Literacy Dig: Digging the Bus

Last week I, along with five of my peers, performed a literacy dig on a public bus.  We rode the bus for about half an hour, observing a) the physical environment including the layout of the bus and any artifacts, b) the people on the bus and what they were doing, c) spoken conversation on the bus, d) vocabulary, written or spoken, unique to the bus, and e) evidence of literacy on the bus, i.e., what reading and writing are required in this environment.

I specifically focused on the type of speech present on the bus.  In general, it was difficult to grasp the complete content of conversations over the roar of the engines, but taking the tone of conversations together with body language and ritual forms of hailing, the bus is clearly a place where "regulars" catch up with each other and compare notes or seek connections with newcomers.  There were, for example, a man and a woman with a baby in a carriage covered with bath towels (it was very cold that day).  The man stood attending the carriage while the woman sat some distance away.  A second woman inquired about the baby (age, gender, name) before going on to describe her own children.  Somewhat unsolicited, she offered, "They grow up too fast.  I got a fourteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old."  The man, evidently aware of the social literacy required in this environment offered responses that seemed calculated to provoke the least amount of further conversation without giving offense.  While he was not particularly eager to share personal details about the child with this second woman (who, he may have noticed, wore work boots that must have been four or five sizes too large for her, the interpretation of which fact I leave to the reader), he was apparently aware that the bus is an environment where people are expected to share, a place that is only semi-public where physical proximity and coincident schedules mandate a certain level of intimacy.

There were another two women sitting in adjacent seats although there was ample room for them to find a less crowded arrangement.  Although I could not fully make out the content of her speech, the tone of the woman sitting in the aisle seat suggested that she was complaining about something.  The woman sitting near the window (and consequently boxed in by the first woman) slumped away from the first woman with her head leaning against the glass.  Toward the beginning of this conversation the second woman dutifully indicated her interest with monosyllabic comments.  As the conversation went on, these signals of interest became less and less frequent though the other woman's speech did not abate as a consequence.  It would seem that the woman in the window seat, like the man above, while not particularly interested in the conversation, understood the expectation that she participate to some degree.  I thought initially that her drop in interest-signaling was calculated to discourage further conversation, but the cheerfulness with which she offered her parting salutation suggests to me that she simply realized that the other woman was content to go on with or without much response and that her interest-signaling need not be frequent to keep the conversation going and avoid awkwardness.

At this point a man boarded the bus with grocery bags and sat down opposite the woman with the oversized boots.
     "Hey, how are you?" she asked.
     "Cold." was the response.
     "Other than that?"  From there what had initially seemed a terse interaction opened into a lengthy and warm session.  The conversation initially focused on work.  The woman had recently started a new job which she hastened to add started at $7.50/hour.  "A job is a job." was the response.  And this was the general subject of the conversation, work and money, with an overall tone of commiseration tempered by a stoic disposition toward labor.  The two compared their work schedules, how to get overtime pay, how much money they each spent on Christmas gifts, the best methods of transportation to and from home, and how long they had been employed at certain jobs (eighteen years at his present job which fact seemed to inspire a new sense of reverence from the woman).  The conversation then turned toward the health of family members with the woman detailing the recent death of her father and the man offering his stepmother's dementia.  Again, there seemed to be a certain degree of pride in the adversity they faced though this pride did not manifest itself as any sort of one-upmanship, but rather as a sort of comradery.  In this instance one sees most clearly that the bus offers not only a means of conveyance, but also a social support system.

But beyond being socially literate about the forms of interaction expected on the bus, what other types of literacy are required in this setting?  Upon consultation with my peers, we observed that although the bus was plastered with warnings, notices, advertisements, maps and timetables (which require a very particular type of reading), these artifacts did not seem to be used by the habitual rider.  In fact we speculated that the types of literacy most immediately useful in this setting would be the use of maps or timetables which utilize visual literacy and numeracy more than traditional literacy, as well as the ability to read the landscape.  In particular, reading the landscape for propriety logos (i.e., the "golden arches" or the eponymous bell of Taco Bell) might be the most practical form of literacy.

That thought might be enough to raise the hackles of any Language Arts teacher, but if more proof is needed that traditional forms of literacy are strange in this setting, consider the quizzical looks I received.  I did not stand out in any particular.  I was not particularly well- or poorly-dressed.  I was not very young or old, or thin or obese.  I was not in any way remarkable to look at except that I was writing down my notes.  Try as I may to look perplexed, as if I were trying to remember that last item for my shopping list, or to look engrossed, as if I were writing a letter to a friend, try as I may to somehow normalize the behavior of writing, people just kept staring at that notebook.

Reconciling Learning to Read with Reading to Learn

I recently read an article from Language Arts that detailed the joint efforts of an experienced kindergarten teacher and a college professor to situate children's reading in real-world contexts, specifically a donut shop.

