Through the Looking Glass

Like many others, I’m surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed blogging this semester. Sometimes I wish I had more relevant real-life experiences to relate to the readings, as many of the teachers do, but nonetheless, I’ve found blogging a great excuse to reflect more closely on the readings and analyze them in a critical fashion. This is especially important for me as a non-teacher because a lot of these literacy concepts are new for me and it’s crucial to take the time to understand them before attempting to carry them out in a school setting.

I think the combined effects of reading these articles and discussing them with my colleagues both within-class and in this virtual realm will be very useful to me as a school psychologist. A lot of us school psych students have expressed the need to gain a “teacher’s perspective” when consulting with teachers within the school system. Through reading teachers’ reactions to our readings and having these virtual conversations, I’m hoping that I’m beginning to understand their point-of-view a little better and will carry this experience with me in the future.

As a whole, I really appreciated the “community of learners” we’ve built here. I know everyone always talks about the research-practice gap in education, so I think it’s important that educators take advantage of such opportunities to grapple with different ideas in the field and collaboratively analyze their meaning. I think virtual communities are a great way to get new ideas out there and into our schools quickly and effectively while providing a forum to support each other in the process.

NCLB is a controversial topic amongst almost any group of educators. As a school psychologist, I’ve typically thought about the law through more of systems-level framework, but Chapter 9 of our text afforded me the opportunity to consider the law from an educator’s perspective (but from either perspective- it seems to have a lot of flaws!)

This quote sums up some of the faulty thinking inherent in the law quite well, “A worry that develops from the expectation that such programs should be the guides for all reading instruction is that these programs will be followed in a linear way; in other words, all children will experience exactly the same instruction. If this happens, then teachers and schools will fail to consider children from an ecological perspective. That is, there will be no consideration of families and individual differences…” (p.207).

This idea seems to go against everything we know about quality instruction. All children don’t benefit from the exact same instruction methods. Teachers should be able to differentiate to their classroom or their students. They should be able to take advantage of natural opportunities for learning without linking it to some predetermined standard. That’s not to say that all students shouldn’t be held to a high standard, but I think the teacher should be offered some discretion as far as how those standards are obtained. I was amazed the NCLB leaves out ideas about print, oral language, children’s home literacy, and forms of text. These are all such major concepts in the reading literature and issues that we discuss in schools of education daily.

NCLB seems to be a prime example of the negative effects of the “research practice gap” discussed so frequently in academia. A one-sized model does not fit all. I am curious to see how this issue gets resolved. It seems as if most people in education at least have some serious gripes with it, yet it’s been on the books for quite some time now. I can’t imagine us ever doing away with it completely, but how can it be modified to help real kids in real schools succeed?

I liked the Duke and Purcell-Gates article on genres because it made me re-evaluate my opinions about “appropriate” text for young children. I think our culture tends to emphasize typical, fictional children’s books with elaborate plots and characters as the “best” type of literature for young children. Even when I was reading the beginning of this article, I was asking myself how a TV guide or a grocery list could be at all comparable to Where the Wild Things Are, Goodnight Moon, or another classic. This article, however, really allowed me to see the advantages of being exposed to a wide-range of reading material.

Going back to the article I blogged about a few weeks ago on Literacy and Capitalism, reading (quality) books for pleasure is sort of a very middle class value. Many children from low-income backgrounds might not see their parents doing a whole lot of that in the home. For them, reading might be something entirely relegated to the school domain of their lives, especially if things like grocery lists and TV guides aren’t acknowledged as legitimate literacy sources.

Not every child is going to eventually read for pleasure. I know plenty of people my age that came from similar, middle-class families and probably haven’t read a book solely for enjoyment in years. Still, most of them were raised in a families were schooling was at least emphasized. Thus, they learned to read, if for no other reason than they were simply expected to do so. Now, if a child is not raised by parents that promote the importance of an education OR reading for pleasure…what is their incentive to learn to read? This article made me realize that incorporating things like grocery lists and coupon books, etc. into the classroom environment makes sense. It allows children to see the practicality of reading and how it fits into their everyday lives. When teachers link “home genres” and “school genres”, I think the child is better able to understand the overall value of reading and how a need for literacy is pervasive not only in school, but outside as well.

Well, April is officially going to be a crazy month for me. I’m traveling a ton and won’t have a lot of free time to write on the weekends, so my posts might be a little off (most likely early since I like to be Type A). Just a warning to all my avid readers out there!

With that being said, I spent this lovely Tuesday afternoon reading the articles for next Monday (April 6^th) which centered around effective teaching of English Language Learners (ELLs). I guess my post last week focusing on the importance of students feeling safe in schools and trusting their teachers was on target, as it was the main focus of the Gersten and Geva article. After reading this article and the one by Gillanders, I was sort of relieved. It seems, to me at least, that effective instruction of ELLs is basically what good teachers do anyway for all students.

