Literacy and African-American Boys: Shifting the Paradigm

University of Wisconsin Reading Research Symposium

June 26, 2009

Dr. Alfred W. TatumUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

atatum1@uic.edu

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In Memoriam

By

Alfred W. Tatum

June 11, 2009

2:09pm

He couldn’t kill the president

So he killed my dad

Does that make my dad a hero

I don’t know

But I know what it makes me - fatherless

Give me the strength

To love again

To live

For my dad’s sake

For the sake of this nation

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Pots for Shirley

ByAlfred W. Tatum2/3/0912:45am

I don’t wash pots

do laundry

mow lawns

I don’t

is what I told mommy

is what I told daddy

I don’t

but I wish I did

My life is moving way too fast

I don’t

is what I said

I do would have saved me

I hate the letters n & t

They destroyed me.

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Neformalna drama je relativno novi termin. Kojim se opisuje niz “na pozoritisu zasnovanih” aktivnosti posebno vrijednih u obrazovanju mlade djece. Vazno je znati o cemu govorimo kada se pozivamo na neformalu drama, jer, kao sto je poznati kanadski teoreticar dramskog obrazovanja Richard Courtney istakao, termini koje upotrebljavaju edukatori u razlietim zemljama i razlietim nastavnim nivoima razlikuju se i cesto su izvor zabune za ucitelje.

Neggeo teuie ejar?

Neformala drama i ________________?

Gageut Richard Courtney?

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Defining Our Times

• Accountability– NCLB– NAEP– AYP

• Diversity– Language– Shifting Demographics

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Defining Our Times

• Standards– Professional Organizations– State Standards– Content Area Standards

• Gap Focus– Reading achievement gap– Racial achievement gap– Opportunity gap– Preparation gap

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Malignant kinshipUndercurrents

• Social Class– Poverty

• Race– Impact– Dialogue

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Literacy is a work in progress. However, NRP and other policy documents shepherd in institutionalized practices that de-legitimize responsive literacy instruction, particularly to students experiencing some form of turmoil, that fails to aim at an agenda of reawakening their minds in order to redirect their actions. We have no clear platforms for progress.

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What is Our National Agenda?

• Major accomplishment? “I increased some kids’ scores.” (efficiency)

• Is this lesson part of a meaningful plan or strategy? (legitimacy)– How does such a lesson mobilize an

adolescent student? A group of adolescents?• As long as we subscribe to narrow goals we will

remain vulnerable as a profession.

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“We have 50 different standards, 50 different goal posts. And, due to political pressure, those have been dumbed down. We want to fundamentally reverse that. We want common, career-ready, internationally benchmarked standards.”

U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

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Current foci emerging from policy documents fail to account for the day-to-day realities of students (high performing, average, and low-performing), but particularly for adolescents and adults living in economically disadvantaged urban and rural communities where long term economic projections are not paramount because of immediate concerns engendered by poverty, violence, or other conditions that cause individuals to feel dehumanized and devalued.

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“There’s been a lot of rallies [meetings/conferences] but no one is doing anything about it”

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Crane High School

Chicago, IL

African American Male in a pool of

blood

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What are we going to offer this student when he returns to school?

a) A fluency strategy

b) Leveled text

c) Remedial reading class

d) Research-based strategy

e) Test prep (then)

f) Choice

g) Technology

h) Standards/evidence -based practices

i) Something more

What does this student need in school?

A) healthy psyche

B) A roadmap

C) Something deeper to compete with what’s happening on the outside (now)

D) Text and opportunities to write (now) - There is a story here that he does not quite understand or will have difficulty making it through)

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Poor Decoder/Limited Vocabulary

Who are you?I ‘ont know.

What do you what to be when you get older?What?

How long do you want to live?Huh?

Do you love yourself?Nope.

Why not?I just don’t.

Do you care about these questions I am asking?Not really.

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Why are you here today?My mother made me.

What do you see when you look in the mirror?I see me.

Who are you?I’m Daiquan.

What does that mean?It don’t mean nothing.

Daiquan means nothing?(no response)

How old are you?I’m ten.

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The Imbalance

Out of School Literacy Overload

In-School Literacy Under-load

Students often lack sufficient texts in-school to help critique, understand and compete with the texts they are exposed to on the outside of school.

