Moving from Local to Global

Critical Literacy should be a major component in all schools; however it is crucial in our “at risk” neighbourhoods. For many of these students their lives are usually bordered by well known streets and intersections. Their parents usually work in the area and many of their family and friends live close by. I remember taking my Grade 5/6 class on a trip to downtown Toronto. The students were awestruck by the huge golden buildings and questioned if they were made of real gold. When they were told they were office buildings and they might be working in them one day in the future, they were shocked and in disbelief. It is our job as teachers to expose and connect our students to the world at large.

How do we prepare our students for the future? Using critical literacy/social justice can provide them with the tools to understand their position in several discourses. Like Luke said, teaching is like dancing. We need to change the dance steps when the music changes. Teachers need to teach were our kids are at. We have to use texts of all types: media, internet, books, and magazines. Our teaching styles needs to be flexible…inquiry based as well as some direct instruction.

This unfortunately can not happen in the bubble that is your classroom. I was lucky as a new teacher to have a few mentors that assisted and lent me a hand for the first couple years of my teaching career. We need to see what works for other teachers/students. We need to share what good teaching looks like. Many teachers are very secretive of what they do in their own classroom, afraid that another teacher will “steal” their great idea. Which means, “then I can’t do it next year.”

Mentorship should happen organically and not forced upon the new and experienced teacher. Principals, new and experienced teachers should back and support good teaching. Our younger teachers can help experienced teachers with the technological world we all live in and our principals and teachers can be of assistance to our younger teachers by helping them see the larger picture of education.

Full Day Kindergarten

Starting in 2010, Ontario elementary schools will implement full day kindergarten for children ages 4 and 5. Charles Pascal, the government's early learning adviser, recommends that full-day learning programs will start in lower-income neighbourhoods. Our premier, Dalton McGuinty says that this will help address the government's anti-poverty strategy and give children a stronger start to their education. This is in connection to what Shirley Heath says in, ‘What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Stories at Home and at School’, “The general view has been that whatever it is that mainstream school-oriented homes have, these other homes do not have it; thus these children are not from a literate tradition and are not likely to succeed in school”.

This new initiative is encouraging our students to embrace a social practice that may be new to some students and for others just a continuation of what and how they have been learning at home. Mainstream school-oriented children, by the time they are 4 and 5 years of age have learned to listen to adults, how to wait patiently to share responses in a group setting and see reading from books as a form of entertainment. Teachers tend to see these behaviours as positive and they are “well behaved” or “good children”.

Teachers will sometimes get upset at students if they do not come to school with these skills and strategies. I had overheard a conversation in a school staffroom recently about a junior kindergarten student who did not know how to hold a pencil. She was blaming the parent and saying “How can the parent send the child to school like that?” That got me thinking about what we teach our students. There is a curriculum for junior kindergarten students and as teachers we have to teach them what is in that curriculum. We do not have time to stray from what is written. This reminded me of a time when I was teaching grade 5 and I had a student teacher with me. She saw that I was becoming overwhelmed because we were “falling behind” with the math curriculum. I was complaining that we needed to move on and the students were not coming with me. My student teacher, a woman who was entering teaching as a second career and had more life experience than I said, “Julie, teach the kids where they are at not where the curriculum tells them they should be.” Once I heard what she had to say, the anxiety melted away. I was a teacher, not a pusher of curriculum. I then shared the insight with the junior kindergarten teacher and thankfully she was able to see the situation in a new light. It is too easy to get caught up in teaching the curriculum and forget about learning.

I believe that full day kindergarten will be an improvement to our current system of education however, I still believe there is one piece missing – our teachers. Heath points out, “knowing more about how these alternatives are learned at the early ages in different social cultural conditions can help the school to provide opportunities for all students to avail themselves of these alternatives early in their school careers.” I do not believe this is included in the model that Pascal and McGuinty are proposing. The focus is still on the students to change and adapt to what we are teaching. For example: in the study with the Roadville children, kids were taught to be passive during book reading. Teachers will have to help them to be ‘active information givers’. For the Trackton students, they usually have ‘few of the expected natural skills of taking meaning from books…but they must also retain their analogical practices for use in some of the later stages of learning to read.’ If we as teachers have this information we can then use it to help our students learn instead of forcing them what we think they should learn.

