Literacy Now

Classrooms are more diverse than ever before. In our interconnected world, students bring a range of languages, literacies, and cultural practices into their schools. As educators, we’ve often thought about culture as something associated with a student’s ethnic heritage. However, a newer approach to teaching and learning called culturally sustaining pedagogy challenges us to promote, celebrate, and even critique the multiple and shifting ways that students engage with culture.

Django Paris, associate professor of language and literacy in the College of Education at Michigan State University, developed culturally sustaining pedagogy to extend asset-based teaching approaches such as culturally relevant pedagogy for the 21st century. His approach challenges us to go beyond acceptance or tolerance of students’ cultures and to move instead toward explicitly supporting aspects of their languages, literacies, and cultural traditions. Culturally sustaining pedagogy also encourages us to consider the term “culture” in a broader sense, including concepts such as popular, youth, and local culture alongside those associated with ethnicity.

Recently, educators have taken up culturally sustaining pedagogy within particular academic content areas. My colleagues (Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola) and I have examined what culturally sustaining pedagogy might look like in literacy classrooms in Chicago, IL. We’ve found a few practices that literacy teachers might try as entry points to this work.

Seek out nontraditional texts. In our research, literacy teachers sought out nontraditional read-alouds and mentor texts for writing. We’ve documented teachers going beyond canonical texts and incorporating videos, student writing, poetry, and more into culturally sustaining units. Teachers might also consider using blog posts, memes, podcasts, and other artifacts as reading material or writing models. In addition to potentially promoting students’ cultures, languages, and literacies, these texts encourage broader ideas about what counts as reading and writing in schools.

Explore and model meshing languages. Language is a critical part of culture. Rather than require only “standard” English in the classroom, culturally sustaining literacy teachers explore, model, and support the meshing and blending of language varieties. We’ve documented teachers speaking and writing in ways that blend languages, dialects, and formal and informal registers. In addition to helping students see themselves in the texts they write, this approach helps students note complex power dynamics surrounding language use.  

Encourage students to explore alternative cultural affiliations. Culturally sustaining literacy teachers understand that students engage with a wide range of cultural groups and encourage them to explore these affiliations. In our research, we’ve seen students explore Chicago culture, culinary culture, digital culture, and more. Teachers can ask students about spaces, places, and communities where they feel like cultural “insiders” and can help them connect with these communities in person or online. This practice helps students and teachers understand the complexity of culture and the multiple affiliations of every student.

These suggestions just scratch the surface of what it means to teach literacy in ways that are culturally sustaining. Teaching, like culture, is complex. However, by approaching our practices with this cultural complexity in mind, we may be able to see and understand our students’ languages, literacies, and cultural practices in deeper and more meaningful ways.

Emily Machado is a doctoral candidate studying literacy, language, and culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She researches equity-oriented writing pedagogies in urban classrooms. Previously, she worked as a public elementary school teacher in Washington, D.C. She tweets at @emilynmachado.

Emily Machado, along with Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola, will present a session titled “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the Urban Literacy Classroom: Lessons from Mr. C’s Class” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

June is almost here and, if you haven’t already, it’s a good time to revitalize your classroom. ILA has plenty of tips to help you declutter, reorganize, and breathe new life into your curriculum. Whether it’s reevaluating your assessment process or eliminating tired formats, these articles will help bring about refreshing changes for both you and your students.

Burn the Worksheets: Fire Up Student Writers

A Less-Is-More Approach to Assessing Readers

Use Monthly Quiz Activities to Practice and Evaluate Critical Reading

Bring New Energy to Your Springtime Classroom

Taking Organized Thoughts to the Cloud

Clare Maloney is a former intern at the International Literacy Association. She is currently seeking a BA in English from the University of Delaware.

“This will be the first book I ever read,” shouted one of my seniors. I had left him little choice; he could either read or not graduate. A week earlier, a 10th grader made the same comment. When asked how she made it through so many years of school without reading a book, she explained, “English teachers ask for quote analysis, and it’s really easy to do that without reading the book.”

I’ve heard many similar confessions throughout my 18 years of teaching. Many of my students are reading five to six years behind grade level. I have seniors about to graduate high school who do not meet the literacy demands needed to fully function in society.

Kelly Gallagher (2009) defines readicide as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” He attributes this genocide to two main factors: high-stakes testing (which often leads teachers to value test-taking skills over reading proficiency) and limited authentic reading experiences.

