Guided Reading and Common Core: Can They Co-Exist? Thinking About Text

At the beginning of the lesson, children previewed the text and recorded what they noticed and wondered as partners. They continued this practice throughout the reading as well. 

Qualitative Analysis of Text & Planning

As I sat down to write this post about the co-existence of guided reading and the Common Core, I was reminded of work I did as a consultant in March with 4 second grade children from Newark, NJ.  I have worked with these children since they began first grade, so I was able to use what I know about them to help me create a multi-day set of 'guided' literacy lessons designed to engage students with the text, Stitchin' and Pullin': A Gee's Bend Quilt authored by Patricia McKissack and illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera. The text has neither a guided reading level, nor a lexile level. Now I must confess that when I think of the term, guided reading, I think of it as small-group intensive teacher-led work in which I have selected a text that students will likely not be able to manage initially and will need my guidance in order to comprehend.  I rarely spend much time thinking about guided reading levels or lexile levels as these are not the measures I often use when thinking about text selection. I focus instead on the qualitative aspects of a text, the readers I will be working with, and most importantly I think about the curriculum the children and I are making together as we learn. (See here for a post about curriculum as complicated conversation.)

During a previous meeting with the four second grade teachers, they said that the children were having difficulty naming and supporting theme across multiple texts. I have worked with these teachers for more than two years and will continue to work with them next year too. This continuity of working together builds trust.  I have failed in front of them, beautifully and we have learned together. I respect the work they do with children and their deep commitment to learning.

On this day, the teachers indicated that they were concerned that their students were not attending to the text closely enough and were settling for responses based on unimportant or incomplete details. They had spent the prior week reviewing data and this was the big take away. RL.2.9 and RI.2.9 were concerns.  They had asked if I would design a few lessons that they could observe where I taught students how to attend to closely to details and begin to name common themes across texts. I asked each teacher to observe and make notes about one student during each lesson so that their notes could help us to think about next instructional steps.  Just as I wanted the children to build community knowledge, so too did I want us to do the same.  The lesson was an hour. (These engagements are longer than typical small-group instruction).

Stitchin' and Pullin', a picture book, tells the story of Baby Girl who grows up  during the late 1950s and 1960s in Gee's Bend, Alabama learning how to quilt alongside her grandmother and the other women from the community. The text chronicles Baby Girl's maturation from toddler to young woman during the Civil Rights era and includes historical information about the women quilters from Gee's Bend and the art they make, a time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Gee's Bend to preach, voter suppression, and how African-Americans registered to vote.  The text is told through a series of free-verse poems and includes outstanding illustrations that I knew would help students to problem solve figurative language.  When I previewed the text I thought a lot about the genre and knowledge demands and decided that I would design lessons that used community knowledge as a way to build interest and scaffold learning.

Skylar & Isamar's notes while previewing and reading.

The Lesson

At the beginning of the lesson, children previewed the text and recorded what they noticed and wondered as partners for about 10 minutes.  These children are practiced at listening to and reading beautiful, culturally relevant, and interesting books (see these post1, post2 for lists of books used at 2nd grade). Building world knowledge through high quality text is very present at this school. 

I wanted the children to talk to their partners and make meaning together.  So although each child had a book, they had only one chart paper per partner. I prompted this process by noticing what they were talking about and recording and at times posing a question that required them to look again at an illustration or poem or asked for clarification. At the end of previewing the text, I reshuffled the partnerships so the children worked with a new partner and asked them to discuss what they thought they might learn. I then asked them to connect what their partner had said to what they said and to then write a statement in their notebooks. Isamar was partnered with Aiden who had said he thought he would learn about knitting in the old days. Isamar told him the book was about quilting and showed him a few pages in the book that showed quilts.  She too thought she would learn about life in the old days.  When I asked them what old days the text suggested, they both said slavery. When Isamar wrote her note she wrote: 

"I think I will learn that even if you are a different raise (race) you can let yourself fly free."

After sharing what they thought they would learn, the children and I read the first poem, "Gee's Bend Women." I read it solo and then we read it in unison. We had fun reading the poem as line-around.  I wanted them to hear the poem as poetry is first , an oral art. 

