TEACHER AS SOCIAL JUSTICE EDITOR:POWER, PRODUCT, PRAXISLee Heffernan

January 31, 2012

IUPUI

MOVING FROM A PSYCHOLOGICAL TO A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF LITERACY

…Teaching and learning to read is about teaching and learning standpoints, cultural expectations, norms of social actions and consequences. (Luke & Freebody, P. 208)

cracking the code making meaning

shaping for various purposescritiquing and analyzing

THE PRAXIS OF CRITICAL LITERACY

“radical interaction” of reflection and action (Freire, 1972)

“involves language in and for action beginning from the everyday words and knowledge students bring to class (Shor, 1999, p. 15)

Through praxis, human beings come to see the world as changeable, as subject to transformation (Crotty, 1998)

Initial Hesitance Connections Reflective Stance Actions Enthusiasm, Engagement Responsibility Appropriate Curriculum?

CRITICAL CONVERSATIONSIN READER’S WORKSHOP

RETHINKING POWER:

. The books and the children’s responses interrupted many of our long held assumptions about what third graders are capable of achieving and what is an appropriate curriculum for young children.

Heffernan & Lewison, Primary Voices, 2000

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Read Aloud Partner

Response Notebook

Writing Triangle

Talk Whole

Group Talk History Trail

Artifact

WRITER’S WORKSHOP? SOCIOLOGICAL STANCE?

Princess Meg’s Slumber Party! Jurassic Park II!

My Dog Buddy! The Big Game! The New Bike! Broken Arm!

RETHINKING PRODUCTS

In some classrooms, children’s writing is treated as sacred. Sexist, racist and violent writing is published simply because it is a child’s product….With a focus on the individual, there is not necessarily an awareness of students as gendered, cultured and politically situated people and the negative consequences of literature practices are not considered. Comber and Cormack, 1995, p.4)

LUKE AND FREEBODY 4 RESOURCE MODEL OF WRITINGCoding Practices

*How does writing work?

*What are the patterns and conventions of writing that can be used?

Text Meaning Practices

* What are the cultural meanings I can use constructing this text?

Pragmatic Practices

* What will readers do with this text?

* Which options are available for writing this text?

Critical Practices

* Which interests, values, and positions will I take up in this text?

* How might this text be critiqued and redesigned?

HeffernanAnd LewisonLanguage Arts,2003

CULTURAL RESOURCES…

Social issue texts Conversations Notebook connections Scanning notebooks for themes Proposal

Fiction or nonfiction? Storyboard – picture post its Draft Stages of Revision Picture book

CRITICAL WRITING PEDAGOGY

With a critical writing pedagogy, writers become textworkers, shaping their texts to maximize their intentions to influence readers. Student writers relocate the personal, and interrogate our stories within social and political contexts (Kamler, 2001)

RE-WRITING WRITER’S WORKSHOP

Intertextual borrowing and remixing lead to new, not mimicked texts

Writing as a tool for interrogating and changing…issues of harassment, domination and injustice in students’ lives

Writing collective “norms of the collective were to write social narratives based on themes that were generated from dialogues that began with social issues texts.

Lewison & Heffernan, 2008

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Shared cultural resources

Used fiction as a tool for constructing and analyzing shared social worlds

Participated in a writing collective, where writing is viewed as a form of social action

“I wrote this book about differences and teasing because people like me are teased because of their skin color.” ---- John

KAMLER --- CRITICAL WRITERS, CRITICAL TEXTS

Representation--- “what the writer produces is a text, a story, that comes from her, but is not her.

Analysis --- texts are powerful resources for interpreting every day life. Texts can be interpreted and analyzed in relation to cultural contexts of production.

Labor – A text is “made rather than found” and can be “remade and rewritten….”

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Language is more about forming identities than giving information (Gee, 1999)

“critical literacy involves using discourse analysis in such a way that we see that language is always fully situated in social and political contexts” (Gee, 2001, p. 2)

PRAXIS IN THE LUNCHROOM?

A sociological approach to literacy led these students to grapple with issues of citizenship---personal freedom and social responsibility, independence, and group identity.

Heffernan & Lewison, Language Arts, 2005

“My friendships have gone up and down this year. Segregation has also gone up and down. At our school, we have segregation between boys and girls. We sit in separate groups. We are working on that.

