Pondering literacy practices

So I've been focusing a lot on the literacy practices at the corner store project and finding some interesting things. The research team is thinking of these practices as a kind of reading the world in that participants "read the neighborhood" and "read each other". Today I learned that food corps workers favorite past time is to read. Got to set up a lending library in the store. Now that we are posting data results in the store, participants are also reading how they are written. Cool stuff.  

Coming clean

I decided it's time to come clean about some of the reasons why I have tended to post less frequently to this blog. It's part professional and part personal.

The professional part has to do with an exciting collaborative participatory action research project I have been working on this past year. Together with a local Rochester community development agency, Northeast Rochester Development (NEAD), we have been studying the transformation of an urban "corner store" into a healthy gathering space and a space to find healthy food. Tired of living in an urban food desert, NEAD purchased the store across from its main office and began to change what was offered therein. I have been privileged to be a researcher since the beginning. We started a Freedom Market blog if you want to follow our process.

It's been interesting to study the literacy practices in the store and community. At first, they seemed to focus on transactional exchanges and label reading, but I've also begun to see a lot of formal forms circulating (much like Fine and Weiss found in their study of working class families). Lately, however, I've started to focus on broader practices of "reading" the space of the store and the community as key local practices. I hope to be presenting this work at AERA in April 2013.

The personal part has to do with my son who has Tourette/OCD/ADHD. He has been struggling the past few months and is now in residential placement. Working with him and with the varying agencies we deal with has taken a lot of time. I also have a blog that chronicles our adventure if you are interested. Now that I write this I can see a discussion of the ways in which Marcus is written and read (as de Certeau discusses) across the varying spaces of his life right now. Unfortunately, those readings are not always positive.

Hang in there, more literacy related postings to come:)

A force to be reckoned with

A great quote from Keri Facer's book Learning Futures gives me some hope about what might be possible in schools:
“We can reclaim the right of schools to act as resources for their communities to imagine and build the futures that they want rather than simply training them for the futures they have been given … education is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to shaping progressive futures” (Facer, 2011. p. 10)
Now we just have to get more people to join current resistance movements.  

Ubiquitousness of literacy

I am sitting on a train from Sheffield to Brighton in the UK writing a blog. I am able to post it online as I ride along admiring the English countryside. I am amazed at the ubiquitousness of literacy practices and the availability of new literacy technologies. Who would have thought this would be possible even just a few years ago. Certainly the early Britons whose homes and roads I can see from my window would never have imagined writing to the "world" while traveling. I have to say I am having a blast!

Traveling while literate

I'm traveling to the UK today to give a talk at a literacy conference so am doing a lot of thinking about literacy while moving about. Airports and airplanes are full of rich and intensely multimodal literacy practices. They are fairly exclusionary, however. An African family had difficulty knowing which train stop to get off at Dulles because they don't speak English or at least they couldn't understand the computerized voice that told them what stop we were coming to. Frankly, native English speakers have a hard time understanding that voice. They don't have a written display as a compliment either. Lots of reliance on oral modes that, if one is Deaf for example, you wouldn't be able to hear. Seems like having written displays would be more inclusive.

A day of glass

Check out this video from Corning glass. Oh the literacy practices!!

AERA insights

I am back from AERA in Vancouver and settling into everyday life with new insights about literacy, space and community activism. I even met a poststructural assessment and measurement scholar, Ezekiel Roman Dixon! I can't wait to read his work and include it in my book. Met with the Routledge publisher and came up with a better title. Remember they didn't like the Enough is enough title? The new title is: Radical equality in education: Starting over in American schooling. I like it. It points nicely to Ranciere's concept of radical equality and still meets the publisher's need for appropriately searchable words in the title.

Our presidential session with Edward Soja as discussant went very well, even though there were not as many people there as I had expected given Soja's attendance. He did a great job calling all of us on our shallow use of critical geography. We are novices using this framework in education and hearing from "the man" himself was an excellent learning experience. For my paper, he said heterotopia is not a space, but rather a way of looking at space. I talked to him at length about this during coffee after the session, but am still not sure I agree (or maybe I just don't understand). Foucault seems to talk about heterotopias as places (cemetery, museums, mirrors) and so I'd think that heterotopias are these places and since place is subsumed in space, they are spaces. What do you think?