After the children referred to the stanza as a paragraph, I asked the them to learn three key terms (stanza, line, and speaker) that would help us talk about the first poem. They were able to quickly understand the similarity between a speaker in a poem and a narrator in a fictional story and after sampling a few poems where there were multiple stanzas they were able to understood line and stanza. Aiden summarized for us that stanzas were the way poets organized poems.  I taught only what was necessary so that we could speak about the poems as needs arose.  I had prepared explanations for terms I thought we would need and did teach subject, tone, and theme.  

My notes & explanations

It was critically important that we begin to think about who was telling us about Gee's Bend women in the first poem. Who is the me in the poem? The children studied the lines and the illustration and many thought it would be the little girl. In order to confirm, we read on. After the third poem, I was able to release greater responsibility to the students. They identified Baby Girl and her grandmother and with lots of rereading the children were able to name that this was a book about Baby Girl growing up. I pushed them to reread the 3rd poem, "Beneath the Quilting Frame" and to find the lines that helped us to know literally what Baby Girl was doing in the poem.  We had to reread and study the illustrations to figure out what the poet meant by the phrases: "nine-patch" and tented playground.  One student spontaneously acted out what the poem described which led to another child reading it aloud again.

Third poem in the text. 

Illustration on facing page of "Beneath the Quilting Frame"

When I asked them about the tone of the poem, they were baffled, not so much by what the term meant, but how they might determine tone from the poem. I agreed with them that this type of work is tricky and Kiyara told us that we needed to reread.  So, I asked them to partner, reread, and to quickly say in two words what attitude they felt while rereading the poem.  We had practiced this strategy before. They said things like: loving family, girl loved, singing family.  

We agreed after hearing all of our two-word phrases, that loving family best described the tone. Next, we reread again and marked the words that showed this tone. Skylar was able to make the large leap from what was on the page to what was suggested by those words when she told us that Baby Girl must have been loved because she got to play beneath the table and learn from her mama and grandma by listening to them. Isamar added that she also got to sleep there and that she fell asleep by her mama singing to her. Aiden told us that meant she was safe. 

I asked the students to think about which poems they would like to read next.  They browsed and then marked with a post-it, two more poems. I asked them to read them during their reading time and/or at home. I reminded them that they would need to reread the two poems several times for the poems to make sense.  

Debriefing the Lesson

After the children returned to class, the teachers and I met and they shared their observational notes. Whereas everyone was pleased with the children's attention to detail as a result of rereading, inferring, and using illustrations to support meaning making, we also identified the need for the children to understand historical time. During the previewing we learned that the children thought Dr. King has lived during the slavery period in the United States. This knowledge demand allowed me to refocus the next lesson on building a physical timeline with the children (we used adding machine tape so we could roll out the paper) beginning with their current age, birth, and then moved back in time.  I wanted them to see the distance between the current day and the time when the text is set and the text setting and slavery. The rolled out paper helped them to begin to grasp this. The second issue we planned for was how to privilege writing during the reading.  The teachers indicated that they had lots of children who wrote at very different rates and the annotation process which we all agreed was important took so long as they waited for everyone to finish before moving on.  They had noticed that I invited the children to write at will throughout the lesson using the two column chart. I did not need to have every child paying attention to me throughout the lesson. In fact I wanted students to become so immersed in their thinking and writing that they shifted attention to these acts.

When I planned, I knew that I wanted to deepen children's knowledge about the Gee's Bend quilters and of the historical time the text is set so I brought two very different books with me for the next class--books I left with the children and their teacher. I brought Paul and William Arnett's art book, Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt. I wanted the children to see photographs of the actual quilts as they wondered about why Baby Girl was at a museum. The second book, Belle, The Last Mule at Gee's Bend: A Civil Rights Story, a children's book was one that I read aloud and then left with them for rereading.  This second book helped us to name the time period and to fill in our timeline with more specific information and dates.  This text chronicles Dr. King's visit to Gee's Bend, voter suppression, and how the Gee's Bend residents stood up and registered to vote. Throughout the read aloud, the children were able to make important connections between the poems and the story.  