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Key Questions1. Do we have the capacity to reconnect our young males to texts

- both the reading and writing of texts - a capacity guided by a clear conceptualization of the roles of literacy instruction for these young males being educated in this nation?

2. Are our efforts strategically comprehensive enough for the young males, particularly those who are most vulnerable because of cultural-ecological forces that have the potential to interrupt human development?

3. To what extent has our research and pedagogy been instrumental or neglectful to do both?

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1. Look for a conceptualization of literacy instruction strong enough and clear enough to guide literacy efforts in this nation to influence research trajectories and methodologies, instructional practices and pedagogies, and curriculum orientations. I am particularly interested in paying attention to the life outcome gap on a larger scale?

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2. Examine our field’s current operating paradigms and the emergence these paradigms.

3. Examine historical precedence, namely as it relates to the relationship between African American males and texts, both fiction and non-fiction texts with the goal of reconnecting today’s African American adolescent male with texts in meaningful and sustaining ways.

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Vital SignsR & W Readers &

Educators R&W

Instruction Educators Researchers

Provide the working tools and models

Word

knowledge

Fluency

Strategy knowledge

Writing

Language

& Language Use

Reading

Improving the human

condition (Why)

Home Life

Culture (D,E,G)

Environment

Language

Economics

Relationship

Rescuing the significance of

teaching (How)

Quality

Instructional Support

Text

Context

Assessment

Technology

Rigor

Interacting with students, not scorecards of achievement

(who)

Competence

Commitment

Caring

Culpability

Responsiveness

Utilizing paradigms that address socially

important problems

Interdisciplinary

depth

Knowledge construction

Epistemological

stance

???

Research

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What?

How?

P.O.C

How?

Why

What’s Our Paradigm/Ethos

?Usually Well-DefinedUsually Research-Based

Usually Skill/Strategy Focused

In Search of a “More” Anatomically Complete Model

Just one critical piece

Standards

Rescuing and Refining

Where are we paradigmatically?

Teacher/Principal/LC

Preparation

&

Teacher Professional Development

Effective Leadership&

P.O.C = path of convenience

Policy

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“More” Complete Framework

Curriculum orientations

The role of literacy instruction for adolescents

Approach to Literacy Teaching

Instructional Strands

Strengthen Assessment ProfileMediate Text to Support

Reading, Writing, and HumanDevelopment

Theoretical Strands

Use Comprehensive Framework for Literacy Teaching

Professional DevelopmentPreparedness Strands Professional Preparation

For Teachers and Administrators

Policy

This model also gives attention multiple conceptualizations of literacies/identities, some of which are situated within power structures such as class, gender, and race (Collins & Blot, 2003; Street, 1995) and identifying approaches to support teachers responsible for structuring the day-to-day activities of their students.

P.O.C

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Neither effective reading strategies nor literacy reform efforts will close the life-outcome gap unless meaningful texts are at the core of the curriculum and educators know how to mediate such texts giving attention to reading and writing (Tatum, in press)

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We do not have a clear [conceptualization] of literacy instruction for adolescent in the United States that translates into classroom practice. [Our national imagination is grounded in standards and test scores absent of clear ends.]

Without a clear definition of literacy instruction, overwhelming and embarrassing inconsistency in literacy instruction occurs and can be expected to continue across schools. Literacy experiences and how literacy instruction is conceptualized and practiced are characteristically different for adolescents attending schools in economically depressed environments and adolescents from affluent homes attending schools in affluent neighborhoods?

…Arguably, poorly conceptualized solutions to the adolescent literacy crisis … will continue to manifest in different literacy experiences and life outcome trajectories for adolescents on opposite ends of the economic continuum. (Tatum, 2008)

Paradigm/Practice Intersection

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Placing Three Rs Under Consideration to Restore

Confidence in Literacy Instruction

• Recovery

• Resilience

• Reconciliation

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Limited reading skills cause [adolescents] internal anguish. The pain many of these [students] experience may cause them to openly state, as I heard on a documentary on Douglass High School in Baltimore, “F*** academics, that’s for them nerdy mother*******. I am going to keep it gutter.”

