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Today I listened to CLIP 36 and 37 and they both showed so much about the dynamic power that children have in their world. In the first one, students were working together as an artist, a business manager and a consultant. They were doing things like conducting surveys about student interest in drawing and what kinds of drawing they were interested in. They also involved math into this by having sale prices for their drawings as well as figuring in tax. This was all done in school, but outside of the normal curriculum. Students were able to express their differences and show their strengths in different areas. The business manager was able to sell the drawings by convincing the buyer that they wanted one as well as being able to do the math to figure in tax. The consultant also conducted surveys so that he could advise the artist about what students were interested in and what kinds of drawings that they would buy. The artist also got to use his skill and be able to charge for it as well as working with others for the whole process to be successful. Many students do not take this much initiative to try and sell drawings through a whole carefully planned and thought out business system.
Children do also have power over their parent’s purchases. Toy packaging is designed for children to see it and immediately want one. In designing Pokemon they found their demographic. After all the years it has been on the air it has still stayed popular. Many other shows come and go so quickly if they are not as able to capitalize on the children’s interests and make a profit. In using food as well as toys children see them everywhere. And being on food makes them that much more prevalent and make the children’s desire for them greater. Most children don’t even know about how the market manipulates them and their desires into their own profit. Their marketing phrase of “Gotta Catch Em All” is genius because children do want them all. And very few of them realize why this all is. In this clip one of the students had his moment of realization where he saw how the market has been targeting him to collecting. But it did not seem like it bothered him very much to realize how much be was being used in their plans for generating profit.

Everyday curriculum...

In this reading the children’s classroom focus was on Power Rangers which is not uncommon for children to be very into the figures they admire from TV shows. But violence in the classroom is also unacceptable. Students should explore their interests, but not in a way that could cause harm to other students. In banning students from this type of play does protect them physically but changing the play so that it is creative without the violent play is much more useful and productive. When taking away students favorite activity they all migrate towards another one as a flock because none of them want to be left out of whatever is the fun activity going on.
The issue of social justice came up again in this. The opportunity for a conversation with the students about these actions had to be taken up. When the ban was lifter students went back to their Power Ranger phase, but in a different way than before. They showed a separation of gender than had been present but became even more present within the classroom. When the boy was drawing the Pink Power Ranger he talked about how he didn’t like pink because he was a boy but his mother liked pink and since she was a girl it was okay. The media constructs gender in certain ways and society usually tries to follow these stereotypes. Boys are dressed in blue and girls in pink. But these stereotypes don’t continue through to other cultures. In other countries baby girls are dressed in blue. So having the female Power Rangers colors be pastel while the male color are much more bold also says something about females. Student’s especially younger ones want to conform to their perception of the male and female roles. But social justice and equity need to come from the students in thinking about and dealing with these matters. This show raises so many issues beyond the gender stereotyping. It also shows the males as controlling the power while the individual Power Ranger colors are associated with specific genders and races as well as with the cultures.
Teachers do really need to know about the types of things that are most important to their student’s lives. This will help them to help their students deal with the types of issues raised in these activities as well as help prevent much of the negative stereotyping that students begin seeing at such a young age and then spend the rest of their lives trying to conform to them. This will help the teacher to make material much more relevant to all of her students because they will know their students and their interests much better.

Hilary Janks is a really fascinating educator. She talks about different kinds of literature and how many times everything is separate into genres. Literature needs to be shared to children in all of the forms that it comes in. Students need to begin their multicultural education by being exposed to everything that is out there in all of its form. In separating books and only reading certain ones students are being deprived of things that they should be learning about. Society need to be doing more for a fuller and well rounded education for all students. The dominant books in the culture need to be balanced with a variety of everything else. The classroom is a place where there need to be room for children’s ideas so that they will have a place to express themselves. Children’s ideas need to be accepted and explored in an educational setting so that children do become more confident and secure with themselves and their thoughts.
She also uses range of experiences to show how different students do get different things out of different activities because they all come in with diverse background knowledge and abilities as well as their interest levels. She also used an example of students sharing resources to gain a more powerful learning experience in being able to get closer and more involved in the subject matter. Gaining access to these things are vitally successful for the classroom because students need to learn how they can gain knowledge on these subject matters. Students are learning how they can individually make a difference which is also important. When serving for Americorps we tried to teach our students about how they had the power to change small things and to make themselves more successful as individuals. This never impacted them terribly much, but we always tried to show them how with knowledge came power. Giving students this power helps them to make a difference.
Through design of language students are receiving text through reading and producing text through writing. They are making and remaking texts to better fulfill the needs. There is a wide range of systems used in reading as well as in writing. Writing works very differently than reading though because you can read a classroom or anywhere else you travel because it works across so many dimensions, but writing doesn’t; which is why it is so important for students to learn how to become proficient writers in the classroom because there isn’t anywhere else where they will learn how to produce it.