Writing While Reading

Back of Kiyara's Response Sheet

Front of Kiyara's Response Sheet

In order for the children to connect what they were learning from the different sources, I provided them with a response sheet that asked for three kinds of information: wondering, predicting, and something the author didn't tell me (inferring). On the back of the sheet, students recorded big questions they would like to answer. Whereas, Kiyara was very quiet the first day, she led the group on the second day, and made great use of the reading response sheet generating a full page of questions she wanted to research mostly about race relations.  The children wrote while I read aloud Belle, The Last Mule at Gee's Bend: A Civil Rights Story.  Their writing and talking led us back into the poems and the children read the poems they selected to their partner.  I asked the children to reread their response sheets and the notes they had made about the poems and to think about what messages Patricia McKissack might have wanted us to learn from her book. The children reread, talked and then wrote responses that mostly discussed trying and not giving up (persevering)--a theme one could well support with this text.

During the subsequent weeks, the teachers returned to the important task of helping the 2nd graders connect textual details with themes in literature and textual details and main idea in non-fiction texts. We modified and used David Wray and Maureen Lewis's writing frames. Guiding the children's writing (a part of the guided literacy lesson) took several weeks for students to grasp, especially as the children wrote in response to multiple  literary and non-fiction texts. By the end of the year most of the students in these classes were able to read two texts, compare themes or topics, make assertions and support those assertions with some text evidence.  Closures were still a bit rough. This is hard work in 2nd grade.

Selecting Texts

Guided reading and the Common Core can co-exist and do so in primary grade classrooms where teachers attend to the emerging and often times divergent needs of learners.  The issue between the use of leveled texts and what the CCSS authors call, complex texts, need not limit this instructional practice especially when beneath guided reading and close reading of 'complex texts' rest planning questions that allow us to analyze a text qualitatively and to think about the children we are teaching. Here are some questions I consider depending on the text and the context.  (BTW: I would love if you comment if you add some questions you think about while planning or provide a link to a post with your questions.  Perhaps we could crowd source this?!)



Text Questions: 

When I review potential texts I ask myself some of these questions. These questions shape the planning I do.

1. What makes this text easier to read and for whom? (i.e., syntax, known vocabulary, known sight words,  relevant prior knowledge, prior experience with text structure & genre, familiar author, familiar story, pictures match text...)
2. What's tricky about this text and for whom?  (i.e., knowledge demands, text structure, author style, genre, length of text, syntax, vocabulary, sight words, split dialogue, inflectional endings, unusual format, literary text, multiple text structures, multi-genre, full pages of written text with little picture support, intended ambiguity, figurative language...)
3. Are there requisite knowledge demands that I need to scaffold? What naive understandings might my students bring to this text?
4. Are there terms students need to know in order to manage the content?
5. Will students misunderstand concepts in the text and if so how might I address that?
6. Is it important to couple related texts together in order to help students build deeper understanding of a key concept?
7. What genre is the text? Are children familiar with that text structure and can they use that knowledge to help the comprehend the text? Is there something here I need to pre-teach?
8. Are there multiple expository structures in the text?  If so, is that a consideration for me to think about when planning?
9. Can any key terms be defined contextually?
10. If I preview the text with students, what words, phrases, or concepts might I anchor?
11. Based on notes I have about the high frequency words the children know, which words in this text will children most likely know? Which words do I need to anchor?
12. Are there important sections of text that students will need to reread in order to comprehend? 
13. What textual gaps are there as I read the text that I fill in?  What textual gaps do I think my students might experience? 
14. Are there key text features that students can rely on to problem solve?
15. What task will students be doing and is this text a good match for that activity? Does form and content match?

Reader  & Pedagogy Questions

1. Which students do I think can read this text individually or with a partner?  Which students need more assisted instruction? How might I structure this?
2. What reading behaviors are well controlled by these students?  Which behaviors are they learning? Is this text a good match given what I know?
3. How might I chunk this text? What would make sense for these learners?
4. Do I need to introduce this text and if so, what would make sense to say? 
5. What purpose will I establish for reading this text or is purpose self-evident?
6. What do students already know that will help them comprehend this new text?
7. What resources might students need while reading to aid their comprehension?
8. How might I complicate the children's reading?
9. Given this text, what strategy might I model that will help children when they are problem solving?
10. Would an audio recording I make be helpful for some learners to listen to (match voice to print) as they reread? Would partner reading be beneficial?
11. Are there previous experiences with problem solving that I want to call to the students' attention before reading?
12. Is there a specific coding of the text that would be most helpful that I want to highlight? Have I modeled this clearly? Do students need support with this practice?
13. What role will talking play? What role with writing/drawing play? Is this a text that can be physically enacted?
14. How will I make note of the ways children problem solve at points of difficulty? What and/or who will I want to focus on?