Gallagher’s theory echoes observations and experiences from my own teaching career. I’ve seen English classrooms with no books, or only tattered copies of classic titles. The urban high schools where I teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are becoming book deserts.

Even when books are available, some administrators and educators do not allow students to read during class out of fear of losing valuable learning time. I believe that when students are allotted time for free voluntary reading, they become better readers, score higher on achievement tests, and expand their content knowledge.

Teachers can use free reading time to supplement textbook learning. For example, when studying the Holocaust, students might choose to read Elie Wiesel’s Night: a teen’s account of his survival from the Nazi death camps. Another example is Cindy Neuschwander and Wayne Geehan’s Sir Cumference and the First Round Table, which offers creative explanations for geometry concepts.

I understand that building a strong classroom library can be difficult with budget restrictions. Teachers can try borrowing a class set of novels from the public library, browsing secondhand bookstores, or applying for grants from education nonprofits. I have received $1,000 in book grants from donorschoose.org every year for the past five years.

Ray Bradbury captured the importance of voluntary reading when he said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Concerned educators—it’s time to take action. Let’s reverse readicide.

Karin Kroener-Valdivia is an 18-year English teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District in California. She is also National Board Certified and a UCLA Writing Project Fellow.

Vocabulary is a cornerstone for readers at all levels. Vocabulary-building lessons help enhance readers’ comprehension and raise their overall literacy levels. From games that foster collaborative team efforts to new visual and audio tools, find out how you can make new vocabulary stick with these creative and engaging activities:

Vocabulary Voyage: How a Spontaneous Lesson Became a Favorite Strategy

Vocabulary Expansion: The "Ize" Have It

Using Google Slides to Make Vocabulary Stick

The “X” Factor—and the “M” and “N” Factors, Too: Fun with Vocabulary Acquisition

Using Photos to Support Reading and Writing

Clare Maloney is an intern at the International Literacy Association. She is currently seeking a BA in English from the University of Delaware.

His teacher insisted that Pablo was illiterate, but after an hour of observing Pablo text message friends, check e-mails, and scan the Internet for various chat rooms related to the manga TV series Yu-Gi-Oh, I begged to differ. Pablo was highly literate. His teacher had been using a definition of literacy from a century ago.

When working with teachers, administrators, and parents, I always ask: What good is it teaching kids how to read if they never want to read? Whose bright idea was it to force-feed students “classics?” Why did book reports become such an accepted panacea to demonstrating reading comprehension? When did educational bureaucrats forget that “variety is the spice of life?”

Don’t get me wrong. If students love reading The Scarlet Letter or summarizing the theme of A Separate Peace, by all means, let them. In my work with struggling and reluctant readers (newsflash: most are boys), it never ceases to amaze me how the same child who will not budge to open up a textbook will devour comics. I’ve seen “reluctant readers” spend their entire recess breaks swapping statistics from trading cards. Why? There’s a spark.

“If a student has a spark (or better still, a fire), a curiosity about a topic, learning is more likely for that student,” says educator and author Carol Ann Tomlinson.

Want to make a student a better reader? Give that student things s/he wants to read. In my experience, it doesn’t matter if a person reads James Joyce or James and the Giant Peach; what matters is how much that person reads.

Minutes matter. Pay attention to which students read the best. It is the students who feel most confident reading. Confidence comes from practice, and proper practice comes from passion.

We need to reimagine literacy. I love physical books, but I am not conceited enough to impose my own preferences on others. My wife adores her Kindle. My youngest daughter used to love LeapFrog. There was a time when my son’s interest in reading only revealed itself when he scanned the menu at Denny’s. And you know what? That’s fine!

The best way to make students better readers is to find their passions and adjust our approaches accordingly. The bad news is that when you have 33 students, you probably need to find 33 different accommodations. The good news is that there is a much greater possibility that you will inspire students to become lifelong readers.

Danny Brassell has spoken to more than 2,000 different audiences worldwide. He is a best-selling author of 15 books, including Read, Lead & Succeed and The Reading Makeover, based on his popular TEDx Talk.

Danny Brassell will present a session titled “The Reading Makeover” and will copresent a Special Interest Group session titled “Consequential Validity: Reimagining the Student and Assessment” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17. He will also emcee the ILA Sparks Lunch on Sunday, July 16.