Juarez and Literacy

I failed to notice the invite for our last post before I had already written it, so I'll just make some comments about my observations for this week.

So far, my experiences at Juarez have been truly educational. The school has shown me that the common image floating around about the inner-city, largely low-income high school need not be a chaotic madhouse where learning doesn't happen because teachers are so burdened with classroom management. Instead, Juarez reminds me a lot of the high school that I went to in the 'burbs. The building looks even better than my school. Add on the brand new auditorium, the plethora of student clubs and activities, all the major athletic teams, AP classes, and an IB program, Juarez seems like a pretty good place to receive an education.

What I find most surprising are my mentor teacher's classes. She teaches three College and Career Readiness electives classes and two IB classes. All five are freshmen level. Neither of them are literature heavy, although it is a part of the class. For instance, during my first two full days of observations, the classes have gone over globalization, consumerism, watched the fabulous documentary "Park Avenue" (Watch it if you haven't seen it. It's on Netflix), and have begun research on a topic of their choosing. They will be moving into language and rhetoric as it appears in the media concerning immigration for the CCR classes and a language and power unit for the IB classes.

I love literature, and I can't wait to teach literature. But sometimes I forget how much bigger the concept of literacy really is and how much that entails. As English teachers, we are responsible for not merely teaching great novels and stories but also the dynamics and usages of language. The idea of literacy as a social act, as Beach argues, really comes through here. Students in my mentor's classes are learning how everything they do revolves around the access and restrictions to language. Who determines what correct literacy looks like? How do people use language? How is language a tool of manipulation and power?

These are just some of the questions inherent in the teaching of English, a daunting task to be sure but a privilege at the same time. Most of my future students will not like Steinbeck or Dickens as a result of my classes, but hopefully they will leave my class, and every other English class they have, equipped with better capabilities to decode and recognize, and thereby overcome, the inequities of literacy.

Cheers