These questions are of course, incomplete. Depending on the learners and what stage they are as readers, I am cognizant about different aspects of text.  I have found that Fountas and Pinnell's reading behaviors are useful when teaching emergent and early readers and I like to have on hand a set of leveled texts (1-12 or A through G) as potential books. Specifically, I tend to privilege stories (not informational text during the beginning levels), books with overt use of sight words, and ones that children can use their knowledge to problem solve. I have often used Lee & Low's Bebop books and Rigby's PM Readers with beginning readers. As children mature as readers, the text selection process becomes much more varied.  For example, these 2nd graders learned science largely from Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading (they actually would cheer when it was time for science). The collection of texts from that series were books the children loved to read and these were used in small group and partner reading. Additionally, as the children became such fine readers many of the read aloud texts were refashioned for small group work.

The Use of Quantitative Information

The ways we scaffold children's learning--the thinking and planning we do prior to instruction and the revision we do during instruction-- are significantly more important than adhering to guided reading or lexile levels of text.  We need to analyze the texts we plan to use with students, as well as the tasks. Readability information can be helpful, but it is not as critical for learning as the qualitative analysis we and our peers do. This has always been the difficult and necessary work of teaching. Having a lexile level to me is akin to having a guided reading level--as each offers an incomplete understanding of a text read.  

Most readability formulas rely on a measurement of syntax length and vocabulary. The longer the sentence and the more rare the word, the higher the lexile level. Yet, this method does not always hold up as matters of dialogue, content vocabulary, ambiguity, and art disrupt such formulas giving false lows and highs. For example, William Faulkner's The Sound and the the Fury, Toni Morrison's Beloved, James Joyce's Dubliners and Arthur Dorros's picture book, Rain Forest Secrets, all have similar lexile levels (870 - 900). I've read, enjoyed, and taught with these texts. The first two were with high school seniors (and boy did we struggle), the third was with English majors, and the last was with primary grade children. It doesn't take much to notice there are important differences among these texts. Simply open them and read the first page. And perhaps that is where we most need to start. Reading. Talking with each other. Planning together.

So is there a use for quantitative information, such as lexile levels and leveled texts? Yes. Lexile levels and other readability formulas afford us a general sense of text difficulty. But quantitative measures alone are very, very incomplete. Frankly it worries me when I hear principals, teachers, and district leaders talk about text selection based on lexile level.  P. David Pearson and Elfrieda Hiebert (2013) in an important paper, "The State of the Field: Qualitative Analyses of Text Complexity" write:

qualitative analysis will necessarily trump quantitative analyses of texts, and second, the analyses we engage in for structure and task will be focused on the goal of making texts more accessible to the broadest possible range of students. Such a focus will also put quantitative analyses in proper perspective, for we will recognize that the key elements of quantitative inquiry, long words and complex syntax, are nothing more than symptoms of challenging content. Armed with that knowledge, we will be better positioned to figure out how to help students manage that content, which is our most important job as teachers (p. 28). 

So during guided reading, text choice needs to be a thoughtful and negotiated process hopefully with a child, not for him/her especially as readers mature with an eye to how we are supporting leaners as they learn from texts. What is most important is to be mindful about the text we have selected, the reading tasks a child will be undertaking, the text difficulty (relationship between text and child), and how we are planning to support the child to problem solve at points of difficulty.  This is important and doable work.

Throw Them Out: They Are The Wrong Sort of Map

Watching (2009, M.A. Reilly)

I. Watching

In "The Naturalist" Barry Lopez talks about his habit of visiting the McKenzie River in western Oregon on a daily basis.  Lopez writes:

Almost every day I go down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about 350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it’s that each time I come down, something I don’t know yet will reveal itself.

If it’s a man’s intent to spend thirty years staring at a river’s environs in order to arrive at an explanation of the river, he should find some other way to spend his time. To assert this, that a river can’t be known, does not to my way of thinking denigrate science, any more than saying a brown bear can’t be completely known. The reason this is true is because the river is not a thing, in the way a Saturn V rocket engine is a thing. It is an expression of biological life, in dynamic relation to everything around it—the salmon within, the violet-green swallow swooping its surface, alder twigs floating its current, a mountain lion sipping its bank water, the configurations of basalt that break its flow and give it timbre and tone.

