Day 1 Literacy Statement (excuse the atrocious grammar):

There seems to be multiple levels of literacy that are referenced in the readings
fro this week and from my own observations in my classroom. Very basically there is the
ability to read a text which is at the core of the concept, but then there are many different
levels of engagement, understanding, and repurposing that defines a subjects level of
literacy. With my students, most who are very high-achievers, the actual reading of texts
does not pose a problem. It is rather the deep analysis and integration of texts into their
prior knowledge of contexts that shows me to what level they understood a piece. I also
would not define literacy as just being text-based (in the traditional sense), as I see
images and objects as texts, as well.
At the beginning of the course, I only had a very rough idea of the concept of
literacy and its significance in shaping the educational careers of the students I teach.
Simply understanding an expanded notion of text did not quite prepare me for the
transformative way that the these objects have in shaping my students attitudes,
identities, and the contours of their lives, both inside the classroom and beyond. 1 In a
particularly salient passage, Hagood writes about the dynamic way in which our students
often are formed through their interactions with media, their peers, and their schoolwork:
Readers speak themselves into existence and construct themselves using
texts as they are simultaneously spoken into existence and are produced by
texts. In this way, subjectivity shifts the emphasis from the study of
multiple identities produced in texts to the study of readers as subjects and
to the process of the ways that readers construct themselves.2
After reading this, I immediately began thinking about how this could apply to the ways
in which I engage students in the classroom. Was I giving the right kind of assignments,
assessments, and texts that would help them achieve their ultimate goals?
One area where I identified immediately I could improve my teaching was through an
examination of the academic language that I was using in my classroom. In her article for
the Language Magazine, Cutting to the Common Core: Disrupting Discourse, Kate
Kinsella urges educators to make active and thoughtful choices about the kinds of
language that they use in their classrooms.3 She argues that teachers need to be
developing an academic register through their interactions with students in the classroom.
By using precise academic language and making intentions and expectations clear to
students, teachers are more likely to elicit academic responses from their students. This is
confirmed by Jeffrey Wilhelm when he writes: if students are not learning to do and talk
about history (or any other subject) in the way historians (or other practitioners from

1 Margaret C. Hagood, Critical Literacy for Whom? Reading Research and Instruction 41, no. 3 (March
1, 2002): 24765.
2 Hagood, 255.
3 Kate Kinsella, Cutting to the Common Core: Disrupting Discourse, Language Magazine,
http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=5114.

another community of practice) do it, they are not learning history.4 I knew that in my
classroom, I was often using academic language, but I was not necessarily making it
known that my intention was for my students to be engaging with it in the same way. I
have become much more conscious of discussion activities, that when I take comments or
questions, I will often reframe students words with the some of the key academic words
that I want them to engage with. I try to ensure that this does not shut down the
conversation with the student, but instead becomes a dialogue in which they often
rephrase and refine their words to include words from the academic register that we are
building together in class.
Another equally important aspect of literacy that I had not considered at the beginning of
the year was the integration of materials and texts that are culturally, socially, and
intellectually relevant to the students in my course. While this can be the difference
between success and failure for some teachers in schools where student graduation rates
are the biggest challenge, at my school it is often what stands in the way of student
engagement and excitement. Tapping into the student bodys pre-existing interests and
experiences is often the key to creating learning experiences that are more relevant,
textured, and crucial to students.5 Luis Moll and Norma Gonzalez come to the
realization that these children (and their communities) [English language learners]
contain ample resources, which we term funds of knowledge, that can form the bases
for an education that addresses broader social, academic, and intellectual issues than
simply learning basic, rudimentary skills. 6 Many of my students are involved in
extracurricular activities, service organizations, or are independently pursuing their
interests on a consistent basis. For example, I have a student whose father is a journalist
who works closely with immigrant communities from Mexico and has special insights to
the current drug cartel wars and refugee crises that have arose in the past few years. My
student is writing her term paper on this issue, although from a slightly different angle,
and she is able to draw upon her father in ways that she had not before this project. There
may even be the chance that her father will come into my classroom and share his work
with her peers. By acknowledging that my students have lives outside of the walls of this
school, I hope to show them that their education is not just a repetitive cycle of learning
facts, equations, and formulas, but instead can be about more deeply inquiring about the
world around them and the possibilities that await them when they graduate.
My notion of literacy has surely expanded through this course to include
acknowledgment of the importance of monitoring academic language and attempting to
employ culturally relevant lessons, but one of the most salient and pertinent aspects has
been the ability to learn about and model multiple forms of activities and lesson strategies
that I have already begun employing in my classroom. Now in my second full year, much
of my nightly planning emphasis has moved from personal content mastery, to trying to
figure out the best way that I can implement these plans in the classroom. The lesson
strategies contained in Jodi Reiss book, as well as the lessons modeled in class have
4 Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Imagining a New Kind of Self: Academic Language, Identity, and Content Area
Learning, Voices from the Middle 15 (1): 4445; 44.

5 Luis C. Moll and Norma Gonzlez, Lessons from Research with Language-Minority Children, Journal
of Literacy Research 26, no. 4 (December 1, 1994): 43956.
6 Moll and Gonzalez, 439-441.

already sparked new ways of engaging with my students that has me thinking about the
many ways that I can build academic literacy in my subject area. Last week I delivered
my lessons on the atomic bombing of Japan (the lesson included on this website), and I
found my students using words like memory and monument in much the same way
as the scholars they had read used them. Often they were able to track back to earlier in
the year and draw connections between materials from the entire course. What this has
shown me is that taking an active role in the building of literacy in the classroom is not
just a good way to deliver content, but to increase the abilities, confidences, and
engagement of the students in my classroom.