Students face the new school year with
their own special blend of excitement and apprehension. Each year of high
school brings them closer to the enormous change of passing from childhood into
the adult world, and, as much as they crave independence, they know it comes at
the price of increased responsibility.
 |
I want to break free! |
And then prom comes and everyone's singing,
"This is our last dance, this is our last dance . . ."
Do you remember? This girl does. That's me below, in the middle, high school graduation, May of 19nevermind, pondering Mercury/Bowie, MacNeice, and the meaning of life.
 | |||||
| "Oh, $#%+! What now?" |
Students today face the same pressure and uncertainty. Most
of them feel they are ill equipped for what lies ahead, and I fear too many are
right. Our job as educators is to prepare them, yet we often doubt whether we
are equal to this task. In addition to language barriers and learning
disabilities, many of our students come to us with problems that, while
unrelated to school, affect their readiness to learn. A quick look at the info
graphics the sophomores and juniors created for their first assignment tells me
that at least two of them have children of their own. A number of these
students have documented problems with self-doubt, anxiety, anger, and
depression. Most of them have jobs after school and on weekends, some to help
support themselves and their younger siblings. In the face of so many competing
problems and pressures, how can we engage students in learning so that they
leave our classrooms ready for the world that awaits them?
One obstacle to engaging students is proving to them the
value of the work we require them to do. Surely you remember this as well. It
is the same for college students. English education majors complain about the
need for a statistics class while all other education majors bemoan the
requirement of passing linguistics. Teacher candidates should be forced to take
a vow that they will always remember the trials and tribulations of their own
time as students and strive to provide content with more apparent relevance and
real world application. But what does that look like in practical terms? Most educators
choose to teach a subject they already find relevant and interesting. How can
we help students to see it as such?
As I continue to develop my ideas for using social justice
as an overall focus in my classroom, I have been reading numerous books and
articles on the subject, and a common thread in the majority of directing
student work toward authentic purposes and authentic audiences. The framework I
am reading about and envision for my own classroom allows students to choose
the issues or causes that interest them and then focus their academic work on
drawing awareness to those issues and finding solutions. Rather than writing
for a grade or for the teacher, students do work they care about, others
outside the classroom see their work (which often increases effort), and their
work matters: relevance.
Randy Bomer addresses the topics of student engagement and
relevance from the outset in his book Building
Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms. He speaks of students
“developing habits of engaging—ways of becoming involved and invested in
literate tasks that are significant to them” . . . “because of the ways the
literate activity connects to other things in life that matter to them” (3).
Bomer concludes, “English should, instead [of being about the isolated study of
literature], become about reading and writing lives, about participation in
literate communities within the classroom and beyond its door” (9). Jessica Singer Early expresses a similar goal
in Stirring Up Justice: Writing and Reading
to Change the World. In this slim volume Early describes lessons in which
“students use reading and writing to learn about and participate as agents of
change” (1). The result is a
high-interest curriculum that engages students, connects learning inside the
classroom with life outside of school, motivates continued learning and action,
and teaches skills that remain useful beyond high school or college graduation.
Most importantly, a focus on engagement, relevance, and real
world application empowers students and equips them to succeed in life. It
addresses the needs of the whole person across a the span of a lifetime rather
than presenting education as a series of hurdles in a brief race to graduation
with no track career beyond or further need to run.
As much as I enjoy dreaming up ideas for my own classroom, I
want to begin helping students understand the value, relevance, and application
for their learning right now in my student teaching. I am so privileged to work
with this group of young people and to help them be and feel adequately
prepared for life beyond high school.
References:
Bomer, Randy. Building
Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2011. Print.
Singer, Jessica. Stirring
up Justice: Writing and Reading to Change the World.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006. Print.