Rereading Lopez always gives me pause: much like the river he references.  There is so much to not know and watching opens us to these possibilities. How different might formal education be if emphasizing not knowing was seen as keenly necessary as knowing. 

II. No Standardized Codification

Complex matters refuse to be understood fully, codified neatly, presented completely. And so the last few months I have tried in earnest to see a positive light in relationship to the new national standards, the tests that accompany them, the curriculum and professional products that are streaming into classrooms and teachers' hands daily, the packaged curriculum and I keep coming back to Lopez who offers us this insight about ways of knowing and although he was not writing about the Common Core and other such documents, the insights nonetheless can be applied:

I would like to tell you how to get there so that you may see all this for yourself. But first a warning: you may already have come across a set of detailed instructions, a map with every bush and stone clearly marked, the meandering courses of dry rivers and other geographical features noted, with dotted lines put down to represent the very faintest of trails. Perhaps there were also warnings printed in tiny red letters along the margin, about the lack of water, the strength of the wind and the swiftness of the rattlesnakes. Your confidence in these finely etched maps is understandable, for at first glance they seem excellent, the best a man is capable of; but your confidence is misplaced. Throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map. They are too thin. They are not the sort of map that can be followed by a man who knows what he is doing. The coyote, even the crow, would regard them with suspicion. (from Desert Notes) 

III. Thinking

It is tempting to hold in one's hand the ready made map and think I hold all I need.  There are many types of map we are seduced by, fall victim to, yes?

Ready made maps, especially the slickest, are unauthored.

We would be wise to follow Lopez's advice and "throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map."

Barefoot Knowledge and a Few Birds

Freedom (Mixed Media. 2009, M.A. Reilly)

As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. As a child when I was sent down to Joe Clarke's store, I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Introduction.

 I.

I like to be reminded that that there are all kinds of knowing and unknowing in the world.  

II. 

I have been immersed these last few weeks in studying the Common Core (ELA) and am deeply appreciative of its insistence that knowledge be an important outcome, especially in primary grade education.  We often have emphasized the code aspects of reading acquisition (not saying code isn't important) and in doing so inadvertently devalued factual knowledge.  Susan Neuman (2010) writes:

the true path to literacy is not the procedural skills that stand out in the crowd, but the knowledge of content and concept that underlie its foundation (p. 301).

It is in naming the knowledge and context, which under girds the development of procedural skills such as code-focus learning (alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid naming of letters, print concepts , and writing one’ own name) that is challenging and critical to do. Again Neuman (2010) concludes:

Code-related skills, the essential alphabetic principles that make up our language, are a critical component in learning to read. But while these skills are necessary, they are certainly not sufficient. At the same time, these skills must be accompanied by a massive and in-depth foundation of factual knowledge (p. 304).

 

I think that is an outcome that is sought via the explicit inclusion of informational text and the practice of text-dependent reading, alongside foundational reading skills.  What I want to caution about though is the means by which knowledge is composed and the confusion between information and knowledge. 

III.

Reading informational text is certainly one way to nudge open a door to learning about the world.  But we should not mistake that for dwelling in a world of ideas. George Siemens (2006) states it nicely: "All knowledge is information, but NOT all information is knowledge" (vi). If we think that adding informational texts to the classroom, so that they represent 50% of the library and taught texts, will lead to knowledge--we are surely mistaken. I want to believe that the intent of the Common Core is much larger than the percentage of books that are taught. We have before us an opportunity to reclaim the arts, literature, natural sciences, history, geography, anthropology--many of which have ceased to be potential lines of inquiry as school time has been doled out to studying for tests in mathematics and reading. We have before us the occasion to privilege embodied ways of knowing.

The Weight of Living (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A Reilly)

IV.

Beneath the window where I am writing this I have been stopping, called away you might say, and am listening to and watching birds.  So insistent are some as they use their beaks to move the very leaves that my family and I have neglected to rake from last fall.  They are I suspect in search of worms, insects, food that rests beneath.  They work with an intensity few would not appreciate. There is a kind of knowing, an indwelling here that needs to be learned, embodied, surrendered to.  

V. 

In Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge he explains the need to surrender to what you study.  How possible is that in school when there's so much declared stuff to know?

