Rosalyn Domenick

When I read Freire, I usually have to stop and think “Okay, let me see how this applies to me as a teacher.”  There have been time with his writing that I’ve had trouble doing that.  As I was reading about the two kinds of knowing, I thought about how that applied to my daily life in school.  The first kind of knowing is experiencing or practicing and I thought of how I interact with my students as I complete the lessons I prepared. I go about this exercist spontaneously, automatically in a nonanalytic way.  The second kind of knowing is objectively studying or theorizing and I thought of how I prepare annual review IEPs.  First I look at data I’ve collected and take current data on the goals and objectives.  Then I might take a language sample transcribing word for word what the child says, a very telling evaluative measure.  Then I review a checklist prepared by the teacher with her observations and opinions of the child’s current language skills.  I step back, take a look at the peices of information I have collected, and then formulate a new plan for the child based on this new knowledge. In Freire’s words, I distance myself from the object or the child and his learning to “come closer.” Although these two ways of knowing apper to be contradictory of one another, they cannot exist alone in the the educational world.  Theory supports practice and practice supports theory.  My goals and objectives support the lessons I prepare and the lessons help redefine the goals and objectives. These two kinds of knowing are also what teacher research is all about.  We go about instructing our students and as we do so in an experiential way,  thoughts rise to the surface.  Then we take those thoughts, arrange a plan around them, we step back to examine our thoughts or to “come closer.”  Our practice supports our therory and our theory supports our practiec.  Okay.  So, this time I’ve found a connection to Freire in my educational experience after all!

       Our group’s discussion revolved around President Obama’s plan for America’s teachers.  his plan to require schools of education to be accredited is an important and necessary one in order to have valid teacher education.  His idea of having a “voluntary” national performance assessment to assure that “every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively” is contradictory since only those who volunteer can be assessed.  The plan to support teachers by developing a mentoring system and supplying paid teacher planning time ties in closely with my letter to him in which I stated the importance of teacher training. In my research for the letter, I came across the idea of paid planning time in other districts in the country that were successful.  I would like to see this concept come to fruition.  His reward system for teachers has strengths and weaknesses.  He plans to devleop innovative ways to increase teacher pay with the imput of teachers’ ideas. He would like mentors of new teachers to be rewarded with a salary increase.  This will work because it is compensation for a job or extra responsibility.  I’m not sure about rewarding those who work in underserved places like rural areas and inner city area.  Some of those teachers may work there only because they were not able to find an opening elsewhere, which has nothing to do with their capabilities or willingness to take on a challenge. He also proposes awards for those teachers who excel  consistently in the classroom.  This would be difficult to do .  How would “excelling” be measured? Could it be done objectively? Or would it be a matter of who likes who?  Many teachers excel and to select those who do so better than someone else would be nearly impossible to do. It would be splitting hairs.  Also, we discussed those teachers who do no “toot thier own horn” and whose excellent lessons my go unnoticed by those who make the judgement.  And we certainly agree that rewards for students’ scores would be an abomination.  A teacher’s skill is not alway demonstrated by the efforts of her students.

I sat quietly and listened in class on Thursday as Dr. Brian lectured on Ebonics.  As an SLP in the public school and as a result of my education,  I have always considered Ebonics or African American English (AAE) as a dialect of the standard English language.  However, after listening to Dr. Brian, I decided I needed to find out what the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), the professional organization for SLPs, has to say about this issue.  I did not succeed in finding ASHA’s perspective because as I searched I came across other internet scholarly articles that grabbed my interest.  They might have been mentioned by Dr. Brain in his lecture.  The first one came from a source familiar to us, Rethinking Schools, and is entitled If Ebonics Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?  written by Wayne O’Neil. (http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE/hooked/ In this article, O’Neil strongly supports a resolution of the Oakland, California school board in 1996 that proposed that Ebonics is historically derived from certain West Aftican languages and is recognized as a language.  The resolution says that students who are speakers of Ebonics, also called African Americn Vernacular English (AAVE), should qualify for federally funded programs tradionally restricted to a bilingual population, which would allow for acquisition of and mastery of English language skills. I accessed the resolution on line and yes, that’s what it says. This resolution was soundly condemned by Reverand Jesse Jackson saying that it was “an unacceptable surrender, borderining on disgrace.” The school board also intended to instruct African American students in their primary language (Ebonics) for the purpose of retaining the legitimacy and richness of their language and to facilitate the acquisition and mastery of English language skills. In other words, they were to be instructed as English Language Learners.  So this led me to look at other articles. I found one entitled Hooked on Ebonics by  Dennis Baron from another familiar source, the PBS program Do You Speak American?  http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE/hooked/   He writes of the resolution by the Oakland school board, “Black leader and intellectuals condemned the board’s decision…, denounced black speech as slangy, nonstandard and unworthy of the classroom; condemned as racist the separatism that would result from any recognition of black English. They warned that Ebonics would give schoolchildren a misplaced sense of pride and that students’ continued use of black English would exclude students from higher education and the corporate boardrooms of the nation.” The same opposition to the resolution as Jesse Jackson but for a different reason. Another article pointed out a positive perspective on dialects. 