Alice, Rank and File Feminist, wanting boys and girls to get to know one another.

A DANGEROUS JOBTeacher As Editor

TENSIONS AROUND REVISION

Are they learning to revise on their own?

Are these stories co-authored?

LEARNING FROM EDITORS

COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET

Quite often, …the editor remains unsung. But why does it always have to be that way? More important, why should it be that way? …Why should the editor remain anonymous?... (S)hould editors continue to edit “in the closet” ?

Gross, 1993, xvi

We pay lip service to collaboration and social practices, but we ultimately value the image of the individual writer, working alone (Lensmire, 2000, pp 16 – 17)

MISSING IN ACTION: COMPLEXITY IN WRITING RELATIONSHIPS Tobin calls for writing researchers:

To move beyond either/or thinking---either we have authority or they do; either we own the text or they do; either the meaning is in the writer or the reader---toward a more dialectical definition. Rather than dichotomizing the teacher’s and the student’s roles, we need to see how they are inseparably related. (Tobin, 1993, p. 20)

3 RESPONSIBILITIES:WRITING THEORIES / EDITOR THEORIES

Text

Relationship

World

Process

Post Process

Critical

WRITING THEORISTS TALK ABOUT TEXTS

Process - Student owns the text, Teacher should teach the writer, not the writing (Calkins) Avoid directives, Ask questions. (Graves)

Post Process – Texts are public, interpretive and situated. Text = writer’s guesses about her ideas will mesh with the ideas of her readers (Kent, 1999) No recipe for success. Texts can always fail.

Critical – Texts = products of labor, representations rather than realities, culturally shaped and culture shapers

EDITORS ADDRESS TEXT RESPONSIBILITY

Texts are read not for their meaning, but for their potential meaning

Texts are editors’ primary responsibility (commitment to revision and readership)

Not a step toward future writing improvement

WRITING THEORISTS TALK ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

Process: Follow the child, respect the authority of the author

Post Process: Relations and situations are in flux, so writing can not follow “a systematic process with guaranteed results” Blyler 1993. Writing teachers mediate between the writer and potential readership.

Critical - Teachers are intentional about leading students toward taking “a rigorous critical stance on the experience they write about.” Kamler

EDITORS AND WRITERS = WORKING RELATIONSHIPS

Author’s intentions guide the revisions, Back and forth negotiation

Tact and tactics are used to enact and to check power

Neither is powerless, but the editor has more power, and more responsibility

Ideal: symbiotically moving toward mutual satisfaction

WRITING THEORISTS TALK ABOUT SOCIAL IMPACT OF WRITING

Process - Shifts in power relations within classrooms, affirmation of student voice, using writing to explore social worlds and influence others (Graves)

Post Process - Attend to context in which the writing is situated: writers and writing are implicated in structures of “power and domination” (Dobrin)

Critical - Writing is not only an analysis of power in the world, and in our lives, but is also an attempt to take up an activist agenda for justice (Shor)

EDITORS ADDRESS RESPONSIBILITY TO THE WORLD

Goal = Publish books that meet societal needs that have not yet been met. Work to publish “the risky, the new, the demanding work.”

“Discipline the marketplace while being disciplined by it.” G. Tobin, 1993.

Social goals of the small press: resist the status quo in bookselling; Publishing books in order to work for social change.

An editor’s list develops an identity, and shapes the reputation of a publishing house (Schuster, 1993)

SO THE TEACHER/EDITOR OF THE INDEPENDENT SOCIAL JUSTICE PRESS….

See texts as malleable, revisable Helps writers improve their texts, to

make the texts the best they can be Suggestions / Original Solutions Take responsibility for making the

relationship productive and respectful Approaches every project as a new

project Aims to publish works that meet social

needs and work for social change

METHODOLOGY AND THE METAPHOR Critical researchers / ethnographers

Critical epistemology --- presenting knowledge as communicatively structured and rooted within human interactions and experiences (Carspecken, 1996, p. 22)

Critical researchers acknowledge that society privileges some while oppressing others when doing research and their work is directed toward challenging and changing social inequities. (Carspecken 1996, Rogers 2004)

INQUIRING ABOUT THE EDITOR IDENTITY

How is the teacher as editor responsible to this text?

What are the tensions and satisfactions of the working relationship between editor and writer?

How does the teacher editor take responsibility for the social goods that are produced in her classroom?

