#readerstoleaders

Concluding the Readers to Leaders program, I reflect on the panic and emotions that come with the end of each teaching cycle. Have I done a sufficient job at educating the students in being critical thinkers? Have they learned enough to carry them into the next year? Were my teaching methods and my performance strong enough to make a lasting impression, encouraging future engagement with literacy skills? Have they learned skills that the students can carry confidently as their own into the next year? What will they do without me as their teacher?

What I’m concerned with is sustainable development education and sustainable literacy. Ann Dale and Lenore Newman introduce complexity theory and define sustainable development literacy in their article cited below:

“Sustainable development literacy can be measured in terms of acquiring a set of critical skills, which do provide a sound framework for education. These skills reflect the complex nature of social-ecological reactions, thus interdisciplinary appreciation and skills are integral to sustainable development literacy, epistemology and research” (2005, pg. 351).

Echoing my concerns, sustainable development literacy education challenges rote learning which encourages memorization of specific facts and methods for students to apply as “keys” to their success. Rather, SDL (sustainable development literacy) not only addresses the various and complex lives and life paths of students but give them tools that can be applied to various issues students with encounter within and outside academic institutions that all relate to their education as social citizens.

Dale and Newman quote The Brundtland commission’s definition of sustainable education as “behaviour meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (pg.352). In my own words, sustainable development literacy and education is a futuristic method that functions under my framework of community cultural wealth, term coined by Tara J. Yosso. Sustainable education uses methods and integrated tools that add to the cache of knowledge students come into the classroom with and can apply throughout their daily experiences which center them within socio-eco, environmental, interpersonal, and institutional systems.

The type of education I aim to employ for students encourages students to learn in a way that prioritizes themselves with the awareness to name and work within a chaotic environment. How do students address fascism and state violence aimed at them that seems random and sporadic? How do students talk about climate change and the prominence of processed foods that are more readily available in their communities  without particular knowledge scientific knowledge of how climate change works? How do students talk about the waves of migration and closing borders that bar them from their various family members or relations? These seemingly random or “chaotic” events are part of larger systems addressed though complexity theory and emergence. “Complexity theory’s notion of emergence implies that, given a significant degree of complexity in a particular environment, or critical mass, new properties and behaviours emerge that are not contained in the essence of the constituent elements, or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions” (Mason, 2008 p.5).

I believe sustainable education and sustainable literacy can prepare students not for the events and experiences that come from existing in a chaotic world, but SDL can prepare them to be able to think quickly, critically, and problem-solve effeciently within their communities in order to be successful in their life paths.

Dale, A., & Newman, L. (2005). Sustainable development, education and literacy. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 6(4), 351-362. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 61923033?accountid=15182.

At the beginning of each session, the class is opened with a “check-in” — an exercise in which students are challenged intellectually to encourage students to take accountability for their experience in the classroom.   Often these exercises are physical to help students to unite their minds with their bodies and place themselves psychically and physically in a space of learning. This is an important way to start the day as sometimes students will be physically in the room but not really paying attention. Our check-ins are also important as they also aim to activate students to “learning” outside of what is being immediately taught. Education for one of the learners can come from making a connection between something a student said or did to an event or piece of information that may only be notable to the student themselves. Being able to locate themselves spatially helps students to transfer from “settling in” mode into “preparation mode”.

What I’ve called “preparation mode” is what V. DeLuca names as “metacognitive inventory”, or MI in the article “Developing Students’ Metacognitive Skills in a Data-Rich Environment.  Although MI is used largely within STEM Education, it is also very applicable to language-based study as the Readers to Leaders program uses multiple technologies and teaching methods to engage students and cross-reference important information. MI is “designated to evaluate students’ awareness of their cognitive processes as they approach and solve problems” (2014). Although MI is an assessment test, the appeal is its use of using what students already know, echoing the community cultural wealth (Yosso) pedagogies from which R2L’s framework is built from. Community cultural wealth, or what DeLuca calls procedural knowledge, is first acknowledged and then developed and through processes and strategies which are documented by the students themselves. “However, in order to develop high order thinking skills, students must have the opportunity to apply their content and process knowledge and learn from errors” (2014).

Metacognitive Inventory is shown to be a series of self-evaluations and reflections students keep over themselves in order for both the student and the educator to track cognitive progression. In this article, students’ self-awareness seen through their own tracking, or Metacognitive Inventory data input, allowed for not just better performance or accuracy, but allowed students to learn effectively from their own errors, or cognitive strategy.

What was interesting about this article’s evaluation of the MI study was the inconsequential nature for strategy planning. A large part of the last class, before some of the R2L students were to take the OSSLT, was the stress on planning.