So this reading was really interesting to me since I am still not in the classroom because it shows a lot of variety in perspectives of acquiring knowledge. The idea of teaching and learning to the fourth power is pretty different from other ideas in education. They take the students to explore knowledge and learning in different ways through a variety of different strategies and mediums. But the problem with this as well as all programs is that not all programs will work for every student.
In Hawaiian teaching and learning are the same word which is really how the learning experience should occur. Teaching and learning are interdependent relationships and occur from experience. Teaching and learning are the pursuit of creating relevant knowledge, inspiring students to form their own ideas, and creating relationships which all help to lead to academic success. They are trying to teach students how to become agents of social change and be able to think and act for themselves which requires and educational system that supports their ways of being able to develop these characteristics. Districts are looking for the root of the problem so that they can fix it, but this may be harder than they think since Hawaii used to have one of the highest literacy rates in the west. But this was before it was taken over and its language and culture were taken away and public schools were forced to teach all students in English. This change definitely had a major impact on the lives of Hawaiian people and their whole way of life.
But blaming the educational system for student’s failure is not going to help the situation. A change needs to take place and soon before more students are left behind. But native Hawaiian students are falling behind their classmates in Hawaiian schools. There are many reasons that certain groups of students can fall behind their classmates. Coming up with the goal to provide students with culturally relevant methods to motivate them to become lifelong learners is a great idea but this may not reach all of the students involved and who need to become involved in their own learning process. In the past school systems focused on giving students dominant, mainstream, and Western ideas. But these are not all culturally relevant to any group of students as a whole.

Second half of book...

So in the second half of the book the students in this class continue to amaze me. For 3 to 5 year old students they do some pretty incredible and bold things that I would have never imagined. They use petitions and letter writing for social justice. They show that they have the power to change the world from such an early age which is a value we want to instill in children. The teachers role here is to use the students questions to offer ways for them to take action and to explore and learn within their world. Engaging critical literacy calls for student questioning of existing definitions of community. The critical perspective offers teachers a way to think about what students are learning to read and write, what they are reading and writing, and what reading and writing does for them and their world. This enforces the importance of literacy at such a young age.
With all of this knowledge and power being instilled in them so early they don’t fear sticking up for themselves and others in situations. When they encountered the problem of one of their classmates couldn’t eat at the barbeque they took action into their own hands. This act of social justice expanded into them notifying other schools that they might be facing the same problem of a student who couldn’t eat at school events through letter writing which was expanding their literacy. They are making other students in other classrooms as well as school faculty more aware of equity. They have values and beliefs they are supporting as well as raising money for causes that they believe in.
They also use McDonalds happy meals as a text. They see the gender issue of the toys that are placed inside, how the company markets to children through the toys; how the toys are regularly changed for collectability as well as how much of a financial equity it is for student whose families do not have as much money. They also see children’s power over their parent’s purchases in all aspects of life. Everything in this classroom is so ideal and student generated including their list of what they through next years class should know. If all classrooms could work in this way there would be so many more actions taken for the improvement of our world. And it really would make it a better place to live.

First half of book...

In this reading there were some things I really agreed with and some that I did not. I did not like the idea of using assimilation to try and conform all of the students. They are different and each individuals who should not be expected to be the same as their surroundings and their classmates. I also did not like the idea of using humility as a punishment tool for students. Students will always make mistakes even if they are doing the best they can and it is not always about being right, but learning something along the way.
This book also reminds me of another one of you books that I read last semester, Getting Beyond “I Like the Book”. Since they are both based in critical literacy practices naturally it makes sense that their ideas do overlap. The practices of focusing teaching on the students overlaps and its really great to be able to read a second book to gain more insight into critical literacy.
Children not being restricted to their desks is a great practice, it gives them more space to explore their own ideas and learn at their own pace and follow their own ideas. But I do have doubts about how well this would work in an elementary school rather than a nursery school because so much is student started and motivation based that one unmotivated student could throw the balance of the classroom off. There is also an open connection with parents, which will probably be a good one but some negative parents could be against all of these innovative ideas of adventure and want a set curriculum for their children to follow, which goes against the whole theory of critical literacy in this classroom environment.
However, I really like the ideas of basing the classroom structure around the interests of the students because this is a great motivational strategy for the students and it inspires their creativity and the asking of questions. I also like how the book says that critical literacy programs cannot be taught and that they must be lived. There is so much that needs to be done through examples and practices and cannot be put onto paper. Children’s inquiries become the focus of the classroom and learning which is amazing, not having a set curriculum to follow and being able to explore is great, especially for young students. Having the children be able to make their own reflections and being able to post them is an inspiration to the other students because of all the ideas that it will spread between the students. As my final comment I just wanted to write about the audit trail. I think it is amazing that students have generated all of those wonderful ideas and been able to express themselves in ways like this where there is an open forum for discussion and nothing is deemed wrong because of the classroom structure. Everything is open for exploration and the chart in the book showing this trail just showed so much thought that went into the planning and implementation of it into the classroom environment.

Critical Literacy

There is no single one way to define literacy or a literacy program. In the Australian culture of reading four very specific roles have been defined, these roles include; Code breaker, meaning maker, text user, and text critic. But these roles are also more defined by those using them such as the teachers, students, and school systems that have put them into effect. Different strategies may work very well with one group in a classroom but not with another so that the individualization of this system plays a major role in its success. Cultures and rituals also have major impact of this programs effectiveness, but this is true about any program relying on people. This is why teaching literacy cannot be a scientific practice because there is no one set guaranteed way of working a program. Teachers should pick a program but always be flexible to change depending on literacy needs of students and the same program may not work for everyone. Teacher control is also important in implementing these practices even though it sometimes goes against the correct political opinion teacher support is needed. Teachers need to be able to incorporate reading and writing practices into what they teach. Teaching practices do need to be varied to meet the varied needs of the students. The same practices will not always work which is why varied practices are needed within the educational system. There are all sorts of combinations of practices, which will work in more effective ways for different teachers and their students. There are all kinds of varieties and combinations of everything that can be implemented that the system needs to be flexible in order to accommodate these types of differences and ideas into the curriculum.