SYNTHESIS PAPER

It is hard to interest those who have everything
in those who have nothing.
~Helen Keller


I suppose this quote sums it up for me. The notion isn’t that help can’t be provided for those who need help, but rather the notion is that there is no interest in doing so. The education system has long been satisfied with the ‘status quo’, for status quo requires less effort spent on those deemed 'less deserving'. Wow, am I sounding bitter? Not really...I think I'm sounding optimistic because as our weekend classes have demonstrated, there are many of us who are uncomfortable and/or uncertain with what we are reading, discussing and learning about in this course and that for me signals a readiness for affecting change. Finn's book, Literacy with an Attitude has been a tremendously affective resource in starting the dialogue that makes us so uncomfortable. Our response to feeling uncomfortable is a burning need to take action. We, as leaders in education, need to keep the flame burning, for the danger is that if we don’t see a purpose in affecting change in the interest of our students, we’ll all just ‘go-along and get-along’ and fade into the complacent society that dares not disturb the universe.

We’ve all figured out through our own experiences as students that if we’re ‘good’ ‘complacent’ and give teachers what they ask for, we’ll succeed in school. Only, for some of us it wasn’t that easy. As a child of immigrant parents with little formal education and strong cultural ties, I found myself living two cultures simultaneously and sometimes these cultures clashed. It was during those turbulent times that I found myself asking the most important questions…Who am I? Where am I going? and How will I get there? In spite of the expectations put on me by both my family and the society in which I live, I needed to determine whether or not those expectations aligned with my own. Well, I haven’t yet figured it out and perhaps that’s a good thing. Reading Finn has helped me to position myself and reposition myself, after reading each chapter.

During my early school years, I developed what has been called “oppositional identity”. I didn’t want to betray my culture or my working-class community by adopting the values, beliefs and attitudes of the upper middle class school teachers who taught me. I struggled with wanting to overcome the barriers that I faced and yet, not become a ‘border-crosser’ and therefore betray my own community. However, in my later high school years I found it necessary, as most immigrant minorities do, to adopt the beliefs, attitudes, interests, values and behaviour of the mainstream world in which I lived, for my own benefit. I believed that without abandoning my own, I could make both work, and I was confident that I would be accepted. By doing so, I have been able to remain who I am, at any given time and still participate fully in the world. I had to work on not becoming complacent and simply meet the expectations set for me by others. I had to connect what I was learning in school to my life, so that I could create knowledge from my life and see myself not as an individual separate from society, but rather to see myself as a member of a common society.

While I was in elementary school, one of my teachers read the short story by Leo Tolstoy entitled The Three Questions. Years later, I found a picture book that tells the same story. It’s a story about a young boy, Nikolai, who asks his wise old turtle friend to answer 3 questions: When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? and What is the right thing to do? To these, the old turtle responds: There is only one important time and that time is now; The most important one is always the one you are with; and, the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. As I continued to read Finn’s work, I found myself nodding, frowning, smiling and questioning, for the wisdom of the old turtle still resonates in my life. When we talk about educating working-class children in their own self-interest, we should all heed to the wise old turtle’s answers to the 3 questions. As Freire suggests, we should “educate working-class children like rich children-in their own self-interest”. This can be done if we remember to honour all students and promote literacy as thinking…being critical and asking questions. This type of literacy allows everyone to take action and seek collective solutions to common problems that we all share. We, as educators, need to ask, “Do our students benefit from the methods of education to which they are subjected?” If the answer is no, then is incumbent upon us to make the necessary changes so that no student is disadvantaged or marginalized because of the social class to which he/she belongs.

The discussion about implicit and explicit language is the one that reverberates the loudest for me, for it was this very style of language that was probably the most problematic for me when I was growing up, although, I certainly wasn’t able to articulate it! The fact that implicit and explicit language are related to values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours makes so much sense. Finn speaks of Bernstein’s beliefs that ‘the [British] working class habitually use implicit language and the [British] middle class habitually use explicit language…and because the language of school is typically explicit, …the working class has a great disadvantage.’ This was a ‘aha’ moment for me, for sure!! I grew up in an authoritarian style home and I did whatever my parents told me to do, because it was understood that if they (those who had a position and authority) told you to do something, you just did it. Children were seen as subordinates and parents and other authority figures, like teachers, made decision because they were in charge. This was often frowned upon by children, especially adolescents, but the dynamics were implicitly understood. Decisions were rarely discussed or challenged. For me this was problematic, as I grew up in a mixed-class neighbourhood in North York and some of my closest friends were middle or upper-middle class and they had very open, explicit conversations with their parents at home and so during discussion time at school, they were equipped with the language and the discourse to have conversation. On the other hand, those of us who were not accustomed to such openness often remained silent or waited for the teacher to ask us directly for our opinion and then we still only offered an opinion which we may or may not have believed, but that would be accepted by the mainstream. Oh, how hard I worked at fitting into the norms set by a middle-class education system!

Today, we need to be more attuned to what knowledge and experiences our students bring to the classroom and allow them to engage in their learning and become literate, not just functionally literate, but powerfully literate, so that they can feel confident and in control of themselves and their environment. As Stuckey states: To be literate is to be legitimate. That is the obligation of all school systems…to make everyone legitimate so that they are empowered to do collective good. How can students feel legitimate if the discourse at home is incongruent with the discourse at school? We need to address how we distribute knowledge and who gets access. More importantly, it’s about how we provide opportunity for students to learn literacy. It’s about how we teach, just as much as what we teach. In order to make change happen, we need to trip up the system…we need to disturb the universe, because social practices can be changed if we change the discourse.

And remember the answers given by the wise old turtle: There is only one important time and that time is now; The most important one is always the one you are with; and, the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side.