The Literacy Club
From the title you might expect that this piece will be about a group of people meeting to talk about books, but I have a different story to tell.
It’s Black History month, and I saved the Martin Luther King birthday issue of Time for Kids. This marks a departure from their usual self-selected “chapter book” reading. Asking them to read this article and answer questions about it is outright schoolwork, and I am a brute!
We’re in school, after all, and we’re here to find out a thing or two about the world. It’s the informational part of the institutional mission. So how do I get a bunch of fourth-graders who are reading Lemony Snicket, and Little House on the Prairie, and the Babysitters Club, and Sideways Stories from Wayside School to wrap their minds around what is in that article? I bully them with a set of questions and blank spaces, of course. I’m not proud of myself, but that’s how it’s done. Right?
The article wasn’t much, since it chopped out all of the drama, all of the pain and anguish. The picture of people marching, and the story about Dr. King’s assassination are incomprehensible without a lot of background - which is most of the difficulty we have teaching from written texts. To read that short article, the kids had to know the meaning of segregation, prejudice, civil rights, boycott, and a few other things that were altogether outside their conceptual universe. And I had them look up the words in dictionaries.
But wait, it wasn’t that bad. First they looked through the magazine at all of the more light-hearted stuff. Then they shared in groups of 3 what they had seen or looked at. THEN we worked our way through the article, pausing to discuss key concepts. This is called scaffolding in research journals, but I call it helping in the classroom.
Thinking that we weren’t done, and that these children needed more institutional whiplash, exposure to our culture’s bleak and tortured history, and so that they could be properly acculturated to the ways of the academy should they ever hope to pursue such a path, I handed them two-column note paper with the headings “I Learned” and “I wonder.” Not leaving anything to chance, I told them that ‘learned’ was a euphemism for “It says in the article” and “I wonder” means that you need to find at least 5 gnarly words (I really did say that) having to do with civil rights. And Oh! You have to read the article. A few laughed.
I put them in teams of three and had them scatter about the room. I explained that there was another paper, one with questions on it, that they would need the notes for later. The rest of the afternoon was a mess. Finding words in dictionaries, rephrasing definitions, negotiating turn-taking to read the article, everything took a long long time. I was comfortable and satisfied because it’s what I expected. I know that dictionaries are lousy sources for word learning. I know that questions after the reading are terrible ways to “assess” comprehension.
My questions were simple, though. “What is meant by civil rights? What was Martin Luther King’s dream? What is a boycott? What is segregation? Tell one more thing about Martin Luther King that is mentioned in the article.
Slowly, slowly, they worked through this stringy academic meal. These kinds of lessons fool kids into thinking that they know something about school. These exercises induce sweat, self-pity, and uncertainty in even the most smug and self-confident. But I don’t think they learned very much about Dr. King. What I think they learned is that he had something to do with a bunch of unhappiness in our history, and that reading Time for Kids is not very much fun.
Here’s the part about the literacy club. While I was surveying this forced march through a magazine article, I thought about how useful these kinds of tasks are for keeping kids busy. Now that they know how to read well enough to look things up, reading can become an end in itself. I could do this continually if I wanted to. What a terrific club literacy is for subjugating and controlling people in school, I thought. It keeps them docile, and allows me to force them look for meanings that I have determined ahead of time. They learn compliance and accountability. Literacy is a useful tool for creating a passive public. Neal Postman said that what is public about school is not that we serve the public, but that we create a public through schooling.
Of course, not everyone moves smoothly through the system, and for some literacy in school is seen for what it is - drudgery. In these cases, the club leaves no socially redeeming marks.
To let myself off the hook just a bit for this infraction, this lapse into conventionalism, I should say that I think it is worthwhile to introduce topics of cultural consequence to kids, and to show them how to work through difficult material. I also believe that we need to expose kids to dry and inconsiderate texts. We need to do it, though, in ways that help the kids process what they are doing. The dictionary, however, is a miserable way to generalize a concept for a word, and is not recommended. It is an expedient, and I use it mainly to teach kids how to use it - an antiquated technology.
