The Cultural Lens

1. What do my students like to read?

2. What experiences and backgrounds inform their reading tastes?
3. Mapping a literacy continuum
4. School and Me: what’s the fit?
5. Augmenting the connection
6. Standing behind others’ eyes

“The development of students’ literacy is shaped by many factors like gender, social
and cultural backgrounds, and the extent to which individual needs are met. In
designing learning experiences for students, we need to consider the learning needs,
interests and values of all students.” (ELA Guide, 10-12, p.3)

“The real challenge in untracked classes is the difference in students’ reading ability.
Perhaps the greatest roadblock for those of us who want to untrack classes is our
students’ inability to read difficult texts.” Linda Christensen, Reading, Writing and
Rising Up, p.177

It’s something of a cliché and a truism to talk about the importance of establishing
and maintaining an inviting and engaging classroom climate and curriculum that
takes into authentic account the ideal conditions for and principles of learning and
enhances all students’ likelihood of becoming willing and expert lifelong learners.
Common sense tells us that students- especially those already alienated by school, are
far less likely to succeed when the curriculum and ambience of their classroom and
school actively and/ or implicitly exclude them. Yet, far too many of our well
intentioned classrooms do just that.

There are countless reasons for the underperformance of public education and at a
difficult time for public educators, a number of those reasons are beyond the power of
the beginning teacher to overcome. Our question here then, is what is in our
bailiwick? What can we take up and on? How are we to reach and work with so many
students who have learned to regard their time with us as mere unavoidable formality
and red tape on the way to an official credentialing diploma?

Let’s start with our specific responsibility to engage in and tackle the power of the
spoken and heard, written and read Word. We’re inclined to forget some essential
knowledge about our students. Each of the individual young people who sit in front of
us is already an able communicator and meaning maker; each of them is skilled at
interpreting and responding to particular texts in their lives that hold consequence and
significance to them. So, each of them has the potential to bring considerable
knowledge and experience to the table of our classrooms. So much of that valuable
promise goes undiscovered and untapped… because we – teachers and students alike-
do not easily or always recognize that it is potential. We have all been taught by
school to give preference to School-type interactions and texts. While we recognize
that they are only one sort of communication, we are less inclined and not particularly

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encouraged to think that such communication is the kind that school traditionally
values and assesses as acceptable. We also forget about the gap; about the fact that,
for some of our students such communication is the default position in their lives
outside of school and for others, it’s a second or even third language only engaged
within the context of a school building. If we are to establish that engaging and
inviting classroom, we need to remember that everyone has something worthwhile to
communicate and learn. We need to act upon that knowledge by asking at every
possible turn, not only ‘what do you need to learn to be literate and autonomous?” but
also “what do you bring with you to teach and share about literacy?”

The beginning of each year or semester grants each of us a unique and critical
opportunity to establish that this is our habitual stance toward the members of the
community who share this classroom and school space. Welcoming words are
important and we also need to embody through all our plans, activities and actions
that collective success is contingent on what each of us brings. They need to
understand (and we need them to understand) that we value and rely on the
experience they each bring with them: their background knowledge and their
understanding of themselves as teachers and learners and as people will be central to
our collective planning.

Beginning with Interests

Scaffolding

The theoretical concept underpinning this section is known as scaffolding: the

construction of new knowledge is built, just like a house, upon the foundation of what
the student already knows. The teacher assumes the role of the poles and planks that
support a new construction until it is able to stand independently, at which point, the
support structure can and should be removed. We begin to scaffold with students
from what is close to their experience but not yet so familiar as to be unchallenging to
them and we build with them toward what is further away and/ or just out of reach.

The idea, and also the overarching philosophy/ ethos of the classroom, is that students
take on as much responsibility for their learning as they can productively manage and
continually revise, reflect on and assess their knowledge and use what they have
learned to determine what they can and should take on next. They do this in active
collaboration with each other and their teacher. The goal is that they will
autonomously and creatively be able to complete a task/ tasks for which they had
previously required guidance and then, in another context, make use of their new
knowledge and experience without assistance. The hope is that they will find such
authentic experiences and opportunities rewarding and stimulating- as we create more
and increasingly complex opportunities, for and with them, to move into new zones
of proximal development, they will recognize, appreciate and accept their own
responsibility for their and others’ thoughtful, creative and engaged inquiry.

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Scaffolding students’ inquiries and experiences helps them to meet outcomes and
expectations but more than that, it teaches them a lifelong approach to their own
independent pursuit of expert knowledge or deep interests. It can only work when the
prevailing atmosphere within the classroom is concerned, warm and responsive but
that ambience by itself is not a sufficient condition to guarantee that students will
participate in these kinds of collaborations toward autonomy.

If our students are to reach the level of independence we want for them, we need to
provide a variety of explicit and tacit activities and opportunities for reflection that
help them take stock of where they are and how they got to this place; what the
implications are of where they are for where they want to go and why. We need to
help them develop a habit of scaffolding1.

Reading and Viewing Interest Surveys

To that end, it’s helpful to them and to their teacher to begin the year by completing
base line reading and viewing interest surveys that locate their current knowledge
base, tastes and phases.

