Culture, Fairness, and Technology: Complications In Literacy Instruction

One piece of evidence that Alvermann uses in her article that raises many questions on page 192 when she cites the two types of instruction found by Patrick Finn in 1992. He says there are two types of instruction, empowering and domesticating, that develop two different types of literacy skills, empowering and domesticating, respectively. Moving forward this observation should stay with us. We all desire equality and fairness for all in the classroom. We also know that students come to class with a variety of different skills and abilities, not to mention different experiential backgrounds against which their education must placed. Knowing all this, we still do not have the time to completely focus on each area that every individual student may need help with. One needs help wrestling with print, another is not quite efficacious when writing, another gets confused when looking at graphic organizers. It's a time management problem and I think we need to think about what kind of content to include in our lessons that will challenge and address the issues of each student fairly. Unfortunately, we know that we cannot succeed completely in this. What do you think about these two types of literacy that Finn discovered? Does everybody deserve to be taught "empowering literacy?" Can everybody learn to be empowered by literacy given the time and material constraints under which the typical classroom is placed? This is not only an issue of the practice of education but of the democracy of education as well.

I think Alvermann is wary of propounding the importance of vocabulary in comprehension, so I will do it for her. Understanding vocabulary and jargon and their particular meaning to disciplinary texts is of paramount importance. We established it as one of the first things to do when you read a text. It is impossible to productively analyze a text if the appropriate meanings of its most basic building blocks are not grasped.

Alvernmann's asserts that NRP's findings on how vocabulary contributes to comprehension is narrow because it "risks disenfranchising students who may learn better in socially interactive settings or whose literacies (e.g., visual and computer) span a broader range than those typically emphasized in school literacy." The fact that school's instruction of literacy is narrow is not only self-evident, but sometimes, I argue, necessary. By now we all understand that today's students have developed more than one set of literacy skills due to the ever expanding melange of technological mediums through which information can be transmitted. This is obvious. The problem is not so much that these technological literacies aren't being employed in the classroom as much as the ubiquity of these technologies is undermining students's ability to comprehend print. Although literacy skills do not end with print, we cannot ignore the development of traditional reading skills by bringing in all sorts of tablets and graphic charts. Reading print is probably the literacy area in which most students still struggle. It is more difficult to grapple with than a flow chart. It requires more active thinking than a video which is shot into the eyeballs of a passive viewer. And because reading and writing remain the most difficult areas of literacy, they cannot be ignored. My concern actually gets addressed later in the article on page 200, when it is noted that two girls using instant messaging demonstrated "little critical awareness how the chat/IM technology might be manipulating them and their literacy practices." My suspicion is that focusing on literacy practices that are not usually academic like computer and video can invite students to turn off their critical thinking. Call me a technophobe, but sometimes I think the best thing we can do for our capacity for thought is to throw out out everything that has a screen. For more on this party-ruining conversation, here is a critique of the internet, from the internet:

Culturally responsive instruction could be the first step in bridging the gap between home and community, home and school. The example given is a study where teachers went to the homes of Latino students to develop a greater sensitivity to their students's culture and how it could make reading practices in class more relevant. I think this may be a solution to the clash of public education with non-dominant cultures. Whether we're conscious of it or not, American public education is inherently White, Anglo-Saxon, English oriented. It clicked with me because it was made for me. If teachers can get a glimpse at the cultures of the students they teach, perhaps the assignments and class materials can be aligned with these newly discovered cultural norms. The problem here is how can you invite all students to incorporate their culture into the classroom and have time for the state prescribed curriculum?