velvetpage | Entries tagged with literacy

I'm reading "Airborn," by Kenneth Oppel. It's excellent. I'm fairly sure that if I let myself pick it up again tonight, I won't actually sleep much. It's exactly the kind of SF I like the best - an alternate parallel universe, with differing technology that nevertheless holds together and makes sense.

And yet, the feminist in me can't help but notice that this excellent author, writing for the youth market and winning awards doing it, STILL isn't writing female protagonists. The story is told in the first person, from the POV of the cabin boy, and the female in the story is a wilful, bookish rich girl on a quest who pulls him in.

In other words, she's a smart, capable princess, in a secondary role. Her main job seems to be to get the protagonist in trouble that he can then get them all out of - or at least, the secondary plot is about him getting them out of that trouble.

There aren't a lot of young adult books written in the last thirty years with a female protagonist. (The His Dark Materials trilogy is one, though a boy comes into prominence in the second book; the Kate Pearson books are others. And the author of Ella Enchanted is another, but her protagonists are based on fairy tales and are either princesses, or destined to become princesses. I'm not sure if it counts.) Most of the others - The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke's books, Harry Potter, etc, etc - all male protagonists, even when the author was female. There are strong girls there - but they're always bookish supporting characters like Hermione. She's just as much a literary trope as the princess - in fact the bookish princess is not limited to Belle in the fairy tale world.

Maybe I should start writing for teens after all. Mind you, I'd be likely to simply cast a Hermione type in the starring role, because my favourite female characters are always like her. Annarisse was, Velvet less so, Eklaa in the new book is a lot like that. I understand that character type very well.

It's depressing. We've come so far on the road to equity, but our literature still has a glass ceiling hiding behind its historical genre roots.

Today I discovered what happens when traditional "assign and assess" teaching methods are carried to their logical conclusion at the high school level.

It a nutshell - futility. A large chunk of the student population and an equally large chunk of the staff feel that nothing they do really matters. For the students, this means they do very little. They only do work if they know it's going to count towards their grade. They don't put any effort into it beyond the absolute bare minimum - that is, they were turning in work that wouldn't get a B in my grade five class. On any given day, a third of the class is absent, and it's never the same third two days in a row. They have no motivation, no interest, and very little in the way of skills.

Meanwhile, the teachers fall into one of three camps. Either they recognize the futility of what they're doing and want to improve things so they can reach their students; or they deny the futility and their contributing role in it, just putting in time until they can retire; or they recognize the futility but believe that they are doing their job of teaching - it's the students who are falling down on the job by not learning.

I recognize it, because I've seen what that looks like at the elementary and intermediate levels. I've been there. I was mostly in the third group of teachers, with occasional forays into the second group.

I also saw what can start to happen when a group of teachers from the first group decide that they're going to change. I think over the next few years, that school is going to go through a complete and total makeover, and when it does, it will be because that first group of teachers - the ones who weren't satisfied with putting in time while their students failed - took it upon themselves to learn what to do and embrace a progressive teaching philosophy.

The other two groups of teachers are going to resist. They already are. There are math teachers claiming that literacy is not their problem, and they're very angry at having to sit through in-services that they see no relevance for. (IMO, the OFIP program for high schools is going to have to address this problem at the outset, or none of the changes they make are going to stick for long. They have to have suggestions ready for every subject area of simple changes that can be made to improve every subject area.) There are a bunch of teachers who will go to the in-services, do the bare minimum required of them, but in between they'll continue to teach as they always have so it won't stick. And there will likely be some who can't figure out how to apply what they're learning to what they've always done - and who are scared to try because it's overwhelming.

In any case,

hannahmorgan and I hashed out a plan of action to start getting her kids engaged in their learning, using the five big questions I posted about the other day and a bunch of magazines from the school library's magazine rack. The high school curriculum does require kids to read literature (read: novels) but it also has sections about media literacy that, according to

hannahmorgan, are mostly ignored by the English department at the moment. So she's going to start with magazine ads. They're not even remotely threatening, they have very little that must be read, they can be taken in almost at a glance, and the question of relevance is obvious - "Companies are putting these ads in these magazines because they want your money. Make them earn it!"