My hope would be for our students that the province is targeting -the more than 25 per cent of children that are significantly behind their peers when entering Grade 1, is that when they do attended full-day programs before Grade 1 they will fare better academically and have better social skills. I would also like them to have the skills and learned literacy that they have learned from home. In my opinion, the 25 % will be our well rounded individuals, those who will have a better perspective on the world. They will be able to flow freely, back and forth from one community to the other as opposed to our students the government is not necessarily targeting – they would only have one perspective of how to learn.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire - Critical Litercay Edition

Hello Everyone,

I am having problems posting my power point. It is based on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. If you would like to play the game, post your e-mail and I will send it to you.

Julie

Where Do I Fit In? What Can I Do About It?

The overwhelming theme in Literacy with an Attitude is ‘where do I fit in and what can I do about it’. I see the book as a window into a world where a white, middle class woman, living in the suburbs of Toronto can peer into the communities only minutes away from her home. The book gave me an opportunity to really understand the deeper issues facing some of the students I teach and how I can assist them on their journey to success.

I am going to look at the subtle and sometimes not so subtle dance between teachers and students as they both struggle to do their best at their respective jobs. I have come to the conclusion that people are trying their best in their daily life, school or career by dealing with the situation they have at hand. Many teachers are well intentioned, however still come to school with biases. Students come to school, not only dealing with homework but with outside stresses and their biases. I believe that teachers have to be the ones to extend the olive branch to invite our students to be critical learners.

At one school I taught at, in one of Toronto’s 16 ‘At Risk’ neighbourhoods, many of the teachers were either European immigrants or first-generation Canadians. Many of us came to work/school every day with the “My grandparents made it; why can’t they” (page 50). I have to admit, the thought crossed my mind as well. Again, I was looking at the situation as a first-generation Canadian. My grandparents and parents did struggle and were discriminated against, however my grandparents immigrated to Canada as they always say, “for a better life”.

If you look at the Italian community in Toronto and the GTA, we have made accommodations and some people have assimilated. When I worked as a cashier, one of the requirements was to be able to speak Italian. One of my grandparents lived in Canada for over 50 years and only could speak a few words in English. She however, made sure all of her children did well in school and stressed the importance to her grandchildren. We were told to become teachers, doctors and lawyers. Funnily enough it did happen, except for the doctor. Most European immigrants had the option to return to their homeland if they did not like the conditions in their new chosen country. In Canada for Italians, there was a sense of freedom and choice.

For the people that Finn calls, involuntary minorities, they, “experience discrimination as permanent. They have no homeland to return to” (page 42). This is the major difference in the immigration stories that the teachers I worked with. They did not seem to know or were unaware of this notion. Students see themselves as ‘members of an oppressed group’ and “there are things I reject because I associate them with my oppressors and to do them is to betray my people” (page 42). As teachers we need to know where our students are coming from, what kind of discourses they have before coming to school each day and help our students see where they fit in the world and what they can do about it.

It is really unfortunate that I did not have the opportunity to read this book 12 years earlier. I truly believe what I know now would have helped me connect better with my students. At times, I am sure I was just like one of the Chicago teachers, ‘hard-bitten’. I am sorry to say, I was not the only one. The teachers at my school, worked really hard, we did not give up on the kids and we were exhausted at the end of the day. When we went to workshops on new techniques, we would wonder ‘who was the resource teacher, who had been out of the classroom for 10 years, who created this new method of teaching’. At the back of our minds, we doubted these new approaches to teaching would work in our classrooms. Maybe they would work in the fancy areas of Toronto, but not here.

At times, I guess I was just ‘lightly-bitten’, I never thought I knew more than the resource teachers and what they were telling me so I would attempt their new fangled techniques and ideas. Dare I say, I was pleasantly surprised and embarrassed to see that my students could handle the task at hand. It was I who doubted them and did not believe they could do it. I try to look at the positive in this situation; I did try the ideas with my students. Regrettably, there were some teachers, who felt, ‘why even bother, it won’t work anyway.

