Gatto and embedded literacy

I think that Gatto’s practice sounds similar to Carter’s practice for teaching from Ladson-Billings’ article. Both Gatto and Carter are structuring the teaching-learning process so that students can feel ownership over their products. They are also making sure to teach what is culturally relevant. They are making sure their students have hands-on opportunities to connect to subject material in a way that is meaningful to them.

Haneda says of literacy, “it is...important for teachers to reflect on what it means to help students to become literate and, on this basis, to create learning environments where students feel safe to express their ideas in a developmentally appropriate manner and to engage in critical discussion of substantive issues by using reading and writing as tools for thinking” (p. 343). I think Gatto’s instruction embodies what Haneda is describing here. Gatto’s students have many opportunities to “express their ideas,” they have ownership over almost everything they learn about, they constantly “engage in critical discussion,” and use “reading and writing as tools for thinking.” Not only do Gatto’s students have this type of experience with literacy instruction, but it permeates throughout all of the teaching-learning process in the classroom.

When we think about power, as we talked about in the neo-liberal, neo-conservative week and as mentioned in Lewis’ “Even Sweet, Gentle Larry?,” we realize that Gatto is giving her students the power to chose what they want to learn. She has students engaging in making charts about questions they have, and things they would like to know. She takes these questions and lets them drive what it is students will learn about during the unit. It is authentic, and students are gaining control over what they learn and how they learn it. Instead of the companies selling textbooks determining the outcome of student learning, the students and teachers collectively decide this.

I too plan to utilize this type of integrated and choice-driven approach in my classroom (and not just for literacy instruction). I believe that the teaching-learning process is not simply: the teacher gives the student information. I think it is more interchangeable, dynamic, and interaction driven than that. I believe that this interaction takes place between student-student, teacher-student, student-teacher, and even teacher-teacher. You would never tell a student that any one person has all the answers, would you?

In researching and implementing my action research project this past year, I came across an article by Karen Gallas titled “Art as Epistemology: Enabling Children to Know What They Know.” This article is largely about how different forms of art (which reminds me of Ken Robinson’s talk from last week) can enable students to demonstrate their learning. Ironically, she too did a unit on butterflies with her students that incorporated science, the arts, technology, reading, and writing. To give one example of using art to engage students in the teaching-learning process in her article is that of a Spanish-speaking student named Juan. He had a very hard time speaking English and so could not demonstrate to his teacher what he knew. Fortunately, Gallas understood and realized the potential his artistic ability and love had for him to explain his interest, learning, and knowledge. She would have him draw pictures to demonstrate these things, as well as to find a way to help him learn more English vocabulary. In another case, a student who had trouble sitting still and paying attention spontaneously reenacted, in an interpretive dance, the different life stages he had observed in the butterflies. I feel this type of teaching also lends itself to Gatto’s approach.

I want to give my students as many choices as I can to respond to, interact with, and internalize the knowledge they gain in the teaching-learning process. I believe Gatto has outlined a very effective way of doing this and I think art-integration can be very successfully tied to this type of integrative, imaginative, and empowering way to design curriculum.

This is tough

I believe that I have seen my students learn. I believe I have seen “a-ha” moments. The struggle I have is that this is my perception. I also think agreement with Dr. Tuck’s first statement depends on the context of the classroom. When I worked in a 6:1:1 with nonverbal students on the Autism Spectrum in grades K-2, it was very difficult for me to know what they were learning. They did not speak the same language I did and often times, it would appear that they were catching onto something we tried to teach them, and then all the sudden, the evidence of understanding would disappear. Some days one of my students could match his colors and some days, he couldn’t. Now were these instances where he matched colors just coincidences? Did he always know how to match colors and just didn’t concentrate on me enough to demonstrate it? Did he know a lot more that I couldn’t find a way to bring out? Was I even teaching him colors or did he already know them? The learning of these students was harder to know about than say, the setting in Poughkeepsie Day School that I observed where eight grade students were highly skilled at verbalizing and articulating what they learned and how they learned it.
In terms of assessment, no, I don’t think assessment as we see it today is a clear indicator of what our students learn. I do not believe that state standardized tests are any indicator of what students have learned in school or how much they know. I agree with Carini when she says, “Describing requires that I not rush to judgment or conclude before I have looked” (2001, p. 163). I believe that all standardized testing does is squeeze children and their abilities into little boxes so that we can put a stamp on it and quickly judge it “before [we] have looked.” The same is true for curriculum and purchased tests. I remember having to administer tests out of a science book purchased in the 1980s in a classroom I student taught in. More than half my class got the same question wrong and I remember thinking, something is not right with that question if more than half my students got it wrong. I ended up giving everyone a point for it.
Luna (2002) points out, “unless we change the fundamental elements of our approach to assessment, such as the grading system, we cannot truly change our classroom practices to include a wider range of learning styles” (p. 603). I agree with this statement but I am flabbergasted at how to achieve such a huge change in the system that has been operating for so long. My immediate reaction is to think about portfolio assessment. That seems to be a different approach, but at the end of the day, teachers have to fill out little boxes on report cards that give a standard grade. It’s still smashing students learning into little boxes. Can we do what Carini suggests and describe student learning. Take time to mull it over, keep looking back at it and then coming up with descriptions rather than codes, numbers, and letters to assign meaning to it? How can we standardize a way to “transcribe what [we] have seen…reenact the gestures, seeking for words sufficiently apt to translate them, words that do not flatten meaning and intensity, but call them forth” (Carini, 2001, p. 164)? The bottom line is that the government will want and need to standardize whatever new form of assessment we come up with. Part of the idea of standards is to make sure that all students are being pushed to excel, that no student exists in a school that does not ask them to achieve of their ability. The government does not trust local communities and teachers to set the standards for their own children. How can this be rectified?
Personally, I tend to swing toward portfolio assessment, because then at least students are being viewed more wholly than as separate grades. Students also have choice when it comes to what they put in their portfolio for grading. They have more ownership over the process. In addition, I think students need choices about how they represent the knowledge they have learned. This is reflected in the case Luna (2002) describes about how Cary made a “three-dimensional ‘map’…of an essay she was writing about James Joyce’s The Dubliners” (p. 601). I plan on allowing my students creative options for reflection of and response to course topics so that they are not limited in the ways they share their learning and knowledge.

