First Day of Fieldwork

I’ve only spent one day at Benito Juarez Community Academy, but these are a couple instances that demonstrate why I was so impressed:

Starting with the freshmen class this year there is a new IB program being initiated that will be throughout the school in four years.  On the day I was there the director of the program came in to discuss with each class personally the importance of their engagement in after-school activities and beginning awareness of the college application process through attendance of the college fair. 

At such a speech I characteristically rolled my eyes; my thoughts being somewhere along the lines of “really? College fair for freshmen!... And how can they make clubs mandatory, seriously.”  I might have actually said these exact words to Michael who was with me at the time.  To my great chagrin the students in the class all responded to this imposition on their free time with excitement, asking questions about different club meetings and the time of the college fair. 

Their reaction provided me with a much needed reality check: that basic information about the college application process is not universally innate.  While you can debate the appropriateness of a push for all students obtaining a college degree, there is no doubt about the need to align the disparity in who has access to this possibility.  The point being that for many students fulfillment of this aspiration is beyond reach, not just because of grades or money, but also from not being provided the literacy in the application process.  Knowing how to research, choose, apply, and overcome all the things that always go wrong in this tedious process.  Therefore, I take back my eye roll and applaud that Juarez is forcing these freshmen to at least start considering these future difficulties ahead and preparing them with the IB program to have an impressive resume.

My other moment of revelation during this day came in response to the content being carried out in the IB Freshmen English class I observed.  These students are finishing up a unit pertinently titled “Literacy and Power.”  After several days of reading articles, writing a personal “Literacy History” and completing research pertaining to the power of language in different environments(both known and unknown to the students), they were working on a final project applying what they had learned.  This final project entailed a presentation of a country of their choosing tied to a piece of folklore.  The presentation had to display norms that they chose based on some of the previous research they had worked on as a class.  They also had to analyze the folklore to demonstrate how it was reflective of the society from which it came.  The day after my visit the students were going to display these projects as a gallery walk to comment and respond to each other’s work. 

I thought this moment serendipitous as this unit aligned so clearly with the reading we’ve been doing(although it is maybe less coincidental when it is known that the teacher graduated from this same program).  Nonetheless, the unit brought to mind what we had so recently read in Beach, “Critical engagement includes critiquing how texts position readers and readers position texts based on discourses and cultural models…[and] is also useful in helping your students examine issues of literacy and power”(Beach 58-59).  The unit I witnessed succinctly and not so subtly(which I think is overrated with teenagers) was bringing the students into a position to examine their own literacy, place it in a position of society, and compare literacy in other contexts.