Readings 1/26 - The Beginning

Assignments: Beers et al Ch 1,
                      Baker, Pearson, and Rozendal 'Chapter 1'
                      Cohen "Zine Project: Writing"                  

The Beers et al Chapter started with a quote " In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them" Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat"

As I began reading the first text, I thought to myself that this was a lot of reading and that I was not sure applying for this course was the best decision I made to start the year off with, but as I read and highlighted I realized that I found the content quite fascinating.

The most fascinating thing about the texts were their connections the basis of which lies in the above mentioned quote. All the authors wanted to stress that teaching should be changing because learning was changing as well as the fact that students were bombarded with many more issues than we could see or even conceptualize within a classroom setting.

All three readings highlighted that fact that literacy learning and instruction was based on, and should be based on the different perspectives that students as well as teachers bring to the classroom. The thought of meeting students individual needs being paramount to effectively educating them was of great significance. With which I agree. I however believe that educators are faced with the task of performing anywhere from three to five roles within a given classroom on a given day along with the role of educator and it all at times  can be a bit overwhelming.

Many authors write books from research taken place within staged settings, which often do not reflect the real life challenges. We all want to live in an ideal world but as we can all see, we don't. The ideas and concepts behind teaching children as individuals with their own ideas and different perspectives take a lot of man power, dedication and resources that have to all come together to make education effective. There is so much that can be done but lack of time and resources, make it challenging, not impossible, but challenging, and as teachers and human beings in general we often tend to focus on what the 'acceptable required' outcome is. In one of the treading the author(s) mentioned the decision of a well respected literacy advocate to focus on academic literacy as that was what he thought was the focus of the masses in education, which the author(s) found disappointing, of course that is reality. Schools need to educate students so as to meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) or they will loose funding and eventually the school itself.

As I reflect on these readings I began at one point to think that this is a no win situation, if schools focus on the students and their progress as individuals then students make progress but the school does not meet AYP. The schools loose valuable funding that they need to help these students to continue making progress, which in turn staggers or stops the progress these students are making which leads to the schools being closed, which means students now have to find other schools to attend which are sometimes out of their districts and deters them from actually attending school. How do we as educators prevent the snowballing effect without punishing our students?

I am by no means implying that this is an impossible feat. I am inquiring of myself as well as my readers, how as we study 21st literacy and research the different perspectives that affect literacy education, do we implement this into a whole school, whole district setting and not just individual classrooms of the teachers who are trained as Literacy Specialist and see the benefits of this? Or is this the answer - one classroom at a time? I can guarantee that most teachers in Literacy Programs will return to their schools or do so as they learn, and implement  programs as they teach, we will think about our students and the different perspectives they bring, their learning styles and how we can effectively meet their needs as we plan and implement daily lessons, but we are only about five percent or less (I am open to being corrected) of the teaching population, and probably don't even teach the students who need this the most.

I get it, but wonder how do we move from Me to We in a society that needs a total make-over of the education system to effectively meet the needs of all its students?

Iffeisha