p23-29 Green Stucco House

I’m really enjoying the characters and the feel of the culture and time period. I think it’s very easy, at least for me, to identify with a book like this, even one that’s incredibly outside my personal experience. However, one thing to keep in mind is that this is just a single story. Not all Black girls in the 60’s have mothers who don’t want them. What the shame is is that kids who don’t enjoy reading the way I do now and I did as a child, even though I don’t recall stories like this being readily accessible to me aside from Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry which I read the whole series of, those kid don’t get to read and experience multiple stories. A couple classroom techniques I could mention to my students could be having different students read different books and then sharing their stories in order to increase the multiplicity of available stories. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are other fictional stories that address this particular time period. Another option could be to use short non-fiction pieces such as news paper articles or excerpts from books to add in these alternative viewpoints in a time-period/cultural/event specific way. Another question that I usually address as part of contemporary realistic fiction is the idea also of how common the story is. I think I could tie in to that while teaching historical fiction to as a way of testing if the particular story is a wide experience or narrow or what elements of it go each direction.

p8-22 Golden Gate Bridge & Secret Agent Mother

The story is really well written and easy to get absorbed into, although as a good reader accustomed to reading fiction, slipping into new characters is a skill that I posses. I’ve always known that not everyone is as good at this as I am, which really speeds up how long it takes me to get through a book but also in how I am able to get enjoyment from a book. I think MESE has made me think more about other people having different “reading ability capital” especially in the Souto-Manning article that talks about adapting read alouds to better match cultural capital learned through literacies at home. One of the exercises that I do with my students uses the metaphor of going on a journey and considering what supplies you had to take with you, what you were missing, and how you were able to survive the journey given what you did and didn’t have. A lot of them don’t seem to get this at first but I usually use it particularly in response to reading a novel in verse (a challenging format) and a multicultural book (possibly challenging content). Perhaps I need to stress looking out for this type of thing with the understanding that each of their students will have different supplies given their cultural capital and that they are responsible for coming up with the adaptive techniques to help their students read and ideally enjoy these pieces of fiction while gathering some pieces of information from them. In my poetry class, Dr. Soter talks a lot about the importance of re-reading things and I have to admit that I never do this. I think that I’ve trained my brain to pick up on many things that other readers might not get at the first pass but I also need to consider the alternative perspective.

p1-7 Cassius Clay Clouds

“The last thing Pa and Big Ma wanted to hear was how we made a grand Negro spectacle out of ourselves thirty thousand feet up in the air around all these white people” p2 - awareness of social tensions, time appropriate and insider language (Negro) more on p5
“can’t no one knock down a mountain” p3- vernacular speech?
A friend pointed out that White children in books aren’t described as White but children of other colours are described. Delphine, Fern, and Vonetta aren’t physically described but cultural references are speckled throughout this opening scene. While I would have been aware of the tiny historical pre-MESE, I think I would have let a lot of the racial things “sit in the story” rather than focusing on them and thinking about the wider importance of these feelings and the difference between my experience and the characters’. The voice feels very fresh and open and the scene opening has a good amount tension as an attention grabber. The first person voice also makes it very easy to identify with the main character in a very active way.

My preparation before taking the big leap

Things to keep in mind while reading:

* The main goals of the project: consider how I read the book differently and how I would teach it differently given my explorations of multicultural and equity issues through this course


Theories to Review at the End:

1. Chimamanda Adichie: the idea of the single story
2. Michael Apple: hidden curriculum and ideas of conflict, especially within social studies/history, replication of social class structure
3. Sonia Nieto: socio-political context of learning, “everyone can learn,” accommodation, go beyond recognizing everyone to make learning better for everyone
4. Maxine Greene: dialectic of freedom, community, open spaces, understand shared humanity, classical literature examples
5. Gary Howard: culturally responsive learning, stages of White identity development
6. Bourdieu: cultural capital

* “Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).
* Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu defines social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."
* Cultural capital: forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system.
* Later he adds symbolic capital (resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige or recognition) to this list.” -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_capital

7. Geneva Gay: Voice and Visibilitiy p167, “counter memories” p 170
8. Patrick Camangian: autoethnographies, caring, connections
9. Mariana Souto-Manning: Literary practices in the home such as church, ideas of reality

African American churches were an important part of many children’s lives. Thus, during reading aloud and shared reading, JW and Marilyn chose books which brought words and illustrations to enhance (or to be associated with) texts that were already familiar to many children. Not only did the texts enter the classroom, so did culturally situated ways of acting. Marilyn and JW also created spaces for children to express themselves and let their bodies feel the text and the beat as opposed to quietly sitting during read aloud circle time. Marilyn and JW designed different kinds of read alouds—some of which were done standing up and with more active participation. In the beginning, the children felt a bit weary about such a structure as indicated by their looks and debriefing “interview” events, but soon the two kinds of read alouds became more of a hybrid form in which children were not necessarily dancing, but were using their hands to express the rhythm of the text. Children re-designed the activity with lots of fist movements. Yet, such redesigning represented just the beginning. The activities identified by the children as occurring in out-of-school settings were those that were redesigned by them based on the initial (re)designs presented by the teachers.
Another literacy practice observed in Latino and African American households was storytelling from a very personal perspective linked to culturally located moral messages—e.g., kinship, the importance of extended family, etc. JW and Marilyn observed that many of the ethical and moral teachings happened through oral stories based on personal experiences (26/37 households). When asking families later if the stories were true, the teachers found out that many of them were based on real occasions, yet constructed as realistic fiction with added details. Others were completely improvised. The “real” was a very ethnocentric concept—the central tenet of such stories was to pass on consejos (advice) by bringing them to life.



TO DO:
Watch http://www.learner.org/workshops/tml/workshop1/index.html# if time permits

* more TEACHING MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE: A Workshop for the Middle Grades available at http://www.learner.org/workshops/tml/index.html
* series with high school focus at http://www.learner.org/resources/series178.html for future reference

Ongoing List of Major Ideas:

Names and identity
“grand Negro spectacle”- proper behaviour in the mixed race public
Fear (FBI, COINTELPRO, understanding, affection, being needed, the mystery of their mother’s disdain)
Cultural conflicts- Chinese, even within the Black community, based on geography as well as skin colour
Cooperation and community- even how the three sisters work together, social conflicts even within African American communities, “We know the same things. We have to stick together” p178
Perception- esp. of the Black Panthers
Selfishness, freedom
Protection of those you love, those you are linked to by skin colour and other cultural affiliations
Power, bossiness, responsibility