Gender issues in the books we read

According to Vivian Vasquez's article titled "Our Way: Using the Everyday to create a Critical Literacy Curriculum," teachers have to be more cognizant of the various social issues that occur in the classroom. She states, "not recognizing Power Ranger stories prevented me from being able to use this text to get at some deeper underlying issues such as gender, power, control, racism, and cultural stereotyping." This particular statement resonates with me because it relates to some of the texts I plan on teaching my students during this last advisory. Gender is a important but convoluted word because of the unique cultural perceptions our students have about the opposite sex as well as different power struggles that exist in the books they read.

As a result, I have decided that this advisory, I will make an effort to teach texts that will give me a better understanding of my students' perspective on gender and how it affects their personal lives. Since most of my students are 9th and 10th graders, I want them to be able to identify and analyze some of the gender biases and disparities that exists in the books we read. Among one of the books I look forward to reading with my students is Speak, which is a novel about a high school teenage girl who gets raped at a party, but is unable to disclose the issue and the assailant to anyone, including her parents and her close friends for fear of alienation. This is an issue all of them are familiar with, but it is also an issue that is hardly spoken about. In addition, I hope to help my students discover some of the control issues that teenagers, especially girls experience in their young lives.

Teaching to the 4th power-continued

Tomorrow is the last day of the third advisory and there are some critical things I will like to put in place as the 4th advisory approaches. This advisory, my students completed a project on leadership by composing a newspaper article of an interview they conducted with someone in their community that they thought met their criteria of leadership. Many of my students interviewed their mothers, grandmothers, while others interviewed teachers, coaches, and administrators. Some branched out and interviewed other people in their community such as police officers and youth center coordinators. The astonishing fact is that none of my students interviewed a male figure in their family, since many of them lack a positive paternal relationship in their lives.
Overall, I enjoyed teaching the students about "leadership" and they enjoyed learning and composing a newspaper article about a word which has such a significant meaning to their lives. Since many of the students did an outstanding job on the project, I would like to publish some of the best interviews I received, thereby helping my students reach the 4th stage as mentioned in the teaching and learning to the 4th power article. The only problem is that the actual publication of my students work can take a long time, especially because this is the time when all of them are taking standardized tests. Does anyone have any suggestions about other publication outlets I can utilize to help publicize student work?

Teaching to the 4th power

It is every teachers dream, no any dedicated teacher's dream to have each of their students reach the 4th tier of learning. However, I feel that there are numerous roadblocks that prevent teachers from helping their students become transformative learners. For instance, in a month, most of the students at my high school will be hurdled together like swines and forced to take the DCCAS, an exam that gives little indication of a student's aptitude level in math and English. The test my inner-city public school students take, many of whom are recent immigrants, is geographically, culturally, and linguistically biased because many of the questions is not relevant to my students' lives.
The time it takes to prepare my students to perform well on this exam detracts from valuable class time I can use to help them build (T1), use (T2), interpret (T3), and produce (T4) a depiction of their newly acquired knowledge. Our school system today, including my school has an unwarranted obsession with teaching students how to pass a test instead of giving students the necessary tools to help them become a part of their learning. I teach because I want my students, most of whom are socio-economically disadvantaged, to think critically about the world they live in and at some point become agents of social change in their community. Teachers cannot help their students learn effectively if they are constantly bombarded by standards-based bulletin boards, standards-based lesson plans, standards-based curriculum, all of which are important, but not as important as helping our students reach the fourth tier of learning.

What do we mean by literacy now?

A few weeks ago, Dr. Harste, a professor at the University of Indiana, delivered a thought-provoking lecture about children's literacy in contemporary American society. Some of the most pertinent comments he made included the fact that kids must see themselves as characters in what they read, in other words kids should be able to identify with the character in the book. Teachers must select texts that their students can relate to on some level.
He also discussed multiple literacies, which pertains to how cultural groups induct their kids in literacy in different ways and critical literacies, which suggests that different cultures value different types or kinds of literacy over another.
The most poignant point he made was the fact that in today's society, we educate inner-city school students to follow directions and work in assembly lines while we train suburban students to be lawyers and doctors. As a teacher who educates students in a school district where only 59 percent of students graduate from high school, it is a sad reality that some of my students end up with menial jobs. Since the beginning of the school year, I have already lost about 9 students, which is very troubling. There are various reasons inner-city school students do not succeed, however, I believe that our current educational system is designed in many ways to fail our students. No substancial changes can be made until some of the problems that plagues the educational system are eliminated.