Adolescents have a well-developed impression of themselves as people and as school

students. Specifically, by the time they reach middle school, they ‘know’ 2
absolutely where they fit on the reading continuum integral to success in school:
people who enjoy reading and are highly skilled at it, people who are able to read
sufficiently well but regard reading as work, people who struggle with reading and
find it nerve-racking, etc. They also know their reading preferences and are able to
articulate them clearly. They know their viewing preferences just as clearly but are
often less inclined to judge them or to regard viewing as a school competence or as an
act of considerable skill that they can draw upon to help themselves and each other to
negotiate print texts.

When we take time at the beginning of the year, to invite students to fill in reading
and viewing interest inventories, we simultaneously demonstrate to them our sincere
interest in their interests and develop an early appreciation of each student’s attitudes,
choices, and sense of self as a reader and as a viewer. At the same time, we remind
students that reading and viewing are both broadly defined and comprehensive in this
classroom and that their particular interests and expertise matter and count. The
following two examples illustrate how these surveys work.

1
For more details about scaffolding, see appendix 1A
2
As with text, ‘knowledge’ does not have one non negotiable, timeless, universal or unbiased
meaning; rather, it is considered as a socially constructed and dynamic language event that
inescapably, explicitly and implicitly reproduces and reveals some of the ideas and beliefs people held
at the time of its creation.

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 Reading Interest Survey

Age___________ Male Female

Which of these is your favourite to read?

1. Magazines
2. E’zines
3. Comic books
4. Newspapers
5. Books
6. Graphic novels

List some favourite titles if you can.

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
______

Which do you prefer?

1. Fiction
2. Non fiction

Which types of fiction do you prefer?

1. Adventure
2. Fantasy
3. Historical
4. Horror
5. Humour
6. Mystery
7. Romance
8. Science Fiction
9. Sports
10. Young adult dilemmas
11. Other: ___________________________

List some favourite titles if you can.

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
______

Which types of nonfiction do you prefer?

1. Magazine type ______________________
2. Newspaper _________________________
3. How to Manual______________________
4. Travel books________________________
5. Hobby guides_______________________
6. Biography__________________________
7. History books_______________________
8. Science__________________________

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List some favourite titles if you can.
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
______

Viewing Interest Survey

Age___________ Male Female

Which of these is your favourite to view?

1. Movies
2. Television
3. Computer games
4. I-comics
5. Web surfing
6. Video games
7. Visual art
8. Performing art

List some favourite titles if you can.

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
______

Which do you prefer?

1. Fiction
2. Non fiction

Which types of fiction do you prefer?

1. Adventure
2. Fantasy
3. Historical
4. Horror
5. Humour
6. Mystery
7. Romance
8. Science Fiction
9. Young adult dilemmas
10. Other: ___________________________

List some favourite titles if you can.

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
______

Which types of nonfiction do you prefer?

1. Documentary__________________________
2. Sports

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3. Biography
4. Fashion
5. Talk shows
6. Reality shows
7. News/ Current affairs

List some favourite titles if you can.

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
______

Is there a category that interests you as a reader/ viewer that is not listed here?

___________________________________________________________________

The 15 minutes it takes to fill out these inventories generates, for students and
teachers, a record of people’s tastes and interests a base line from which to develop
and monitor individual and collective growth and exploration; a guide for grouping
students for particular kinds of activities; a concept of where we might begin our
reading and viewing together. It’s a map as well as a record- at the same time as we
take into account and start with students’ current tastes, we also plan a challenging
journey in which we will move into uncharted territory and support each other in the
effort.

It’s important, then, that compiling and drawing on the information that can be
gathered from these surveys not be the sole or undisclosed task of the teacher.
Explicitly discussing and deciding with our students what the surveys can and do tell
us, how they can help us, how we’ll plan and organize our year and why we think this
preparation is important, helps foster students’ engagement; it reminds them that their
active contributions of expertise are as vital to our collective success as is their
willingness to be taught; it helps them to begin thinking about the impact of our
learned beliefs on our preferences and of our preferences and beliefs about ourselves
on our aspirations and accomplishments- school and otherwise.

Perhaps more for teachers than most professionals, it is crucial to remember that
accurate as our self knowledge can be, it can also be taken- for- granted and
unconscious. In ways our students need to recognize, what they believe with
unquestioned certainty affects, in a way they cannot always perceive, the outlook they
bring to their growth and success in general and in the Language Arts classroom in
particular. What our students’ know’ about themselves with such certainty is
unavoidably a product of what they have been taught to think- sometimes to their
advantage and sometimes in a way that is deeply deleterious. It’s useful to remember
that as unsettling as this discovery can be for some of them, students often find the
problem of inescapable social construction is deeply interesting.

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Before going on, take time to reflect on your own interests and potentially
unexplored interests as a reader and viewer. What patterns can you find? What
story might your interests reveal in terms of your potential expertise as a consultant
and teacher in a classroom? What might you want/need/ hope to seek expertise
about?

Investigating Experience and Culture

It’s normal and necessary for teachers to base their plans for a class and the
individuals in it on the results and outcomes they want students to reach. We are also
aware that we need to factor varying degrees of ability into our reparation. What’s
less likely to happen, unless we are very deliberate about it, is a consistent effort to
keep at the forefront of our thinking and planning the inseparable connection between
students’ social and personal experiences and the kinds of responses they make to
texts, including the text of the school and classroom; responses we need to anticipate,
plan for, and work with or else, no matter how detailed our lesson and unit plans,
their chances of success are considerably reduced. When we build on the intersection
and connection between where we need and hope to go and where our students are
currently standing, we can design and build activities and climate that simultaneously
invite and challenge all our students to see themselves and their own capacity for
learning and teaching within and driving the official curriculum.

