Literary Practices As Social Acts

Power, Status, and Cultural Norms in the Classroom

Cynthia Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135655075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines the social codes and practices that shape the literary culture of a combined fifth/sixth-grade classroom. It considers how the social and cultural contexts of classroom and community affect four classroom practices involving literature--read aloud, peer-led literature discussions, teacher-led literature discussions, and independent reading--with a focus on how these practices are shaped by discourse and rituals within the classroom and by social codes and cultural norms beyond the classroom. This book's emphasis on intermediate students is particularly important, given the dearth of studies in the field of reading education that focus on readers at the edge of adolescence.

II
Literary Practices

3
Enacting Classroom Culture Through the Ritual of Read-Aloud: What Do We Have in Common?

Since ritual is a good form for conveying a message as if it were unquestionable, it often is used to communicate those very things which are most in doubt. (Moore & Myerhoff, 1977, p. 24)

This chapter frames a slice of life in Julia’s classroom—the first read-aloud of the year—to represent the classroom culture that Julia and her students enacted. To understand this slice of life, I must first introduce Julia, whose very comments about the read-aloud practice she initiates at the start of every year underscore its ritual power. When I asked Julia what she did to form a community in her classroom, she gave a lengthy and thoughtful response. (The book she refers to here is the one she read aloud at the start of the year, The Brothers Lionheart [Lindgren, 1985].)

Julia: I think the central, the most important thing I do at the beginning of the year is I read to them…and I think that’s the strongest message I give them of what life is going to be like—that we all have something to say, that there are no right and wrong answers, that, that I don’t know everything, that I use some strategies to put things together in my head and it might be different from the way you do and I want you to share what you do with me and I’ll share what I do with you…. I always read a hero tale. I would always choose a white hats/black hats book.

Cynthia: [after turning over the audiocassette] You were talking about why you always choose a hero book, and you were saying you like the line in The Brothers Lionheart that says/

Julia: In The Brothers Lionheart that said, if I didn’t do this [save an enemy from certain death], I would be a speck of dirt. That there are choices that we make in life that articulate who we are…. Sometime in these two years, they all test authority in these ways. They have that first glimmer of beginning to internalize the moral system that’s been imposed on them, and saying, “What can I—what will I—take away?” The world, my culture, my family, have given me these feelings, most of which are unconscious about the way the world ought to be…somewhere in this fifth and sixth grade you can almost see it happen to most kids—that for the very first time they say “What happens if I don’t?” which is the beginning of “What will I take as mine, and what will I discard?” And I think…we cannot have a culture without it. I mean we have to do that, and nobody does it perfectly….

Cynthia: But do you relate that not only to who they will become, but to the class context for the year?

Julia: Well, that we become…. It’s our one piece of common background. It’s the one piece, the one referent in terms of a tale that I know we all have in common…. We have this story in common and it binds us together…. There’s something about that curling up on the floor together, get a pillow, take your shoes off, and I never say that, I just allow it…. That’s Emerson, that’s Emerson, that’s the building, that’s the neighborhood, that’s we’re-all-in-this-together, that’s, you know, years of shared history—I remember when your garage burned down, and I remember when…. This is our shared experience…it’s much more than modeling the reading process. Really what I’m about with that first experience is seduction into this community. This will be—especially it worked beautifully for James—this is a place in which you will be safe. This is a place in which you will be at least part of the time intrigued because of the quality of the question, not because the teacher wants you to be, and not because it’s where you ought to be, and not because this is your task in life at this time, but because aren’t stories wonderful.

Julia’s comments made explicit the meaning she gave to the read-aloud practice and the context she hoped to create with her students. Understanding the ritual function of the read-aloud was no mystery. Julia signified this function through the language she used to talk about read-aloud: culture, common stories, community bonds, shared history, first experience, safe place, seduction. When she talked to the children about the purpose of her reading aloud to them, she focused on the modeling of reading processes—thinking aloud, visualizing, posing problems. However, it was the ritual experience that was most important to her, for it transcended these academic skills. Indeed Julia believed that participating in rituals at school was particularly important for these students, who she felt had little ritual in their lives outside of school: “There is very little of that ritualized anything for most kids, especially Emerson kids…not being religious, not having extended family, and not being ritualized sort of people.” Thus, ritual in Julia’s class was meant to “convey a message as though it were unquestionable”—a message of what this culture of the classroom could become.

To understand the kind of culture Julia hoped to create with her students, one must know something about Julia, her background, and her beliefs about teaching and literature. As with any teacher, Julia’s background and beliefs played a role in shaping the expectations for social and interpretive competence in this class. I am defining social expectations as those related to the beliefs, codes, and norms for action and interaction promoted within the classroom. Interpretive expectations are those related to the reading, understanding, and discussion of literature. Although it is important that I draw distinctions between these two sets of expectations for the sake of clarity, the literature events depicted throughout this book show that the social and interpretive are intertwined. As I stated in chapter 1, readers are constructed through social codes and practices that shape their relationships to texts, including literary texts and how such texts might be defined.