It is certainly a shame that only 15% of BA early childhood teacher prep programs and 13% of AA programs require a course in working with bilingual children, and ideally, all teachers would take such a course. However, a lot of the strategies that the authors promoted: building relationships with children, acknowledging each child’s unique background and culture, teaching at a developmentally appropriate level, offering lively instruction, connecting various aspects of reading, providing frequent review, etc. seem to “best practices” for teaching in general. Perhaps a few of these strategies are more crucial for ELLs than your average student, but I don’t think most teachers would be surprised by any of the strategies listed here. That’s a relief considering the scarcity of such courses focused specifically on ELLs in most early childhood teacher preparation programs. Of course, having a bilingual teacher or teacher’s aide would be ideal and offer added benefits for ELL students in the classroom, but outside of that, it seems that good teaching for ELL students in a monolingual classroom is, just that, good teaching.

Before we can teach English Language Learners how to read and write in English, we must gain their trust and allow them to see the school and the classroom as a safe and caring environment. I thought it was interesting in the video when one of the kindergarten teachers said that her biggest concern in working with ELL students is making them feel “safe” in the beginning of the school year. The professor suggested that many kindergarten students want to run away on the first day of school, which I’m sure is true, but for a young child who doesn’t speak English, the experience must be all the more terrifying. After hearing this teacher speak, I tried to imagine any of the 5 year olds I know thrust into an environment where perhaps no one speaks their language or looks like them, where the toys and other classroom materials might be unfamiliar, and where they might be away from their family for the first time. I can’t envision any of them handling it that well.

I thought that our text book actually offered some nice suggestions that would ease young ELL children’s transitions into American classrooms. I especially liked the section on play centers (pg.65) where the authors discuss starting with centers that are familiar to all children, such as a house or a classroom. Each center should contain print materials with common words on them to begin the process of developing English sight words. I loved the idea of asking parents to bring in props and print items from their own culture and language, and even asking parents to be coplayers. The authors suggest that this experience creates “funds of knowledge”, where “the community enriches the multicultural and multilingual experiences of all children in the class, and also makes the classroom a more familiar environment for ELL children.” I also think this process would assist in the area we spent so much time debating in class last week: getting parents to be partners in their child’s educational experience. This experience helps establish the relationship between school and home, and allows the child to see that their parent values their schooling, trusts their teachers, and hopefully that school is a safe and caring environment. This will hopefully lay the foundation needed for young ELL students to begin learning the English language.

For our class assignment this week, we were asked to select any article from the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, read it, and prepare a one page hand-out on said article for our PLC group. Being in a pre-professional program, such as School Psychology, I often miss reading more theoretical articles on education and pondering the greater societal implications of our educational system. With that being said, I chose an interesting article entitled “Literacy and risk: An analysis of one middle-class parent’s taken-for-granted understandings of independence and freedom” by Steve Bialostok (2004). In this article, Bialostok discusses why literacy is seem as so paramount to a child’s success in our society and links literacy to capitalistic values such as independence and autonomy. While Bialostok does not state that promoting literacy in our children is detrimental, he implies that it is certainly typically done in pursuit of a specific agenda. While I cannot do this lengthy and complex article justice in a short blog post, I thought I’d introduce it in case anyone else is itching for some more theoretical reading and would like to look it up for themselves.

Through this article, Bialostok promotes the ideas that literacy practices and middle-class ideologies adopted by our school systems promote the concepts of “personal autonomy and independence that conform to the needs of late modern capitalism”. Reading is seen as a just and moral practice in which to engage. Those that do not read are seen as lazy and unfit for our society. Parents want their children to read so that they can be more independent, make their own decisions, and make productive use of their time. The mother analyzed for this article relays an example where she was at a St. Patrick’s Day parade with her young son who is not yet reading independently. While they waited on line, he was “doing nothing”. The mother said that if he was a reader, he could have been looking through the program, deciding what he wanted to do, and making more efficient use of their day. Since he can’t read, he is “stuck within whatever that is presented to him as the choices and the options and the things to think about…reading is going to free a whole world for him”.

Sorry, this is already getting to be too long for a blog post, and there’s a lot I haven’t gotten to. I can certainly see and understand the mother’s desire to make her son more independent, but I disagree that just because he is not yet an independent reader, that he cannot make his own decisions. I think him and mom could have read through the program together, she could have asked him what he wanted to see, what he knows about St. Patrick’s day, parades, etc…I think there’s ways to promote his independence through literacy even at this stage in his development. Read the article for Bialostok’s societal implications of the mother’s words!

I’ve been doing my Kidwatching project with a young girl named “Sarah”, who just turned 5 last weekend.  She is still in preschool, but already does a great job reading beginning level text.  Sarah definitely approaches all written material from an almost exclusively phonics-driven system.  I might write about this some more when it is my turn to lead our group discussion!  While this approach gets the job done, so to speak, I think a lot of the joy of literacy is lost on her.  She always seems so focused and serious when reading, and gets very embarrassed if she cannot decode a word.  She almost never uses pictures or context clues to figure out what a word says, focusing entirely on the letters/sounds.  Her comprehension is also often lacking.
On Wednesday, I did a Language Experience Approach with Sarah.  We simply wrote about her school day.  Sarah LOVED it. I think she felt empowered by dictating the story to me, deciding which details to include and which to leave out, and determing where to start and stop.  She laughed when hearing her own words read back to her.  When asked to “read” the story to me, she didn’t focus on each individual letter, but took the story as a whole, reading some words and remembering what she had told me earlier to compensate for the words she didn’t recognize.  While sometimes watching/listening to Sarah read is almost painful (gAHH–AHHH–TTTT…..GOT), this was a fun and enjoyable experience for both of us. I am not knocking the importance of decoding or phonemic awareness, but I think incorporating these types of experiences into the classroom help keep reading fun and interesting for the child, while also allowing them to focus on the comprehension of written material.

