The role of schools in adolescent literacy
In my previous Medium writing, I briefly referenced the idea that NCLB legislation worked better in theory than in action. While NCLB aimed to decrease the achievement gap among students in the US, it also manifested problems like “teaching the test,” racial bias in certain areas, unawareness of what students need to be successful in their day-to-day lives, and insurmountable pressure on teachers to increase test scores, instead of getting to know students on an individual basis. (This arguably led to situations like the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal). Other educators suggest that a generation of students who were inundated in NCLB legislation lack creativity by the time they reach college, thus are less likely to come up with innovative, interdisciplinary ideas (I embedded the TED talk that refers to this idea below if you’d like to watch more. Although this particular talk is more than a decade old, several principles referenced still apply). Although NCLB is one isolated instance in the larger picture of schools and literacy, I believe strongly that it is indicative of more generalized problems that we see happening in school districts across the nation. Specifically, I think we can see that schools do not always capitalize on student potential in three ways: schools being unaware of students’ cultural capital or general livelihoods outside of the classroom, legislation that (over)implements traditional literacy practices, and the general lack of an interdisciplinary approach.
We saw in the case of Carlos from the podcast in class that it is not uncommon for (minority) students to fall through the cracks, or to simply be dismissed as “not smart enough.” Kirkland (2013) argues that young black males are often seen as bad, dangerous, and lacking literacy in the traditional school setting. Knobel (2001) uses Jacques to show us that students who cannot make a connection between classical literacy practices taught in a classroom to language practices performed in the real world are often pushed to a remedial zone because their test scores aren’t successful. (Kirkland’s book echoes this idea). Thus, there is plenty of evidence for us to deduce that some students are “getting it” even when we think they aren’t “getting it.” As teachers, it’s our role to recognize valuable cultural capital and bring it into the classroom. Although it sounds easy, we must know our students. We must understand their lives outside of the classroom, and be creative in how we introduce course material to mirror what they see in their day-to-day lives.
The legislation of education is nothing new. We’ve seen NCLB, which has been replaced with Every Student Succeeds (although we still seem to be generally unclear on certain nuances), Reading First, Race To The Top, Common Core, Read2Succeed…the list goes on. Simply making a list of education legislation post-2000 is tiring, which should be evidence enough that we are simply too inundated with mandates and acts and programs, etc. More times than not, the general goals of these programs are the same, which is to say that they often create a more complicated means to an end than is necessary. But that’s not even the biggest problem. When students are more concerned with getting a multiple-choice question right on a standardized exam than they are with creating a new multimedia project that discusses an important issue (often cited as a negative effect of NCLB), then education is no longer doing its job. When schools have to manipulate test scores just so they can receive money they desperately need, then the legislation isn’t working properly. I could go on. (I loathe the standardization of education, can you tell?) While none of us are policymakers (yet), as teachers, we have to be cognizant of the detrimental effects of over-standardization, and implement other practices where we can.
The TED talk posted above is one that I show my students every semester, and one line that always resonates with me is this: “More times than not, creativity, which I define as having new ideas that have value, comes from interdisciplinary ways of thinking” (Robinson, 2006). The story of the young blake males in Kirkland’s book (2013) demonstrates the reality of this claim; he proves that the boys have new ideas (the Cypha) and that those ideas have value (the Cypha builds identity, trust, language). Even more so, when we can connect concepts like parenting and reading or emotional abuse and storytelling, students are more likely to be engaged, as we saw in the case of Danielle (Pytash, 2013). Danielle was more likely to read and learn from what she was reading, which helped her while she was incarcerated, when she could understand the point of reading the book outside of reading just for reading’s sake (i.e. when she could make connections between different disciplines in her life).
In jest, it seems like most of what I have said here comes down to the idea of knowing your students — truly knowing who they are, what their lives are like, what they need to get out of your classroom, and what’s going to help them in life. I know for a lot of us that will mean we have to step outside of our comfort zones, but I suppose if we weren’t willing to do that already, we wouldn’t be in an MAT to begin with.
References
Kirkland, D. (2013) A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men. Teachers College Press: New York, NY.
Knobel, M. (2001). “I’m not a pencil man”: How one student changes our notions of literacy ‘failure’ in school. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44(5).
Pytash, K. (2013). “I’m a reader”: Transforming incarcerated girls’ lives in the English classroom. English Journal, 102(4).
Robinson, K. (2006). Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity [video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en
