Who Gets to Noun? Fran, Language, and Standards

American Bus Stop V: Prison (M.A. Reilly 2010)

I. Context

I'm reminded of Fran, a 20-something mom who taught me so profoundly as I sit outside reading from Gregory Orr's (2013) River Inside the River.  In one poem, "To Noun," Orr writes (p.18):

Nouns were a giant
Confining--
Adam felt the sounds
He made
Build bars around
The things he saw. 

It hurt and thrilled him
To see how meekly
Each thing
Entered that cage. 

How snug it fit;
How smug he felt.

Who gets to noun?  Who gets to build bars around the things seen and be hurt and thrilled by such action is a question worthy of our time, our work, our energies. Years ago  I wrote an ethnography about ordinary courage, faith and chaos.  I was an adjunct instructor at a community college teaching a Developmental Writing II course which was mandated for students who had not passed the college's entry test. Instead of teaching the course as it had been strongly suggested (issue grammar worksheets, essay writing prompts, and practice sample test. Then repeat.) by the department head, I created the course with more of an inquiry bent.

Prior to the start of the semester I am reading Annie Rogers’ research about ordinary courage in girls' and women's lives and am finding her work to be fascinating. In discussing the etymology of the word courage, Rogers (1993) writes that in 1051 it simply meant “the heart of an age.” By 1300, courage means “to speak one's mind by telling all one’s heart” (p. 271). Towards the end of the 1400s, courage no longer is related to the heart, but rather commonly means facing danger without fear. In thinking about this work, I wonder how my students and I might investigate and document examples of ordinary courage in our lives.  It doesn’t occur to me that such interest may be connected to my own middle class life. I am largely ignorant at this point that many of my values may not be the values my students bring to class.  What I don’t know as I plan and revise the course is that nine out of the eleven students I will teach are all working class poor--half of whom are single moms in receipt of welfare services. 
             During the semester I introduce students to Rogers' definition of courage inviting them to author a memoir, collect an oral history from someone who is different from them (gender, race, etc.), and create a portfolio based on artifacts they created and collected. Through these projects I hope to occasion their growth in uncovering and witnessing courage in their own and others' lives and provide them with opportunities to develop their writing by composing texts related to themselves and others they find interesting.  (From Chapter 1)

I interviewed students multiple times in one-to-one situations and with their permission was able to study what they said and wrote in notebooks, essays, interviews, and commentaries about read texts. Fran helped me to begin to think about issues of power--to consider, Who gets to noun? I had been so enmeshed in the study and practice of teaching method, that the harder-to-see issues of power and consent were largely missing from my view.  Fran changed that.

II. Learning from Fran

During that semester Fran, the other students, and I wrote and read one another's writing alongside memoirs and essays authored by Jimmy Santiago Baca, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Charlotte Nekola, as well as oral histories collected by Stud Terkel.  Our interactions with the texts we wrote and read helped me to learn much about these students. For example,  Fran clothed and feed her family on $322 of welfare assistance per month.  Her only additional income was a $50 payment from her son's father, $140 in food stamp and a rental allowance that covered all but $100 of her monthly rent. Fran was at college (although barred at the time to take further courses until she passed the college entrance exam) as part of a condition to the welfare assistance she received. I was married, at that time had no children, and apart from teaching one class and doing some consulting work, I enjoyed a full scholarship to Columbia University where I was earning a doctorate.  Of course we were each more and less than these easy categories suggest, but nonetheless it was difference that first caught my ear as I listened to Fran talk.

When Fran was 17 she became pregnant.  Her boyfriend at the time, who was not the father of the baby was violent she tells me. She miscarried in her fourth month because her boyfriend beat her up. She told me the story through long pauses--her head bowed, eyes staring at the ground. "The place they put me. Right next to the nursery. In the hospital, right next to the nursery. I was sittin' seeing all those babies. It was hard." Neither Fran, nor her parents, pressed charges, although her stepfather "took the shotgun and was gonna kill the guy."  Fran explained that she just wanted to forget all about it, "to not think about it no more." (from Chapter 3)

She would tell me that is why she did not like to write. It caused you to remember, She said that choosing violent men as partners was familiar and say this with some laughter. "I just seem to have radar for them."  Later, she said softly, "I'm always fearful when I write. All the writing I get is bad news."

