Capstone Essay

Piper Pugh
University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education
EDUC 629: Teaching English/Language/Literacy in Middle and Secondary Schools
Dr. Debora Broderick
December 16, 2021
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Epigraph

Men and Women are Searchers

Found Pantoum Poem

I don’t remember how old I was,

Taking the shame

But I know that I was too young.

Taking the pain of their lives

Taking the shame

Hammer is the most powerful tool and you need it

Taking the pain of their lives

The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing

Hammer is the most powerful tool and you need it

I saw sound as their possession

The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing

I had ideas I wanted to express but couldn’t

I saw sound as their possession

We’re looking at them as dirty slates

I learned to be respectful of their sound

We’re looking at them like dirty sheets that need to be washed

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We’re looking at them as dirty slates

Turn against their domestication

We’re looking at them like dirty sheets that need to be washed

And the attempt to domesticate reality

Turn against their domestication

I don’t remember how old I was,

And the attempt to domesticate reality

But I know that I was too young.

Essay

In this pantoum poem, I cut and pasted lines in an attempt to embody an adolescent

student, and to reconstruct the experience that many young people have in school. The

experience can best be summarized with the third stanza, which reads “Hammer is the most

powerful tool and you need it / I saw sound as their possession / The teacher knows everything

and the students know nothing / I had ideas I wanted to express but couldn’t.” The narrator–the

student–has words to say and ideas to share, but “sound”-- speaking–is the right and possession

of someone else–the teacher. This alarming classroom power dynamic is clarified in the line,

“The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing,” a line which encapsulates the

banking concept of education so often embedded in classroom practice and curriculum (Freire,

1970). This theory suggests that students just “‘receive’ the world as passive entities,” ready to

be filled up with someone else’s knowledge. It suggests students do not have their own
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knowledge (or ways of knowing) to contribute, that they are unable to synthesize and make

meanings of texts (or “the world”) in ways that are unique and significant to them (Freire, 1987).

Naturally, the “powerful tool,” the “hammer,” alludes to the way these beliefs and power

structures are maintained, how “sound” is kept from some and silenced for others. It is often

through continued force and hammering that students are taught to accept their place in the

classroom–and worse, to accept the way that their teachers define them and their literacy

practices. This pantoum reflects the egrocious power dynamics that preside over students’

learning. As teachers, as part of the education system, we have a role in determining what can

and cannot count as literacy, and who does or does not count as literate. I have watched my own

definitions and ideas about literacy change immensely over this semester.

I entered into the course and to the RWL program with a focus on writing, much more

than I was concerned with the R and L that make up the Reading/Writing/Literacy program. I

had survived my childhood through writing; I had taught creative writing for years, and I

desperately agreed with Ladson-Billings (2016) assertion that writing is a vital tool for

“liberation, empowerment, and self-determinism.” It did not occur to me how singular this focus

was. At the time, I might have even said the name R/W/L was redundant–why does literacy need

to be added at the end? I was not aware how prevalent the autonomous model of literacy was,

even within my own understanding of students’ practices (Street, 1984). I saw writing and

reading as the key (or only) components of literacy.

However, reading Rose (1989), I found myself enchanted by the way that community

literacy practice and day-to-day literacy engagement was elevated to the status of in-school

literacy. He called the newspapers and conversations he encountered on the train or in his

community as “textbooks”--demonstrating how this knowledge acquisition and learning context

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possess the same amount of importance as sanctioned school spaces and school texts. He creates

a picture of what it looks like for one person to “read the world,” suggesting that our adolescent

students are constantly “reading,” inquiring, creating, and making meaning in their communities,

homes, and in-transit through life. However, regardless of the undeniable wealth of knowledge,

ways of knowing, creativity, experiences, and ideas our students enter our learning spaces with, I

have seen, read, and been galvanized by the fact that this knowledge is often ignored, uninvited,

or punished in classroom spaces. Some ways of knowing and existing in the world are endowed

with power and privilege, while others, often the everyday language practices of

students–particularly students of color who are multilingual and transnational–are deemed

“inferior” (Orellana, et al., 2012). Why?

