Critical Literacies and The Space/Time Continuum: A Good Star Trek Episode Title?

Across pages 117 and 118 of the chapter titled "Dialects and Writing," Adger et. al. propose a rather extensive list of what they emphasize as "key factors in writing instruction for secondary school students from vernacular dialect backgrounds:"

Although I completely agree with, as well as plan to implement each and every one of these "factors" as a practicing teacher throughout my career, I believe that this lists leaves out an important, if not the mostimportant, factor for teaching writing instruction to non-Standard American English and/or otherwise culturally/linguistically diverse students – explicitly discussing the "whys," "how comes," and "wtfs" behind why certain language forms are valued over others. In other words, although I found the Adger et. al. article to be very fascinating and useful, I feel it is missing an extremely critical piece to writing instruction – the critical literacy piece.

The closest that Adger et. al. get to discussing this critical literacy piece regarding vernacular's relationship to Standard American English occurs as they state,

"Although errors in writing stemming from dialect features may be minor in terms of the communicative goal of writing, they often are accorded major importance in formal evaluation. Points of mechanics and Standard English usage are sometimes used as a measure of writing ability… putting the speakers of vernacular dialects at a disadvantage… Such items privilege Standard English speakers and discriminate against speakers of vernacular dialects." (122)

The key words in this passage for me are of course the dichotomy between "privilege" and "discriminate." However, instead of problematizing the overall issue of writing instruction to non-Standard American English dialect speakers (and perhaps the entire range of linguistic cultural diversity) around these underlying
privileges and discriminations as afforded by language, I feel as though Adger et. al. stop short, accepting vs. challenging these privileges and discriminations as natural/matter of fact/ just the way it is requirements for being part of this society. Although Adger et. al. make a good case of their own, I feel that their stopping short of explicitly engaging the underlying "whys," "how comes," and "wtfs" behind the extremely overt privileges and discriminations as afforded by language renders the remainder of their other instructional strategies as completely useless/pointless. For example, looking at "key" instructional factor number 1, how are teachers and students supposed to "understand and appreciate basic linguistic competence" and have "positive expectations for students' achievement" if they don't begin to begin to question and understand how and why certain language forms/dialects are not appreciated and connote low expectations in the first place? In other words, I feel as though this very underlying, critical foundation to support the remainder of their "key" instructional factors is not present.

In her book "Other People's Children Cultural Conflict in the Classroom," Lisa Delpit engages this missing link as she discusses Martha Demientieff's instruction of Standard American English to Athabaskan Indian students:

"…her students, who live in a small, isolated, rural village… are not aware that there are different codes in English. She takes their writing which and analyzes it for features of what has been referred to… as "Village English," and then covers half a bulletin board with words or phrases from the students' writing, which she labels "Our Heritage Language." She and students spend a long time on the "Heritage Language" section, savoring words… She tells the students "That's the way we say things…" Then she turns to the other side of the board. She tells the students that there are people, not like those in the village, who judge people by the way they talk or write." (41)

Delpit then continues with Demientieff's own words:

"We're going to learn two ways to say things… One way will be our heritage way. The other will be Formal English. Then, when we go to get jobs, we'll be able to talk like those people who only know and can only really listen to one way… We'll talk like them when we have to…" (41)

Although this lesson is of course geared toward much younger students, I feel as though both Delpit and Demientieff hit on an extremely important factor when teaching Standard American English to culturally/linguistically diverse students – explicitness. Explicitly telling it like it IS. Explicitly saying that students WILL be judged based on the language they use. Explicitly telling them why they are learning a language that may not feel natural, but instead extremely uncomfortable. However, as educators, I definitely don't think that we should stop here. Although this baseline explicitness may be as far as we could go considering the cognitive development for these younger students, we should strive to "push" older, more cognitively developed students, further. For example, after explicitly laying bare what things are they way they are, dive straight in to analyzing and uncovering why and how things are they way they are. Analyze why language can afford either privileges or discriminations by critically looking into things such as power and prejudice and the history behind them. Overall, language needs to be taken apart during not only writing instruction, but education as a whole, to give access and opportunity to ALL students, regardless of their baseline familiarity or lack thereof with Standard American English. However, this entire discussion of course raises some more, trickier questions for me including perhaps:

-At what age/level of cognitive development should these issues be engaged? At what age/level of cognitive development can they be engaged?

-Should they be engaged before students even enter schools? Can they be engaged before students even enter school?

-Depending on their cultural relationship to Standard American English, do parents have more power than perhaps teachers to explicitly "lay bare" underlying power issues concerning language?

-Would a "team effort" between teachers AND parents do this best? Would it even be possible?

-The list goes on and on…

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Ok, now I'd like to take a break from today's readings and discuss something else… Last Friday, Friday the 13^th creepily enough, I taught my cooperating teacher's class all day, pretty much on my own, four back to back lessons concerning looking at The Yellow Paper through the feminist/gender lens. Although I feel that my first "real" time leading a set of lessons went extremely well, I would like to take a moment to comment on how surreal it felt like to do the same thing, back to back, 4 times in a row.

To keep a long story short, I thought that it was going to feel like like I was caught in some type of never ending loop in the space/time continuum, like I was doing the same exact thing over and over again. However, I quickly figured out that this was not the case. During my first delivery of the lesson, although overall it ended well, things got off to a rocky start. I was posing questions that the kids couldn't answer right away without first getting some more help getting there. In response to this, one of the girls said something along the lines of "well, that's a good question, but don't we need to ask 'why' she is depressed in the first place to get there?" I was dumbfounded by this question. "Very good idea, let's start there," I replied. I adjusted on my feet, and things shaped up to be awesome. Between delivery 1 and 2 I quickly made a note on my lesson plan regarding the change to implement it the next time around. With each delivery of the lesson something similar happened, causing me to change things up, think on my feet, revise, and re implement. By the end of the day, the lesson that I originally had was completely different, and a TON better.

I guess that my main message to everyone is just to keep open and really LISTEN to your different groups of students. At least for myself, mine gave me some extremely good advice to really tailor the lesson to their thinking.

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Resources:

http://www.adlit.org/

• This site looks like it is a resource for all things adolescent literature. On the left of the page are links to topics in adolescent lit including, but not limited to: libraries, motivation, achievement, learning disabilities, and so on. Also, there are links to classroom strategies for teaching students to comprehend. Lastly, the site offers literature recommendations and discussion prompts to go with each recommendation.
  
• If teachers are running into problems in their classrooms with things such as student achievement and motivation in regards to reading, they could navigate to these links to see what other teachers and experts have to say about the issue. Furthermore, teachers could use this site as a resource to generate book lists and discussion questions.