Cultural Capital and Climbing Fish
This video is going viral right now. I just saw this on my own brother’s facebook page. And it reaches into the heart of what we have discussed in this class. The validity of the school system, of the testing system, and of recognizing literacies. I will let you take a minute (or 6) to watch it.
Now that you have seen it I want to take the time to deconstruct it. Specifically I want to look at this ideas about abilities and school requirements and expectations. What is he saying about skills, ability and literacy? What is he saying that is helpful to consider as educators?
First, he discusses the well known saying that often attributed to Albert Einstein, the one that will get to the heart of much of our discussion, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” This hits hard at the idea of different strengths of students and the ideas of different literacies. Thankfully, unlike what the speaker is presenting, many within the educational world do and have recongized this as an issue. There has been increased emphasize on differentiated lessons, assessments and assignments to reach students varying skill sets. However, in someways he is still correct, at least of the front of literacies. Not traditional literacies are still often ignored as valid forms of literacies. I see this within my own classroom, as writing and reading are focused on to convey historical content almost to the exclusion of any other forms of literacy. This is especially distressing in a content heavy subject, instead of specific skill focused subject, where the form of learning is not as important as teaching content and how to think like a historian.
Of course, all of this is not to say that students and teachers should be allowed to abandon traditional literacy. It is still the primary mode of expression, learning and advancement in our society. The Unesco Education for all Global Monitoring Report (2006) has an entire chapter devoted to the topic of literacy and its benefits. Traditional literacy does not just hold cultural capital, but as Unseco report directly correlates to items like economic success, a decrease in children, and increase in social equality. Another study by Bennet et al. (2012) shows specifically a decrease in teen pregnancy with higher literacy rates. The benefits of traditional literacy skills are obvious.
Despite that is clear from the viral nature of this above video that people do not feel that the education system is doing enough to individualize learning to reach the skills and interest areas of the students.
Another angle of this problem becomes clear from the text by Margaret J. Finders, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High (1997). In this book, students interest and literacies and their literary choices were often dictated by their social group. When Dottie, one of the so called “tough cookies,” wandered out of her gender norms by showing interest in learning about baseball, she was teased and mocked for this deviation.
Therefore as a teacher, what can you do to help bridge the gap between content, literacies and skills? To address Dottie’s problem, perhaps encouraging, emphasizing, and even setting free choice among reading assignments allows students to engage with new topics and subject matter in a social safe way.
But what about our video, how to you get at content using nontraditional forms of literacy? Linda Flanagan’s article “How Teachers Are Using ‘Hamilton’ the Musical in the Classroom” (2016) looks at just that. Teachers are using musical literacy, specifically hip-hop (a genre that has strong cultural capital with many groups of teenagers), to give connect in a new exciting way.
This musical, written based on the historical monograph Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, often has just as much historical rigor as any textbook or documentary. But it is using a new medium and a different set of literacy skills to deliver the content in way that engages students normally disinterested in the traditional presentation of the content.
You can see how this use of Hamilton plays out in school in the video above. It’s clear from the students interviewed that this use of literacies that feel revalant to them has engaged them far more then just traditional methods.
By finding ways to marry the good of the old -to acknowledge the importance of many of the tradition skills schools teach- with the literacies, skills and new realities of modern life and the individual, schools can avoid being relics of the past. We can no longer be seen by the public as places that flatten our students into factory man workers, but as a place that imparts essential skills and knowledge, while also enhancing and encouraging student unique abilities and literacies.
Works Cited
Bennett, I. M., Frasso, R., Bellamy, S. L., Wortham, S., & Gross, K. S. (2013). Pre-teen literacy and subsequent teenage childbearing in a US population. Contraception, 87(4), 459–464. doi:10.1016/j.contraception.2012.08.020
Education of All Global Monitoring Report. (2006). Retrieved October 5, 2016, from http://www.unesco.org/education/GMR2006/full/chapt5_eng.pdf
Finders, M. J. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high. New York: Teachers College Press.
Flanagan, L. (2016, March 14). How Teachers Are Using ‘Hamilton’ the Musical in the Classroom. Retrieved October 5, 2016, from https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/14/how-teachers-are-using-hamilton-the-musical-in-the-classroom/
