11/26

I thoroughly enjoyed all of the articles this week on critical literacy. I think they were all very interesting and supported what I would like my future classroom to look like as a Language Arts teacher. I am a strong believer in how powerful literature can be, and I think employing a critical lens to reading in the classroom can have a very powerful effect on adolescents.

            I loved the idea of reading all of these texts that represent different aspects of our society and lived experiences and giving our students the opportunity to explore the social consequences and implications in these texts. I think as young adults they will become empowered and enlightened by this new knowledge and new way of understanding our culture, which will prepare them for higher education and help them flourish as intellectual adults.

I love the quote by Fehring & Green that Molden uses to end her article, "Critical lit- eracy has the potential to give students the opportunity to read the word so that they can read the world”. I think this is very important in the context of “urban education” because our students need to be able to critique and analyze the worlds they live in. They need to understand the greater social systems and histories that influence and motivate even the smallest aspects in our society and this why I also really enjoyed the article by Marshall, Staples, and Gibson.

Sometimes it is really odd reading these articles because I see myself in a lot of the adolescents these writers and researchers are discussing. I think that is why this endeavor into teaching in urban schools is so important to me. I am that student, and so is my sister, my brother, my boyfriend, my best friend, and a slew of other people that I know and love.  I was definitely the young Black girl reading The Coldest Winter Ever and Flyy Girl, I’ve actually read a great deal of books by Omar Tyree that me and my friends would share with each other my freshman year of high school. I actually loved those books because like the authors stress the plots were very interesting and that is something most of us look for when choosing a novel to read. I also loved them because they represented a world that I was living in. I could relate to the characters and so could my friends. After school we would have long conversations about the characters and how we would react similarly or differently to certain situations they were involved in. I would have loved if we could have had classroom discussions about those books with a teacher who helped us go beyond what we were thinking and critique the greater social implications of those very heavy texts. I was also motivated by the sex in these texts. The main character in Flyy Girl, like myself ,was being pursued by a lot of boys at school as well as men in her neighborhood and  I was interested in how she handled herself in those situations. I like many teenagers was curious about sex, what it actually was, and what one actually did. I think this aspect scares a lot of people but in my world teenage sex was a huge reality and I think it is much more useful for us to talk about it especially in secondary classrooms than to pretend it’s not happening. When the main character in Flyy Girl lost her virginity, I wasn’t at all compelled to do the same. I actually became even more mortified at the thought of sex because the consequences that came after for her were not experiences I was interested in.

All in all, I think looking critically at literature is very important and as a teacher I’m not interested in reading anything if my students and I will not be looking at the text with a critical lens. Even if we’re writing creatively, I think it’s important to look at each piece critically because there is too much to be learned from each other about the society we live in.

As for my fieldwork experience, it is still going about the same. I was able to visit Mrs. Kelt and San Miguel’s classrooms, but it happened to be on a day where neither of them was in a position to show what the class looks like on a normal basis because of sudden changes in their personal plans. However, I am looking forward to next semester and hopefully having a more meaningful and happy field experience

11/12

        I have noticed that there has been a significant amount of discussion in our readings surrounding this idea of “identity formation” and how that impacts student performance. This idea is really starting to resonate and I think as a teacher I will definitely push my students to recognize their strengths and construct identities based on those strengths in hopes that those identities will give them a sense of power, belonging or individuality, that they could use to guide them through their experience as a student. Black talks about this positive relationship in her article on ELLs, and we get Mandys’s story in Fernsten’s article. However, I think this is something that could affect every student in a positive way. Every time we mention identity I think about the students I worked with in Miami. They had very low self-concepts and sadly but simply believed that they were incompetent.  I believe it was the work of the adults who tragically treated them more like inmates than learners.

