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.