Travis Dalsis--Response to Pespective-Taking as Transformative Practice in Multicultural Literature to White Students

Disequilibrium when it relates to beliefs and perspectives that are extremely personal and invested into is a difficult process to undergo.  I remember one time during my undergraduate studies at UM-D, a professor challenged my own beliefs and perspectives on gender issues.  It was difficult totally accept the perspective being presented, but through what this articles calls, “trying on” new perspectives, I was able to temporarily suspend my own biases about the world and understand a different point of view.  Since then, my opinions and viewpoints on gender have change dramatically.  In my homogenous people group comments are made that I immediately recognize as inconsistent with the knowledge base I acquired during my stint in the professor’s care.  Overall, trying on new perspectives for me didn’t totally change my beliefs, but rather enriched them and allowed me to see from other points of interest.  How can this be valuable in the middle school education level?

            I was very impressed with the narrative told of how the high school teacher used several powerful strategies to help students engage in trying on new perspectives.  One technique that I found most helpful and plan to implement is the letter writing.  Students in this article were given a powerful opportunity to consider the motivations and past experiences that created a human condition for one person.  During our reading of “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton, I am going to practice this strategy.  Overall, the practical techniques of how to help students experience multicultural texts along with the reasonable expectations for subtle changes, even if they are momentarily, provide another resource to help students become critical readers.

Travis Dalsis--Response to Positioning Students as Readers and Writers through Talk in a High School English Classroom

Vetter’s article is intriguing to me because of the positioning theory that she employs in her collaborative research project.  Students and the teacher are invited to become active constructors of knowledge and understanding.  Vetter raises a few very insightful points about teacher research.  One, positioning students is ongoing through verbal and non-verbal interactions.  Students that are positioned as trouble makers do not become active learners, but rather follow that self-fulfilling prophecy and get into more trouble.  Likewise, when students are treated and positioned as capable learners, they react in those ways.  I’ve seen myself make many mistakes by targeted certain students out of frustration.  Those students, by my own ignorance and frustration, were positioned in a way that resulted in very little positive outcome.

            Another insightful component to Vetter’s work was her detailed explanation and prescription for conducting her research.  In my own research study on autonomy, I plan to use many of the methods employed in this study such as painting portraits from a positioning theoretical framework using a micro-ethnographic lens.  Additionally, her explanation of valuable data collection consisted of field notes and interviews.  I also plan on using surveys and work samples in my own personal research.  Lastly, Vetter described how she made sense of the work completed.  She discussed the triangulation of data between the students and teacher involved in the study and her own initial understanding of the data.  Overall, examining Vetter’s methods of teacher-research has given me a more solidified grasp of how I plan to conduct my research in the first mini-project.

            A final point raised in Vetter’s article was about how one characterizes the style of teaching during a teacher-research study.  Vetter uses several phrases to describe her work which made me think about how I would characterize mine.  Three ideas were raised in reading.  One, I would want my teaching to lead to student agency in the selection of texts.  Secondly, students would be given autonomy in deciding the method of demonstration of working through their texts, and lastly created a valued shared response through journals and class discussion.  Overall, Vetter’s positioning of students to become active readers and writers has been most inspirational and preparatory in my own teacher-research.

Travis Dalsis--Response to Performative Literacy: The Habits of the Mind of Highly Literate Readers

One of the major points that peaked my interest in this article is that our public education has been evolving ever since its inception (Pre-Revolutionary War).  Blau posits the interesting notion that what a period in our nation’s history called literacy then is ever increasing and mutating to something more complex and possessive.  Readers in today’s environment, Buau states, are called to do what the literary elite of every culture  have always been doing.  She states that critical literacy, the new literacy, is to be an “active, responsible, and responsive reader” who does not take a literary work and digest it at face value, but rather ruminates over the written piece.

            Another interesting point Buel makes is that the new literacy, performative literacy, requires “a capacity for sustained focused attention.”  Is this a current challenge in education today?  Yes!  I’ve found it incredibly difficult to select texts that require deep concentration because I know that students will struggle with focusing.  This bias has been my biggest mistake.  Buel’s point reminds me of a simple analogy.  As in the gym one gains physical strength to lift heavy weights for a sustained period of time, so in the classroom one gains mental strength to take on difficult texts for a sustained period of time.  Overall, there is a great need to address this task of sustained focus during reading.  Blaming culture is a hot-button issue.  Ipods, laptops, cell phones, and even televisions create a culture of sound bite information.  In Neil Postman’s, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he addresses the death of a critical thought process when sustained thinking and reading cannot be found in a sea of mass information.

