immersion literacy

Literacy first: Being such a teacher

Content Area Reading...As I’ve stated several times, my readings tend toward science and religion as those writers force me to stretch my thinking and allow me to intellectualize a bit over what we’re doing as a society and why we’re doing it. To this end, I’ve been pondering a quote I read recently from American theologian Phillips Brooks: “Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God’s paradise.” Of course, the challenge here is to be “such a man” every day (not just on some days) who carries himself with great pride and dignity and faith and service as to be a model for others. More than that, Brooks suggests that if every man were such a man then the world would be, well, such a place.

    And so I ponder the same for our teachers.

    In recent weeks, I’ve been speaking with the teachers at my school about how much literacy (and to what variety) we are looking for in our day-to-day lesson planning. That has led to some rich conversation about whether we plan each day and each unit around literacy or whether literacy only happens from time to time by accident or happenstance. Put more directly, I’ve been wondering whether our instruction is designed to help our students become more literate or if students are simply becoming more literate (or not) as an unplanned by-product of being in the class. These are certainly two separate things and with quite separate ends.

    The amount and type and tone and end-product of literacy in a classroom is especially troublesome for teachers of science, math, social studies and elective areas (like art) where reading and writing happen from time to time but may not be part of the everyday routine. And even if teachers in those areas do more reading and writing (even every day) are they doing so to make the students more literate or is reading and writing happening only because someone asked them to do more reading and writing? Again, I continue to submit that more reading and writing will lead to better readers and writers – period and without debate. I’ll certainly take that all day long.

    Still, writing lesson plans that happen to include reading and writing (like exit tickets as an example) is quite a bit different than writing lessons that are specifically designed to improve a student’s ability to read or write. This is ultimately a discussion related to the amount and degree of literacy that we expect from our teachers. It is also a question about how much each teacher owns the literacy growth in his or her classroom, which gets us into the messy business of accountability. At my school, I have engaged my teachers in a discussion around the latter. Though I have always encouraged them to include more reading and writing, I am now going further in asking them to own the literacy struggles of our students and to plan around those struggles.

    Trust me, I wouldn’t even go there if I didn’t already have a great group of teachers who were willing to go places where no teachers had gone before. We’ve started at my school with the teachers of English I and II, earth space science and world history. Though I have many examples of great lessons and progress, I will share only one. In a quiet moment after a recent literacy meeting, one of the teachers came up to me and said something like: “I finally get it. I mean, I have always included literacy strategies into my lessons but I have never felt personally accountable for their literacy growth.” She and I chatted further and we agreed that her feeling of personal accountability was a big step for her but that we wanted her to feel that level of pressure only out of professional pride, not because some administrator might be checking on her lesson plans.

    We actually went so far as to consider the following: If she wants to be a literacy-focused teacher then literacy has to be a place where she lives each day, not simply a place where she visits from time to time. In short, it requires that she becomes “such a teacher.” Come to think of it, if she was “such” teacher and you were “such” a teacher and every teacher was “such as you,” then our literacy problems would be so much less and our schools would be, well, such a place.

Giving voice to the voiceless

Content Area Writing...Though most literacy experts spend their time in conversation about such cerebral topics as syllabication, prosody and metacognition, there is something much more profound to all of this reading and writing chatter: giving kids a voice!

     If we get right down to it, there is no reason to teach kids to read and write if not for giving them a voice.

      We know reading and writing to be acts of expression and we know that all of us have plenty to say. Whether we are 3-years-old or 83-years-old, we all have something to say. It is part of the human existence. It separates us from the beasts.

     Confucius tells us that “words are the voice of the heart.”

     Said another way: Who cares if we are fluent if we don’t ever read and write anyway? Who cares if we picture things as we read them if we don’t have any original thoughts to begin with?

     Count me as one who favors the human being over the beast, the art of teaching over the science. Count me as one who believes that hope always, always trumps fear. 

      And count me as one who favors the child.

      I would like to think that I am an educator who favors giving our children a voice and trusting them (not us) to change the world. Why am I so certain? Because it’s the only thing that ever has.

     I know that I pontificate and lollygag my way through most of my life and here I go again. Trust me, the teachers and students at my school tell me that all the time. “Get to the point, Evans!”

     So let me be especially clear about what I am saying. If we view reading and writing as a collection of skills that lead to more reading and writing then maybe our students won’t see much value in it.

     Instead, maybe we should view reading and writing as it was designed to be – as way of helping the next generation communicate, to gain their voice, to have their say.