"It's always written down," she tells me. "The stuff you don't want."
"Like what?"
"Gettin' evicted, going to court, shit with the police." (from Chapter 3)

She continues adding child custody, child care payments, and welfare to the list.

Language hurts.  The who who gets to noun is not Fran.  She is acted upon.  A great confining.

I didn't understand that slim truth about language and pain prior to Fran.  That is not to say I had not experienced pain by what had been said/not said, but I didn't get it so viscerally.  In Fran's life, men nouned and women functioned more like silent conjunctions, ever joining.

Naming is a power.  It's one of the reasons I worry with our ongoing romance with state and national standards here in the United States.  The people who get to name them, hold great power.  They act. Everyone else is acted upon. They are like Adam building "bars around/ The things he saw."

It's the absences we need to account for.  The things not inside the bars that are ever so hard to see, to notice, to be brave enough to name.  It is the tensions between the things that get named and the things that are set off stage that we experience under the broad banner of reform.

Breaking Silence

This is an example of some thinking about Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much
With Us," posted by a 3rd grade teacher. I covered table tops with paper so
  community knowledge might be built, shared.

I. Dissent

During this last week, at a professional learning session I was engaged in with administrators and teachers, a guest joined the group looking through the materials I would be using and stayed for about 20 minutes.

The guest said almost nothing.

The group and I were exploring the connections between figurative language and meaning. Specifically we were examining how assonance, consonance, alliteration, metaphor, and connotative/denotative language complemented, complicated and perhaps even sharpened our understanding of Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With Us." It was a dynamic session--the type I had hoped for as I made my way to the school that morning. Our thinking could not be contained.

Later, I would learn that the guest who is employed in a position of power was concerned that I would be referencing an article in which I had written:

Screen capture from article,
"Opening Spaces of Possibility: The Teacher as Bricoleur,"
published by JAAL in 2009.

The concern as I would later be told (not by the guest, but by another who had been present) is that I would ever reference something critical of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in front of educators. Such a problem further called into question whether hiring my services for next year would be a good idea.

Because I authored the article, I rarely (if ever) use it with clients.  It's an intimate look at a teacher, Murray Krantzman, and his students and the beautiful work they compose as they compose themselves. It reveals (perhaps) more about me than I might want to share.  But with this group, I was willing as we have worked together for a few years and I am thinking of them like family.  We rarely seem to mention love & schooling these days, but really love is at the center of the work we do as teachers, yes?

I wanted to contextualize the poetry study we were doing which originated in Krantzman's classroom and as the article focused on him and his students, it seemed like a good idea. But here's the rub: the article predates the CCSS, so even if I wanted to be critical--it would have been the wrong article to bring.  The CCSS did not exist.

II.  Breaking Silence

All of this has me thinking, wondering about issues of power and rights and fear and democracies and teaching and learning. And children. It was just a moment, I tell myself--as if saying this could allow me a reason to say nothing here about this matter.  There's a considerable contract that feels a bit threatened.  But the very words once uttered (and only in my head) do nothing to soothe me.   As Seamus Heaney alludes to (here),"there's distance" in my head for this is a silence I could choke on.

Education leaders must engender thinking, not act to control teachers' and students' thoughts. To control thought is to do harm.

Doesn't a democracy require the possibility of dissent?  Are not public schools our committed method for teaching democracy?  Was it not Jefferson who said dissent was the highest form of patriotism?  It seems ironic that the very next day I would find myself back at the same school site, except this time I am learning alongside a group of history teachers and we are studying, very closely reading, Dr. King's speech - Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.  Dr. King says,  "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

On that night at Riverside Church in April of 1967 my father sat in the audience. A year later to the day, I would see my father cry for the first time when Dr. King was assassinated.

My silence, even on this slight matter, would shame my father.

Have We Lost Our Minds? The Omission of Guiding Students' Reading

2 second grader's initial thinking while reading

I was conducting an in-service for NYC elementary school administrators this past week when a person in attendance asked me to weigh in on the question of guided reading in primary classrooms. Underneath the query was the question of whether or not guided reading was an appropriate instructional practice given the emphasis on 'close reading' via the Common Core.