Assessment quandry

When all intelligence is equal and everyone counts in equipotential heterotopias, how do we know we have learned what we set out to learn? Have to take achievement as standardized test score, at least a high stakes test score, out of the mix. How would we assess?

A student told me about empowerment evaluation where each stakeholder in the teaching and learning situation is accountable for her/his role in the activity. Sounds interesting and something I should look into. Fetterman is the person associated with this idea. Does anyone know this work? What do you think about it's application to teaching and learning activity?

The curriculum teams I am envisioning would have to also be responsible for assessment, but then you get the question about transferability across contexts since Americans are so mobile. Should we still have a high school diploma of sorts to show that someone has "completed" a certain level? But once we start in this direction, we end up with inequality of intelligence because intelligence has to prove it knows rather than coming to see itself. Is it enough for a person to say they see for an assessment to be satisfactory?

Outdated models

I know this is out of context, but does this paragraph make sense? Am I assuming too much understanding of factory model education on the part of the reader?

Schools are based on an outdated, scarcity production model of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that is based in traditional business economics and are not responding to changes in skills and practices needed to participate in a global world. This is not a new argument, however. Similar arguments were made in the early 20^th century during industrialization. Calls for changing schools to accommodate a changing world of work rang throughout the literature. I am not making a “change so we can have more efficient workers” argument here. My main argument is that we need to change schools so that they are equitable and just, not to compete in a global marketplace. Part of how we make them equitable and just, however, has to do with ensuring they are relevant and meaningful to children and youth. Here is where schools have become outdated in that they have not taken into account the changed and changing practices associated with internet communication technologies and social media.  De Alba et al. (2000: 9) argue that “our curricula are becoming overwhelmed by practices of diagnosis, intervention, and remediation grounded not merely in ‘basic skills,’ but in old and outmoded forms of basic skills (italics in original).” The basic skills we need are not those needed to fill a workforce, but to engage a dynamic generation of sophisticated children and youth.

Musings while writing my book

The stakes are so high. I think of George Moses and what he calls the battle for survival. It is a crisis when children are being harmed and they are. They are harmed by test driven pedagogy that is rooted in deficit ideologies about who poor children from non-dominant groups are and what they are capable of. But as Jim Gee told me one time, “schools are bad for all children, white kids just get As for it”. We don’t see the damage so much in white middle class kids because of their tendency to score well and because they receive additional supports in their home communities. Not that poor black kids don’t get support at home, that’s for sure. But something about school (don’t think it’s the ‘matching” practices issue) kills them. White kids are not killed in schools but damage is being done nonetheless. Damage to innovative and creative thinking (Robinson); damage to critical thinking. By critical I don’t mean the ability to analyze or reason. I mean the ability to deconstruct power relations evident in texts (broadly defined) and uncover inequalities in order to rectify them. This is definitely not happening in schools. Frankly, not even the boring definition of “critical” is happening in schools. Pre-packaged, test driven pedagogies have stamped that out. Comprehension becomes the ability to retell a story. Understanding doesn’t seem to count and it’s difficult to understand when texts are abridged or shortened to the point of no longer making any sense.

What’s frustrating is that we (educational researchers) know a ton about this stuff. We know that you can’t do reform from the top down, outside in (Darling-Hammond, Tyack, Cuban, Sarason). We’ve known this for 25 years or more. Yet, government continues to impose reform from the outside and districts implement from the top down. Funny that down is always teachers. And the one grass roots, teacher-driven reform I know of – Whole Language – was squashed vehemently and even banned. Never mind students – they don’t count in the equation at all until their test scores are posted on the classroom door. Now those same scores will drive teacher evaluations in spite of the complete lack of evidence of a connection between teacher performance and student test scores.

We know a ton about learning, especially now that we have been studying the learning theory in video games (Gee) and digital environments (Ito et al.), none of which is in schools. And we know that if we take video games or other digital practices into schools without first transforming schools, we’ll kill whatever it is that makes them attractive to students in the first place.  Street would call this pedagogization or the sucking in of anything meaningful or authentic into autonomous definitions of knowledge. And we are right back into assumptions of inequality of intelligence and the pedagogical myth.