            Yet a third very powerful point Buel makes about students growing in performative literacy is the notion that texts are hard and students MUST be willing to fight with a text.  She uses the phrase, will versus wit.  Most of my difficulties with teaching texts lies in this point right after the first one made.  Students don’t have the will to work out the understanding of a text.  Does this change when students pick their own reading selections?  Will they even venture to choose a “less safe” text that they may have to struggle with?  These questions are interesting in relation to my research in autonomy over the selection of texts.  In the past, I’ve seen students choose the paths of least resistance and this often times lead to selecting lower leveled, easier texts that don’t challenge my students’ mental faculties or even engage them.

            One area of skepticism that I have, and it may just be in the phrasing that Buel makes, is about readers needing a tolerance for literary ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.  Buel makes a claim that people who have seemingly simplified versions or morality, even to complex situations, are not expert readers.  I see this as a value judgment on values.  Buel cannot assume that a person’s morals and interpretation of a text based on a moralistic lens means that there is an ignorance.  This message seems overly simplified in the discussion of complexity.

            Overall, I think that Buel has some great points in this article that are very helpful in understanding the demands for this new literacy, critical literacy with an emphasis on performative literacy.  Her points are intriguing.  She lists several components to literacy and the issues of teaching literacy that I see affected regularly in my practice as a teacher.

Holly's response for "Textual Shift"

In "The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, I found I had questions that the article didn't really address. However, that may be because my questions really didn't follow what the article's primary purpose was.  What caught my attention in the article was the mention of decoding.  I think many students decode and think they're reading, but the words never really make it past their eyes.  For instance, when my sister was in high school and working on a history assignment (answering questions about what she read), she just could not remember the answers from her reading.  She literally had no idea what the reading was about.  My mom was trying to help her (and becoming slightly frustrated) when she finally said to my sister, "I thought you said you read this!!" My sister's reply was very telling, "My eyes read it, but it didn't make it to my brain."

I would guess that happens a lot with high school (and college students), especially in subjects they don't like or are unfamiliar with.  My question (that the article didn't really seem to address) is how do we move students past just decoding, and into thinking about what they read and reading critically?  How do we get students to understand that "Reading is not static, it is a constant interaction between reader and text"?  While it's important to understand the benefits from reading different types of texts and how students read those, I would wager that perhaps we have students who don't know how to get past decoding.  And I think that's a question we need to be asking more of: How do we move or help students move towards a more critical  reading strategy?

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.

Mitra's Response to "Bridging the Pedagogical Gap..."

Reading this made me thankful to be a middle school teacher! I felt successful as a teacher of eighth graders balancing the teaching of reading through introduction and practice with reading strategies and what the author calls "critically engaging with textural material and assuming an interpretive stance" (p. 111). To ignore one would be to ignore many students because their ability levels were so varied. In middle school, (which may not be the case in high school) no one assumes all kids can "read." Many students struggle to decode while others are able to interact with the text in meaningful ways.
The author makes the case for reading across the curriculum in the way the writing across the curriculum has become more prevalent in middle school classrooms. It can no longer be only English/language arts teacher introducing students to analysis and interpretation skills. I agree that developmental reading instruction and interpretative reading instruction should be linked in all core curricular courses.
I disagree with what literary theorist Eagleton (1996) described as the "state of reading ...as one of intense attention...a state in which the text works on us, not we on it" (32). Not all reading is the same. And some reading does not require our "work." This is particularly true for students asked to read multiple texts for multiple reasons. Some of the reading they do requires them to be more active than other reading.

Holly's Response to "Globalizing English through Intercultural Critical Literacy"

I found this article interesting for a couple of reasons.  The first being the use of technology.  I love the idea of partnering with another school in a different culture and using a discussion board to facilitate conversations about literacy and culture. I found it interesting that the author stated that "These differences [cultural differences] tend to remain silent in face-to-face discussions, but they might surface more easily in online discussions where students have time to reflect and compose their responses and inquiries about the cultural values and beliefs that shape their ideas" (p.167).  I think that this is an interesting thought.  I know that I often have a hard time processing how I feel about something or coming up with questions on the spot, but when I am given time to think about it and write, I can usually figure out what I'm thinking and how I feel about a topic.  I think that it's interesting that the authors noted this difference even in high school students.  I am wondering if this might even be true for younger students.  And why is it true?  Why is an online written form of communication more effective than an in person discussion?

Another idea that I found thought provoking was the when the authors quoted Scribner and Cole on page 152: "Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use."  It makes me wonder if this is how we are teaching students today.  Are we only teaching them how to read and write in order to get into college or pass a test, which have to be done, or are we also teaching them how to apply that knowledge in other areas of life that will last them much longer than a college entrance essay or a standardized test?  Are we teaching our students that it's more important to know this information because it's on the test, or are we teaching them the information is important because you can apply it here, here and here? And are we teaching them the correct contexts for use?  That quote brought out some questions for me, as I'm sure you can see.  I don't think these questions have easy answers either.  The answers will take time and may be very complicated, but there are answers.