Why is such connection essential? In terms of the big picture, we all want our
students to consider the ways in which they and their thinking and attitudes have been
shaped because such understandings help them to make authentic and autonomous
choices that they may not previously have seen as beneficial or even possible. In
terms of the immediate and smaller picture, when they distinguish for themselves
how their initial, unconsciously acquired understandings3 of who they are as persons
shape their sense of who they are as readers, viewers and students, they are better able
and more willing to help in and respond positively to the planning that helps them
become autonomous. (Please stop here to read Home and Away: The Tensions of
Community, Literacy, and Identity, available in the appendix as a PDF.)

Acquiring a set of meta-cognitive (Meta-cognition is “knowing about knowing”; it’s

the knowledge and awareness of your own cognitive processes at work) reading
strategies that go beyond skill acquisition is fundamental to supporting all students’
engagement and growth, but it is especially necessary for students who do not
identify themselves as ‘school smart’ or who do not identify with school as a relevant
and vital chapter of their launch into adulthood.

Developing an instrument through which the teacher and students, individually and
collectively, can consider how experience and culture have affected reading and

3
These understandings are frequently referred to as one’s primary discourse. James Gee (1996)
describes it this way: “ our initial taken- for- granted understanding of who we are and who ‘people
like us’ are, as well as the sorts of things we (‘people like us’) do, value and believe when we are not
‘in public’. (p137)

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viewing interests, can help create a safe space for all students to begin the potentially
risky work of tackling their assumptions and convictions and the implications these
things have for their expectations, accomplishments, decisions etc., about themselves
and each other.

In active consultation with them about categories that are important and why, we can
develop, complete and discuss a cultural and social awareness inventory and
questionnaire that helps them gain insight into the various reasons for their penchants
and preferences and look at themselves as complex people whose experiences have
helped to shape them, their active and unconscious choices and their inclinations. The
following example offers one possibility that takes only a few minutes to complete.

Cultural Awareness Inventory

My age
My gender
My race
My education
My social class
My political positions
My sexuality
My spiritual connections
My challenges
My abilities

This exercise4 gives us a forum to discuss with students and for them to consider and
discuss with each other, a number of interesting ideas about text, reading, and readers
that they might not have previously reflected on:

 Language necessarily constructs identity

 Language is unavoidably political
 At the very same time that the reader makes meaning of text, the text makes
meaning of the reader- meaning the reader isn’t always conscious of
 Our various identities can and do position us in either or both dominant and
marginalized groups; all of us belong to both but not necessarily the same
both
 If we do not belong to a particular group and share its experiences of the
world, its struggles may elude us

4
For a more detailed description of a lesson and of the class time, please see Appendix II

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  We unavoidably bring our cultural and experiential assumptions- our primary
discourse to the secondary discourses we are acquiring an to texts that we read
and we forget and even discount the fact that we are bringing them
 We can therefore go along with and believe the common misconception that
[reading] preferences and strengths are purely a matter of inherent inclination
 Awareness about how our assumptions shape reality helps us to change
reality.

Creating, completing and discussing such an inventory:

 puts at the center of our classroom the strong and hopeful possibility that we
read (in the broadest sense of reading and text) as and what we do not
because of our limitations because our social and cultural experience have
honed our expertise in these areas
 actively engages students in setting the tone, pace, and goals for the class
 reminds students that meaningful, focussed discussion and conversation5
about shared teaching and learning will be a central approach, methodology
and responsibility in this educational community
 reminds them, therefore, that success is also a negotiated and collective, not
solely an individual and individualistic, responsibility
 incorporates Critical literacy (ELA pp 157- 159) not as a discrete unit of study
within the language arts program but as a way of working, thinking, and
creating together within the overall context of the language arts program

The preceding inventories are not discrete. Taken together, they provide an initial
understanding of the standpoints of the individual students in the class, a sense of this
classroom community’s preliminary ethos and a set of introductory planning maps
but, just as crucially they give students explicit permission and responsibility to
interrogate and possibly interrupt the nature of school and schooling and its role in
their literacy acquisition and aspirations.

Students are asked to keep a copy of each of these surveys in their reading response
or learning logs6 and make reference to and update them as the year goes on. When
they have authentic ownership of, and can monitor, their own growth as well as an
informed belief that they can and should be able to define and have success, they are
more likely to grow in ways that they genuinely recognize and attach importance to.

Before going on, take time in your teaching journal to express and explore your
own spontaneous attitude toward school and schooling and its role in your literacy
acquisition and aspirations. Now take a few minutes to explore the connections
between these beliefs and your hopes and beliefs about the students you have
worked with to date.

5
See ELA PP 107- 8
6
Appendix III provides detailed descriptions of reading response and learning log and helps you create
a classroom community climate in which their use is routine and purposeful.