Methods that did work for the R2L students were the check-ins that allowed the students to actively place themselves in the mindset to learn. A method I would like to implement in the future are cognitive process journals where students can track cognitive processes made, cognitive goals reached, and errors they can identify and self-correct. I believe that teaching on how to perform self-correction rather than depend on grading and official assessment will help students rely on and more heavily depend on their own self-awareness and cognition and perhaps detract from the stress induced by expectations around a large (and final) assessment like the OSSLT.

The Readers to Leaders program is an intentionally made Black Space. I define Black Space as a site of development and creativity that centralizes the existing strengths of Black and POC students and their varying lived experiences in consideration of social and economic climates perpetuated by white supremacist standards. White supremacist standards are still glaringly perpetuated through IQ tests and other standardized intelligence and performance tests. In the early 1900s, the Stanford-Binet IQ was developed to justify the segregation of POC students and the lack of sufficient education for the. Anthony G. Allen uses his dissertation to examine the history of these tests and quotes Green et al.’s research on the tests. The creator of the Stanford-Binet IQ test “wanted to establish a “gradation of innate ability that could sort all children into their proper stations in life” (Green et al., p. 83). Additionally, he suggested that, because of their poor test performance, Mexicans, Indians, and Negroes should be educated in segregated, special classes focusing on making them resourceful workers. This notion was widely accepted and thus, used as justification for segregated schools for African Americans and other disenfranchised groups deemed innately incapable of becoming educated” (Allen, ).

This type of segregation and exploitation of racially-founded inequity is still seen today as schools such as Westview and C.W. Jeffreys continue to get less resources, insufficient number of teachers for ESL classes, and less funding than TDSB schools where the majority of schools are White. The continuous excuse for these inequities is that the urban students won’t have as much need for more resources which reads that minority students aren’t as “teachable”. The maintained views of teachability within White-dominated society not only centralize and consider their own values and standards when educating students of colour but continue to use these standards to justify deficit models of addressing and teaching BIPOC students (Black, Indigenous, Peoples of Colour).

Readers to Leaders is a type of segregation where only BIPOC students are the majority but rather than perpetuate the systemically-racist models of education, what is introduced is Black Space. Black Space pedagogy is founded in desire-based frameworks which does not gauge intelligence on a standardized scale but locates students’ strengths and builds constructively from where students at. This also considers the years of possible intellectual neglect or oversight by teachers using deficit frameworks to educate.

How to create Black Space can also be used as a mobile pedagogy to be implemented in any BIPOC space to instill confidence in students’ existing knowledge base as well as amplify and build on existing skills. As students begin to strengthen their own knowledge base individually, what is also taught is learning from each other’s strength and knowledge bases or cross-pollination. This counter-educates students around intellectual  competition which would be instilled under White-supremacist standards of educating. Black Space from a desire-based perspective centralizes community cultural wealth which “is an array of knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist racism and other forms of oppression” (Yosso, 2006).

Readers to Leaders (R2L) is a literacy program for high school students from Westview Centennial Collegiate and C.W. Jefferys Collegiate located within the Jane and Finch region of Toronto, Ontario. This intersection is not only racialized but simultaneously stigmatized within the ever-ambiguous word urban. The Readers to Leaders program is set to assist students in preparation for the OSSLT (Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test -- a mandatory standardized test all Ontario secondary school students must pass n order to earn their high school diploma. Considering the racial minority demographic of the students within the program, they are historically expected to earn lower grades or struggle to pass the literacy test.

Our white supremacist society codes/racializes space to imply deficit or the inability to succeed to a set standard. Throughout this blog documenting my observations while teaching and organizing this year’s program, I will also expand on the varying needs of the students and the real challenges they experience that are not accounted for when the broad term urban is used,  

As a Black woman instructor alongside two TDSB teachers and one community liaison, I observe the class’ progress through a constructivist lens. Patricia Hinchey writes: “The task of a constructivist teacher is to design experiences that will give students an opportunity to develop their own understanding of the data at hand” (Hinchey, 1998). What is so violent about the misunderstanding or rather, the collective consciousness, around Urban Education is that it automatically informs teachers of the “unteachability” of their students rather than the possibilities of how teaching can be done differently that shows students how to think about themselves not just positively but with a sense of agency.

           Through constructivist pedagogy, I can creatively challenge racialized stigmas through my instruction and through the material I provide for my students. This blog will document how challenging how racialized space is viewed while simultaneously challenging how students think about themselves and their own success. I will document how students how the students learn to critically think about the structures that are put into place which produces urban environments rather than simply being an urban product. “It doesn’t matter which novel a student reads; what matters is that the student comes to understand that authors make choices among certain devices in order to try and affect the reader this way or that” (Hinchey). 

 By addressing students’ dreams and actively working towards their personal goals, I will document students’ engagement, motivation, and hard work in relation to the material provided and how they develop insight into seeing themselves as agents of power.