Victoria Purcell-Gates's essay, "'... As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth!': Issues of Language, Literacy, and Power," is an argument for the education of those students with dialects marked as incompetent. Through the story of a young Appalachian boy, Donny, and his mother, Jenny, and Purcell-Gates's own experiences, she conveys that such dialects do not mean a student cannot learn.
Purcell-Gates believes these students are not given the chance to learn; these students are permitted to fail. They come from homes where there is little literacy experience. In Donny's case, because both of his parents cannot read, he, too, cannot read. Donny has not grown up observing and listening to fluency in the English language. He cannot comprehend the connections between how he sounds and how the phonetics of a word sound, just like his mother.
This is no fault of Donny's parents; "this is not a deficit theory, nor is it placing the blame on the children, their parents, or their homes." (128) Purcell-Gates gives the reader an example of Phil from either the desert of Palestine or a rural village in Afghanistan. Phil enrolls in drivers ed. Though a fluent speaker of English, Phil fails the exam because he has no experience actually driving a car. He is a product of his experience. If Phil were given the opportunity to have such experiences as stopping, starting, and driving a car, he would have done much better in the class.
Most important in my reading of the essay was the section labeled "What Schools and Teachers Can Do." Purcell-Gates gave the reader two tips: (1) "Teachers and schools must accept, believe, and act upon the belief that the children of poverty are learners, have been learning since birth, are ready to learn at anytime, and will learn," and (2) "it is necessary to accept their language as that with which they learn, and use that language to help them begin their education."
My question after read this essay are these: I plan to teach English at the 8th grade level. Should a student enter my class who has routinely been passed from graded to grade without ever having learned to read, what do I do? How can I possibly catch the student up on a lifetime worth of learning in a year's time? How is such a thing be allowed to happen? Are other programs in existence to aid such students?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Anne, you asked the same thing that most of us asked after reading chapter 8: What will we do as secondary educators if we encounter students who still cannot read?
ReplyDeleteWhat I liked about Joan Wynne's essay is that her ideas of teaching have application in the classroom beyond just teaching language. She describes how a person who feels inferior to the majority has a difficult time learning and developing cognitively. We can learn from this that a vital part of teaching any subject is respecting the students individually, and being mindful not to feed existing stereotypes and prejudices.
A student who makes it into middle school with no reading ability will certainly feel the sting of inferiority, and it's important for us as educators to adjust our teaching accordingly, to create an environment where our illiterate students feel accepted and valued. The ball doesn't stop there, there obviously has to be more intentional and devoted teaching for that student, but the first step is creating an environment where the student feels encouraged to learn, not opressed by his or her illiteracy.