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 Charting Ourselves as Readers, as Students as Citizens

A purposeful, engaged learning climate is not merely an end in itself to signal we are
competent professionals; we want students to work within this setting to understand
and internalize their own responsibility and opportunity ( always these two sides of
being a student) to make and carry out strategic plans they learn to develop for
themselves as learners. We want them to continually use, revise and re-apply their
developing awareness of where they are and where they want/ need to go; to
recognize that such negotiated work is fulfilling, ongoing and evolving.

At the same time as we want as many students as possible to experience hopeful

gratification, we, as teachers, want to learn as much as we can about how to
simultaneously support and challenge them on that journey. Our task as their ELA
teachers is not only to teach them enough of the mechanics of literacy to complete
their year with us successfully. In addition to helping them get through or even to
become better language arts students, we also want to help our students to:

 understand how to collect and organize information

 analyze the data they collect
 connect that analysis to the establishment of their own appropriate and
attainable [literacy] goals
 explicitly and deliberately connect the application of such strategies and skills
with their own growth and autonomy in many areas of their lives.

In effect, the content (practice) and the approach (theory) that we develop reflect,
support and sustain each other in a form of praxis. The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ and the
‘why’ of our classrooms constantly reinforce our belief in and expectation of
students’ responsible engagement with us (and vice versa), with the syllabus and with
each other. Needless to say, this process is often complicated, muddy and halting-
indeed, in classrooms where such arrangements prevail, research tells us that
abundant and evident conflict are more likely than in traditional classrooms. The idea
isn’t to carry out our curriculum seamlessly or to be inanely popular with people we
do not challenge or expect the best from.

The presence in this place of conflict and disagreement as unavoidable and productive;
of collective problem solving, revisiting, and renegotiating as lifelong strategies for
gaining individual and collective ground serve as vital opportunities for our students to
practice, develop, and internalize the skills and dispositions that will help them not
only to become better readers and writers, viewers and speakers, students and
apprentices but also- and ultimately most importantly, creative, critical, autonomous
citizens. The following website_ http://www2.csusm.edu/middlelevel/comlit.nmsa.html and
then article by Linda Christensen (1994) “Building Community from Chaos” in
Rethinking our classrooms. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, pgs. 50-55 are both useful
explorations of these concepts.

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 Developing a Personal Reading Continuum

Because school’s official attitude toward literacy is somewhat narrow, many of our
students have an equally narrow and fixed definition of their own literacy abilities
and skills. It’s quite common for people to think of their reading abilities and tasted
in a once- and –for-all kind of way that get in the way of developing the classroom
ethos we want and our collective and individual growth as literate people. One simple
means of demonstrating to each and all of the students a) that all of them can read and
b) that each of us is simultaneously knowledgeable and uneducated and that therefore,
we all need each other’s help is to ask everyone to complete is a simple visual
instrument called a reading continuum

We begin to design this continuum together by brainstorming all the kinds of texts
that students can think of and writing them down on overhead or chart paper so that
everyone can see them. When the list is complete, the teacher works with the students
to develop an example of how a reading continuum might work for a hypothetical
student. This is just an example of what they might come up with:

Math text, Shakespeare, poetry, novels, magazines, web pages, drivers’ handbook, video games
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Presents a big challenge to me Okay most of the time No problem for me at all

To further promote awareness in the classroom that reading is a multifaceted skill we all
have in varying degrees, depending on the context, and to make the point that
inexperience is not only commonplace but inevitable, the teacher can demonstrate by
completing the collaborative model of the continuum in a way that reveals not only
his/her expertise but also, and more importantly, the areas in which s/he is a genuine
novice who can/ will seek and get help from people in the classroom. Following her/ his
example, students can then make use of the brainstormed list of texts to fill in their own
continuum in their learning logs.

When they consider and discuss (small and large group discussions are both useful and
important and we’ll talk more later about how to structure those to yield the most
purposeful and inclusive engagement) what they have done, they begin to recognize that
literacy isn’t an exclusive monolith some of us own and others do not but rather that our
individual literacy is always contextual; that everyone is a novice and an expert at the
same time.

This is a crucial lesson

 for readers whom school categorizes as struggling or students who read literature
rarely reluctantly
 for students who do not experience school reading as a challenge and assume that
all reading is unproblematic for them

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  for all of us who fill it out honestly and thoughtfully to remind ourselves that even
as we excel at some forms of literacy, we labour at others and vice versa.

It legitimately takes the historic sting out of and normalizes struggle and describes the
work and play of reading in this classroom community as social, negotiated, and
ordinary.

Explicitly teaching students to routinely collect, analyze and draw on such information
and working with them to set individual and collective goals and to chart pertinent
courses toward those ends:

 gives them an appropriate sense of responsible ownership

 sets the tempo of the class as focused, engaged, and responsive
 establishes that learning in this space is a thoughtful, authentic and
autonomous activity
 reminds them to reflect deliberately and continually on their preferences and
how they learn best
 normalises learning risks and encourages them to take risks, explore,
experiment with, and use learning styles other than those they [have learned
to] prefer
 facilitates their consideration of the numerous factors that affect their
learning- environmental, emotional, sociological, physical (ELA 8-9)

Helping Students Apply and Internalize School Knowledge

As we work collectively to analyze all this information, we validate and incorporate

students’ experience and background as expert resources in our work together. Such
active integration of who they are and what they bring as a form of essential know-how is
a very different and far more effective approach from simply telling our students we
value them.

