FINDING YOUR VOICE- THE KEY TO LITERACY IN THE ADOLESCENT LEARNER
*Susan is a homebound student who was removed from the school environment due to being a victim of bullying. She believes she is a poor student with little hope of a future. She puts forth minimal effort for assignments and struggles with bottled up anger and feelings of rejection. Her most common statement to me when asking her to complete assignments is, “Why? Everyone hates me anyway?” I tried many tactics to encourage and motivate her, to give her a sense of self-worth, but it wasn’t until we read Dante’s Inferno that we made a major break-through. In the background lesson, her regular ELA teacher explained to her that Dante had been exiled from his own country (much like Susan felt she had been exiled from her school), and throughout Inferno he throws in “digs” at those who were in power politically and ecclesiastically and points out their sinful ways. He no longer had a voice in his hometown, but he found a voice in his writing, and that voice, while serving as a great outlet at the time, also had the added benefit of living on well after his life had ended. We pointed out to Susan that writing is one of the few mediums through which a person can have both a current voice and an everlasting one.
As we read Dante, I asked her at each level of Hell “Who is someone you know whom you would say belongs in this level?” Yes, there was some therapy going on in getting her to open and up and speak about what she had been through. She was captivated by the fact that an “old story” related to her current situation, and that Dante was “snarky and petty like [she was].” For one of her assignments, she had to write 3 journal entries from Dante’s point of view. I told her to use those entries to find her voice, to speak out against what she had gone through. This once apathetic student who rarely gave an effort wrote not three, but four journal entries and wanted to do more. A student who normally did the bare minimum added drawings to her entries that depicted her feelings about what had been done to her (see drawing to the left). For her final project, she created a diorama that called to account the sin of lust (punished in the 2nd circle) and wrote a powerful essay that went well beyond the length requirements and addressed the way adultery had ruined the families of two people to whom she was very close. Susan had found her voice, and by finding her voice she realized she could read and write very well.
I saw a man wearing the following shirt the other day at the coffee shop where I work.
It represents the common misconception about literacy: either you have a knack for it or you don’t. But as seen with Susan, anyone can develop their literacy skills in the right environment. So how do we, as teachers, create an environment where students like Susan and the gentleman in the coffee shop can understand that they, too, can develop literacy skills? In order to develop literacy in our classroom, we must show an immediate and current need for it and challenge students through rigorous curriculum based upon inquiry based learning.
Frist, we must show students that their literacy skills meet an immediate and present need in their world as opposed to a far off, long-term goal (getting into college, getting a job, etc). Suzanne Plaut (2009) states that for students, “their future as adults may feel distant; they have so much to get through before they get there” (p.50). Susan, for example, couldn’t focus on college and a job as an adult when she was simply trying to survive high school. Adolescents are ego centric and think very much in the present moment. For literacy to be important, they must discover a use for it in their current situations. Plaut (2009) in The Right to Literacy in Secondary Schools discusses the fact that “access (to knowledge and learning) and power (of analysis, persuasion, and participation) are relevant issues for the students in the here and now” (p.50).
Once they realize the current value of literacy, students must then be challenged through a rigorous curriculum focused on inquiry based learning. Growing the brain is much like growing any muscle in the body: it will not grow if it is not pushed beyond its current limitations. Don Karnazes (2007), a talented ultramarathoner, says in his book Ultra Marathon man: Confessions of an All-night Runner: “Most people never get there. They’re afraid or unwilling to demand enough of themselves and take the easy road, the path of least resistance. But struggling and suffering, as I now saw it, were the essence of a life worth living. If you’re not pushing yourself beyond the comfort zone, if you’re not constantly demanding more from yourself — expanding and learning as you go — your [sic] choosing a numb existence. Your [sic] denying yourself an extraordinary trip” (p.152).
If we are not pushing our students beyond their comfort zone and into their zone of proximal development, they will never improve and develop their literacy skills. In short, if they are not uncomfortable, we are not doing our jobs. Our job is not to carry them, and to appease them, but to come below them and help elevate them to higher levels of learning.
The danger of pushing kids out of their comfort zone is in them losing motivation at the thought of failure. Most adolescents have an innate fear of failure and are unwilling to try new things and look at new ideas. Inquiry based learning uses the student’s natural curiosity to push them over the hump of being uncomfortable. Inquiry based learning takes us beyond the traditional lecture to notes to exam model of learning and allows the student to direct their learning towards what interests them. Heather Wolpert-Gawron (2016) believes inquiry based learning is the key to developing student motivation. “Inquiry-based learning is more than asking a student what he or she wants to know. It’s about triggering curiosity. And activating a student’s curiosity is, I would argue, a far more important and complex goal then the objective of mere information delivery” (Wolpert-Gawron, 2016). There are many methods and varieties of inquiry based learning, but teachtaught.com lists five elements that all methods should have in common:
I. Learning focuses around a meaningful, ill-structured problem that demands consideration of diverse perspectives
II. Academic content-learning occurs as a natural part of the process as students work towards finding solutions
III. Learners, working collaboratively, assume and active role in the learning process
IV. Teachers provide learners with learning supports and rich multiple media sources of information to assist students in successfully finding solutions
V. Learners share and defend solutions publicly in some manner. (4 Phases of Inquiry-Based, 2017)
Taking the time to develop a challenging, inquiry based curriculum that includes these elements can at first seems daunting, but the benefits are well worth the effort. We have a choice to make: we can allow students like Susan to drift though life, falling through the cracks and never uncovering the hidden literacy skills that lie within reach of every human being; or we can choose to take the time to draw out students and give them a voice, a voice that will today, not one day, but today, change their world and the world around them.
*Names have been changed to protect privacy of students
Works Cited
4 Phases of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers. (2017, November 15). Retrieved December 7, 2017, from https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/4-phases-inquiry-based-learning-guide-teachers/
Karnazes, D. (2007). Ultra marathon man: confessions of an all-night runner. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Urwin.
Plaut, S. (2009). The right to literacy in secondary schools: creating a culture of thinking. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wolpert-Gawron, H. (2016, August 11). What the Heck Is Inquiry-Based Learning? Retrieved December 07, 2017, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/what-heck-inquiry-based-learning-heather-wolpert-gawron