THE CLASSROOM CULTURE: SOCIAL AND INTERPRETIVE EXPECTATIONS

The social expectations that Julia promoted were shaped, in part, by the social conditions of her own life. Julia grew up in a Western state where, in her view, individualism was prized and social expectations were not as codified as they are in the Midwest. The premium placed on being self-expressive back home caused her to care less than she felt she should about how others viewed her. Although she wanted to be seen as a team player in her school, she was willing to make her opinions known and did not want to adopt a set of procedures or beliefs that would force her to compromise those that worked for her and her students. Julia was confident of her opinions. Once, for instance, when the class was studying Columbus, I suggested that she might want to read aloud the picture book Encounter (Yolen, 1992), which depicts the arrival of Columbus and his men from the point of view of the Taino people. Julia said that she found the book reductive, taking sides without considering the complexity involved. Religion was as much to blame as Columbus was, she argued, and one cannot judge past actions without fully understanding the worldview at the time. She feared that kids would be too quick to say “Oh, how terrible,” without fully understanding that history has context, that disease killed more Tainos than slavery, and that one shouldn’t trust “White folks” to speak as though they were Tainos. This highly charged response, which took place in the space of a few moments before the children burst into the room, was typical of the strong, well-articulated opinions Julia held. Thus, I was not surprised when Julia told me that she wanted her students to learn to “talk back” and “question authority.”

Julia explained that her own education in Catholic schools, where “everyone knew who was smart and who was stupid,” convinced her that “collective learning skills are vital—more important than being able to take the test.” She believed strongly that her students benefitted when they were allowed to learn from each other. In an effort to facilitate this shared learning, signs hung from the ceiling, each labeled with a color to represent the cooperative learning teams that students formed at various times during the day, most often during social studies. Collaborative learning occurred informally as well. On the first day of school, Julia asked the students if they understood a particular concept. When few raised their hands, she asked them to talk with their neighbors and told them to get some ideas from each other. “We’re all learning together and we’ll all have opportunities to teach,” she told them. She also emphasized on the first day of class the students’ responsibility both to help and learn from a boy who had just come to Emerson School from Guatemala.

Julia wanted students to share with her the responsibilities of forming a classroom community. “Hopefully, more and more of the talk will be talk that you do,” she told them during the first week of school. I can think of countless examples when Julia asked students their preferences for the day’s agenda or future events. What activities did they want to plan for the class party for the practicum student, she would ask them. What book unit did they want to do next? What were their specific book preferences? Class rules were formulated through a group process of brainstorming and prioritizing: Behave safely, respect yourself and others, and participate in everything you can. Time spent on read-alouds and in reading groups was negotiated; students were taught to view their classmates as experts. Julia kept a journal along with her students for a book she hadn’t read before. Students participated in assessing their own growth because, as Julia told them, “I see you from the outside,” but “you see from the inside.” Throughout the year she shared power with her students in many ways, although she wielded power as well.

Julia felt comfortable making her expectations known. She usually included a reason for the expectation and tried to relate the reason to the communal need for safety and respect. When Julia talked about vandalism that had occurred in the bathroom the prior year, forcing monitors to accompany students to the restroom, she told the class, “All of society pays the cost of one person’s wrongdoing. It is symbolic of what happens in society.” Once, in a section Julia read from a book about the American Revolution, the author wrote that a man’s head bounced off his body. The children laughed and whooped. Julia stared at them in silence, then spoke softly. This was not Wiley Coyote, she told them, but human life. Forming a community was important to her, but it had to be the kind of community in which she would want to live.

The kind of community Julia wanted to live in was one where people took an interest in what others thought. The students kept a spiral notebook of their language skills work, but for those students who wanted more communication with Julia, the spiral notebook also served as an optional dialogue journal that Julia would read and respond to on a weekly basis. One girl, Lisa, loved to read and frequently used the journal to discuss books with Julia. When Lisa read The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, 1969), she wrote that she was put off by the scientific “macho” language of the book. Julia wrote back that Lisa’s classmate, Mark, liked the book for the very things that Lisa disliked. “I’m interested in your perspective on the macho language,” she wrote. “Ask Mark what his feelings were at the same point in the book.”

Julia also wanted to live in a community that had a historical ethos on which to draw. She often extended the community beyond the classroom or even the particular historical moment, referring to those in the “Emerson community” who had since left, again demonstrating the importance of being rooted in this neighborhood over time, of knowing the people and the terrain. In the same dialogue journal, for instance, Julia told Lisa that The Trumpeter of Krakow (Kelly, 1928), which Lisa had been reading, was the favorite book of a former student whom she mentioned by name. At other times, she mentioned remembering a particular book according to the way a former student had responded to it:

I remember books by the people who were touched by it. The questions the book raised for them…like I can’t teach Where the Red Fern Grows [Rawls, 1961] without talking about Billy being sexist…because [a student from the past] raised it.

