In our class, we have a unique opportunity to build on the cohort's learning in the summer about education and society and extend that into how language is often an enabler and constrainer of social opportunity. To do that, most classes we will have something called a praxis workshop.
The workshop is a place for you to bring up issues, challenges, moments of victory, tensions from your school setting that have to do with language and we'll, well, work on them. Some praxis workshop ideas might come from one particular pupil's issues; others might come from how to set up a classroom for language learning. This is the place to post your ideas for the praxis workshop. When you encounter a moment that would benefit us as a community to think more about in terms of language and schooling, respond to this thread and tell us a little about it. Post by Wednesdays at noon.
However, to get us started, for our second week of class, please post a brief (no more than one paragraph) memory you have of language/literacy from your schooling or a book or text that is important to you. The memory can be positive, negative, or neutral. Please post by Saturday September 9, 2011.
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ReplyDeleteThe first memory that strikes me when reading this question was when I was kicked out of bilingual program a little less than a year of moving to the United States. The bilingual program that I was placed was a failure, the teacher only talked about wrestling all day. This was something that I told my mom everyday, until she couldn’t have enough and made the principal to place me into regular program. When starting middle school, it was really hard to understand what the Literature Teacher was saying in terms of metaphors, critical thinking, etc. in books like Tom Sawyer and so on. The piece of literature that stuck to me in that difficult time and still read until this day, is a poem called A Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos. Is a poem that she writes to herself about the outside way that she portrays helfself versus the way that she really is inside in her environment of the power of masculine machismo and the way society wanted women to act by. When I was in middle school I used it as me trying to fit in a different language versus all the literature and analytical knowledge that I previously had in my native language.
ReplyDeleteMuch like Yamira, my memory of my own language and literacy development comes from an inneffective bilingual education program. The elementary school I attended offered transitional biliingual education, one of the most commonly used methods in this country, where the ultimate goal of the program was to mainstream students into an English-only classroom as soon as they are deemed “proficient.” For this reason, in third grade I was placed into an English immersion classroom. During the course of the year I experienced a very rough transition since I had only picked up a few words and phrases in English from television shows such as Power Rangers. I often directly translated my thoughts into English, saying, “going you?” instead of “are you going?” which often lead my classmates to giggle. I did not understand that there were differences in syntax and much less how to fix those errors in my speech. Furthermore, the teacher never acknowledged my “funds of knoweldge” or supported my language development in any way. He simply privileged the English language as if it were the only language in which learning could take place. Such program setback my language development.
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