Attempts at Looking Up

Lipman asserts that “critically reading the media, popular culture, and texts in order to better read the world is a crucial aspect of critical consciousness and collective action” (p. 62). Apple presents a discussion about the Channel One, “for-profit television network” that mandates schools to guarantee “that their students will watch Channel One every day” (p. 42). This television channel has “mandatory advertisements” that sells students as a “captive audience to corporations” (p. 42). Brining this back to Lipman, one thing teachers can do to counteract this market strategy is to, essentially, teach against it. Teachers can use material like this to sprout critical analysis and conversation about the effects of this in their students. Teachers who have the critical thought to examine the underlying effects of this type of material can hold workshops during staff development days in order to teach other teachers how to teach against this material and inspire critical thought in their students. The same can be true for the literacy packages described by Irvine and Larson. Teachers can elicit discussion about how the “skills-based pedagogies…[constrain students] in what they are enabled to do with and through text” (p. 54). Even very young students can engage in a discussion about what it is like to hear a story and discuss it versus filling in worksheets and practicing phonemes that are not grounded in the content of the story. When asked, students know surprisingly more about their learning than policy makers recognize. Students can tell us when they “use reading and writing to access the world as meaning-making subjects” as opposed to “objects of instruction” (Irvine & Larson, p. 54). This type of “teaching against” will also help students “learn from and with each other and adults in the classroom” as is advocated by Osbourn (p. 174). What I am trying to demonstrate here, is that there are ways to use crappy materials as a means for creating discussion about and in effect, teaching culturally and developmentally relevant information and meaning-making.

In addition, I think teachers have an outstanding source of potential power in their Unions. Although Apple asserts, “teacher’s unions are relatively weak at a national level” (p. 61), there is undoubtedly strength in numbers. He also explains that “behind much of this conservative impulse is a clear distrust of teachers and an attack on both teachers’ claims to competence and especially on teachers’ unions” (p. 51). I am not sure, and perhaps I am jumping to conclusions here, but I wonder if this distrust is based on a perception of teachers’ unions being solely enacted to raise teacher salary. Lipman describes that change “will require social movements of communities, students, and educators to challenge the neoliberal education agenda and the larger neoliberal economic and social agenda and to pose alternatives grounded in social justice” (p. 63). Although I don’t think the unions are the sole place for this type of movement, but I do believe it could present a starting point. The number of teachers in unions across the nation is much larger than the power of the union would suggest. However, I believe that there are many teachers in this nation that share the standpoint on change being advocated for by the articles for this week’s discussions. I think teachers relatively agree that there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we assess and teach our students. Clearly, what we do, does not work well. Clearly more needs to be done to help all our schools as we are a culturally diverse nation that is not reflected in curriculum and standards. I believe many teachers share these thoughts. I believe that combined, we could hold power and create a grassroots effort to raise money in order to match the “financial and organizational backing that stands behind the neoliberal, neoconservative, and authoritarian populist groups” (Apple, 2001, p. 61).

Although our voices as teachers count less and less in decisions about the students we educate, there is optimism and hope in our numbers as well in our daily actions. Raising our voices will arguably only help our concerns and collectively, we have more to offer than we do individually. Grassroots organizations, conferences, scholarship, commitment, and stubborn adherence to teaching that reflects social justice are weapons.

Language Diversity

It is almost unfathomable to me that some people do value and respect second language learning. As somebody who so badly wants to learn how to speak other languages, I do not understand disrespect for any language and especially not for an ability to speak more than one language. I understand when people say that English is the prominent language in America and that students need to learn how to speak it, but I cannot imagine, as was the case with Native Americans in Lomawainma and McCarty, how people can shut down a whole other mode of expression for their students. This saddens me and makes me realize, like Stubbs explains, the “complex sociolinguistic factors [that] lead cumulatively to educational problems for a child” (p. 79).

Haneda’s point about not knowing what our students know out of the context of school is important to look at in light of these complexities. Yes, after reading this, we are aware of some complexities for students who are learning English and for students who know English, yet speak another language at home. How many complexities exist that we may not have read about? Can we ever really understand all of them? What happens outside of school that we cannot be aware of and how can we remedy this? There are so many questions that arise from this. I guess what I am taking away is the fact that it is important to look into my students lives in order to dig deep enough to glean more of an insight on what they do know. As is the case with Baker’s trilingualism concept and Stubbs’ discussion about the different appropriateness of language styles in different contexts, students are using languages in many ways, for many reasons, and in different contexts. These will more often than not, fail to converge into a neat little package that we can stamp literate or illiterate on. We have to combine all the different literacies our students possess and strengthen these together. We have to throw the unfounded notion that there are primitive languages (Baggs and Stubbs) out the window. We have to realize that all forms of communication are valued, serve a purpose to a group of people we may or may not be a part of, and are complex. I think more often than not, a failure to do these things results in our students educational difficulties. It is not our students that fail, it is we who fail our students when it comes to multiple literacies. This is an area that needs much work in our education, but I think, as is evidenced by the rise in ESL and ELL programs, this issue might be ripe for change.