Thinking Thoughts We Forgot To Think About

Little side note as I feel all of everything from this semester is blending together, but in Fosen’s class we just read Nelson’s “Reading Classrooms as Text”, which I find helpful as a student. It also makes me question if I am reading this classroom right and what we are to blog about. Initially I had the urge to just regurgitate the information, but I feel like sometimes in doing that, I don’t really remember the material than if I find how that reading is applicable to my classrooms or life in general. So, in saying that I will do a bit of both regurgitation and application, though I am still feeling out the dynamic of the class, so not sure what path I am on yet.

So we start with the myth that being literate is the key to being financially and socially successful, but that is not that case. Majority of social inequality stems from, “Class, ethnicity, race, and gender” (Graff, 641). If this is the case than the idea of being successful does not wholly require you to be literate. Though, as we mentioned in class, is there not some form of literacy that needs to be achieved, ie: reading signs, symbols, etc.? Which brings us back to where we started in what do we consider “literacy”. Jonny brought up in class a great point last week when he spoke about his culture and how his culture did not need the same literacy we in our American culture did. They could communicate with stories and spoken words, but his family understood the importance of an “American education” and the need to be “literate” to succeed. His culture has a different view on what success is and how being literate applies. As we see in in “Literacy Myth at Thirty”, it seems to be the culture that makes a person successful, not being literate in the “American” sense..

Case in point is, “Writing “Race” and the Difference it Makes”. There are great points mentioned that literacy has become a tool to oppress others. In using literacy that way, it was an excuse to feel both superior while continuing to make others feel inferior, contributing to the continuing bias of those who were “illiterate” or “incapable” of formal writing. In a way do we not still do that? In no child left behind, it promised to keep everyone on the same page, but if you spoke a second language and your writing was weak, you were not set up for success, but rather “weeded out” for your “illiteracy”. We will always find a way to use literature (not necessarily education, as Dani pointed out in her notes, both have been used to oppress others, but we are using literacy as a separate variable) to benefit those who have already the benefit of being a fluent speaker and writer. Just as we as a society will always use whatever means we can to find superiority.

To continue this argument beyond the reading, as teachers, do we then find ourselves forgetting the legacy of other cultures and pushing things like grammar and well-structured sentences and forget what it is the students are really saying? Do we push so hard for this “literacy” that we forget to look beyond that and look for what is really being said? And in saying that, if we let loose on the grammar and sentence structure, etc, do we lose value in what literacy really is? Or maybe, just maybe, I myself have no idea what literacy is and am reading the readings wrong. That is a total possibility...