Saturday
February 09, 2008
At the statewide No Child Left Behind conference on Wednesday, the lunchtime keynote speaker was Alfred W. Tatum, an education professor at UIC. He spoke on the challenges of engaging adolescent males - especially African-Americans - in reading.
He focused again and again on the importance of text:
Students aren’t getting texts in school to help them critique, understand, and compete with the texts they are exposed to out of school.
Essentially, he despairs that schools are giving up on teaching struggling readers by focusing the curriculum on basic reading comprehension of texts with no meaning. He told the story of observing a student teacher trying to tutor a struggling 16-year-old boy with a Berenstain Bears book. Possibly at his reading level, but anything but appropriate for his life experience.
In a related Educational Leadership article, Tatum expands on this idea:
History is laden with these kinds of enabling texts for African American males. An enabling text is one that moves beyond a sole cognitive focus—such as skill and strategy development—to include a social, cultural, political, spiritual, or economic focus.
During the last 30 years, however, the kinds of texts that African American males as a group encounter in schools have been characteristically “dis-abling.” They lack that broader perspective and largely ignore students’ local contexts and their desire as adolescents for self-definition, focusing instead on skill and strategy development. This shift is largely influenced by policy decisions to measure reading output using psychometric instruments.
These instruments, the use and misuse of the data resulting from these instruments...had dire effects on African American adolescents. These practices have created an oppositional identity in students, a resistance to school-related tasks, and a diminished sense of self as an academic being.
The article includes a list of suggested enabling texts. Also check out this TEN blog post for a related conversation.
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