We normalize a classroom culture in which every member of the community has areas of
expertise to share and areas in which we can and should willingly seek guidance-
guidance any of us called upon to offer it should afford gladly. This seeming bit of
common sense is actually something that takes both students and teachers time and
determination to internalize. So much of both sets of experience has been shaped by in a
tacit school conviction that errors are flaws to be eradicated, not opportunities to ask
more and more difficult questions. So much of what we believe about the teaching and
learning exchange – our own as well as our students- is that there is one final set of
immutable answers the student needs to parrot in order to pass go.

Their growing collection of data in the form of inventories and continuum give our
students essential practical reference points and also combine to help them generate and
consider their own cultural and personal experience/ paradigm in a way too many of them
have not had enough opportunity to do. But we don’t want to stop there. We want to use
this new awareness as a scaffold from which to extend beyond the self; to genuinely

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examine and understand the contexts and situations in which the other people with whom
and characters about whom they will learn, find themselves.

It should go without saying that as literate and responsible people, we want students
to:

 recognize that everyone’s viewpoint, including their own, is moulded by

context and experience
 appreciate that our own perspective, therefore, is one among many
 understand that seeing from a particular location determines what and how we
see and the sense we make of it
 examine the views of others in discussion and presentation to clarify and
extend their understanding (ELA p34)
 be willing to consider more than one interpretation of any text (ELA p64)
 be aware that varieties of language and communication styles exist in different
contexts (ELA p64).

Helping students translate such ideals into regular and habitual practice is another
piece of staging in our collective scaffolding work. A helpful initial in-road into this
next conversation is to explicitly place the connection between their current, carefully
considered experience and the school context in which they presently find themselves
at the heart of our next piece of curricular and community building work.

No matter what their perceived level of academic achievement, they may be

unconscious of the fact that school has a paradigm/ frame of reference within which
we all operate with varying degrees of success. Students do not always recognize how
their primary discourse diverges from or matches the discourse of school. Nor do they
always recognize that our ability to learn secondary discourses is partly determined
by their similarity to the primary discourse each of us has unconsciously and fluently
acquired.7 Because the degree of fit between their cultural experience and the values
of school directly impacts every student, this is a discussion in which they can all
make a unique and significant contribution to our collective understanding, planning
and growth. Thinking about the rules and discourse of school as they relate to
students’ own discourse and conventions helps students:

 more consciously consider and recognize the effect of the correlation/

difference between their experience and the culture of school on their success
with schooling in general and in the English language arts classroom in
particular

7
Gee describes secondary discourse as “any local, state or national groups and institutions outside
early home and peer group socialization.” (p 137) Secondary discourses, unlike our primary
discourse, are consciously developed and acquired. Schools, churches, clubs, bureaucracies
government departments, cults, etc., are all examples of secondary discourse.

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  examine people characters, stories, points of view, and contexts with a
growing awareness of the impact of their own experience on the way they
read and view and a greater willingness to think critically about both texts and
their responses to them.

As is this case throughout this guide, the purpose of our praxis is to support our
students’ efforts to connect literature and life, to draw life lessons that are constructive,
and partly through that process of recognition, to come to appreciate the joy and wonder
of reading. Finally, such teaching gives students for who it is all too often denied, the
kind of cultural capital they can use to negotiate subsequent secondary discourses they
need to speak and read fluently on their way to materializing their own dreams.

The following exercise demonstrates how we prepare for and guide a class discussion
that reveals and explores the relationship between our primary and secondary discourses.

Vignette
Cultural Connection Charts

Materials: Chart paper and markers

Learning logs
Cultural Awareness Inventory

Ms. Paris begins the class by reminding her students that classification is
a familiar skill they all have and that indeed, they are already highly
practised at it. She asks them to quickly think of some categories they
use all the time and she lists them. She asks what the students have
noticed about the social rules and structures we adhere and what extent
they think those can also be classified in terms of common and/ or group
rules that apply to different social situations.

She asks them to help her brainstorm a list of social occasions and
contexts with which they are familiar. The list is extensive and includes
raves, instant messaging, face book, funerals, dinner at their
grandparents’ house, work, school, job interviews, work, the golf course,
the beach, the school dance, the mall, the library, the cinema, baby
sitting, parties, etc .

She places students in groups of three and assigns each group two
different contexts for discussion and exploration. Everyone is asked to
look at the expectations and dress code for a third context- school. They
are given 15 minutes to come up with and depict, verbally, visually, or
in combination, the code for dress and behaviour in each of the assigned
locales. She tells students that at the end of their discussion time, they
will be asked to display what they have done and describe their
discussion findings and process to the whole group.

