Discourse Discourses and Promoting Identities in Classrooms for Literate Learners. A Task That Helps to Bring Readings Home

Many of of the readings for Best Practices in literacy and writing instruction address the big D / little d discourses often upheld and/or held down in academic settings and yesterday we read Dr. Delicia Greene's great work about literacies of Black girls in digital spaces. The examples she deconstructs and promotes were fantastic, especially while discussing the super diversity in U.S. classrooms and the failure of many to accept them, celebrate them, and to teach the academic discourses often favored by school institutions. 

To hit a point home, I simply ask students to give me a topic people talk about and in pairs, talk at their table as if they are different people. Last night's crew said, "Vacations," which seemed relevant as our University's spring break is next week. I then flip through a series of couples and have them become individuals at their tables, drawing on their assumptions, their change in dialect, the items they talk about, the stereotypes, and the comedy that comes from any writer who pushes against such constructions (I remember vividly loving Pfifer's People, a play, when two old ladies on a porch we're discussing the boredom of senior citizen living and the need for excitement in their life - comedy works this way). 

The point I was making, drawing on Gholdy Muhammad, Beers & Probst, and Greene, is that we have assumptions all the time about our students, their literate lives, and the way they read their words and worlds. Academic literacy (especially writing) is a 2nd language to us all (thanks, Mr. Austin, for that quote from my dissertation days). 

The activity works with teachers, with elementary-aged students, with older students, and with college students. In bird-like parroting, we're conditioned towards assumptions and our ears are attuned to themes/topics/vernaculars, etc. that comes from the diverse language practices of human beings. 

The question posed to them is what do you champion and/or police in your room and why? What stories are allowed, celebrated, and coached? Which ones aren't?

My students do textual lineages because of Dr. Alfred Tatum, and I often position this conversation with the languages/literacies promoted in school. You can guess the books they've been taught and the lacking diversity in prose or representation.

That's the point. And we deconstructed my whacky teaching styles, choices in texts I teach, and intentionality in what I assign with reasons why. 

Not many of us could hit the private jet couple, even though we did discuss what might be discussed amongst them. Then we played with mixing conversations with different populations and wondered why would it make us laugh? 

Nuns playing football. Now that would be a great game to watch.