Reflections on the act of reading/discussing one text with a group of people

In my response paper based on my reflections on the process and content of my group presentation on Literacy Practices as Social Acts by Cynthia Lewis, I chose to engage the issues of peer led discussion (partnerships or book clubs, as we are familiar with in the Workshop model) and the notion of authority and power in our classroom’s culture.

I am curious about and would like to question Julia’s (the classroom teacher) choice to create routines and common practices such as giving ‘teacher’ or ‘mother’ roles to certain female students during peer led discussions. The reinforcement that these students had power was evident by their consistent responsibilities to monitor ‘bad’ boy behavior and the direction of the conversations about books. I asked myself if I had seen this in classrooms I conducted fieldwork hours in, and my answer was most definitely. My confusion occurred when thinking about how it was possible that classroom teachers couldn’t see that by assigning leaders or monitors in hopes to manage classroom behavior was taking away a crucial element of the peer led discussion, that all students felt their voice was welcomed, valued, and heard. This purpose and function of the peer-led discussions was practically impossible to achieve when students were entering talk already assuming roles of power or submission: “Rather than decentering power in the absence of a teacher as they are meant to do, these peer-led discussions often gave dominant students a position of power” (p. 116). Such structures, as Julia practiced, were creating a classroom culture that allowed for the continued negotiation of social roles that students found they fit into. I found the book to offer an opportunity to bring light to these types of negotiations, and suggested that conditions such as ability, age, and gender were fueling negotiations of power. I hoped for more obvious classroom application, although recognizing these conditions exist during peer-led discussions can help an educator look for ways to eliminate this shaping of performance.

Secondly, I’d like to reflect on my inner dialogue that existed when reading about the teacher’s open admittance to her favoritism of girls over boys because she had more to relate to with girls, as she had may daughters, and found her life experiences to lend themselves more to the girls experiences in the classroom than the boys. During the routines of her read-alouds, in an attempt to ‘claim a community’ and identify the importance of common bonds, tensions and contradictions were exposed that created avenues of power and status. These routines that Julia practiced in her classroom created and exemplified a clear divide between the boys and the girls of her classroom, in how they responded to their teacher, the texts they were encountering, and each other. In multiple ways, these rituals positioned students’ relationship to power and status whether it is on the rug during read-aloud, in small peer-led discussions, independent reading, the lunchroom, or outside of school all together. This sparked thought about how teacher’s choice (giving older girls in the classroom power), although perceived as well intended (help instill order and management during classroom activity), when not considerate of the effects it has on social positioning or negotiation of their students is silencing the voices of so many in the classroom, which is shaping their thoughts about their role(s) in the classroom and world around them. It was true that these students and teacher manipulated the social codes available to them during literacy practices, but an advantage of such is the ability to ‘try on’ different roles: engaged learners, passive learners, resistant learners, leader, risk taker, friend. Over all, I took away that when Julia gave up power, it was evident that students (several in particular) came through to gain it creating dimension and change in the social roles of students during literacy practices in the classroom.