Many teachers, I was certainly one, in times of stress used sarcasm as a strategy for disarming students and revealing who was more powerful. It is not one of my proudest moments as a teacher but I can definitely relate to the teachers of the lads. Sarcasm by teachers only perpetuates the idea that students are continually oppressed. Why would students want to come to our side or participate in secondary discourse? We are now rooting ourselves deeper as ‘us and them’. Again, teachers need to be the ones to meet our students where they are at and help to build them up to where both of us would like to see them in our world – successful member of our society.

The reason why I am in Guidance today is because I realized, thanks again to my experience at the high needs school, was that my students needed the social skills and strategies in order to play the game and be successful in life. So many time we are told to have the students work with a partner or in small groups and we expect them to have conflict resolution skills as well as complete the task assigned. Many of my colleagues would rather have their students work individually because, “they do not know how to work in groups”. Since when is it not our job to teach the skills required in order to complete the task? Yes, it is easier to jump right into group work if the students already have the skills. It does not mean we should just not give the students the opportunity to work in groups. We as teachers need to teach our students the skills that will help them with their success in their current and future life.

Countless times teachers feel the stress of completing the curriculum before the end of the year and sadly see our students as empty vessels to be filled with as much knowledge as we can before the end of June. So much for student engagement, there is not enough time! If we would only think about our own lives, we are most engaged and learning when we can connect with it and it actually means something to us.

I think if my colleagues and I worked on these concepts we would be on the right track to assisting our students being critical thinkers and not oppressed anymore.

Some of our students make a point of “embracing ideas that are rejected by oppressors as an act of freedom and defiance” (page 42). I am a firm believer of if we believe it we become it. This principle can be used in both a positive and negative way. If you consistently believe you are oppressed, you are certainly going to feel and be oppressed. The philosophy of Power of Now and A New Earth, Eckhert Tolle, believes we all have terrible things that happen to us. We can not change the incidents that have happened to us in the past. If we choose to focus on what has happened, we are not ‘present to the present’. A quote I refer to often from Tolle,

“Action may be required to change the situation or remove yourself from it. If there is nothing you can do, face what it is and say, ‘Well right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it or make myself miserable.’ The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation” (page 96).

Maybe this is another strategy teachers need to employ to assist our students to find where they fit in the world and what they can do about it. It seems teachers are the catalyst to student empowerment and critical literacy.

Where I am From...

I am from flash cards, The Pokey Little Puppy and stories at bedtime,

I am from..."Do something constructive", things to do lists and "This is the way to do it",

I am from picture books, chapter books, romance novels and chef biographies,

I am from Gourmet, Fine Cooking and America's Test Kitchen magazines,

Plus to many cook books to count.

-Julie

Register Variation

I really never thought about "correct" or "standard" English as a dialect, I just thought it was the norm. In order to open doors, which leads to success in a multitude of careers, one must adopt this style of language. Standard English is the ‘language of power’.

I did not realize that speaking differently in the context I was in actually had a name – register variation, I recall talking to my grade 6 students about this. Many of my students came from a lower socio-economic background and some of them frequently used “street talk” (for lack of a better word). I mentioned to them that there are many ways of talking and speaking to one another. The way I speak with my friends when we are hanging out on a Saturday night, would not be appropriate in front of the class or speaking with the principal.

What I was stressing to my students was, “street talk” is not wrong and there is a right place to use it. They too, can speak to their friends in the neighbourhood or at recess in a way that they feel comfortable, but in class and when handing in assignments, it should reflect the audience they are participating in. As a teacher, my goal is to assist my students to be successful in any path they pursue.

We had countless conversations about going to York University once they graduated from high school. Many of my students were able to see the York campus from their bedroom window. We spoke about how lucky they were to live so close to a university, which meant they would not have to spend additional monies on residence. By practicing register variation, my students would be able to attend and thrive in university. This would then open the doors to the career of their choosing.

I see register variation is a life skill, if we teach our students that we embody many ways of speaking and we can choose how and when to speak a certain way in order to be successful in our lives.