Tomorrow, we can search Google images for the words segregation and civil rights, and see if the idea takes on a little bit more meaning. The trick to making the literacy club a source of power rather than an object of dread is to show the kids how to use it for their own purposes. This little exercise with the magazine was just an opener. Now it’s time to let them hammer with it for a while and see what they construct.
Leigh Blackall wrote,
Great post Doug! I hope you’ll keep us posted on how it goes from now on. Quite an interesting realisation you’ve shared about literacy as a control. Really got me thinking about my use of the literacy concept in my efforts to promote ICTs in education…
Link | February 24th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Artichoke wrote,
I loved the flip in the interpretation of “club” in this post Doug,
And I think - How can I make what I share with kids “a source of power” rather than an “object of dread” - is a great mantra to hold in our minds when we teach.
Steven Johnson (Everything bad is good for you) has this interesting take on the rewards of reading - as being both the information conveyed by the book, and the mental work you have to do to process and store that information. - the acquiring knowledge and exercising the mind argument. I tend to get trapped in the acquiring knowledge bit. Johnson claims that society places a “substantial emphasis” on the skills of “effort, concentration, the ability to make sense of words, to follow narrative threads, to sculpt imagined words out of mere sentences on the page”, and this is why we value reading, even reading for pleasure - so much.
But by including visual literacies through google image search you are alerting students that there are many other ways in which they can learn about their world - ways that also require mental work to process, make sense of, and store information.
Link | February 27th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
Doug wrote,
Google image search was powerful, since for the word segregration we found a picture of two drinking fountains labeled ‘white’ and ‘colored’ that got some real questions started. ‘Why’ is unfortunately way too big to tackle. We can narrow it a bit, but I’m pretty sure the kids, like most people, don’t want to work on such a hard topic.
A teaching mantra is just what I need to stay focused. I’m doubtful that I can be the source of one, though. According to Shrila Prabhupada, a mantra has to be received through a channel of disciplic succession or its power won’t kick in. I’m not part of such a lineage, so I suppose we’ll have to make-do with “a little help from our friends” for the time being.
Link | February 28th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Chris Lott wrote,
You write “To let myself off the hook just a bit for this infraction, this lapse into conventionalism”– and I hope you were being sarcastic. There is a danger in this kind of knee-jerk reflexive response– trying to make everything about innovation– that is not only tough on you, but gives critics of innovation their most potent ammunition.
Link | March 14th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
Chris Lott wrote,
re: Steven Johnson. The book is intriguing, but ultimately not particularly compelling in the sense of giving me reasons to believe other than my own sympathetic suspicions. A lot of theories COULD be true– Johnson’s happen to align with my own ideas, in many cases, but we really need some solid research (or at least observation) to determine if there is any reality at all in the arguments!
Link | March 14th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Doug wrote,
Chris,
Thanks for your comments. For reasons that I don’t quite (yet) understand, your comments (and only yours) are getting Wordpress-moderated. I just got home from several days out town to find them.
To answer your concern about my “knee-jerk reflexive response”… yes I was being sarcastic, but not altogether. I don’t think that my approach to teaching is about “making everything about innovation” but may indeed be about finding a way to make reading instruction something other than conventional question and response activity in which meaning and significance is predetermined. There is a crying need to question conventional approaches that *don’t work* towards promoting critical thought, or even understanding the author’s purpose for writing a text.
The tension is at least in part a matter of distinguishing between the need to honor convention and prepare students for the rigors of academic culture, and the desire to promote enthusiasm for learning and discovery, allowing students to bring new and unique meanings to school experiences….finding the balance between authority and freedom.
Teaching comprehension is something that teachers have traditionally NEVER done effectively. If innovation isn’t called for under such conditions, then I don’t know when it would be.
Link | March 19th, 2006 at 11:01 pm