Gee's What is Literacy? Implications for Teaching

Some intervention efforts for the classroom were suggested during Gee’s What is Literacy? article:

1. Settings, which focus on acquisition, not learning, should be stressed if the goal is to help non-mainstream children attain mastery or literacies. These are not likely to be traditional classroom settings (let alone my ‘reading class’), but rather natural and functional environments, which may or may not happen to be inside a school.

2. We should realize that teaching and learning are connected with the development of meta-level cognitive and linguistic skills. They will work better if we explicitly realize this and build the realization into our curricula. Further, they must be carefully ordered and integrated with acquisition if they are to have any effect other than obstruction.

3. Mainstream children are actually using much of the classroom teaching-learning not to learn but to acquire, by practicing developing skills. We should honor this practice effect directly and built on it, rather than leave it as a surreptitious and indirect byproduct of teaching-learning.

4. Learning should enable all children—mainstream and non-mainstream—to critique their primary and secondary discourses, including dominant secondary discourses. This requires exposing children to a variety of alternative primary secondary discourses (not necessarily so that they acquire them, but so that they learn about them). It also requires realizing that this is what good teaching and learning is good at. We rarely realize that this is what good teaching and learning is good at. We rarely realize this is where we fail mainstream children just as much as non-mainstream ones.

5. We must take seriously that no matter how good our schools become, both as environments where acquisition can go on (so involving meaningful and functional settings) and where learning can go on, non-mainstream children will always have more conflicts in using and thus mastering dominant secondary discourses. After all, they conflict more seriously with these children’s primary discourse and their community-based secondary discourses, and (by my definition above) this is precisely what makes them “non-mainstream.” This does not mean we should give up. It also requires, I believe, that we must stress research and intervention aimed at developing a wider and more humane understanding of mastery and its connection to gate keeping. We must remember that conflicts, wile they do very often detract from standard sorts of full mastery, can give rise to new sorts of mastery. This is commonplace in the realm of art. We must make it commonplace in society at large.

I’d like to take up #4 specifically in this blog entry because it speaks to all children (mainstream and non) and allows an opportunity for them to look at their personal discourses in a critical manner. This is something that can be done in every classroom by every teacher for every student. Each has their individual dialogues, primary and secondary. The goal is not to teach the acceptability of one discourse over another but to learn about them in a way that shows students they all possess areas in which they exist and can work from, using what students currently have to create opportunities for success in school and other environments.