In this program, the children opened their own donut shop in a corner of their classroom, starting by researching how a donut shop works on a field trip, applying for a building permit with actual building inspectors, applying for a loan and soliciting shareholders, all culminating in a grand opening at the end of the project.  At each stage, literacy was worked into the tasks (taking notes at the donut shop, writing to prospective shareholders, filling out a loan application, etc.), and students engaged with real members of their community.  Not only was the project undertaken to facilitate the children's literacy, but also to provide them with a sense of empowerment and engagement which is often absent in traditionally under-served urban communities.

The merits of this type of program seem manifold and obvious.  But it is precisely in the type of urban communities addressed by this article that administrators and policy-makers are calling for less of this sort of situated literacy and for more and more "schooled literacy," that is, literacy addressed as discrete skills alienated from any sort of real-world context.

Given the increasing time restraints imposed by ever more data collection and test preparation, how can this sort of holistic program really be integrated in the communities where it is most needed?

Mixed Messages on RTI

Responsiveness-to-Intervention (RTI) is a topic that has educators divided.  Some may see the strategy as yet another instance of a teacher's autonomy and professional discretion being eroded.  Others may find it a useful tool for getting help to at-risk students quickly.  But as Dr. Jennifer Gilbert pointed out on Voice of Literacy in October, RTI isn't going anywhere anytime soon with a number of states now mandating its use.

In a paper written with her colleague, Dr. Donald Compton, Gilbert studied the efficacy of a 14-week RTI program involving 649 first-graders.  The study utilized three tiers of instruction.  Tier 1 was general instruction.  Of the 649 students, 212 were identified as "unresponsive" to the general-education setting.  Of these, 78 remained in that setting, and the other 134 were assigned to Tier 2 where they received small-group instruction, typically three times per week.  Of the 134 students assigned to Tier 2, 45 were identified as unresponsive to that instruction.  Of these 45, 21 stayed on in Tier 2, and 24 were assigned to Tier 3 and received one-on-one instruction fives day per week.  So the final composition of the students was:

Tier 1:  437 responsive, 78 unresponsive
Tier 2:  110 responsive, 21 unresponsive
Tier 3:  24 students

The results don't offer much in the way of settling the RTI debate.  Even the two researchers themselves seem unsure of how they feel about RTI. The paper's abstract states that Tier 2 students "made significantly higher word reading gains" compared with the non-responders who remained in Tier 1.  However, in the Voice of Literacy interview, Gilbert characterizes the effect as small and says that these modest gains dissipated quickly.  The situation for Tier 3 students is much more dire: these students saw no gains when compared to non-responders left in Tier 2.

But when asked for recommendations for parents, teachers, principals, and policy-makers, the two researchers still generally advocate the use of RTI even as they claim that their results challenge the model.  Gilbert postulates that possibly the method and timing of intervention offered at Tier 3 were not effective.  Possibly some variation on the one-on-one, five-times-per-week intervention would have yielded more promising results.  Furthermore, Gilbert suggests that a 14-week period of intervention is perhaps too short a time.  But taking these two considerations into account, longer periods of intervention and larger groups of students (larger than one anyway), one notices that this type of RTI starts to look a lot like the old tracking model that RTI is, in part, meant to move away from.

So while the efficacy of RTI remains in doubt, there is at least one silver lining: unlike previous methods of recognizing learning disability, RTI, when properly implemented, does not assume that because a child doesn't know something, the child can't know something.  According to Gilbert, prior to RTI, a student's lack of knowledge in a particular area might have indicated a learning disability.  With RTI, the student is supposed to be examined on the basis of how she or he apprehends new knowledge, not on the basis of whether she or he comes to class with certain knowledge.  RTI then distinguishes between learning disability and a lack of educational opportunity.  In this respect at least, it is an improvement.


UPDATE:  I just came across this:

After years of research working with proficient and struggling readers, Marie Clay developed Reading Recovery as an early intervention program. Reading Recovery teachers train extensively to work with the lowest 20 percent of children in first grade. They provide thirty-minute daily lessons to individual children. The majority (75 percent) of students reach grade level standards in just twelve to twenty weeks. Reading Recovery has had amazing results worldwide. Tens of thousands of teachers have been trained, and 1.7 million first graders have become successful readers, having accelerated their learning to reach the average reading level of their classmates. It should be noted that these numbers also include children who are labeled learning disabled.

Pat Johnson. Catching Readers Before They Fall: Supporting Readers Who Struggle, K-4 (Kindle Locations 323-327). Kindle Edition. 

I am not quite sure what the implication is in comparing these two programs.  The duration is comparable (14 weeks compared to 12 to 20), and the method of Reading Recovery very much like that of Gilbert's RTI (half an hour of one-on-one instruction).  Could a possible conclusion be that perhaps the 75% of the bottom fifth of readers who respond to Reading Recovery would also have responded to small group instruction like that received in Tier 2, differing only in how much previously lost ground students made up for?  What about the 5% (25% of 20%) of all students who are unresponsive to Reading Recovery as compared with the approximately 3.7% (26 out of 649) of students who were unresponsive to any kind of intervention in Gilbert's program?  What is going on with these kids?

hello world