FIRST STEPS: ANALYSIS OF THE ROUGH DRAFT: THE AUTHOR’S INTENTIONS

Four Resource Model: Asking questions about the practices and resources developed by the writer in the text

CDA: Analyzing the writer’s identities, and how these identities produce and reproduce our social and political worlds. (Gee, 2004, 48)

RHA allows for a reconstruction of what is usually unspoken or underlying in communication or action. RHA = based on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and offers a set of categories that are universal features of human communication.

SECOND STEPS: ANALYZING EDITOR RESPONSIBILITIES

Imaginative Metaphoric Analysis

Critiquing and exploring my beliefs Getting inside the work completely In the Margins Press Reflecting on my interactions with one writer,

and offering contradictory examples with other writers

Improvisational interview incorporates passages from the interview transcript with Daniel

ANALYZING AND PRESENTING RESEARCH WITH IMAGINATIVE / DISRUPTIVE GENRES

Research can be a “literary process” and involve experimentation…”Thomson disrupts the conventional sociological genre of third person narrative, analytic prose and indented direct transcript quotations with what she calls acts of delinquent storying” (Kamler,, 2001, p. 156)

Making a commitment to imaginative research renderings --- “tools for engaging in research must be more imaginative in order to better capture the local/global relationship”

(Blackburn and Clark, 2007, p. 23)

MEET THE AUTHORS OF IN THE MARGINS PRESS

Crowton Elementary Middle Class/Upper Middle Class Less than 4% F/R Lunch High Test Scores High Parent involvement Classroom – 26 students, 15 girls / 11 boys , 1 AA

boy, 3 Asian American girls and the rest of the writers were white

Daniel T. Bradley, Author Imaginative, Helpful, Emotional Farm Background, Big part of identity,

Redistricted Relationship with Dad – important resource

WORKING WITH WORK

Story Painter, the Life of Jacob Lawrence

Harvesting Hope Augustino Nieves

Testimony Coolies Working the Rails:

Irish Workers Carpet Boy’s Gift Fight for Child Workers! By These Hands Bobbin Girl

A DANGEROUS JOB

One blazing day me and my friends were playing with our remote control cars. Suddenly my mom came screaming. George your father got hurt. He fell out of his crane and broke his leg and arm. Frantically his friend Bodert came over and we waited.

George’s dad fell off the crane. He felt as if he was jumping into an eight food pool and he hit his head but luckily he had a hard hat on his head. So he tipped over and broke his right arm and leg. He heard sirens loud as a lion’s roar calling for him.

AS MY MOM TOLD ME…

to get the fire ready and she dropped me off and I got the wood and the matches and lit the fire and it exploded like a bomb, a German bomb and we cooked marshmallows.

Theme : stereotyping workers Reason: People stereotype my dad’s job Ideal reader: 10 – 20, because they can

understand

ROUGH DRAFT ANALYSIS

Child’s Play vs A Man’s Job Connecting: Father and Son, Young Boy with

a Friend Work brings power, but also risk

Range of cr resources: Notebook entries, Ideas in texts, favorite recess activity, stories about his father, interest in bombs, inquiry project about Anne Frank, Jeannie’s story about her grandmother’s house being bombed in WWII, construction equipment

11 READSRed Read - 23 errors

Green Read: Creating the Meaning Field Construction Work is Dangerous Anything Can Happen At Any Time We hope people who get hurt will get money. Kids should be worried about their dad’s job.

Orange Read: Craft – Similes and Snapshots

Blue Read: Take action for justice Worker’s Compensation Son defending his father

IDENTITY ANALYSIS: RESPONSIBILITY TO TEXT

Q: Daniel’s text, A Dangerous Job, seemed perfect for your list since it dealt with the theme of stereotyping workers. Is that what attracted you to his manuscript?

A: His text…did fit the social narrative genre…His story was barebones, but I could see potential there.

Though I’m directive, Daniel offers several surprising and strong revisions, new similes, interesting ambiguities, new connections between the father and son characters. His theme, meaning field, and text critic purpose guide the work.

Q: HOW DID YOU KNOW HE DIDN’T LIKE THE WORKER’S COMPENSATION SUGGESTION? DID HE TELL YOU THAT?