This type of thinking cannot be interrupted by providing explicit skill and strategy instruction alone. There is something deeper at work here. We have to think deeply to counter a mindset that causes one to embrace the notion of “I am going to keep it gutter.” (Tatum, in press)

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Building Textual LineagesVital pathway to recovery/resilience/reconciliation

•Currently, there is an absence of useful research data on the impact of texts, both literary and non-literary, on adolescents’ resilience inside of schools and outside of schools and how to use texts such texts in schools.

•We need to begin to examine the impact texts have on nurturing resilience in adolescents.

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African American Males and Texts

The impact of text on the lives of African American adolescent males cannot be underestimated if the history of text and its influence on African American males are examined. Historically, texts have been central in the literacy development of African American males, with the connections among reading, writing, speaking, and actions eminently clear (Tatum, 2005).

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TL

MA MA MA

Du BOIS

MA

LENIN Wright MARXMarx MARX MARX GUEVERA

GARVEY WRIGHT Faulkner TROTSKY ROUSEAU PAINE LENIN TROTSKY

Textual Lineage1965-1975

Brown Carmichael Cleaver Newton

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Textual LineageReading

Dick Gregory(Nigger)

Malcolm X(The Autobiography)

Richard Wright(Black Boy)(Native Son)

William Henley(Invictus)

Gordon Parks(Learning Tree)

Booker T. Washington(Up From Slavery)

Frederick Douglass(Narrative)

Claude McKay(America)

Shakespeare

Macbeth

Edith Hamilton

Mythology

Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men

Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Textual LineageWriting

K.K.K

Research

Paper

Total Investment

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The Severing of Text LineagesOne of the Great Tragedies of American Education

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Dichotomy betweenEnabling and Disabling Text

Enabling Text –moves one to be, do, and think differently.

Disabling text –reinforces students’ perceptions of being struggling readers and writers and incapable of handling challenging, meaningful texts.

Opportunities to display dysfunctions and be

“identified”

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What are we going to offer this student to help him R/recover?

a) A fluency strategy

b) Leveled text

c) Remedial reading class

d) Research-based strategy

e) Test prep (then)

f) Choice

g) Technology

h) Something more

What does this student need in school to nurture his R/resilience?

A healthy psyche (now)

A) A roadmap (now)

B) Something deeper to compete with what’s happening on the outside (now)

C) Text and opportunities to write (now)

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Today I want to introduce you to a new concept“disaster capitalism” and how it affected one of America’s

most storied cities

The news racing around the shelter that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent (very important) Republican congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyist, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did (referring to Hurricane Katrina).”… “I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with the clean sheet we have some very big opportunities.” … lower taxes, fewer regulations (controls or laws), cheaper workers, and a smaller, safer city - which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of “fresh starts” and “clean sheets,” you could almost forget the toxic (deadly or poisonous) stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway… I call these orchestrated (planned) raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with treatments of the disasters as exciting market (money-making) opportunities, “disaster capitalism.”

From The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, pp. 4,6

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Example of a disempowering text orientation

For word study instruction, the teacher called out the words Agatha, Demarco, Adeline, Emilia, and pumpernickel. The students repeated the words. Then the students took turns reading aloud. He then had the students respond aloud to the assessment questions at the end of the text. They provided wrong answers for a majority of the questions. For each incorrect response, he provided the correct answer. The students were reading from a text that held little to no significance in the way that it was discussed. They were not provided with any explicit strategy instruction. The whole process was deadening for the students and me. The students were not becoming better readers or learning new information. This is borderline criminal.

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Problems of Pandering With Text/Literacy Instruction

• Does not suggest an urgent need for more and better education

• Reconciles them to failure

• Fails to restore confidence in the literacy education offered in this nation

• Suggests that we have unlimited time with unlimited resources– Classic problem of economic

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Textual forces

National backdrop

Economic backdrop

S/C/G backdropsCommunity backdrop

Personal backdrop

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I like the part when it say, “We got to let our own light

shine.”

It was the first slavery book I read in the 8th grade with a

group

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TEXTS, TEXT STARTERS, AND ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

(Sample from Reading for Their Life)

Text Text Starters Essential Questions

47 Š Walter Mosley And every night they chained your feet to an eyebolt in the floor. The men out there were mostly angry and so they were always fighting or crying of just plain sad. (p. 12)

1. What are the alternatives when someone tries to stamp out the existence of others? 2. Are there appropriate responses? Inappropriate responses?