Gee (1991), in his attempt to define “literacy,” argues that certain discourses are

“dominant,” given preferential status over others; these dominant discourses are “intimately

related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society…[leading] to the

acquisition of social goods.” Our students’ literacy engagement outside the classroom is not

often seen as valid, and not often seen as literacy if it does match up with dominant notions of

literacy “learning.” Witnessing this process, in which students’ knowledge is not recognized or

invalidated, has been even more impactful than scholarship to absolutely demolish whatever I

thought I knew about literacy.

Over the semester’s fieldwork, I watched a brilliant and exceedingly creative 17-year-old

student routinely parrot the things he had heard about his literacy abilities– “I’m not good about

being creative,” “I’m a bad writer,” “I’m not good at English,” “I don’t read,” “I don’t know how

to close read,” or “I’m not one of those smart kids.” In between making these comments, he

revealed his daily obsession with reading sports and finance articles, his penchant for writing
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poetry, his bilingualism, and his keen and honed ability to analyze text messages and song lyrics

by discerning tone or scrutinizing punctuation. He was defined as struggling with literacy. Some

literacies are prioritized in the classroom space and seen as valid, while others are not.

Orellana et al. (2012) label our inability to see across in-school and out-of-school

contexts as a “false dichotomy” of language practices; we often conceptualize school and home

as being absolutely separate and disconnected from one another. She argues that this

understanding can “keep us from seeing continuities as well as discontinuities across contexts;”

it can prevent us from creating a classroom environment in which students feel able and “free” to

bring a fuller scope of the literacy practices into formal learning spaces (Haddix, 2018). Morrell

and Duncan-Andrade (2003) suggest the rich possibilities of shattering this “false dichotomy;”

they consider how we can teach critical literacy skills through engaging with what students

already know, and what they are already practicing outside of the classroom. For instance, the

authors suggest that we “utilize our students’ involvement with Hip-hop culture to scaffold the

critical and analytical skills that they already possess.” In other words, Morrell and

Duncan-Andrade recognize that students are already engaging meaningfully with texts outside of

the classroom, and instead of seeing that as separate, unrelated, or invalid, the authors invite

students to leverage the knowledge they already possess.

Students are, whether or not we want to realize it, engaging in multimodal literacy

practices across every context–as they walk home from school, speak with family, message their

friends across multiple platforms, or take photos of the world as they encounter it. Students are

already richly literate; they are already engaging with literacy in ways that we can only imagine.

It is partly up to us as teachers to rewrite that reality, to decenter our authority, to co-create a

classroom environment where students feel “free” to bring their full selves.
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“Sound” is not our possession; we are not the keepers, posessors, or disseminators of

knowledge. We walk into any learning space to find multifaceted and multiliterate people with

experiences and abilities we will never know the extent of. But if we don’t know how to look, we

will miss it; I want to do everything in my power to see and support what is already there.
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References

Freire, P. (1970). Chapter 2. Pedagogy of the oppressed, (pp. 71-86). New York: Continuum

Publishers.

Freire, P. (1987). The importance of the act of reading. In P. Freire & D. Macedo (Eds.),

Literacy: Reading the word and the world (pp. 29-36). South Hadley, MA: Bergin and

Garvey.

Gee, J. (1991). What is literacy? In C. Mitchell & K. Weiler (Eds.), Rewriting literacy: Culture

and the discourse of the other (pp. 3-11). New York: Bergin & Garvey.

Haddix, M. (2018). What’s radical about youth writing?: Seeing and honoring youth writers and

their literacies. Voices from the Middle, 25(3), 8–12.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2016). “#Literate Lives Matter:” Black reading, writing, speaking, and

listening in the 21st century. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 65(1),

141-151.

Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. (2003). Promoting academic literacy with urban youth

through engaging hip-hop culture. English Journal, 91(6), 88-92.

Orellana, M. F., Martínez, D. C., Lee, C. H., & Montaño, E. (2012). Language as a tool in

diverse forms of learning. Linguistics and Education, 23(4), 373–387.

Rose, M. (1989). I just wanna be average. From Lives on the boundary. New York: Penguin.

Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University.