…The worker’s compensation revision wasn’t the smoothest, but I’m still attached to the idea of exploring worker’s compensation in a children’s book. … There’s no way to know now, but if I could re-edit that book I probably would have done a few things differently. But I may not have. I was intrigued with his work on that revision and how he worked on heightening the conflict between the father and his boss. I thought that scene was dramatic and made the father less of a victim.

Q: WHY REVISE THE TEXT FOR A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE?

A: In the Margins is a social justice press, so our books enact some dimension of critical literacy…In these texts, writers take a stand, and readers consider where they stand. Daniel had trouble with the blue revision, but he chose “take action for justice” as the work he wanted his story to do. So that was a guide for me when I made suggestions. I always kept in mind, how would these characters take action for justice?

Q: You rejected his first three blue revision attempts.

A: I felt a responsibility to the the text, to keep it realistic and in line with Daniel’s proposal.

Q: ARE THERE DRAWBACKS TO THIS TYPE OF WORKING RELATIONSHIP?

The writers are usually quite surprised when their draft keeps coming back because they haven’t experienced that level of editing before. Kyung Mi, the writer who wrote the gondola story… wrote me this funny note…”Don’t give me another suggestion! You gave me like 1 million (no offense) suggestions. I’m exasperating.”

Q: How did you respond to her note? A: I realized she had hit the wall and we

wrapped it up. At that point the suggestions I made were about small changes. I have to gauge the writer’s reactions to the editing work and that can be tricky….

Q: WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE THE THEMES YOU EXPLORE IN THIS BOOK?

A: I picked a theme of working, stereotyping work and the kids get in a big ol’ fight and the kid finally takes action for justice and (says) “You gonna keep makin’ fun of my dad, go home.” And I’d say probably the same thing.

Q: I BET YOU WOULD. CAN YOU TELL US WHY YOU WROTE THIS BOOK?

A: I just… I feel like…. I should write this book cause out of all the stories this is the one that probably….make kids change their life. Turn their life around.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about that? After a kid reads your book, what would they think?

A: I think after he reads it, he’ll realize, man….I really don’t pay attention to my dad that much. I haven’t worried about it that much.

Q DID YOU MAKE ANY REVISIONS IN BLUE, TAKING ACTION FOR JUSTICE?

Yeah, at first, that one fight wasn’t even in it at all. The two friends fight and the dad has a fight with his boss. At first I didn’t want to add anything. I just wanted to check it off and be done. I have to admit it cause I did.

Q: Do you think the writing template could be changed or improved?

A: I think you should keep taking action for justice…it’s the most powerful I think. Cause that’s when you really get into writing, that’s when you really get power and your writing changes, all of a sudden it just changes, everything changes.

Q: HOW DO YOU SEE DANIEL’S STORY SHAPING CULTURE? DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE IT CAN HELP A KID “TURN HIS LIFE AROUND?”

A: I don’t see why not. Books can and do change people’s lives. There aren’t many children’s books out there that focus on workers and their families. Daniel’s readers will see women and men as workers and can consider some of the consequences that come with risky, or dangerous, jobs. They’ll see that workers aren’t passive victims…They might also be inspired by a strong young character who takes action for justice by defending his father when his job is being ridiculed. Daniel stands by the power of his text and so does his editor.

OUT OF THE EDITORIAL CLOSET…

Praxis, Power, ProductSocial relations, Reflecting and Acting

through the publishing projectPower – Editor responsibilities act as a guide.

Product – High Stakes

Literacy as Symbiotic Social Practice Distinct identities in a working relationship:

Interactive, complex, negotiated, emotional

RECENT PROJECTSCritical Literacies: Visual, Digital, Global

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZEZine Writing and Critical Stance in the Middle School Classroom

QUESTIONING CRITICAL STANCE

Conscious Engagement?

Trying on Alternate Ways of Being?

Responsibility to Inquiry?

Reflexivity?

POLITICAL CARTOONING AND READER RESPONSEWhat kinds of readings and stances are produced by readers when they respond to a text with political cartoons?

POLITICAL CARTOON MISSION….

Think about the IDEA that connects to this book that is IMPORTANT to you!!!!

What do you want people to think about when you see your cartoon?

I NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD GO AROUND THE WORLDGlobal Literacy Research In Room 306

CRITICAL PODCASTING AND PARTICIPATORY CULTURES

NEXT STEPS…Critical Writing Pedagogies, digital literacies, on line publishing, publishing collectives