More Thoughts on Culture, Literacy, and Learning

I have been thinking about Lee's book since last week's class discussion. I have recently read Winn & Johnson's (2011) Writing Instruction in the Culturally Relevant Classroom, and I have found what I was looking for in Lee's text. Winn and Johnson state, "Culturally relevant pedagogy is not merely an invitation for students to explore their lived experiences, ideas, and communities, but it can provide ways to map these individual experences onto a global platform" (p.27). They further explain that culturally relevant pedagogy "seeks to allow students to examine and question sociocultural and sociopolitical realities that affect their lives" (p.22). This is the piece that I feel is missing in Lee's cultural data sets. She brings student's prior knowledge and cultures into the classroom, but once the students move to the analysis of "academic" texts, the process stops. It seems like the process needs to move back into students' lives for the learning to be relevant. The students now know how to perform close readings of literature--so what? How will that enable students to look more critically at their lives, their world, and work to change their world? I feel like there needs to be a larger purpose than just analyzing literature.

I am also becoming more and more wary of using a New Critical framework for teaching literature. (And this is coming from someone who used that very framework for years.) I do think that close reading is a skill that will aid students in high school and college work, but I do not think that is the best overall approach.

After our class discussion last week, I started thinking about how culturally relevant pedagogy is used primarily with African American and/or Latino populations. But I think that white students need this type of pedagogy as well. Why are there no articles or books about how white students need exposure to diverse texts and "cultural data sets"? For another class last week I read "There is No 'Race' in the Schoolyard: Color-Blind Ideology in an (Almost) All-White School" by Amanda E. Lewis (2001). She explains how the white teachers, students, and parents claim that race does not matter in their school, yet she sees interactions that prove those beliefs to be false. Lewis state that "it is often Whites’ lack of understanding of their own roles as racial actors that stands as a roadblock to further progress toward racial justice” (p.782) and goes on to argue that "education that is critical, multicultural, and focused on racial justice cannot be reserved only for students of color....In this way, it is crucial that Whites learn more not only about the reality of racial inequality, but also about their own role in its reproduction" (p.804). I absolutely agree and want to think more about this topic.