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 Each group is given the opportunity to speak briefly to the findings they
post as wall text for their colleagues to read and to add only what has not
yet been noted about school expectations and dress code. One group
posts the following:
Setting: Beach party

Dress Code
Bathing suits and towels
Shorts
Tee shirts
Hoodies
Tank tops
Minimum of clothes
Colourful
Protocol
Loud voices
Casual talk
Laughter
Playful
Screaming/ yelling
Everyone talking at once
Not much serious conversation
Kind of disorganized
Everyone there is invited and/ or part of the group

Setting: Funeral
Dress Code
Quiet
Black
More formal
Fairly plain
Sober
Protocol
Quiet voices
Formal talk
Respectful
Crying in public is appropriate/ expected and maybe some laughter

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Listening and being quiet unless speaking
Orderly
Lots of ritual
Everyone has the same reason to be there

Setting: School

Dress Code
Kind of depends what group you belong to/ want to fit in with:
Hoodies, jeans, different kinds of tees
Jock stuff
Alternative stuff
Emo Stuff
Rock Stuff
Hip hop stuff
New preppy stuff
There’s an official dress code and many kids don’t follow it for different reasons- the
stricter the code the more likely some kids are to rebel.
The official code is about covering up your skin and your body and not standing out too
much

Protocol
Depends where you are-
Loud voices are okay in the halls, cafeteria, sometimes the gym, outdoors, before/ after
classes
Not okay in the office, when class is going on, in the library but often happens anyway
Casual talk okay as above but not okay when teachers are talking. It happens anyway
No hat or doo rag rule
No cell phone or I pod rule
Laughter- okay when ‘appropriate’; not okay otherwise. Happens anyway
In class listening when others are talking and talking when it’s your turn or you are asked
or you ask permission- speaking out is against the rules but people do it anyway
Being prepared to work- homework and assignments ready/ books and notebooks ready-
this is what is supposed to happen
High level of order. People [are supposed to] move with the bell or buzzer
Everybody is supposed to be treated the same and have the same rights. Some people can
be/ are treated a lot better or worse- depends who you are
People have to be there

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 Asking one of the students to act as a scribe, she asks students work
with her to draw out of the posted findings, a formal definition of
secondary discourse to be posted on the wall for future and further
reference.

After all their conclusions have been shared, she asks them to think
about the connections we can make between this kind categorization of
social texts and the way individuals choose, approach and respond to
written and visual texts.

They talk about hidden and explicit cues and rules and the fact that in
certain situations, each of us knows all the rules without being told and
in others, we try to guess, or don’t understand and/ or make social errors
that can be embarrassing or lead to confusion or even arguments. They
discuss the fact that even what they understand perfectly without
thinking about it has been taught to them and, therefore, can be learned.
They also discuss the fact that even though some people know the rules
of a setting perfectly well, they don’t always or easily abide by them-
sometimes from choice and sometimes because other rules are more
important to them. It’s important to their teacher that above all, they
understand that fluently reading, viewing, interpreting and responding to
school texts is not such a different task from reading social text-
experience with the unspoken rules has at least as much to do with
successful negotiation as ability and in fact, often get confused with
talent. There are many purposes to this discussion, not the least of
which is to demonstrate to her students that what they think is
interesting, intelligent and useful but her particular purpose is to make
clear that the focus of literacy is social practices- “it’s not just how you say
it, but what you are and do when you say it.”

By putting into practice something at which they are already skilled and
experienced, Ms. Smith has helped her students to identify three
important goals they need to work toward:

 reminding themselves that the very act of reading any text

confidently is contingent on grasping its rules.
 learning to take time to analyse their understandings concretely
and explicitly in order to prepare for more highly developed
reading of diverse texts and genres
 Learning how to demonstrate their authentic understanding of
audience, purpose and genre.

She has also taught them something important about her beliefs about
them and about teaching and learning:

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  that it is important to students’ success at reading and their
serious engagement in the rich conversations that can come out
of what they read;
 that she values and deliberately structures opportunities for
students to practise making their own insightful connections.
 that in this space, authentic discovery and autonomous
application of helpful strategies is valued much more than
passive delivery of these strategies from her.

To that end, she asks her students to go back to their individual cultural
awareness inventories and to revisit them, thinking hard now about what
is central to their identity, to what she wants them to think about as their
primary discourse8 as they consider the set of conventions the class has
generated to describe the discourse of school. She wants each of them to
create a third chart which makes explicit the degree of correlation
between their cultural identity and the code of school.

To ensure that everyone has a good understanding of what they have

been asked to do, she describes the three areas she wants them to think
about and she provides a realistic example and model for their own
charts:

1. the particular vocabulary, dress code, values, and interests that

they consider to be fundamental to their identity
2. the vocabulary, dress code, values and interests that they
consider to be fundamental to school
3. areas of overlap between their primary discourse and the
secondary discourse of school.

My Identity School Overlap

Time with friends Doing homework Being responsible
Four wheeling on time Cooperating
Hunting Doing group work Reading (in a
Reading car Reading novels way)
magazines Writing essays Meeting
Fixing old cars that explain the expectations
with dad meaning of books
Working at Following the
Wilson’s rules

8
Research demonstrates to us that fluent understanding and use of such language not only helps students,
particularly those with less experience with it an expectation of using it, to understand and negotiate the teaching
and learning context better but also gives them the kind of cultural capital that helps them to be taken seriously by
school.

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 As they work on the assignment, her students focus on the extent of the
‘fit’ between their own background and experience and the world of
school. Her goal is to help them to begin to recognize how the
complements and frictions actively contribute to their success and/ or
lack of it. Again, her purpose is to interrupt and help her students
challenge a very old school myth- that success is purely a result of
individual ability and effort. She actively encourages small and large
group discussion about their discoveries9. This fresh insight into old
conceptions provides the basis upon which she wants them to plan for
their individual and collective success.

