Literacy with an Attitude

    

    Patrick J. Finn argues that there are two types of literacy taught to students: powerful literacy and functional literacy. He argues that powerful literacy is often taught to upperclass students which "leads to positions of power and authority" while lower class students are taught functional literacy which "makes a person productive and dependable but not troublesome."

    Finn discusses a study that was done on different class levels of schools and highlights the main similarities and differences between the schools. The first thing that I noticed is that I teach at a working class school and I can confirm that my school does run very much like the study describes. The school thrives on discipline and students are rewarded for good behavior rather than creativity. In many ways they are graded based on discipline as well. Reading this study was a rude awakening when compared to other schools because you see the flaws in how your own school is run however, I have to say that the issue feels a lot more complex than it reads on paper. In my school, we deal with many safety concerns due to behavior. If we do not run a tight ship where the teacher is an authoritarian model students start fights, are inappropriate in the bathrooms, and have even left the building many times and this is in an elementary school. Now, not all teachers are necessarily yelling at the students at all times but teachers who do not run their classroom in the way described in the study for working class schools, have typically had more safety concerns from what I have observed and since I see every class in the school, I would like to think this is a fairly accurate observation. I can also speak from my own experience as a first year teacher. I had student taught at a school in Providence and the fifth graders there were tough and I thought that everyone was exaggerating and they just needed more freedom and creativity with assignments that mattered to them. So when I found out that I was going to be working in Providence I had already started brainstorming creative projects that the students would be interested in doing but even though I set clear classroom expectations, giving them the little bit of freedom led to them walking all over me and losing control of the classroom. This could be due to my lack of experience but I'm just not sure it's as simple as teaching in a different way because these students grow up differently than students in other classes and not all idealistic methods may be best. 

    Another point that I found interesting is that this almost conflicts with Delpit's argument in a way. Delpit claims that we must explicitly teach our students because by teaching them implicitly we are doing them a disservice. We should provide our students with the exact steps to succeed rather than probe them to come to what they think the answer should be. Finn on the other hand seems to believe that by explicitly giving lower class students these step by step tasks that lead them to the answer we are doing them a disservice and that the affluent classes who are probed to come to what they believe the answer to be on their own are much better off. In my opinion there should be some sort of middle ground between the two where students are given the exact steps needed to succeed but then are given further learning activities that probe students to use what they've learned to try to discover something else or to think creatively. 

    The final point I would like to discuss is that, at least in my personal experience in education, I have not really been taught about overall how to run a classroom to create a productive learning environment for students, I have instead been taught about how to simply manage a class. This may be the downfall of not being educated as a regular classroom teacher but I found that most of what I learned about running a classroom I have learned this year as a first year teacher but I have learned it based on how other teachers model their classroom that is "effective" in a working class school. Now I fear, that I may be continuing this cycle and I'm not quite sure how to break it as of now. This is something that I would like to continuously work on as an educator and I hope that with more experience I come to correct my flaws so I can create a safe classroom environment where students are looking forward to learning. An interesting article I found about equity in school systems based on funding can be found here and is worth a read to see part of the problem with why working class schools may not be able to achieve the same things as affluent schools.