     That’s why I would like to see us do more to have kids always, always write for an audience, for publication, for debate or for other platforms that give reading and writing a purpose.

     Trust me, the students at my school have much to say. They just don’t view reading and writing as a way of expressing themselves. I think we – not they -- are to blame for that.

     At my school, we celebrated our students’ voices through a Poetry Slam event this year and I am certain that more events like that will provide students an opportunity to make their voices heard.

     It might also provide them with a reason to read and write…making all that fluency and vocabulary stuff meaningful to them.

     Let me close by providing you with Margaret Meade’s full quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

     Most people who have examined this famous quote have focused on the notion of a “small group” of citizens. Instead, let me turn your attention to the word “thoughtful.” I submit that if any group – if any individual – is not “thoughtful” then they are not citizens at all. In fact, they are not human.

     We owe it to our kids to grow them into great citizens. Let me put it this way: It would be a great mistake to grow a generation of kids who know how to read and write but who – sadly -- never do.

The Deep Ecology of Literacy

Content Area Thinking...I continue to be pulled in by the writers of science and religion. Though I’m a veteran educator and fledgling philosopher around learning and literacy, I often turn to the writers of science and religion because they are the ones who are seeking the truth. They are the ones seeking answers to the “big” questions. I mean the “really big” ones. You know, questions like: How did life begin? What’s the point of human existence? Is there any relationship between one thing and another? Might it be that all things are connected? Might there be a plan that we don’t quite understand?

        As I read these writers I ask the same questions about literacy and learning. In my recent re-readings of Fritjof Capra’s books (The Web of Life is a favorite of mine), I draw all kinds of parallels between his commentaries about science and my wonderings about education. I am struck most recently by the connectedness of things as espoused by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess under the heading of “deep ecology.” By this he means to move away from the anthropocentric tendencies of some scientists and toward a deeper understanding of the connectedness of all things. In short, he views the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as “a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent.” This notion of a “web of life” – that all things are related – has been rendered before under headings like “systems thinking” and enriched by Gestalt psychology and even quantum physics (the point of Capra’s book). Of course, we’ve seen all of this before. Most notably, the great intellectual debates between the mechanistic world view of Rene Descartes and the broader, more romantic worldview of philosophers like Aristotle and poets like Blake and Goethe. Count me among the latter.

        So what’s all this to do with literacy and learning? It has everything to do with how we approach the fixes around students who struggle and schools that struggle. I submit that any fix begins with the questions we ask and ends with the solutions we seek. More to the point, I say we begin with questions related to the whole (not the parts) and then we seek answers that address the whole first, not last. Let me provide two examples. First, the entire notion of having students read better has been reduced to assessments that disaggregate every last dexterity (from prosody to consonant / syllable patterns). That is clearly a parts-focused approach. Writing too is often reduced to its least common denominators – indenting five spaces to begin each paragraph or (I shudder to think) the celebration of canned transitional phrases like “my first reason is” or “in conclusion.” What’s more, it may be that we need to consider the same things when we look at improving teaching lest we reduce the art and majesty of sublime pedagogy to the number of word walls we see and the preciseness of the teacher’s agenda. Once again, I see evidence of a “parts” fix to a “whole” problem.

        Let me be clear. I have no issues with prosody or with indenting paragraphs or with word walls. Still, I wonder if all that would be as necessary if we just asked our students to read and write more and to read and write more about what they want. I can’t help but use my son again as an example…the wisdom of an 8-year-old. He is in third grade and he reads quite well. He gets home at night and he reads for fun. He loves to read everything from the Book of World Records to the Hardy Boys. Still, he hates his reading class. He came home today and told us that he would much rather read the story instead of having his teacher spend all his time breaking down every part of the plot and theme. My son put it best: “I just want to read the story! When I’m reading the Hardy Boys I don’t think about how I’m connecting with Joe and Frank Hardy! I’m just trying to figure out the mystery!”

        Maybe we should go back to Arne Naess and draw on his notion of deep ecology when we think of transforming students into deep thinkers and schools into forums for deep learning. Naess puts it this way: “The essence of deep ecology is to ask the deeper questions.” Or as Capra states: “We need to be prepared to question every single aspect of the old paradigm…from an ecological perspective: from the perspective of our relationships to one another, to future generations, and to the web of life of which we are a part.” I say: Let’s just be sure that we are asking the big questions and solving the big problems. If we don’t, we might find that we are feeding the parts whilst we are starving the whole.