Calling all Secondary English Teachers!
I am currently in the process of developing a chapter for the Andrews and Lupart (Eds.) text on Understanding and Addressing Student Diversity in Canadian Schools.
I ask, What would happen if we consider diversity as a resource, rather than a deficit?
To illustrate, I share an example that was told to a group of us at a conference in Toronto a few years ago:
The gentleman described himself as a secondary science teacher. He spoke of his concerns with a number of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students in his class who congregated at the back of the room and were virtually ignored by the rest of the students. As they were nearing the end of a unit on the Circulatory System, he decided to create a new ‘review activity’. He assigned his students the task of creating a ‘children’s book’ on the circulatory system. The basic concepts would need to be clearly stated, and the book would need to include accurate, labelled illustrations. Bonus marks would be assigned to groups who created a ‘dual language book’.
Suddenly, the CLD students had significant cache. Not only were they required to complete the task, but their participation added ‘value’. The final product not only served as an excellent review, but also became an introductory classroom resource for new non-English speaking students in subsequent years.
In my chapter, I would like to highlight the ways in which Secondary English teachers across Canada are addressing diversity in positive ways in a section entitled, “Diverse Voices”. I work from a multiliteracies perspective, so this theoretical orientation will ground my chapter. As you can see, the ideas are not long, but are incredibly inspiring. If you have an idea to share please contact me in one of the following ways:
Email: khibbert@uwo.ca
Twitter: @khibbert
The best ideas will be published and you will be credited with the submission. If I get more submissions than can be published, I will include the others on this blog so that all can benefit.
I have included my chapter ‘outline’ for my book chapter below, for any who are interested:
In the past half century, research in the field of education has exploded, furthering our understanding teaching and learning, and importantly, our understanding of diversity. While much of the focus of the past has been placed on finding and implementing standardized tools and strategies that reliably assess individual student and teacher competence, future oriented scholars are reconsidering how we understand and address diversity. Today’s classrooms challenge us to find ways to acknowledge the complexity that diversity brings and to reconceptualize diversity in ways that reposition it as a resource for learning rather than as a deficit that needs to be fixed or remediated.
Canadian classrooms are a cornucopia of different races, national or ethnic origins, color, religion, sex, age and various cognitive, social, emotional, learning, and behavioral abilities. In this chapter, we consider language and literacy in the Secondary English Classroom, and consider the ways in which a multiliteracies framework may help us reconstruct diversity as a resource.
It is important to understand that we position ourselves as scholars that believe that we all use and create language and literacy in different ways. We see literacy is a socially situated practice (Barton, Hamilton & Ivancic, 2000) that begins by considering the teaching and learning environment within which we practice and who the students are before us recognizing that linguistic and cultural resources are often informed by social positioning (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992).
One of the key challenges, particularly at the secondary level, is the ways in which teachers appraise who the learners before them are; what they bring to the teaching/learning interaction; what their prior knowledge and experiences are that allow the development of appropriate responsive pedagogies. Despite the growth of research in the call for expansive definitions and practices within language and literacy areas, schools in Canada continue to be caught within a context that conceives of literacy as linear and print/text based reading and writing skills. Traditional canonical literature (most often from Great Britain and the U.S.) continue to dominate the choices consumed in Canadian classrooms. Students who do not respond well to such privileged forms of academic literacy are often pathologized as ‘at-risk’.
In today’s context, Hibbert (in press) argues that ‘at-risk’ students need ‘risk-taking teachers. This shift prompts us to re-consider how we view the diverse resources that students come to school with and how as educators, we might better create opportunities for our students to engage in literacy in multiple ways that enable our students to construct an image of themselves as literacy learners.
A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, introduced by the New London Group (1996) and it starts from the position that there are multiple modes and media through which people communicate and multiple languages through which people communicate. Developed as a framework for action, that sought to emphasize that English is not the only language spoken in classrooms and that print is no longer the dominant ‘text’ consumed by many of our learners. Despite the calls for action, policies and practices continue to limit the ways in which broad conceptualizations of literacy are adopted in Canadian classrooms. For example, standardized assessment practices continue to conceptualize (and assess) literacy through primarily linear print methodologies highly valued by the cultural elite (Asselin, Early & Filepenko, 2005; Burke & Hammet, 2009). A multiliteracies approach acknowledges the power and privilege associated with print literacy, but embraces multiple ways of developing that proficiency; accessing multiple modes and media that expand the communication options adopted and developed along the route to proficiency. It is therefore a more inclusive form of literacy pedagogy.
I look forward to hearing from you!