“We need to be acting on the knowledge that we already have by ensuring that all students receive engaging instruction that requires extended, reflective, critical writing and supports their developing identities as successful writers.”
“We must also ensure that all students receive instruction that values the cultural identities and linguistic resources they bring into the classroom so they can develop powerful discourses that allow them to become contributors of knowledge in their own communities and in the larger society.”**
The three quotations above were pulled from the conclusion section of chapter 31 in the Handbook of Research on Writing. The authors, Ball and Ellis ended their piece with these calls for scholars to take up researching in greater depth the connection between writing and identity with respects to culturally and linguistically diverse students. A little over a week ago, I went to presentation at Ohio State University The Politics of Writing, Place, and Youth Digital Discourses, which was a snapshot from Dr. Valarie Kinloch’s newly released book Harlem on Our Minds: Place, Race, and Literacies of Urban Youth. Both her book and presentation represent a researcher’s journey into the complexities of youth literacy, community, and identity. Moreover, Kinloch’s research I believe truly embodies one scholar’s answer to the authors’ call for research about the relationships between identity and writing.
Her research not only investigated the lives of young people from Harlem and the relationships among place, writing practices, and social interactions, but it also touched on a number of additional issues including community, gentrification, power, knowledge, struggle, and multiple conflicting narratives. One of the most fascinating aspects about her work through both her research and writing she challenges traditional stances of writing being bound on the page, and instead she represents the literacy practices of urban youth multimodally by means of collaborative interviews, photos, and writing samples. The multimodal nature of writing is found in her book as well. A side note about the book: it is particularly insightful how she managed to weave together multiple voices (students/teachers/graduate students/community activist) from the Harlem community. As a readers it gave me a rich sense of the place and some of the individuals who reside there.
Even though I also ended last week’s blog with a quotation from Maxine Greene’s book Releasing the Imagination, I find it fitting to end this entry by quoting her yet again. While Chapter 31 by Ball and Ellis is a review of literature about identity, writing, and diverse students, the chapter's message for me goes beyond those points and reaches into larger ontological, ideological ideas about what it means to live in a democratic society. In thinking about the chapter and Kinloch’s scholarship, I can think of no better way to end than with Maxine’s words:
How are we to comprehend the kind of community that offers the opportunity to be otherwise? Democracy, we realize, means a community that is always in the making. Marked by an emerging solidarity, a sharing of certain beliefs, and a dialogue about others, it must remain open to newcomers, those too long thrust aside. This can happen even in the local spaces of classrooms, particularly when students are encouraged to find their voices and their images (p. 39).
** The quotes at the beginning of this entry come from page 511 of: Brazerman, C. (2008). Handbook of Research on Writing: History, society, school, individual, text. New York, NY: Routledge.
No comments:
Post a Comment