In Dr. Victoria Purcell-Gates's essay "...As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth!" , the author addresses the issue of language and literacy discrimination, and the power (or lack of power) held based on literacy level.
Dr. Purcell-Gates talks most specifically about a boy named Donny, who gets to second grade and cannot read or write beyond his own name. Neither of his parents can read or write either, and we learn that they both dropped out of school in 7th grade. Donny's mother recognized that her son's inability to read and write was leading him down the same path, and she fought for the school to help her son learn better so he could make a better future for himself as a literate citizen. However, because of her illiteracy she was written off as ignorant, and her concerns were unaddressed. It stunned me that his teachers had no concern for whether or not he ever learned to read.
I thought that this probably wouldn't be too much of an issue for me as a teacher, because it's unlikely that I would get a student in my classroom who doesn't know how to read or write. However, Donny's parents made it all the way to 7th grade and still didn't know how to read or write. So that left me wondering, how do you encourage a student who has never learned to read? As teachers, we have a social responsibility to invest in our students for their academic success, but if no one else has done that before middle school, where do we begin? We talked in class last week about being step focused, and pushing students who are behind to their next step, not necessarily to where the school or state says they need to be. It's sad to think that a student would be pushed along to middle school without someone really teaching him to read, but it happens, and we have to be prepared to deal with that.
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Joan Wynne’s “We don’t talk right. You ask him.” addresses the psychological damage language biases have on African-American students and the lack of cultural we all receive due to these biases. Wynne tells several stories about African-American’s being afraid to speak publicly in the presence of a white majority, in spite of the fact that they possess strong feelings on the subjects and clear intelligence. Wynne believes that those African-American’s were afraid to speak because of the “language myth” that is being taught in schools. The language myth entails that “Standard English” is the proper/correct dialect of English, and dialects such as Ebonics are inferior. Wynne suggests that this type of teaching is not only damaging to the psych of African-American students, but it also stifles “all students’ cognitive development” as she refers to Rokeach’s The Open and Closed Mind (209). According to Wynne, teaching Standard English as the superior form of language is “intellectually limiting” to our students (213) and creates a cultural divide. Wynne asks: “How dare we patronize as an inferior dialect the language of such heroes and sheroes?” (215). For the benefit of all our students, we must accept the students’ language because if we do not we are possibly damaging a student’s potential to learn the standard dialect and each students’ culture.
ReplyDeleteKaren, to be perfectly honest I do not have an answer for your question; however, I do think there are little things that we can do to encourage students like Donny. I think the most important thing to do would be to accept Donny without any prejudices. Not only would our prejudices against him affect his learning, but it could also affect the learning of our other students, as Wynne suggests. Another thing that we can do is be supportive and encouraging during the learning process, but we must be careful to not let students like Donny continue to fall and accept failure. We cannot expect students like Donny to be reading on the same grade level as the rest of the class, but we can expect these students like Donny to have some type of reading level. Take that reading level and go from there.