow of stereotypes” which sets the stereotype that black men can’t read or just straight up don’t want to read, which is an incorrect assumption. Later in that same section, Kirkland says “By contrast, more progressive scholars might argue that Beowulf lacked direct relevance to Derrick’s life; therefore, he did not read it because it was not relevant to him” which falls out of the whole idea stereotyping, but still that isn’t a good assumption. Then Kirkland introduces the idea of ideology and its role in literacy. Kirkland says that ideology is related to what is called the “ideological self” which is what motivates and drives us to be the person that we are. If you think about it, the person we are is directly related to our culture. In preparation for this blog post, I started thinking, "what is culture?". There are so many different meanings to the word culture. One in particular stood out to me. The meaning of culture is "a particular society that has its own beliefs, ways of life, art, etc". This one stuck out to me because it focuses on the idea of ones’ own beliefs, which is exactly what connection I feel like Kirkland is trying to make between reading and culture. 

            With that all being said, the role of culture in literacy has a lot to do with how you view yourself as a person and your idea of yourself. I agree with that idea, since everyone is different, we all have different ideas of ourselves, and we all read in different ways. I know that how we all view ourselves and the way we read seem to be non-related what-so-ever but in theory, they are.

Connecting Everyday Knowledge to School-Based Knowledge

The article "Modeling as Multidimensional Cultural Space" brings up many great points.  Two of the ideas that Lee discusses are students entering high school unprepared and connecting what students learn in high school to what they know in everyday life.  I have seen students enter high school and college alike in a state of mind that they feel like they won't make it.  Students feel as though they can't connect to the material being taught and they can't connect to their teachers.  I have seen students in high school excel in classes when they felt like they could connect to a teacher culturally or they felt that the teacher understood them beyond just another name on a class roster.  Another point that Lee brought up was offering multiple methods of instruction and solving problems for students.  These are all great points because they point to the idea that not all students are the same, students don't learn the same, and students don't all engage in the same manner.  As teachers we need to help our students connect to the curriculum and model methods and solutions for them to use as individuals rather than as masses.  Lee states that "The challenge is to select highly generative cultural data sets and not to trivialize making connections between everyday knowledge and school-based knowledge." (Lee, 35).  This tells me that we must select materials for students that broaden their understanding of school subjects and cultures.  We must make connections and help students understand texts in a way that goes beyond just skimming for the basic message.
I think students should be better prepared for high school with the foundations of reading and writing.  Many students don't know how to properly write a paper or actually talk to a text and make intellectual connections.  Students think that school is all about the grades and test scores so they skim materials for the basic idea without going in-depth into the message.  Students need to be shown materials that they can connect to because those materials can broaden their understanding and might show students that school does actually connect to life outside of school.  Being able to connect everyday life to school is important because it gives students that idea that the two worlds don't have to be separate.  School is a place to broaden understanding, bring in different materials showing different cultures, and expanding methods and solutions for problem-solving.

Complex Texts and How to Navigate Them

Chapter 6 of Buehl begins by discussing a myriad of complex subjects: Renaissance music, neuroscience and a challenging read from Dostoyevsky. All of this revolves around the essential question posed at the beginning of the chapter: How can instruction scaffold the reading of complex disclipinary texts? Areas such as science and math are not quite my forte but I have applied these skills to literature and history countless times throughout my education and as a teacher in some small ways.

When we examine historical texts, many students are discouraged by the sheer volume of necessary prior knowledge in some cases. To understand a new concept or figure, we must trace back the thought/figure through a variety of different sources. For example, if I were to lecture and say "The success of oil baron John D. Rockefeller during the Gilded Age was in spite of, or perhaps because of, his rivalry with the steel king Andrew Carnegie", there is much to be teased out and explained to a student with no prior knowledge. Such as "What is an oil baron? When was the Gilded Age? If Rockefeller was in the oil business and Carnegie was in steel, why were they rivals?". It is a disservice to students to teach without leaving the floor wide open for questions and inquiry to build their knowledge so that sentences such as the one above fly straight as an arrow and not sail over the head.

One particular example of this that stuck out in my mind was when I was a counselor for a middle schooler's summer camp a few months back and I had this kid named Amar'e. Amar'e loved music, he used to dance and rap all the time. I would give him shit for playing Chief Keef and Drake, and he would throw it back at me for saying everything I listened to was weird and no one liked it. So, one day he was listening to Drake and he said "Man, I don't know why people think Kendrick Lamar is better than Drake, that's bullshit." And I asked "Why do you think that?" and he said "Kendrick is always talking about things I don't know, he doesn't make sense most of the time."

