My Thoughts

EQAO and Social Practices

After reading the articles I am left thinking about a couple of things. One thing in particular is in regards to a discussion our school was having at a staff meeting. Our EQAO scores had gone down and we were now tasked with the responsibility to figure out how we could increase them. Several headings were given and we had to spend 20 minutes working in large groups to come up with various ideas. All of the teachers worked hard to think of new and innovative ways that we could reach our students and at one point our specific goal was to think of ways for us to increase parent involvement or ‘buy-in’. Again many ideas came up, but after reading several of the articles, it is clear to me that we are still really trying to increase literacy skills from inside the school and rarely using the parents as a resource as discussed in our articles. We are trying to educate the parents on what ‘we’ want the child to do, but we have not taken the time to look at it from the other side. We need to work with our families and get the parents to let us know what they are doing and what practices they are using at home, what their ideas of education are/look like, who the ‘important people’ in their children’s lives are who are working with them and helping the children to develop their multi-faceted literacy skills. I think that we really need to embrace these ideas and get the community working with us and really valuing and respecting the ideas and wealth of knowledge that our students come to us with.  

Critical Literacy and the “Neutral Curriculum”

On another topic, I took part in a network meeting this past week and we spent some time discussing social justice math. One of the first statements made by the lead speaker was that we are working with “curriculum that is culturally neutral” and then continued on discussing a critical cross-curriculum approach and how we could work with our students’ various backgrounds and look critically at all areas that we are teaching. I feel like I almost jumped out of my seat in a need to tell him that nothing about our curriculum, or literacy in general, is neutral. Throughout our course work and especially because of our most recent readings, nothing about what we teach or how we teach is neutral. And as these articles suggested, as soon as we realize this and encourage students to realize this, we will all be in a better place to look at literacy critically and really begin to unpack what is really there, the voices present or missing, the messages/agendas under the surface, who is it serving and how can we cause change to shift what we see. The rest of the session did provide a lot of ideas about implementing a critical literacy discourse in the classroom and I did feel better by the end, but I was surprised with how quick my reaction was and how my need to tell someone about this was so great.

Application In My Classroom

One area that I am specifically working on in my classroom right now is the attempt to get a better writing program underway. One that does not emphasize a checklist of skills to be taught, prompts to be given or one size fits all graphic organizers to use. As discussed in chapter 12 of Finn’s text, the idea of shifting the power from teacher to student and encouraging the students to take ownership and no longer having the teacher as the gatekeeper really resonated with me and reinforced what I am trying to do in my grade 1 class. I am trying to implement my literacy program in the “new literacy” format where I attempt to be more of a facilitator and provide choice to the students. The text that I am using to help guide my writing program is called No More “I’m Done!”, by Jennifer Jacobson. I have found her book to be very helpful in me moving away from the text forms we have had to do over the past 6-8 years and allow students to write based on their interests and really focusing on their message and not the correctness of writing (which is something I have always tried to do, but this text really reinforces the importance of it). I am finding that this method of teaching really allows the students to take control, even in a grade 1 classroom and I predict will end up with students being much more engaged and active participants in their writing. And this can only lead to good things, especially the idea of powerful literacy.

What I Continue To Think About

I do find that much of our reading really intrigued me this past seminar. Ideas such as meritocracy, logic of deficit, the status quo, no one best approach to teaching literacy, powerful literacy vs functional literacy, primary/school discourses, capital D discourse, social practices and the class system, have continued to linger with me and I have gone back again to reread parts of the texts, especially chapter 13 in Finn’s text. I have even begun discussions with groups of teachers during grade, staff and network meetings that I hope will encourage people to think about literacy and our approaches to teaching. I certainly am no where close to having answers to much of what I am thinking, but the exciting thing is that our readings are making me think and I want to share that and open up discussions with other colleagues. I feel like I am in a good place and most of the time wish I had more time to really sink into the readings and the application of them in my own practice. I recently said to someone that my brain feels so full of what I am learning and working through, that I almost wish I could repeat this year again next year so that I don’t miss out on anything.