Interversity.Org

I have been rereading Alfred Tatum's book Teaching Reading to Adolescent Black Males. I think my reading and research about critical literacy is shaping the way I'm reading Tatum this time. I see my students so clearly in his descriptions of urban black males. What made so much sense to me this time was the idea of young black males taking on a "cool pose" as a way of establishing an identity.

I'm into his chapters on the theoretical strand of instructional planning--that is, thinking about what goes into the curriculum, not so much about how to teach it (that comes in later chapters). Tatum emphasizes how important it is to provide students with texts that connect to their lives in meaningful ways. Janet Allen says the same thing; in fact, that very point guided her selection of core texts and text sets for Framing Best Practice English 1 and English 2 curricula.

This whole notion of getting students to think about the voices in the selections we read--whose voices are heard, whose are not, whose stories are being told, whose are not, and so forth--this is a different way of thinking for me. I've always asked students what would change if the author were to retell the story from another perspective, but I had never given thought to the fact that by privileging one voice over the other, the author is shaping our understandings. I guess I knew this subconsciously. This idea hit me over the head like a frying pan.

[My family is demanding the computer, and I need some more think time.]