 http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/fasold.html  This one is entitled Ebonic Need Not Be English. Notice his spelling of Ebonics without the final s.  The author, Ralph Fasold from Georgetown University,  equates this spelling to the spelling of other languages, such as Arabic, Slavic, and Germanic. He states that linguists who look at Ebonic as a dialect consider it as one of a number of equally , orderly dialects of English, including the standard one, like equal slices of a pie. With that definition, we don’t need to look at a dialect as a corruption of English but instead a legitimate component.  Another very intersting piece is Answers to Some Questions About Ebonics by professor Peter L. Patrick from the University of Essex. http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/aavesem/EbonicsQ&A.html One point that he made that impressed me is that language does not need to belong to a country.  Languages have existed long before the modern world was organized into countries. I didn’t get an answer to ASHA’s view on Ebonics as a language, but the reading was fascinating.  I was exposed to varying attitudes on the legitimacy of Ebonics as a language, the origin of Ebonics, the definition and description of languages and dialects and the controversial Oakland resolution.  Although my profession has taught me that AAE or Ebonics is a dialect of standard English, these articles have prompted me to consider it a language in its own right.  I want to read and research it further and, as usual, make my own decision.

While reading Chapter 6 in Oakes and Lipton and the article Who Are the Bright Children? The Cultural Context of Being and Acting Intelligent by Sternberg,  I began to think of my own view of intelligence.  Is it based on nature and what we inherit from our parents or nuture and how we develop intelligence based on what happens in our environment?  My belief is that intelligence is a combination of both of these factors.  I don’t believe  entirely  in Hernstien’s bell curve or Darwin’s theory of evolution as it relates to intelligence,  or Goddard, Terman and Spearman’s belief in eugenics.  However, I don’t think we can ignore the genetic material or physiological makeup with which we are born.  When you hear people speak about capabilitities in thier children saying, “Well, she didn’t get that singing voice from me,” or “He’s great with mathematics like his dad, ” I think there is validity in recognizing the physiological make up of an individual and how that predisposes him or her to being skilled in a given way.  The twenty four chromosomes that each cell in our body has and the finite combinations of genes that lead to the creation of eye color, hair color, skin color, height, weight, facial features, your propensity for high cholesterol or heart disease does not allow us to completely ignore the physiological structure of the brain and its capacity. But the source of an individual’s intelligence does not stop there.  This is where nuture comes into the picuture. No matter what gemetic material or capapbilities one is born with,  there are a multitude of factors that can either nuture intellectual growth or stifle it. Each culture places value on different characteristics as indicators of intelligence - Americans on problem solving speed, Chinese on memorization of facts, Ugandans on being slow and careful, Kenyans and Maylans on social and personal responsibility – and each culture will convey this to its members and reinforce these characeristics in its people.  Social conditions can also stifle expression of intelligence in individuals, such as the negative effect of oppression and poverty. (Oakes and Lipton, p. 227).   Subjecting an individual to continual  stress has been sown to actually destroy brain cells and most certainly negatively impact the ability to function intellectually.  A parent has the choice to praise and reinforce intellectual expressions or ignore or villify it, each response leading to a child’s intelligence either flourishing or withering.  And most importanly, in relation to us as educators, how we respond to our student’s efforts has huge impact on the development of our students’ intellectual capablities,  either positivley or negatively.  “Fundamental …………..is that teachers see all students as extraordinalriy capable learners.” (Oakes and Lipton, P. 243)  So we ask, “Is intelligence a result of nature or nurture?” Neither one nor the other.   It’s both.

       After reading Savage Unrealities by Paul Gorski, I was disappointed to read A Framework of Understanding Ruby Payne by Anita Bohn and find out that it was also a criticism of Payne’s workshop and theory that supports their design.  I was hoping to read a contrasting article and hear a positive, supporting description and opinion of Payne.  I have no previous knowledge of Payne, her book and her enterprise, so I would have preferred being exposed to a broader view of her beliefs,  her methods  and their basis, and decide for myself if I think her theories are valid and valuable.  Any skilled writer can take the words and expressions of another and cleverly manipulate them to represent any frame of thought they personally select to support at that moment.  I don’t have an opinion of Payne, and if I select to learn more about her, I will want to look at a variety of perspectives.

      The third article, from Social Class and Hidden Curriculum of Work by Jean Anyon was more interesting and pointed out explicit differences among the education practices within social class groups. I wondered at the applicability of a study that was thirty years old.  How can we find this information useful when it was written about a time in history that is different than today, simply because of what happens with the passage of time –  changes - both enourmous and finite? Teachers’ instructional langauge was quoted in this passage and interactions among students were described. Do our classrooms sound like this today?  

