Literacy with an attitude (corniest title of a book ever)

This week’s reading really affected me and made me really want to either get into the class room or find a way of changing educational policies in this country. It made me think very deeply about social class and how the language and the approaches to education are really meant to keep the status quo in check. The author relied heavily on the influences of Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo Freire. Paulo Freire in the 1960 started an adult literacy program for Brazil’s illiterate poor. Freire believed that the way that literacy was being taught to this group of people needed to be approached differently.

“Before he started teaching reading and writing he asked his students to reflect on the concepts of justice… He asked his students what he might do to secure justice and suggested that literacy would make them far better able to engage in the struggle they would certainly face if they tried to get a better deal.”

Freire’s intentions were to teach literacy with the intention of education a social class to be able to fight for their rights in an unbalanced Brazil. His teaching eventually led him to be exiled from Brazil, as those formerly illiterate students began to get registered to vote. Freire “understood that for the poor in the slums of Recife literacy as part of the identity of the “other”—a hated other in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor is ever so much more obvious than it is in the United States” Paulo Freire made me think about the Martha Demienteff quote in the Lisa Delpit reading.

We listen to the way people talk not to judge them, but to tell what part of the river they come from. These other people are not like that. They think everybody needs to talk like them. Unlike us they have hard time hearing what people say if they don’t talk exactly like them. Their way of talking and writing is called formal English.

In a way, Demienteff is teaching a Freirean idea, with that quote she is underlying a dislike for those who speak formal English, but she is also hinting that in order to succeed they need to be able to become literate in that world. You can almost feel her expressing and understanding the disdain for the Alaskan native people of the culture of power, but she is teaching them so that one day they can affect change in their communities.

 The literacy that Freire is talking about is also teaching historical and cultural context which is important in any classroom for economically oppressed students.

My favorite passage and the most emotional passage for me in this week’s reading comes from the author describing one of Freire’s thoughts on the poor, “They are so submerged in their daily lives that they have little or no awareness of the possibility for change, much less what they might do to bring about change. They view their conditions as natural, the will of God, or determined by fate” this passage speaks to me on so many levels, and I feel it speaks greatly of our socio-economic system in the US. Our working poor in this country work so hard and are economically running in circles and if they were to stop and think they would notice that it isn’t something natural, or the will of god it is a cause of a system in place by those who want to keep power in their hands. It made me think about my father a lot and the story that I tell to students in the inner city when talking about the word opportunity.

Rhode Island college is nicknamed the college of opportunity and I ask the students to give me a synonym for the word opportunity. usually a student  responds with the word “chance” It is then that I ask the students the question 

Why college? 

Students usually respond with various answers, “to have a better future” or “to make money” or “to have a job that I like”

I then ask them, If I were to ask you parents 

Why do they want you, their children, to go to college what would they say?

I let them respond until I get one of the students to answer “so that I could have a better life than they had.”

I then proceed to tell them about my father and the story goes like this.

"My father was the smartest man I had ever met. When I lived in Dominican Republic he used to read my history text books from front to back within the day and then recited most of the important parts in history to me and help me with my homework. My father had a high school diploma but never had the opportunity to go to college.

After we immigrated to the US, my father took a job at a local supermarket. I never knew what he did for work just that he worked at C-town supermarket. One day my father’s car broke down and I had to pick him up at work. It was winter and the temperature was in single digits.  I arrived to pick him up that day 20 minutes early and when I looked around the parking lot I realized what my father did for a living. My father was the person at the supermarket who retrieved the carriages and I remember looking at him and seeing how the bitter weather conditions had made his skin dry and ashy. Not that there is anything wrong with pushing carriages as it is honest work, but I am talking about the smartest person that I had ever met.  I remember looking at him and understanding something that I was too young to be able to verbalize.

I then proceed to ask the students why do you think the smartest person that I had ever met was pushing carriages for a living?. There is always the one student who says something to the extent of “because he didn’t get an education” My goal is to get those students to think of their own experiences and to think about their working class parents. From experience from working in the community I can tell you that most working class families I come in contact with know that education is the way out of their struggle as working class families, but now we just need to make that education a much more transformational one.