Polanyi writes:

A true understanding of science and mathematics includes the capacity for a contemplative experience of them, and the teaching of these sciences must aim for imparting this capacity to the pupil. The task of inducing an intelligent contemplation of music and dramatic art aims likewise at enabling a person to surrender himself to works of art. This is neither to observe nor to handle them, but to live them. This the satisfaction of gaining intellectual control over the external world is linked to a satisfaction of gaining control over ourselves (pp. 195-196).

We create environments by the decisions we make--be it in a schoolroom, a boardroom, or a bedroom.  Hauling in a different collection of books will hardly matter if language has been stripped from meaning, replaced with the pre-made 'thought'.  

Contemplative experiences require agency and error.  

Room and breath.

VI.

The birds are insistent. I wish I understood what their varied cries and calls meant. It's a sound-alphabet I cannot decipher, cannot hear well to mimic. I can't seem to ease the birds from my mind. It's like that moment in Hitchcock's masterpiece when you begin to really see the birds because they block the sunlight.

The world cools.

VII.

This morning I am thinking how the birds are always before me so often in fact that I hardly stop to notice.  This indwelling, perhaps, comes with a cost and so I try to distract myself from the ways the birds seem to part the air by turning to Annie Dillard. I read a bit and it worries me that even as I write this someone else somewhere is penning a quiz or a test based on Dillard's "Living Like  a Weasel," as it is now a Common Core exemplar.  I hope they will resist the urge to test.  As Dillard says in The Writing Life, I hope the birds eat your crumbs.

I have lived a half-century and have read and reread "Living Like a Weasel" and perhaps the greatest thing I can say is that meaning still is slippery. With each age, I read it differently, understand aspects less. 

Is there a quiz in which knowing less is an A?

I Found Words (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

VIII.

A task we might try on is one that invites children to name their world--through embodied experiences and text-based experiences.  I know that is hardly the stuff we think about when think about curriculum, but it gives me pause--especially when I think of my own child.  Using what we know to name the world opens us to recast what we first know as simple with increasing complexity, with increasing simplicity.   

This is a kind of knowing we cannot codify for another.

IX.

In 'Total Eclipse' Dillard first mentions a child's bucket and shovel as noticed when passing through a hotel lobby: 

On the broad lobby desk, lighted and bubbling, was a ten-gallon aquarium containing one large fish; the fish tilted up and down in its water. Against the long opposite wall sang a live canary in its cage. Beneath the cage, among spilled millet seeds on the carpet, were a decorated child’s sand bucket and matching sand shovel (pp. 11-12).

Later in the essay, when she and her husband have gone to witness a full eclipse, she tugs on that simple mention of the bucket and shovel.

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives (p.24).

She will return to the bucket and shovel again in this and other essays. It is not that she is tossing facts at us, as much as it is that she understands common objects in multiple and contrasting ways. It is in the space between the mentioning and my recognizing the mentioning that I reach to make sense--there, beneath the codification, is a restlessness that suggests a way of knowing that cannot be taught.

Barefoot (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

X.

Dennis Sumara observes: "Curriculum is a normalizing experience...Teachers become tour guides, showing students which sites must be noticed...As a daily performance, teaching becomes a pointing ritual that seldom pierces underneath the skin of the everyday" (p. 233).

Paying attention to the everyday is a call to the sensual. See how Luis Moll and his colleagues frame this:

The primary purpose of the work is to develop innovations in teaching that draw on the knowledge and skills found in local households...We use the term funds of knowledge  to refer to these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual function and well-being.   Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Norma González, 2005. "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to connects Homes and Classrooms"

For Dillard, like Moll and his colleagues, funds of knowledge are in everyday objects.

XI.

There are all kinds of things purported as knowledge. I wonder if knowledge can exist outside a body?

The birds have quit their rooting with the onslaught of Saturday lawn mowers and blowers.  But they remain.  In trees, between trees, on the deck railing across the street, on the wires that cross, I spot them. Their tweets and calls rise above from time to time the insistent motoring of mowers. I wish I knew more about birds, their songs and such.

Pages (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

There is much to learn in simply being present.

 

XII.

In a few weeks a friend and I will be presenting at a conference.  At that time we will  engage participants in the closest of readings: the kind you embody.  Through choral reading and dramatic tableaux we will step in and out of text.  

I hope they leave unsettled.

XIII.