As I mentioned in chapter 1, Turner (1969, 1982) suggested that the breeches that occur within a culture, the unravelings, can lead to either cultural change or affirmation of existing norms. Such affirmation occurred when Nikki left school and repented. One can read, in the discourse of Julia’s initial irritation with Nikki, the meaning of social competence in this class: to be social rather than isolated; to value learning from others; to think critically, yet set goals and work toward positive action; to appreciate human connection and collective history. This was the social community in which Julia wanted to live and it was the social community she promoted. Many students worked in consort with her to promote this notion of community. During our last interview, Julia shared with me an image she held from the last day of class for the year, a day I was unable to attend. Julia had asked her students what they cared about that happened during the year, what they would take with them. After a few initial comments, Brooke said, “We all loved each other.” They found a song that they all knew on the radio “and they spontaneously got into this huge circle with their arms around each other and started dancing.” I do not include this image to suggest that everyone felt as though they were equal members of this community, or even to suggest that everyone felt loved; rather, I include it to underscore the value Julia placed on having this living evidence of the culture she hoped to create, this proof that at least for some students, and Brooke was one of the most influential, the enactment of a certain kind of culture had been complete.

In addition to these expectations for social competence, Julia’s beliefs about what it meant to read and discuss literature also created a set of interpretive expectations in the classroom. Julia held high expectations for student engagement with texts. Toward this end, she regularly modeled her own engagement, talking casually with the class about books she had enjoyed, for instance, and making connections among her experiences, her readings, and the life of her classroom. When a student noted that evil in A Wrinkle in Time (L’Engle, 1962) was like smog, Julia referred to St. Paul’s phrase “to see through a glass darkly.” When Julia couldn’t understand why a character behaved in a particular fashion, she would express her confu-sion to the class, take them through some of her thinking, and ask them for help in figuring out the dilemma. She showed them what it meant to be intellectually curious and to engage in critical thinking, often asking questions that focused on what was left out of the texts they read and the films they saw. Once, for instance, she demonstrated how she might come up with a topic to pursue for the medieval project by explaining her interest in what happened to Jewish people during the Middle Ages and in what life was like at that time in the countries that are now Japan and the Americas.

Meaningful inquiry was important in Julia’s class. She frequently asked students if they had burning questions at the end of a literature discussion, journal entries were to include intriguing questions, and book choices should be made with questions in mind. ‘There ought to be some questions that you’re going to have about the book. Otherwise, it won’t be worth your time,” she told students as they began to choose their first books for small group discussions.

To extend this academic engagement, Julia was willing to spend much time with her students outside of school. As already mentioned, she invited all interested students to stay after school to help her, to chat, and to have a can of pop. Although the invitation was open, it was primarily the sixth-grade girls who felt comfortable accepting the offer. Julia also spent time after school and on weekends participating in school activities or taking students on field trips related to a unit of study. She occasionally called Kate (Nikki’s friend mentioned in chap. 2) to attend concerts with her because they shared an interest in classical music. One Monday in the spring, Julia told me that the past weekend had been the first in 6 years of teaching during which she had not come to school at all. Julia’s desire to extend the academic community she hoped to create was perhaps most evident in her commitment to “Friday School,” a program she developed for any fifth or sixth grader who wanted to visit places of educational interest—museums, historical collections, laboratories, and such—after school on Fridays.

Julia placed much value on reading in her class. On the first day of class, she told her students, “Pick your favorite spiral and label it reading.” She told me that she had sympathy for the student who sat with a book in his or her lap ignoring the teacher because she had once been that kid. When it came time to assign chapters for the next day’s discussion, Julia never limited the amount a student could read as many teachers do because it disturbs their plans to use prediction as an instructional strategy. Instead, she told students they could read as far into the book as they wanted to, but they needed to be prepared to discuss the chapter the group had agreed on, and they must never tell others what would happen later in the book. Once a student raised his hand during read-aloud, announced that someone in another room had told him what would happen, and started to tell what he had learned. Julia, who had made her feelings about this well known, interrupted him: “Nothing makes me angrier than when someone’s mean enough to steal the pleasure of a good book.” During an interview with David, he told me that he knew that reading was important to Julia because “She acts different. Like if it’s reading homework [that has not been completed] it’s out of the group forever, you know. And if it’s science homework, it’s a recess in.” Indeed, students who came to literature discussion groups without having read the chapter or written a journal were given one warning and then expelled from the group.

Julia expressed confidence to me about her own reading and writing experiences. When she was in high school, one of her teachers submitted to a national writing contest a paper she had written about a friend’s death, and she won first place. That experience made her cautious about usurping ownership of her own students’ writings because her winning paper had b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Foreword
• I Contexts
• II Literary Practices
• III Reflections and Implications for Pedagogy
• Appendix Methodology
• References