When I saw the titles of this week’s readings, I was immediately drawn to the article on reader’s theater because it brought back a flood of memories of my younger brother Tim, when he himself was an “emergent reader”.  Tim was a kid who was always more into TV than books.  He was always obsessed with the latest Disney movie and never wanted to do anything other than watch movies or play with toys related to the movie of the day/week/month. He even slept with videocassette cases rather than stuffed animals! (Yes, he was an odd one). When the movie Hercules was released, Tim was fascinated with it.  Being a former teacher herself, my grandmother decide to capitilize on Tim’s sudden interest in Greek mythology by providing him with a copy of the famous Greek Myths by D’Aulaire, a wonderful collection for those of you that haven’t read it.

Tim became fascinated with these stories and would often put on his “very own Greek show” for our family using his puppet theater.  Myself, being about ten or eleven at the time, used to groan about having to sit through them and made fun of him incessently,  but this article pointed out the many literary benefits of such practices.  First of all, the obvious benefit here is just getting a kid who was only interested in movies and avoided books to start taking an interest in literature is a major step here.  I think teachers could, like my grandmother, incorporate the interests of children who avoid reading into interactive and fun encounters with literature like this one.  Maybe not all of these children will be future actors (Tim is!), but many kids might appreciate a more interactive, active interaction with books.

Until reading this article, I didn’t really think much about how children develop an awareness of intonation, pacing, dialogue, etc., as they read aloud, but readers theater seems like a great way to do this.  In addition, by acting out the stories and making them their own, children are forced to go over the material over and over again and perhaps get more out of the content.  This seems like it might be more beneficial than simply listening to the teacher read a book over and over again.

Today, Tim is both in the process of applying to college as a theater major AND is an active reader in his spare time…maybe it was the readers theater all those many years ago that did the trick

For my inquiry project, I am planning to research emergent literacy in children with autism and other developmental disabilities.  I haven’t started the research yet, but I was thinking about how so much of early literacy involves those relationship-building read-aloud sessions with parents and teachers.  Also, early literacy is related to verbal language and vocabulary.  Both of these areas seem as though they would present difficulties for children with autism due to their communication and socialization impairments.  I’d imagine then the emergent literacy process, as well as the most effective instruction methods, would be different for these children than more typically developing children. This is what I plan to look into for my project.

Reading about the Language Experience Approach, I thought about how it might be a useful strategy to use with young children with autism.  Typically, these children have repetitive stereotyped interests and particular speaking patterns.  Reading their own words in print would prevent them from having to take the perspective of another and give them the opportunity to read about their own interests in words they understand.  This is a benefit of the LEA for all children, but for children with autism it might really be salient, and help create an interest in literacy if one was previously absent.  Obviously, working on communication and social skills in children with autism is important as well, and more typical reading experiences could help with this as well, but the LEA seems like a great add-on for children with developmental disabilities who are learning to read.

“One must only start from where each particular child is, and work from that place with the child to help new academic material become sensible and relevant, too.”

I really liked that quote from Maren Aukerman’s article on “A Culpable CALP” for many reasons.  The first is because it seems so intuitive and second because it can apply to all children who experiences difficulties in the classroom, not just ESL/ELL students.  If I am understanding this article correctly, Aukerman argues that there’s really no such thing as decontextualized language and that there is always a given set up assumptions about what the context is; however, there is sometimes a disagreement between what the teacher and student each view as the “context” of the language at hand.  Thus, what may at first appear to be a child doing something wrong is simply them understanding the context of the assignment/directions in a different way than the teacher.  The example offered is a teacher who is instructing a child on how to correctly form the letter “M”.  She said, “make it a little longer here” meaning one leg of the “M”, but the student took it to mean the entire letter.  These simple misunderstandings occur between teachers and students, and really any other interpersonal interaction, daily, even among people who speak the same language.  The language gap further adds to the frustration, I’d imagine, as body language, figures of speech and other subtleties, probably often go unnoticed.

In this case then, I find it especially important to adhere to the quote posted at the beginning of the post.  People learn naturally, through their environment, in context.  I don’t see why there needs to be such a big distinction between “real life language” and “academic language”.  In my experience, students of ALL backgrounds (including us grad students!) get frustrated and shut down when we can’t see the purpose or value behind the work we are given.  Yes, there is a need for all students to be able to read “academic material”, but I don’t think this should be the sole determinant of how well they are functioning or a manner to assess the amount of language they possess.

Sorry, this post was a little all over the place, but it’s a lot to digest on a Saturday afternoon.  Hope others are doing more exciting things this Valentine’s Day