The Classroom Environment
Create an environment where there are not right-answers-only
Questioning Techniques
-
focus on questions that are schema based and require students to 1) gather information; 2) perceive relationships and make inferences and 3) use information to form new ideas
-
encourage students to develop and ask questions
-
guide and participate in the discussion while answering questions that elicit other questions
-
create an environment that requires students to engage in critical and creative thinking as they solve problems; clarify values; explore controversial issues; and form and defend positions
The Focus of Instruction
-
Students have personal and cultural experiences that are unique. There is no way to predict student contribution. When discussing, student understanding is the central focus. Pick up on what students say and encourage them to gain vision from others. Probing, questioning and redirecting—all are methods to be used to direct discussion
The Process of Literary Understanding
-
A literary orientation involves living through the experience—involves calling on that which is known (schema-based); it may result in multiple interpretations, demonstrating and expanding the complexity of our understandings as new ideas mix with the whole. Literature allows students to ponder, contemplate, reflect on, interpret, develop, question, and defend. Students should share questions and develop interpretations and should not be banalized: right answer/true or false. The possibilities for exploring should be endless
How To Conduct A Reader Response Classroom
Initiation
Replace vocabulary and review of plot summary initiation with inviting initial understanding, developing interpretations, and taking a critical stance (i.e.: related readings; personal, historical, cultural, or conceptual connections)
During Reading
Keep students’ thoughts at the center; develop interpretations: develop explanations, reflect, use conflicting views; examine related issues; challenge perspectives and responses
Post Reading
Summarize key issues, noting changes in ideas, and pointing to concerns not
adequately addressed; leave room for further exploration of possibilities; invite continuing envisionment building
Expressionist/Socio Historical Implications
1. Voice
Students should develop a keen awareness of voice. Accordingly, Schneider writes, “I hear them trying to sound like Tennyson, Emerson, T.S. Eliot, or some other half-remembered (almost always male) literary model, trying to write, not guessing that the rhythms of the language they heard spoken at the kitchen table by their own mothers and fathers are what hold the power of art for themÉStories can be written in the voice of street language we hear on the subway and poems in the voice of the mother at home as she braids the hair of the child who sits on the kitchen stool.” This unit is designed to give students opportunities to explore a multitude of voices (Schneider, xviii).
2. Teaching Unstandard English
Min-shan Luc in her article “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” writes of the experience of being multi-lingual: speaking in one dialect of Chinese at home to servants, another in school(standard) and English with her parents. Upon reflecting on the explanation given by her as reasoning for speaking standard Chinese and English and the explanation for speaking “proper” given her daughter, Lu expresses concern that the metaphor of a survival tool (the explanation) dominates their (young people such as her daughter) understanding of language as it once dominated her own. In relation to instruction she writes, “ I am especially concerned with the way some composition classes focus on turning the classroom into a monological scene for the students’ reading and writing. When compositon classes encourage these students to ignore those voices that seem irrelevant to the purified world of the classroom, most students are often able to do so without much struggle. Some of them are so adept at doing it that the world process has for them become automatic.’’ Luc goes on to suggest that we encourage students to explore ways of practicing the conventions of the discourse they are learning by negotiating through these conflicting voices . . . and that we must teach them from the beginning to struggle. Supporting Luc’s position is Gloria Ladson-Billings who points out the difficulty black students have when “choosing” academic excellence without losing their sense of self as black people. In her essay, “Like Lightening in a Bottle: Attempting to Capture the Pedagocial Excellence of Successful Teachers of Black Students,” she suggests that teaching with cultural relevancy is the buffer to this difficulty and the essence of pedagogical excellence for teachers of black students. Cultural relevancy, being directly related to self-esteem, allows students to feel validated in the classroom. Thus, it does not yield feelings of exclusion and masked voice as depicted in following excerpt from June Jordan’s essay:
Black English is not exactly a linguistic buffalo; African Americans living here depend on this language for discovery of the worldÉWe begin to grow up in a house where every true mirror shows us the face of somebody who does not belong there, whose walk and talk will never look or sound “right” because that house was meant to shelter a family that is alien and hostile to us. As we learn our way around this environment, either we hide our original word habits, or we completely surrender our own voiceÉ (Jordan, 363-367)
Teaching the blues allows students to reclaim their voice whether it speaks in Black English or Standard English. Exploring writings from the works of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou and others who write in Black English provides students with rare opportunities to be validated. Jordan and her students provide the classroom teacher or novice writer with rules and qualities of Black English in the same article which can be discussed and revised according to trends and dialects spoken by the African-American population in the classroom. In addition, it could be contrasted with other trends and dialects of the natural voices in the classroom.
