Mitra's Response to Reading for October 12, 2011

The reading for this week left me feeling completely overwhelmed. And I am not even teaching right now! It seems to me that too much is being asked of teachers of English/language arts.

I read Sheridan Blau's "Performative Literacy..." first, and I was diagnosing myself the whole time. Do I have what it takes to be performatively literate? Then I started to wonder how you would ever assess performative literacy in a classroom. Some of the traits constitutive of performative literacy seem measurable; a capacity for sustained focused attention and a willingness to take risks. But Blau writes, "As any attentive teacher knows...a major difference between strong and weak readers has to do with the way strong readers monitor the progress of their understanding as they move through a text, self-correcting as necessary and recognizing when they need to re-read or re-focus their attention or take some other step to assist themselves in understanding what they are reading" (p. 21). I consider myself an "attentive teacher," but come on. How are we to know this about the 150 different students we encounter each day, while also teaching them to write, spell, organize, think critically, and not bully one another? I believe in performative literacy as a goal for teachers to reach with their students, but I have no idea how I would get it done.

Blau's condensation of the history of literacy from "signature literacy" to "recitational literacy' and then to "analytic literacy" made clear to me the origins of the cannon we know find ourselves rebelling against (p. 18). The origins of literacy take root in comprehending and reciting the writing of white men of power, and like Dr. Staunton talked about in class, not enough has happened to change that.

I found myself overwhelmed again reading "Perspective Taking as Transformative Practice in Teaching Multicultural Literature to White Students." The authors believe it is the job of English/language arts teachers to "teach for change" (p. 54). They state, "....teaching multicultural literature must somehow be about changing students' cultural perspectives..." (p. 54). But they also write, "...teachers may do a disservice to students by leaving them with the impression that they can authentically understand situations that they haven't and may never fully experience” (p. 54). I believe the purpose of teaching multicultural literature to white students, or any students, should be to expose them to a broader world than what they might otherwise know. In contrast to what the authors' suggest, I tried to make space for students' values and beliefs while introducing them to different values and beliefs, but change was not the goal.