After she's got them used to asking those big questions about ads, then she can move on to other text forms, including novels. The questions are the same - it's the methods of communicating the message that change.

Meanwhile, she has to get their writing up to something that can pass the grade ten literacy test, in short order. I have fewer suggestions for this - other than getting them to write about things in the ads, and how the company writing the ads is trying to dupe them. They get to be jaded, angsty teenagers, and turn it into good writing! However, this is where she's going to come against that wall of well-developed indifference to anything academic. I know how hard that can be on resistant nine-year-olds; I can't imagine it's any easier on resistant fifteen-year-olds.

The literarily uncritical take texts (of all kinds - not just print) at face value. They fail to look for the author's point of view or bias. This is an immature and very dangerous outlook, because it leaves one with no resources to recognize or discredit bad information. Ensuring that my students do not grow up with this outlook is a big part of my job.

The first stage of critical literacy, however, is every bit as bad, and it's a lot more subtle. It's the stage at which the reader can identify a bias, can even point out all the evidence of a bias, but then makes a fundamental error: he uses the bias of the author as an excuse to discount everything the author has said. The reason this is bad: everybody has a bias. If you're going to throw out a work because its author is biased, then you're either throwing out everything or, more likely, you're choosing what to throw out based on what biases you agree with. You're judging the biases you disagree with as bad, and the ones you agree with as being unbiased and therefore good. Again, dangerous - there's no real criticism there. In fact, this is potentially more dangerous, because the person doing this believes himself to be critically literate. There's an inherent superiority in it which doesn't allow for learning. This attitude is the main reason why discourse stagnates - people run out of real arguments (or don't start out with any) and fall back on this. EDIT: This is also where the idea that "everyone has a bias, but not everyone lets it affect their work" comes in. That's not true. Sometimes people will try to keep their biases out of their work. Sometimes they won't. But whether or not they try, there will be bias in the work, and anyone who thinks they've found a "neutral" source has fallen into this trap.

The truly critically literate person recognizes one central fact of text creation: everyone has a bias. Bias is a slightly deeper synonym for point of view. It's the experiences, the knowledge, and the level of criticism that an author is bringing to their own text. The critically literate will then use that bias as a basis for evaluating the merits of the text itself.

For example: basal readers in the fifties generally included stories about men who went to work wearing suits, women who stayed at home with their children and had dinner on the table when their husband came home, and three or four children who had normal childhood problems like fighting with their sister. The text is biased, not in what it says but in what it doesn't say. It says that the families that count are the middle-class ones where Daddy wears a suit to work and Mommy cooks. It says that families that aren't white, aren't normal. It says a few other things, but one thing it doesn't say: it doesn't encourage the reader to look deeply for anything. It's a text about the surface of life. The author didn't critically evaluate it - or if he did, the evidence of that does not appear in the text itself.

The first group, the uncritical, immature readers, will look at this text and see nothing wrong with it. The second group will throw it out because it's so incredibly racist and classist, how can anything good come of it? The third group, however, will draw from it the attitudes that permeated mainstream culture in the fifties; they'll look for other texts that contradict this one from the same time period; they'll agree that there were, indeed, families like this, many of them, and their experience is no less valid because it wasn't complete for its time. They will look for what the text has to say, without expecting it to be a complete view of the time in which it was written. It's biased, of course. Everything is. That doesn't make it worthless.

*this post brought to you by the teacher in me, who is mildly disgusted with the so-called debate going on over in

canpolitik, which tends to have the second problem.*

Current Mood: pedantic

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Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

and Cabbages and Kings

The feminist in me. . .

Reinvigorating a failing literacy program

PoAC: A little note on critical literacy

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May 2020

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