In this way, she provides an opportunity to successfully build and

practise a strategy for connecting to the many other texts that they will
be reading and viewing with her. By linking

1. students’ lived experience and the worlds and experiences she

wants them to open up for themselves
2. strategies for living and strategies for learning

she clarifies her expectations and hopes for her students and confirms
that they are within reach, worthwhile and well-founded.

Explicit teaching about the influence of dialogue, conventions, and experiences on

our perceptions opens an intentional space in which individual students can
collectively work, consciously and increasingly open-mindedly, to understand that
our differences of style, opinion and attitude and aptitude are profoundly informed by
our various communities of origin and primary discourses. They can then also begin
to recognize that certain discourses are groundlessly and unconsciously awarded more
or less status.

Enriched by the information they have generated, they are better prepared to
recognize and appreciate that such differences predictably extend to reading and
viewing tastes. Preferences for particular characters, attitudes, or plots in texts or
attraction to certain genres rather than others also rest, to a significant degree, on their
previous experiences.
This understanding and language helps them to access, take more conscious
possession of, and examine the knowledge, conception and language of school, the
language arts classroom and the texts that it opens up for them. This insight and the
ability to express it in ways that get heard and validated also help students to take
academic risks and reach beyond their current context to contend with unfamiliar
genres; to figure out and access the background knowledge they need to make such
endeavours successful.

9
Such discussion is not left to chance or to the unconscious, old, and entrenched patterns where particular students
feel the right and/ or responsibility to speak all the time; others tune out and disengage and others feel silenced by
their more confident colleagues. Please refer now to the appendix entitled “Deliberately teaching Discussion.”

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 Before going on, take time to fill in your own correlation chart. Giving careful
consideration to the final column in which you consider common ground and
disconnect, use your Think Book to convey the reasons you decided to become a
teacher.

Ideally, as the year progresses, students should continually and systematically [re]
consider the information and insights they build up in order to develop and make use
of dynamic profiles of themselves as growing thinkers, readers, writers, creators, and
collaborators. This way, they have an ongoing and self- motivating record of their
growth and progress. Their learning and reading responses should not only to reflect
what they are reading, viewing and thinking about, but also their planning for and
participation10 in their own growth. The following survey suggests one way of
helping them generate and put into operation constructive information about
themselves as language arts students. (The language is aimed at you and can be
tailored, with your students, to help them to explore the same kinds of questions.)

Needs and Assets Survey

Given the all the information about my unique self that I have generated:

1. What literature, information, media, and visual texts am I most

likely to be comfortable selecting, reading and viewing?

2. What can I predict will present challenges for me?

3. What strategies, resources and technologies am I likely to

understand and use well?

4. What texts and kinds of texts am I likely to understand, relate to

and enjoy?

5. What kinds of text may not appeal to me as much?

6. What kinds of text will I be able to respond critically to?

7. What kinds of texts will have language, forms and genre I am

familiar with?

10
This may seem unnecessarily complicated and/ or unfeasible to you but it has a real and crucial purpose. All too
often, the relentless focus of school on mastery of a set of disconnected tasks the student had no role in developing
and no opportunity to negotiate in any meaningful way teaches her/ him unconstructive dependence on extrinsic
cues and rewards. By the time many of you students reach you, they will have had years of learning to be compliant
or counterproductively defiant. They therefore require your explicit and conscious help with developing the art of
taking their literacy and their education into their own hands in ways that open, not close, life’s possibilities for
them. This kind of re- teaching takes time and patience because it involves considerable unlearning as well as
relearning but the pay off in terms of your students’ autonomy, engagement and opportunities and in terms of the
purposeful engaged classroom ethos they will help you to create is well worth the effort.

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 8. For what texts might I need to seek more guidance and support?

Before going on, take time to consider the answers for you to these questions in
terms of your own primary discourse. You can use your response as an example to
your students and also as means to identify and consider the impact of your
unconscious preferences on your language arts classroom.

Taking time to teach and remind students

 how to assess their own needs,

 to use information they have already gathered as a reference point from
which to make informed judgments,
 to revise and update their needs assessments as they meet goals and outcomes
they have negotiated with their teacher

makes them more genuinely autonomous and reminds them that the work they do
in your classroom has a larger purpose that exists beyond the walls of the
classroom in their lived experience.

The consistent and purposeful link between where and who students are and the
worlds of school and literature begins with what they know and teaches them how to
intentionally select and use the tools and strategies that help them move toward where
they need to be. Their own serious engagement with determining a successful and
feasible course of action motivates them to take both tasks seriously, to follow
through on their commitments, and to use what they learn through the process to plan
next steps. In short, we are teaching them to reject spoon feeding in school and to
teach themselves to scaffold all their learning; to think about their own thinking and
to think for themselves.

It is a logical move to guide students from creating and considering their school
connection charts and their Needs and Assets surveys to generating and considering
responses to texts. Students historically perceive that school requires them to read so
called good or ‘Great’ books whose value they do not necessarily recognize or
appreciate. Because they can regard such reading, from the outset, as a meaningless
chore, and because it then becomes the kind of school reading they automatically
expect, they can miss the vital opportunities for rich connection, engagement and
response that good and “great” books might be able to offer them.

