What’s Your View?

Both Workshop 7 and 8 had me thinking and re-thinking, and also questioning my own personal ways of how I view “literacy” and “reading” in my teaching practices. This especially became evident when reading the article by Lindfors, on how teachers teach and how children learn. The article clearly showed the different views of different people and what each believed reading was about. It wasn’t until he mentioned the differences between teaching and learning, did those individuals become defensive because he was questioning their “COMFORT ZONE” and “BELIEFS” to what was the right way to teach children to read. We as teachers are often so caught up in the “methods” and “formula’s” to create the perfect readers, that we often ignore the fact that children are reading and it’s not only about the children following our prescribed curriculum.

I found myself giggling aloud when reading Brian Cambourne’s “A Sure-Fire, Never-Fail K-12 Recipe for Producing Dependent A-Literate Learners.” At first, I thought he was going to really provide us with a “sure-fire recipe” and not only until I realized his sarcasm did I find it quite amusing. But that feeling quickly turned to a sense of fear because as I continued to read the article I found myself in some of those circumstances or I found myself thinking of other teachers I know that are following his “recipe” and this terrified me.

How do we as teachers, stop ourselves from following the laid out procedures of how to teach children reading and literacy and allow them to explore, experience and stumble upon literacy as a social construct. Literacy is more than just reading books we choose for children, pronouncing vowels and consonants, and ensuring that spelling and punctuation are impeccable. Literacy should be a means for children to discover, familiarize and falter upon at their own pace and comfort zone. We often frown upon children playing video games or reading graphic books-(since these are not real books) or playing with Yu-Gi-Oh cards because surely these are all a waste of time and their brain power. Being a parent of a thirteen year old myself, I often found myself questioning his love of the Japanese Anime books and his completion of video games in a day as a waste of time. It was not until I saw the “critical learning” in all of these activities that I changed my own tune as a teacher in my classroom. Learning is indeed taking place in all of the above mentioned circumstances and children are in fact developing personal experiences that they can take with them for their entire lives.

In order for us to be teachers of “critical learning and literacy” we need to have an open-mind and allow for a plethora of possibilities. The problem with this is the “teacher’s role” in the learning process, that is the constraints we place on the methods we use to “teach” the students. When we ourselves are uncomfortable with the “unknown” we tend to shut down our own pathway to critical learning and disable rather than enable our students to become “critical learners”.