Connecting kids' lives to the books they read

Reading Vasquez’s book forced me to think about ways I can include critical literacy in my high school classroom. Since my students read at different levels, I intend to use a variety of books such as Yo, Yolanda, Lost Boys of Sudan, First Jobs: Life After High School, Hip Hop Heroes, for my lower level readers and books like Derek Jeter, The Greatest: Mohammed Ali, Speak, Gloria Estefan, Esperanza Rising, Monster, and Slam! for my higher level readers. These are books that are written by a variety of women and men from various socio-economic and racial backgrounds about issues that are relevant to my students’ lives or their community. I hope to use these texts to help my students connect their individual experiences, knowledge, and perspectives to the social and political issues addressed in those texts. Since a large majority of my students are struggling readers, I have to use various teaching materials that represent the perspectives of individuals that relate to my students’ lives.

Negociating Critical Literacies with Young Children

As I was reading Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children, the two most significant words I encountered were "social justice" and "equity." Although the text is primarily geared towards elementary and middle school students, as a high school teacher, I believe that critical literacy is vital for all grade levels, especially because majority of the students we teach have not been overtly exposed to it. This advisory in my reading class, I have made a concerted effort to incorporate elements of social justice and equity in my unit. My students are exploring the various facets of leadership by forming their interpretations and constructing their definitions of what a leader is. In order to give help them acquire a better understanding of leadership, we read texts documenting the achievements of world-renowned individuals like Rigoberta Menchu, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mohandas Gandhi. None of my students had ever heard of any of these individuals except Martin Luther King Jr. However, giving my students the opportunity to read about the monumental changes Rigoberta Menchu, a Nobel Laureate from Guatemala, made for her people enabled me to expose my students to various political, social, and economic inequities that exist in the text as well as in the larger society in which they live in. I was also able to intertwine critical literacy into the leadership unit I am currently teaching by having my students read about the accomplishments of Mohandas Gandhi in “Gandhi’s Forgotten Legacy,” which documents his peaceful struggle to attain Indian independence from British rule. Critical literacy is not an obscure concept, but a tool that can be effectively implemented at all grade levels to help our students achieve.

Why is the Dropout rate so high?

According to the “Four Resources Model” article, “it remains our position that literacy was never a matter of deficit but principally an issue of economic and social access to the cultural institutions charged with literacy education and practice. It is no mere coincidence that the graduation rate for African-American high school students is 59 percent in Washington D.C. and 95 percent in Loudoun County, Virginia, which is only about an hour from the district. These dropouts often carry familial, financial, and social burdens that hinder their ability to obtain sufficient “access to the cultural institutions” that can help them lift some of these burdens. The distribution and maintenance of literacy on the surface is available to all; however, African-American and Hispanic students have a difficult time acquiring as much literacy as their White counterparts. Often, literacy education and practice in many inner-city public schools disproportionately represent the perspective of one dominant racial group. This is sometimes due to the fact that those who write and teach the texts these students read are completely out of touch with the demographic the texts are created for. For example, one can visit any “under-achieving” high school and find that many of the texts the students read are obsolete, unrepresentative of the student body, and most importantly, irrelevant to their lives. It is absolutely ridiculous to open a 9th grade English textbook with a few poems tucked in the middle written by some African-American authors, an exert from Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, and a poem from Sandra Cisneros. The dropout rate among inner-city school minority students can begin to decline with a multicultural literacy education that celebrates the unique multiculturalism of the students. In practice, teachers need to begin by evaluating the texts their students read in order to ensure that there is no dominant voice. Othello, Antigone, and Weathering Heights are good novels, but considering the demographic most of us teach, we should also include Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Joy Harjo ever once in a while.

critical literacy in my ESL

I teach at a local high school that is approximately 63 percent Latino, 23 percent African-American, 10 percent African, and 5 percent Asian. Majority of the students come from a variety of countries like El Salvador, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and China with various languages and cultural practices. With such a diverse student population, it is pertinent that each classroom, especially mine incorporates the multicultural or bilingual aspect of the student body. As a reading and English teacher, I work with a lot of students whose first language is not English, but who have a basic or proficient understanding of reading, listening, writing, and speaking English. Since many of my students read and write at or below a 4th grade level, I use a variety of texts that are relevant to the their lives and correlate to their lexile (reading) levels.
The diversity that exists within my class strongly indicates that I have to incorporate critical literacy into my day-to-day instruction in the classroom, especially when it comes to the texts we read. When selecting the books my students read, I look at the genre, the structure, and the kind of language used in the book. For example, in the first advisory, I picked the book Life of a Slave Girl, which is an autobiography about the life of Linda Brent Jacobs, a slave who later devised her way to freedom. The language used in the book was challenging, but was not overwhelming. The book also belonged to a genre in which many of my students have a wealth of information about. This produced a lucrative conversation among the students in my class when we discussed the book.