Many in attendance, it seemed, have been struggling with the absence of guided reading instruction for primary grade children. It seems an odd thing to me that guided literacy might be stricken from the primary grade classrooms, along with children actually practicing reading--but that does seem to be the situation many educators and their students are facing as time has been allotted for newer, (better?) basals that do not incorporate guided reading. In the mad dash to have all children 'PARCC-ready,' we are harming these same children by denying them the space to read with a more knowledgeable reader alongside them. Guided literacy learning offers the possibility of assistance during problem solving--be it as a writer or reader.

Linda Dorn and Tammy Jones (2012) explain:

An apprenticeship classroom should be structured so that children can work in their assisted and unassisted learning zones, including whole group, small group, one-on-one, and independently.' 

I like Dorn and Jones's reliance on Vygotsky and Bruner as they craft an approach to teaching that includes scaffolding (always with an eye to deconstructing the scaffold when it is no longer necessary). They explain the complex process of scaffolding:

Assisting a child in the zone of proximal development is called scaffolding (Bruner 1986; Wood 2002). During guided instruction, teachers provide children with varying degrees of support that enable them to accomplish specific tasks. As children become more competent, the scaffolding is removed and the children take over more of the responsibility. Scaffolding is not simply a case of breaking learning segments down into scope and sequence. Instead, it is a complex interactive process whereby the teacher regulates levels of support according to how well the children understand the task at hand. An essential quality of a scaffold is that it be self-destructing.

There's such clarity in the way Dorn and Jones situate the concept of guiding learning, while not succumbing to foolish (mis)understandings of text being inherently complex or not. Rather it is through interactions among child, teacher, task, and text that complexity and degrees of scaffolding occur. To me this is what the phrase, guided reading, has always meant.  It's not the technical aspects of group size, location, time, or a particular book or task that define this type of practice. Rather, it is the intentionality of the learners (teacher and child) who work alongside one another to problem solve. It is a relationship of shifting power as the child gains control over the processes of meaning making.

Over at EngageNY, there is a 5-minute video that has the title, "Guided Reading and the Common Core State Standards," that I watched twice as it did not make a lot of sense to me. I recognize this could be a shortcoming on my part.  It felt like the two speakers were trying to fit their ideology into a practice that was not actually a close fit and as such there was a lot of talk and not a lot said. Curious if you watch it what you might have to say. Truly it baffles me.

Guiding children's reading is essential for some learners at particular times.  It is practice that can help bridge the distance between I can't read it and watch me read it on my own.  As such the question of whether guided reading ought to be in primary grade classrooms is more a question of power and agency and less a question of method. To impose an absolute decision about such matters from positions beyond actual classrooms, is to deny agency and power to learners.



Cited
Dorn, Linda J.; Jones, Tammy (2012-09-28). Apprenticeship in Literacy (Second Edition) (Kindle Locations 3845-3846). Stenhouse Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Questioning the Logic of 'Only an Expert Can..."

Leaders have to take control, assert their will, use their political power, and push ahead to get results. How the leader uses power can be either subtle or brutish, but it’s unquestioned that such power is necessary to accomplish anything, to bring order out of chaos. In the logic of this kind of power, people need to be forced to do work through either rewards or threats. People get rewarded if they are compliant and obedient, if they don’t ask questions or challenge the status quo. Creativity and new ideas are construed as a threat to authority; better to use old, familiar solutions repetitively, even when they don’t work. People who work in this machine-like environment do begin to behave as machines, robotically performing tasks, convinced they’re not creative, waiting for experts and entrepreneurs to tell them what to do.

Wheatley, Margaret; Frieze, Deborah (2011-04-11). Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now (p. 64). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Common Core, Informational Text, and Reading

There's an overt belief in the Common Core State Standards (ELA) that reading a lot of informational text is the way one learns how to comprehend such text.  To that end, the Standards specify the percentage of text types that learners must annually read:

                                   Literary                        Informational

By Grade 4                 50%                                    50%
By Grade 8                 45%                                    55%
By Grade 12               30%                                    70%

The authors of the Standards write:

The Standards aim to align instruction with this framework so that many more students than at present can meet the requirements of college and career readiness. In K–5, the Standards follow NAEP’s lead in balancing the reading of literature with the reading of informational texts, including texts in history/ social studies, science, and technical subjects...the Standards demand that a significant amount of reading of informational texts take place in and outside the ELA classroom.