Bang Š Sharon Flake A black boy donÕt get a hundred chances to get it right. Sometimes he just gets one. ThatÕs itÉY ou blow your chance, you blow your life. (p. 124)

1. Is the United States a redemptive society? 2. Is the society constructed to save some and sacrifice others?

Handbook for Boys Š Walter Dean Myers

The problem with so many young menÉ is that when theyÕre young, they really donÕt know how to get their lives togetherÉ After a while they just give up and start talking about how they really donÕt care. (p. 135)

1. How does one recover a part of his soul? 2. What does it take to escape vulnerable-producing conditions unscathed?

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Š Frederick Douglass

I often found myself regretting my own existenceÉ (p. 55)

1. What does it mean to exist? 2. What are the factors that contribute to oneÕs existence?

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About 75 million people died of the bubonic plague during the 14th century. Half of the population of Italy fell victim to the ______________________. The plague caused high _______________, swollen glands, dark splotches on the __________________, and spitting of blood. Most _________________ who got the disease ___________________ within a few days. The disease was ________________ from the fleas and rats. Lack of sanitation and poor _________________ account for the continuous plague epidemics throughout the 14th century. So many people died so ___________ that it was difficult to bury them in the _________________ way. The dead were ____________ without the usual prayers and ceremony. Dozen of people _______________ buried in a single big grave.

Using the Text to Teach the Text Monitoring Comprehension and Building Schema

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A,E,I,O,U count to 1 count to 2

Split consonant between vowels– bal / lad

Move one consonant between vowels to the next syllable– te / na / cious

Split neighboring vowels– jo / vi / al

Do not separate blends or word groupings that need each other– ous, qu, bl, cl, dr,

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This absence of research is contributing to policy, curricula and pedagogical misalignments that are not effective for these young males. The lack of research on African American male adolescents contributes to three major issues:

1) Many educators are failing to increase African American male adolescents’ engagement with text, and subsequently their reading achievement.

• Specific texts and text characteristics that engage African American adolescent males are strikingly absent (Tatum, 2006).

3) Educators find it difficult to integrate reading instruction to use texts to counter in-school and out-of-school context-related issues that heighten the vulnerability level of African American males.

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Life Course Perspective

Life course perspective (Mizell, 1999) aligns neatly with cultural-ecological theories that have an analytical bend toward out-of-school and in-school contexts, students’ identities, and structural barriers that exists in a highly stratified class based, race-based society. This perspective requires a broader conceptualization of literacy instruction for African American male adolescents who can be both resilient and vulnerable at the same time.

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Major Barriers Stand in the Way of Addressing the Literacy Needs of all Adolescents

No clear strategy has emerged on how to attain this goal

No clear definition of the role of literacy instruction “Scientific Casualties” - Numbers can determine their fate

Situated paradigmatically (role of courage here) “Minimalists” or “Maximists”

Educators disagree on how to provide effective literacy instruction for struggling readers

Educators and policymakers have focused on skill and strategy instruction while ignoring curriculum orientations, forms of pedagogy, and other factors found to be effective in increasing the reading achievement of students of color

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Where do we go?

• Design research and shape pedagogy to look at the intersection (s) of the vital signs that have emerged from multiple disciplines– Interdisciplinary Depth

– Theoretical grounding

– Focus on responsive pedagogy These increase the potential to shift the paradigm for

advancing the literacy development of African American adolescent males.

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CheckmateAlfred W. Tatum

He taught me how to play chess when I was youngerTo make all the right movesThe rooks, the knights, the pawns, the bishopsI could castle and use my Queen to protect myselfAll of these thoughts flashed in my mind when the car pulled up beside usIt’s 12:15 amI am eighteen, sitting on the passenger’s sideNo where to move, no strategyI thought about learning chess when I was youngerThe young man in the other car lifts his hands – checker hands, TIC, TAC, TOE handsI was no match for himI thought my scholarship letter would save me – it was my next moveMy buddies scream firstI’m hit nextCheckmate – game o v. .

5:37am after a sleepless night on August 10, 2008

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It’s not just about students’ literacies, it’s about their lives.

Tatum, 2005