Teaching in a whole new world!

Imagine a world in which every teacher began her day singing the lyrics from Aladdin:

I can show you the world

Shining, shimmering, splendid…

…I can open your eyes

Take you wonder by wonder

Over, sideways and under

On a magic carpet ride

A whole new world

A new fantastic point of view

No one to tell [you] no

Or where to go

Or say [you’re] only dreaming

A whole new world

A dazzling place[you] never knew

But when [you’re] way up here

It's crystal clear

That now I’m in a whole new world with you

Now I'm in a whole new world with you

Unbelievable sights

Indescribable feeling

Soaring, tumbling, freewheeling

Through an endless diamond sky

A whole new world

Don't you dare close your eyes

A hundred thousand things to see

Hold your breath - it gets better

I'm like a shooting star

I've come so far

I can't go back to where I used to be

A whole new world

Every turn a surprise

With new horizons to pursue…

There's time to spare

Let me share this whole new world with you

A whole new world

That's where we'll be

For you and me

It’s a whole new world

It never seizes to amaze me that when a group of educators gather in a room it is transformed into a magical world of wonder or is it? The song lyrics from Aladdin describes what I felt when I first entered the wonderful world of teaching. My excitement was infectious and my commitment and dedication to helping kids learn was always driven by my passion to empower students and to stimulate their imagination. I never ‘named’ my craft. I never thought about barriers that might impede my journey or the journey of my students. My naivete was the fuel that thrust us into orbit. My ingenuous intentions strengthened my ability to afford learning to happen in my classroom. Was I jaded by the myths that kept surfacing like spot fires in a forest? No, not I …I would overcome all obstacles and leap tall building in a single bound…I was super teacher! But the costume got harder to put on because the phone booths got harder to find. Contrary to the myths that surrounded me about learning and literacy, my students and I would survive…one year at a time.

The mainstream discourse that echoed within the halls didn’t always serve my students, so I had to find ways to engage them and help them to understand that their discourse had a place in my classroom and that they should expect it to have a place in every classroom. If learning is, as has been echoed by numerous expects, a ‘social phenomenon’ then is our obligation to foster an environment in our classrooms that affords students to learn not simply by passively listening to formal instruction, but more importantly to learn by engaging in reading and writing with others, and becoming catalysts for social action. For this to happen, my middle-class discourse will have to be open to the discourses of my students’ and only then will they be provided the key to enter the wonderful world of learning. Was I aware of the impact of this decision, perhaps not, but I did it intentionally. And it is for that reason that I am a firm believer of explicit teaching and learning.

According to education experts this wonderful world of education is filled with so many myths about literacy and learning that the sky becomes cloudy and the horizons diminish. It becomes incumbent upon us, as educators, to dispel those myths and encourage our students to use their imagination as a vehicle to exercise their personal power and engage in social action, for as Allan Luke says: “literacy teaching is always first and foremost a social practice, one that is constrained and enabled by the changing economics and politics of schooling and communities.” Teaching reading and writing isn’t only done using one method. There are numerous methods within the education world that claim to be the ‘answer’ to the debate on how best to teach reading and writing. In my early teaching years, I thought that the method that the principal, at my school, prescribed as the method of teaching reading and writing would cure the ‘problem’ of those students who just ‘didn’t get it’. How very naïve was I to think that we could exorcise the disengagement out of our students by excluding them from their peers and forcing them to follow one program that disadvantaged them before they had even begun. Such thinking was founded on the premise that all students are the same and therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare put it. There is not one program that will work for all students. It’s not just about teaching and learning in ‘context’, but rather how to teach and learn so that students can respond to the changing ‘contexts’ in which they find themselves. It is all about a whole new world.

I will tenaciously continue in my capacity as a teacher, a curriculum coordinator and a member of society to hone in on literacy as a social practice, because students don’t learn to read and write from my instruction, but rather from my actions. What I do, what I say and what and how I read and write will impact my students more than the lesson on conjugating verbs. I will pay attention to the social, cultural and economic aspects of the journey that fails our disenfranchised students, over and over, and I will forever be grateful for having had my convictions challenged to the point of discomfort, for it has afforded me the good sense to be more critical in my approach to teaching reading and writing and realizing that it’s never a fait accompli.