As I am not beholden to a system of  learning, I daily grant myself permission to blindly follow 

    lines of flight 

that may     and      may 

                               not lead                          to 

  

                                                 ideas

  insights

  

                                                            blind alleys

                                      buckets          shovels   

       

                    bits of sand

Bloomed Ink and Birds (Mixed Media. 2009, M.A. Reilly)

                                                                                       

 and 

                                birds

Works Cited

Dillard, A. (2009). Teaching a stone to talk. NY: HarperCollins - Kindle Edition.

Neuman, S.B. (2010).  Lessons from my mother:  Response to the National Early Literacy Panel.  Educational Researcher, 39, 301-305.

Polanyi, M. 19581962. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Siemens, G. (2006). Knowing Knowledge.

Sumara, D. (1996).  Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York: Peter Lang.

Create Dangerously

Osip Mandelstam (M.A.Reilly, March 2012)

"We live, not feeling the country beneath us," writes Osip Mandelstam in his poem, "We Live, Not Feeling." Mandelstam, as you might know, was shortly arrested after the poem came to the notice of Stalin, who had the poet tortured and imprisoned. He was sentenced to five years hard labor in May 1938 and died at the transit camp in December 1938 from starvation and madness.

Here's the full poem:

We Live, Not Feeling

We live, not feeling the country beneath us,
Our speech inaudible ten steps away,
But where they're up to half a conversation -
They'll speak of the Kremlin mountain man.

His thick fingers are fat like worms,
And his words certain as pound weights.
His cockroach whiskers laugh,
And the top of his boots glisten.

And all around his rabble of thick-skinned leaders,
He plays through services of half-people.
Some whistle, some meow, some snivel,
He alone merely caterwauls and prods.

Like horseshoes he forges decree after decree-
Some get it in the forehead, some in the brow,
some in the groin, and some in the eye.
Whatever the execution - it's a raspberry to him
And his Georgian chest is broad.

I think about Mandelstam and his courage, as well as that of his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, who preserved his work at considerable cost.  I think of this poet in light of what it means to write and read and how we situate these acts at school. I worry that we are forgetting (perhaps have yet to learn?) that writing is not five paragraph test responses (regardless of those who would elevate such nonsense to a genre), nor is it a race through 10 different genres crammed into a sad map.  I wonder what will become of us if these understandings become what writing and reading mean to our children and their children.  Who would want to do such things unless forced?

II. Professional Texts

I grow weary of the number of professional texts that are about reading and writing and are poorly written, inaccurate, cite research that seems not to have been actually read or at least comprehended, and make gross assumptions about teaching, learning, and children.  Tonight I read a section of a literacy text that will be published in the summer.  The author is so grossly misinformed about so many of the topics--that it seems impossible that anyone would publish such nonsense.  But it will be published and countless school educators will read it and some will actually act on it. This is the great race through nothing: Every few weeks the students are to read and write some different type of genre. And now that technology needs to be embedded--they are to create films, digital comic books, picture books, short stories, advertisements, legends, fantasy stories, performance works and so on.  I think of it as the great units of study scheme.

Such nonsense. When does one dwell? I have lived a half century, authored numerous books, and I could not accomplish the list of writing tasks this author sets out for 10-year-olds.  No one has time to breathe, let alone think.

As the book mentions the Common Core a lot, I suspect it may become a best seller. Mores that pity.

III. Embracing Danger

It seems so demeaning to art to tell our children that writing and reading are about testing genres and that text can be understood by listing the literary components of a specific genre (even when the list is erroneous).  Whereas this is demeaning to art, it is a spirit killer too. Each time my son comes home with a silly writing task to do or a cereal box response to construct based on a book he was forced to read or a pseudo close reading response log-- I shudder and I think of Mandelstam who died because of the power of the written word.  That's what I want my child to understand: that composing are acts of bravery, acts of danger.

Edwidge Danticat (2011) offers an inspiring interpretation of composing.  She advises the writer to "[c]reate dangerously, for people who read dangerously." She explains that she has lived by this adage:

This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. (Kindle Location, 181-182).

That seems a fair litmus test. Let's ensure our children feel their country beneath them.  Resist the recipe book professional texts that insults you by offering to do the thinking for you.

I can imagine an entire literacy curriculum summarized as such:  

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously.

Works Cited
Danticat, Edwidge (2011-09-20). Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Kindle Location 181- 182). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.