Culture, Literacy, & Learning

I like the title of Carol Lee's book Culture, Literacy, and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind. Schools do often feel like whirlwinds with little time for one-on-one interactions or meaningful classroom practices in a culture of high-stakes testing. I appreciate Lee's honesty about the often overwhelming culture of schools, negative attitudes of teachers and policy-makers, and difficulties in students' lives. She offers, however, pictures of engaged students and caring teachers involved in what she calls "Cultural Modeling."

I do have a few concerns about using cultural data sets. Teachers must recognize diversity within cultural groups and must avoid essentializing those groups, as Lee asserts. She acknowledges that she mistakenly assumed that her students would respond to an R&B song. We cannot assume that because our students are African American that they will necessarily enjoy a rap or R&B song. I wonder about classrooms that involve multiple cultural groups--how can a teacher use cultural data sets with students with diverse backgrounds and interests? I'm also thinking about how Lee uses the data sets to lead to canonical texts. The students practice problem-solving with more familiar texts, but the purpose is to use those skills with more "academic texts." Does this set up the cultural texts as merely introductory, as having less inherent or "serious" value than "school texts"? In using cultural data sets, the teacher would have to be careful to not "use" students' home culture or position the data sets as gimmicks to get students interested and involved. Similarly, how do we move students from an "everyday explanation" (usually oral) to a more "formal explanation" (usually written) without devaluing the students' language. Again, we start with the students' practices but then move them to school-based practices. It seems like no matter how hard we try to value what students know and do, we always end up privileging academic practices/language/knowledge.

As I read about the use of cultural data sets, I kept thinking about the position of the teacher and the cultural knowledge that the teacher must have. I kept asking myself, "What about my position as a white teacher?" Would my use of cultural data sets seem authentic to students?

Lee focused much of her explanations on how to connect students' lives and knowledge to school-based problem solving, but what about the reverse? How does literary reasoning and close reading transfer to students' real lives outside of school? How do the students see the discussions of literature as valuable and meaningful?

I like Lee's idea of focusing on "flexible conceptual understandings" rather than merely giving students procedural knowledge (p.38) and explaining to students how the concepts are related to each other (p.115). The knowledge of how rather than what is important in helping students problem solve across different contexts. What I'm struggling with is that the teacher is the one who "revoice[s] contextualized claims as general propositions that can be applied across similar problems" (p.76). If the teacher translates the students' words and labels what students have accomplished, do the students understand what they are doing or have done? Do they fully recognize what the teacher is labeling?

Lee says that she works from a New Criticism orientation (p.62) that focuses on close reading of texts. Is this the best place to start? Lee mentions Appleman once in her book, and I think that I would start with a critical framework and then work toward close reading.

Several of Lee's strategies reminded me of Rosenblatt: "rules of notice," metacognitive reflection, making sense while reading, rules of configuration, connecting details into patterns.

In a couple of post-conferences with interns, I have talked about how they feel about noise in the classroom. One intern spoke of her concern with students being quiet. Many pre-service and new teachers equate quiet with student attention and learning, when this may actually not be the case at all. Lee found that the students were most engaged when they were involved in mutiparty overlapping talk (p.101). Noise in the classroom can be productive and on-task. I have also seen the interns rely on the IRE pattern of talk; they feel the need to control the questioning so that they "cover" what they intend for students to know by the end of the lesson. Lee found also that student reasoning was highest when the teacher did not dominate discussion. How can we encourage new teachers and help them build confidence so that they feel comfortable stepping back and letting students take the lead?