Ideally, we are able to provide our students with accessible, inviting, age appropriate
reading material with which they willingly connect and which also stretches them as
readers, thinkers and people. Sometimes, our plans and choices unfold differently; we
work with students to study a novel that we perhaps loved reading and want them to
enjoy and learn from, they fail to see why we feel as we do and we all get quite
frustrated with the results. Or, even worse and very likely, the books available to us to
read are outdated or irrelevant or unappealing to our students. While making the best

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of a bad business and ploughing ahead with the text is an option, it isn’t the most
interesting or the most pedagogically rewarding choice.

Actually validating, identifying and investigating the source of and reasons for
students’ responses to school novels invites them to shape the journey as opposed to
being dragged along it. This is not the same as accepting that everyone’s
unconsidered opinion on a novel is as worthwhile as anyone else’s. Rather, it’s a
deliberate starting place. Teaching students to uncover, account for, and explore
incongruity and /or similarity between themselves and some of the characters and
contexts they encounter in classroom texts helps them to develop the art of
investigating and interpreting what they read. It helps them to gain access to text they
might have previously written off without giving it or themselves a chance
Furthermore, and critically, it teaches them to voice/ communicate their
understandings and their critique, effectively, critically and clearly. It teaches them to
be open to possibility and to express their responses in thoughtful ad reasoned ways
that get genuinely listened to. That alone is a heady and unusual experience for far too
many students.

When we take seriously and non judgmentally the rift between students’ experience
and lives and those of the characters in ‘classic’ books and when we give students a
genuine opportunity to interrogate that disparity, we not only validate student
knowledge and help them make meaning of challenging material; we also help them
practise a recyclable, flexible strategy for building strong bridges from where they
stand into unfamiliar territory.

The following Character Perception Comparison illustrates one such strategy for
helping students access and explore a text. Variations of this model can be used to
enhance students’ connection with/ understanding of characters from ‘classic’ texts,
young adult fiction, or films, real people in news stories, cultural icons, or important
people in students’ own lives. They can then manoeuvre such a comparison to
communicate what they have learned effectively and clearly in discussion with each
other, in representing, and in writing.

Character Perception Comparison for A Separate Peace:

1. In the space provided, briefly describe what you think Gene or

Finney’s views of the following might be:

 extreme sports
 body piercing
 hip hop
 the Iraq war
 gay marriage

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 2. Interview a person older than fifty and record their attitudes in
the space provided.

3. Carefully consider and then record your own attitudes.

4. Use the chart you have made to help you reflect on the points of
concurrence and disagreement among you.

5. Create a response that demonstrates how cultural experiences

affect our points of view. You may draw, make a collage, write a
poem or song or write a two- paragraph prose reflection. If you
have another idea, be sure to consult with your teacher. Be
prepared to share your response with and seek feedback from
two partners as well as your teacher.

Gene or Finney My interviewee My point of view Intersections/

disconnects

Before going on, think about a classic novel, play or story that you were supposed
to study and felt you could not connect to when you were a high school student.
Choose a central character from that text. Now, choose a current custom, cultural
norm, fashion, or situation and identify your own point of view as well as the
character’s given what you know about that character’s context and identity.
Repeat the exercise with a character from a text that you related strongly with. In
your think book find a creative way to express your understanding of the impact of
context and identity on ‘taste’ and ‘ability’.

When we openly and consciously establish the classroom we share with our students
as a place where all students’ cultures and experience, personal reading taste and
location, knowledge and skills consolidate and enhance the work we do together and
the ways we do it, we create a locale where all readers, including gifted and talented
students and students for whom ELA feels like labour, see themselves as capable of
growth and meaningful contribution. We help students understand that all readers’
tastes and strengths are informed and changed by ever-expanding experience.

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 In such a climate, the starting point for less advantaged students is not regarded as a
paralysing deficit. Nor are gifted students viewed as held back. The stories, issues,
ideas and questions in our classroom are accessible to all of us, despite the fact that
some of us will need and offer different kinds of support at different times. We are all
experts about our own needs and goals and we are all responsible for meeting them.
Together we work to unpack, making sense of and use the discourse of the language
arts and literacy classroom to chart appropriate individual and collective courses
toward successfully meeting outcomes.

Students come to understand that, regardless of the kinds of text(s) we read and view
at any given time, the work we do together and the methods and processes we
negotiate will:

 be grounded in students’ lives and experience

 enable and expect them to ask and consider critical questions
 prepare them to respond to what they wonder about in meaningful and open-
minded ways
 expect and help them to respond, challenge, and contribute rigorously and
creatively
 expect and support positive and appropriate participation
 promote a positive, collegial and hopeful classroom environment
 explicitly and deliberately encourage and sustain all students’ effort to access,
possess and operate the kinds of authoritative discourse we associate with
academic and social success.

Embedded in and consistent with your curriculum, your approach and the natural
consequences that follow out of students’ individual and collective choices is a set of
proactive classroom management strategies that will minimize your need to react to and
manage inappropriate and/ or disruptive individual behaviour.

Jot down, in a way that makes sense to you, the management strategies at work in this
section on establishing context, location and purpose. Be prepared to discuss what you
have written in terms of the relationship between a teachers approach to classroom and
behaviour management and his/ her approach to curriculum ‘delivery’.

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