Understanding that he was a 14 year old boy, I said "Ok, play me a song by Drake and tell me what you like about it as the song plays. The lyrics, the beat, whatever". He played me his current favorite, "Too Good" and told me about his girlfriend that he really cared about, and how they have problems and he has anger issues. The song is, in my opinion, a bit simple but that's the beauty of music, a song that doesn't mean much to me means the world to Amar'e.

So then, I reintroduced Amar'e to "Wesley's Theory", and taught him ideas such as that the titular Wesley is a reference to Wesley Snipes, who was jailed for tax evasion, and how the song was about a character who sold out for money because Uncle Sam made him do that, the insanity of America made him do that. Amar'e listened intently, and he was a little overwhelmed but he seemed determined to understand. When we take dense, complex works and give students the spaces and tools to learn and to understand, their creativity blossoms. 

Working Complex Texts

At the beginning of chapter 6 “Instructional Practices for Working Complex Text”, Buehl talked about how he developed the competence to work a complex chemistry text independently when he was in high school. This story reminded me of my experience as a high school student in Jordan. Keeping in mind that the education system in Jordan is different from the education system in the U.S, I can say that most teachers in Jordan are not prepared or professionally trained, and they lack the knowledge of many teaching methods and strategies that I had the chance to learn here. I can say that most teachers there are basically lecturing their lessons to students, and students are only passive learners. The teachers often tell the students what they need to know, and if the students didn’t understand the lecture, they would need to work the text by themselves to pass the class. Since I wasn’t an excellent listener, I didn’t learn too much from lectures, and I often had to work many complex texts in many disciplines independently. I used many strategies and study skills to work such complex texts. For example, I recited, I summarized, and I created concept maps. I used underlining, annotating, and I talked to the texts. Actually, none of my teachers have taught me these study skills. I think my internal drive to excel and my persistence to learn the materials had motivated me to do whatever to comprehend such texts and excel my classes. I wish that my teachers at least had introduced some of these study skills and learning strategies in their disciplines. That would really save me a lot of the struggle that I had been through working such complex texts alone.

The ability to work complex texts independently really made me feel competent, and helped me during my college years. Therefore, as a future teacher, I have realized the importance of teaching students study skills and leaning strategies. I also have learned that I should not assume that students know how to work text effectively or assume that learning strategies are general for all discipline. It is not enough to introduce such strategies to students, but it is also important to provide them with the necessary practices to apply theses skills in different decontextualized settings. Moreover, students need to learn how to transfer the action of these strategies to the study of other disciplines too. To help student to become competent in applying learning strategies in all discipline areas, each disciplinary teacher has to model how to use these strategies in contexts that are specific to their discipline. Moreover, modeling of these strategies should be followed by scaffolded interactions with complex texts and collaborative work to help student build their competence gradually and develop their capacity to access knowledge as readers, writers and thinkers of disciplinary texts. 

Predictions in Mathematics

Before realizing my want to be teacher, I spend a great amount of time in the College of Engineering here at UIC. Throughout my high school career friends, family, and respected teachers all pushed for continuing my education in engineering. My skills in mathematics and natural curiosity for science all seemed to coincide for an engineering career. I find no qualms with the time I spent in engineering because I believe participating in the labs and constant operational work developed a very important skill that I take for granted, predicting answers. Helping students learn to predict solutions can help strengthen conceptual understanding and is just another part of the metacognitive approach we all wish to stress to our students.

            Inevitably we have all followed a solution path that only lead us to an incorrect, faulty, or misleading answer. Anywhere along your journey down this unsettling path, did you every stop to think about the validity of your answer? Did you get a little “squinty eyed,” thinking, “Maybe I’ve made a mistake?” “This can’t be right?” In chapter 6, Buehl, again, talks about this metacognitive voice that should constantly be questioning conceptual understanding of a problem or passage of writing. Buehl quotes Baker and Beall saying, “A good reader, then, should be the one who questions what is read, re-reads, confusing passages, and evaluates his or her understanding of what the author is trying to communicate.” Student work, therefore, puts students in the author’s chair, where the students, themselves, are questioning their own work and evaluating if their work holds truth or not.

            This train of thought continues as we think about the connection to the new common core standards. Regardless of your views on the newly accepted standards, we can all agree that the new practices were implemented with high hopes of increasing student achievement; set up in a way, to scaffold, on a yearly basis, the tools they will need to continue succeeding. The curricula aims to builds upon prior knowledge; thus, we must urge students to see themselves as the source of knowledge in a subject area and have been given the tools necessary to solve the problems we put in front of them