So I was thinking about how I read and what informs the ways I make meaning from text, be it a literary work or an informational text, or a hybrid of both. This led me to think about several related questions:

1. Does the mandatory increase in reading informational text so that it becomes the majority of text type read by the age of 11 for all students in public schools actually help these learners better comprehend informational text?
2. Does the decrease in literary works at the secondary level influence reader capacity to comprehend complex texts of any type?
3. What effect might the mandate of the percentages of text types have on readers, pedagogy, and textbook development?
4. What happens to learners when central control replaces local decision making?

A lot to think about and I'm of course curious as to what you think and hope you will weigh in on this.  A colleague and I are writing an article about the Common Core and I would appreciate including your insights.  As I think about these questions I want to offer a few observations, beginning with the first two questions.

On Reading
I don't recall having any direct instruction about ways to read informational text as I made my way through elementary and high school.  Now to be sure I am not advocating we ignore informational text. I favor teaching text structure and unique features of informational text as ways to enhance understanding, as well as teaching learners ways to comprehend and evaluate digital texts (regardless of type).  I think all of these can be important, as well as being mindful about the accuracy and value of information.  As I was writing this, the tweet below appeared.

A timely reminder.

My question though remains rather unanswered: Does mandated amounts of a specific text type lead to better comprehension? I wonder about this as I know that reading literary works, especially poetry, continues to enhance how I read as it requires me to actively attend to vocabulary, syntax, tone, symbol, meter, form, and diction. This attention to language directly helps me to comprehend complex philosophical texts. Different genres, yet I borrow from the reading experiences I have had and continue to have with poetry to inform ways of reading and making meaning. Now poets won't be too surprised by this.  William Carlos Williams in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," writes:


                                             It is difficult
             to get the news from poems
                   yet men die miserably every day
                            for lack
             of what is found there.


There's an irony to Williams's words as I not only found what is essential within poems, but I also grapple with contemporary issues too.  For example, it was not an informational text that spurred my interest in El Salvador in the early 1980s, but rather it was poetry.  30 years later I can still recall Carolyn Forche's poem, "The Colonel."(Click the link and you can hear her read it.)

Now, I am not suggesting that poetry reading be mandated. I suspect that there will be different pathways to reading for different learners. And that leads me to the last two questions.

Autonomy
I don't think making students read a certain amount of a particular type of text is going to actually help develop life-long readers or more critical readers, especially among the more fragile reader. I know mandated practices decrease the responsiveness necessary to teach the hard to teach learner.  Had I been limited in this manner and had been force to operate with specified percentages of text types, several of the learners I taught would not have become the fine readers that they did.  If you have faced the challenge of teaching the learner who is struggling to make meaning from text, limiting options doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  I can still recall Kyle, a sandy haired boy of 14, who spent several weeks in 8th grade slumped behind a book he clearly was not reading.  Kyle tried a range of books and it wasn't until he hit on Avi that he began to build, rather quickly, lots and lots of reading muscle.  Kyle must have read a dozen Avi novels before venturing into other authors and types of texts.   Kyle had little faith in his capacity "to read" and for a time thought "the magic" rested in the author.  This is the same child who by December of that school year recommended we form a club in class dedicated to reading really long novels.  Kyle ran that club.  In the same class with Kyle, there were Jamal, Peter, and Anton who I affectionately dubbed, the disaster boys.  You may know the type: they read endless books about disasters and each piece of writing somehow featured a disaster.  That year I learned a lot about F5 tornadoes and the like.  My point here, is that I used any and every method I knew to help my learners come to love reading: to find pleasure in it and then I could nudge them into deepening and broadening their reading repertoires.

In those days, I was not hampered by a national document that specified by percentage what each learner had to read. Nor was I influenced by any administrator who felt obligated to ensure that the percentages were honored, regardless of outcome.  My selection of texts that I helped to place into my learners' hands came from a library I honed with more than 1,500 discrete titles.  I had no mandated textbook that reflected the distribution of text type by percentage that I had to use.  The issue here is not about informational text, but is more about mandates and power.

Local decision making matters when teaching and learning.  My students and I had expertise that today would be discounted by the Common Core folk.  It is as if the two people who authored the document in 2010 were somehow situated as being omnipotent, for only a self-determined god could know what the Kyles of the world need and want to do in 2011, 2013 or next week.  A mandate strips local decision-making and replaces it over time with a learned subservience.  We do x because we have been told to do so. 

Such action is dangerous. A republic requires far more autonomy, far more thinking.