Some things written in the research article, “Racial Literacy in a second-grade classroom: Critical race theory, whiteness studies, and literacy” were disturbing to me. I came away from that article confused and silenced. Obviously, it is important to teach all children about the history of Black’s in America, a history that began well before the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s.  However, this article left me feeling like I was guilty of some great evil because my skin is white and I’m  a member of the White race. The way the authors presented their definitions, feeling guilty demonstrates my “whiteness,” because I have not actively participated in bringing about racial equality, while not feeling guilty demonstrates my “whiteness” because it would be minimizing the whole issue of racism.  I felt silenced because I don’t want to be misunderstood and I don’t want misunderstanding to be offensive to people of another race. Perhaps I will acquire a greater understanding of issues the author was addressing and become more comfortable about discussing issues of White and Black.  I have many questions and many thoughts, but right now I am not comfortable and feel as if I’m in a no win situation.

I’m having a little trouble with the article entitled “Evaluating Children’s Books for Bias.”  For example, “Omission – Exclusion of a group from an entire collection.”  The United States is an amalgamation of so many “groups” that I wonder how all groups can be expected to be included in a collection of books in a given  school library.  We have more than 40 cultures represented in our school and I doubt that they are all represented in our library, nor do I think that students and parents from these cultures expect our library to have books about the myriad cultures present at Eastvlley.  Our country is very young compared to other countries with histories thousands of years old.  We are growing and still adapting to being a country where many come expecting to have an improved life. My guess is that books in our library about their culture is the least of some new immigrants’ concerns.  Our communities will change and adapt to another wave of immigrants, attempting to meet their needs and adapt to thier culture.  Little by little new books will appear in the schools’ libraries but it will take much more time than thirty years for every single group to be spared omission of books about their culture. My family is Italian American. I never sought books about Italians and thier culture as I was growing up nor do I recall ever feeling that Italians did not exist, were insignificant, or did not make contributions to society. Italians who came to America had many challenges to face and many adaptations to make in their lives. Concurrently, our country had many changes and adaptations to make as well to this first wave of immigrants. Changes will occur for the new groups in a gradual, sometimes arduous way, but they will happen and our library shelves will fill little by little with wonderful stories of multitudinous cultures.  I think retrospection and patience would be helpful.

Oakes and Lipton  Chapter 7  Classroom Management:  Caring, Respectful, and Democratic Relationships

Early education philosophy and practice distinguished two main elements in the classroom:  the management of the behavior of the students and the education of the students.  The same philosophy still exists in many classrooms today. Throughout the chapter, numerous examples were presented that made it very clear to me that the key to classroom management is to not separate managing behavior from education but rather to integrate educational practices and student/teacher relationships into classroom management. They are inextricably linked.  In other words, students are engaged in educational practices that address their academic, social and emotional needs in such a way that their behavior is no longer an issue, thus eliminating formal disciplinary practice for all but the most extreme behavior.  The most important element in a well managed classroom is a caring, well prepared teacher who is both interested in her topic and interested in her students.

Paulo Freire   Letter 8   Cultural Identity and Education

In Freire’s writing, I find very simple ideas embedded in a lot of rhetoric.  I was able to glean the following from this letter:  Cultural identity is not the whole of our identify. Each person is individual and our identity springs from what we inherit and what we acquire.  Our cultural identity is then impacted by our class. Freire has described how our own individual cultural identity is formed. He then goes on to talk of intolerance as one thinking that what is different from him or her is inferior.  He relates it to education by saying that the progressive educator should not be intimidated by the dominant class learner nor should the educator feel superior to the lower class learner.  Educators need to learn about their students world first hand and not theorectically. This prompted me to think about my child study and how it  will follow in the footsteps of Freire’s design for knowing our students. Very clever, Rhina!  I agree with Freire’s belief that the semantics and syntax of a given culuture’s language is beautiful but the student must learn the standard language in order to diminish disadvantages and acquire tools to fight discrimination.  Unfortunately, in order for one to be perceived as intelligent or capable, our society typically expects one’s language to meet a certain standard.  I remember Tonia saying in class this past summer that she would code switch depending on where she was at the time. When she was with her friends and family she spoke one way but when she was in other settings she spoke with a more academic venacular.

Silencing Teachers in a Era of Scripted Reading

 This article was very thought provoking. So many questions arose as I read.  The author of this article, Elizabeth Jaeger, was hired to help students who were struggling academically and their teachers . Although she had helped develop a program that was successful and had many accomplishments, her efforts and the efforts of others were discarded and their literacy program was replaced by Open Court.  Why are some school districts so anxious to jump from one program to another?  I’ve heard the classroom teachers at my school talk about how they use one program for a few years only to be replaced by another.  Why can’t school districts locate the most successful literacy program in the country, send a task force there to observe, possibly adopt this program, and stick with it?   Why reinvent the wheel?  I also wondered what would happen if teachers in my school district became proactive for a concern.  Since the district prohibits collective bargaining (strikes to support a cause) and unions don’t exist, I’m very doubtful that teachers feel much freedom to express an opinion that opposes any practice supported by the administration. How much power do we have to change practices in our schools?  I also wondered about the author’s opposition to teaching of phonics for more than 10 minutes a day.  I took a survey at my school and the majority favored the use of phonics to teach reading.  Interesing.