The Jordan piece was very heavy and I made a huge mistake not reading it last because what came seemed so small in comparison.  I think that piece also has a lot to do with identity as it shows how some Black students see themselves, and how just being you can get you “kilt”. In the intro Jordan talks about a “we” “whose walk or talk will never sound right.” I think that statement exemplifies the entire message of the article. Blacks are demonized by the dominant culture just for that reason. I love how she parallels language with police brutality. On the one hand you have a culture whose means of communicating with one another is heavily looked down upon and the fact that the Black students in her class questioned Black English while speaking Black English spoke volumes. It goes to show how much Blacks have internalized the slew of negative ideas and images that stand out so strongly in our society. At times we are even embarrassed to be our true selves.  And on the other hand you have your appearance, something that is so much more difficult to control than language, and Blacks are demonized for that as well, and in a lot of cases killed. I think as teachers what this article teaches us is that when it comes to African-American children, there is an identity, one that we’ve learned is very important in how students see themselves as learners that is very sensitive. This identity is continuously being crushed and stepped on by society and it’s something we should always take into consideration.

There were also some very fun aspects to the article as I found myself laughing at all the translations. I tried writing this blog in Black English, but I realized that I haven’t quite mastered the art of writing Black English yet. It is also important to note that Black English varies because there were a lot of statements I didn’t understand and some rules that were quite confusing. But overall, I enjoyed this article and I think it showed the importance of identity construction and language in a powerful way.

11/5

This week’s readings focused on what I think are innovative forms of literacy and how to apply them in classroom settings. Although I am pretty young, I am not the biggest fan of technology and for one reason or another I’d much rather write in a journal than on a blog. However, I think Bomer makes an important point when he says “we need to remember that literacy is a technology. Writing with ink on paper is a technology, and a reader of a book, turning the pages, flipping back and forth to cross-reference something, is a user of a technological device, too (Bomer 243).” This is important for me because it makes me feel like the older technologies function in the same ways as old technologies. My biggest issue with computers when it comes to communicating or writing is that it feels distant. I would feel much more connected through paper, journaling, or face-to-face conversations. However, I do think it is very important, in an age where kids are heavily involved with newer technology practices to bring those interests to the classroom. In addition, what you do with those technologies should have substance. And I think that’s what Bomer is trying to emphasize in this chapter.

I think my lack of enthusiasm when it comes to blogs played a part in the way I read West’s article on Weblogs. I didn’t find the study as interesting or enlightening as I usually find some of the readings but I do think giving students a space where they can freely and comfortably express their ideas about texts is very important. What I did find interesting was the notion of identity construction in the blogs and how that affects their responses, I wish she would of expanded on those ideas because they stood out to me.

I found Yi’s article a bit more interesting because it focuses on ELL’s and that is a group we do not talk about much. I found what these students were doing to be very fascinating and “sophisticated”. Overall, I was a lot more moved by Schillinger’s article on the Wiki collaboration. I thought everything about what was done in this example was fabulous. I love the idea of purposely creating a class for girls where they can share their experiences. I think it is even more incredible that they can begin to look at race and class and how that affects their experiences as girls and growing women.

All in all, the readings have proved that the newer technologies offer a lot of ways for teachers to make instruction interesting in ways that the older technologies couldn’t do, and we should definitely take advantage of them.

As for the field I feel like I’m in a difficult situation because I wanted to learn, but in the end I didn’t learn much so I’ve been trying to find a teacher at my school that could help with that. Unfortunately, I have not had much luck and the teachers at Travis seem to pretty much follow the same model, a model that does not reflect what we’ve been learning in class, and one that I’ve seen before in my previous experience working in a high school setting. I actually think the teachers I worked with last year did a much better job at engaging their students and rejecting the common practices that Bomer wants us to stray from. As a result, the process has become very boring and I am not engaged anymore as an intern. Everytime I visit the classroom, I find myself back in my own dull English classroom from years ago and wondering how these kids could sit through that environment day in and day out. I am surprised by how well behaved and compliant they are despite how ridiculously dull their class is. In Miami, those kids would have been like “teacher this is boring, we need to try something different (lol). Of course that’s very rude, but I’m not used top seeing kids be so well behaved in such a mundane space. Anyway, I am hoping I can find someone that is a better fit for me soon, or at least by next semester.