Educational Nugget: Literacy with an Attitude

I love thrift shopping and yard sales-- particularly for the great books I manage to find. Literacy with an Attitude by Patrick J. Finn, was one such find. Over the past few years I'd been doing a bit of research in order to complete my Master's degree and I found myself doing A LOT of reading about grammar teaching and reading teaching. I'm always fascinated at how little we actually DO know about teaching students, even though it seems like education has been going on forever. It's really just amazing how hard it is to quantify education. With that said, I wondered if I could pick up some educational nuggets to use in my classroom.

Six months later, I finally finished the book. This isn't a slight for the writer or the topic. Both were relevant; it's just that the book was definitely academic style writing. The book followed a variety of British schools, with some that were dominated by the social elite and then others that were school with working class. The results were typical: schools with elite parents did well and the working class schools struggled. There were also differences in the demands of the parents of the children as well as freedoms for the children at the schools. Elite parents demanded more of the children and of the schools while also encouraging the students to do more problem solving and these schools also allowed the students more freedoms. These school encouraged flourishing leaders and treated the students as such.

To make a long story short, Finn (building off Paulo Freire's ideas) encourages educators to become agents of social change. He pushes for educators to "make reading dangerous again" by fostering students to question and become politically involved and therefore seeing the need to become educated to change the issues around the community. Along these lines Finn & Freire push for the socially oppressed to rise and create their own stories and to embrace literacy as a means for sharing their culture and beliefs-- rather than seeing literacy as being taken over by the oppressors. The result: literacy with an attitude or a literacy pushing for change.

With this push for change in mind, there were a handful of suggestions for educators, most of which simply included getting students politically involved. One of the last small segments was a list of attributes for "domesticating education" (bad) and "liberating education" (good). I found this list probably the single most beneficial piece in the book. For instance, a domesticating attribute would be "work is easy" while liberating would be "work is challenging" or "teachers...focus on correctness before expression" versus "teachers focus on expression before correctness" (respectively).

I must admit with some of these awesome teaching tools snugly tucked into the final chapter of the book, I felt a bit cheated that the author didn't sandwich more of these teaching tools in the text much earlier on. I felt they would have been more easily digestible if they'd shown up and brief forms earlier and then expanded upon later in the book. As it was, while there were some nice nuggets at the end, it seemed that the research was so Freire-heavy that Freire should have been credited as a co-author. Nonetheless, it made me excited to go learn more about Freire's works and life, all while reminding me that while I may struggle with my classes, my struggle is felt by others and the ends justify the means.