A Definition of WOBBLE
Learning occurs in Wobble if we are open to it.
When we aren't wobbling, all seems in order and little thought is occurring. The wobble signals or calls attention to a shift in balance. Attention must be paid. A response must be authored. Some sense of balance needs to be restored.
By being willing to call our own beliefs into question, we push ourselves into new journeys of thought and exploration, to interrogate our own stance as rigorously as you might interrogate that of others.
In wobble you consider the possibilities, raise questions to explore those possibilities, gather substantive data on those questions, and to then decide what your stance is.
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Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on how WOBBLE has played out for you in the area of Literacy and Culture in the classroom.
Please, present and discuss moments of WOBBLE that you have encountered in your life as a teacher, student, parent, and/or observer as it fits into the world of classroom literacy and culture.
Some questions that might help you frame your thoughts:
Describe how you have been put into an uncomfortable place when confronted/introduced to a behavior foreign/different from your own cultural perspective.
What changed for you, if anything?
Did it cause permanent damage or open a door to new directions?
Will you ever be the same?
9 comments:
Well, I'll start this off then.
I wobbled a lot in my beliefs about culture and motivation in the
classroom. Before starting these readings, especially Heath's Ways With Words(1983), I was one of those that blamed much of the school failure on the students and parents having a bad attitude toward school.
In general, I figured that we all have problems to overcome, so quit whining and move on.
What I came to realize, however, is that students' cultures gear them to approach language, knowledge, authority, and social interaction in a culturally specific way.
If that way does not match the educational system into which the children enter, they are rejected by the system, not the converse.
This rejection is subtle and steady pressure toward the margins.
These students who are perennial failures by middle school are most likely that way due to the pressure of their culture clash with the power structure.
Due to the slow and steady nature of the marginalization, I realize now that it is easy to blame the student: they are the obvious and tangible outcome that the finger can point at, but deconstructing the system: that means work.
But, this class convinced me that this work is a moral imperative. To sit back and blame the student or the parent is to validate the system that represses them.
There are undoubtedly some for whom attitude is the major obstacle blocking their path to academic success, but I would not be surprised to find that those people are also within the culture of power.
So, I have wobbled, and I have found a balance which is more like standing on the deck of a small yacht in the midst of large swells.
But this is good.
I have found a door to a brighter place: it's ok not to have a neatly packaged answer for education woes. Learning is a dynamic and fluid process that requires a system to match, and a system that matches is worth working toward.
I am not the same as when I entered, and I hope I never will be the same; otherwise, I'll have most likely become stagnant.
My most recent moment of wobble was being reminded, yet again, that issues of culture and language cause people to feel threatened and that wobble itself creates wobble. Sometimes I get so used to dealing with beliefs being called into question that I forget that, for some, this is a relatively new experience and one that invites threat. Very often, when I frame a class, I objectify wobble a bit too much and start to think that it's just a process that will cause discomfort for a while, but that people will work through it. However, once I have living, breathing, caring students in front of me, I realize how earnestly they are working to grabble with their beliefs being challenged and how disconcerting that work becomes. When I see learners of good intent struggling with understanding the ways they have been privileged and how others haven't--and the implications thereof--I have to remember how hard that is to do and how I need to provide as much support and understanding as I can. It's a wobble that I hope remains with me, that I never lose the sensitivity to the struggles of others.
In the heat of our tracking discussions, I have wobbled tremendously. A glance at NCTE webpage suggests that national educators are wobbling with me. I
do not intend to be the defender of all tracking, but I did want to bring up a few points:
1. Theory drives me nuts when it is suggested in a vacuum. I don't want to adopt/adapt
someone's point--tracking is racist and wrong, and then argue for my own children to be
in tracked classes. That's hypocritical. It's like researchers who write about changing
and being an agent of change for public schools, and then put their own children in
private schools.
2. I do not think the collaborative model (detracked) is working at my children's school at
this point. I am NOT saying it's because they have bad or lazy teachers who are unwilling
to do the work required to succeed. I do think successful heterogeneous classes can and
do work; yet, I also think the most successful of those models has some
inherent ability grouping within those. I am fine with that, Neito I think would argue
against it.
3. Others have suggested that detracking only hurts the top 10% of students; they are okay with that--I am not okay with that. I also disagree with the statistic. I have witnessed problems with children on both ends of the achievement spectrum suffering in a collaborative model.
3. I felt uncomfortable in our discussions at times--but I am okay with that. This issue of tracking
haunts me professionally and personally. I cannot deny the findings and recommendations of Delpit (1996) and Kunjufu (2002), but ultimately, I believe it's people who are racist--not models of learning.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
Choices have an awesome power, they shape who and what we are. Choices are also personal they can ultimately change the person we become. Literacy has the same power to change lives, but given the sheer influence of these decisions, what should a teacher do? I stand at those two roads, torn between helping my students overcome the oppression of society, by teaching them the codes of the dominate culture and an ethical moral dilemma of whether I should? Still, I question what is the alternative, if I do not teach my students to overcome then what? Should I let them continue to perpetuate the power relationships that exist in school and society at large?
However, students are cultural beings and their literacy is tied to who they are. If we change their literacy are we not forcing a choice on them that could potentially harm them? Should schools and teachers try and change self-identity? I wonder if this goes beyond my role as a teacher, am I not too imposing some dominant belief on the child. Is it ethical or moral to purposely put into motion a series of events that can change a child’s culture? Can I do enough to prepare them for the new world they are entering? I am then faced with the question, is teaching and acquiring the dominant codes enough? Can teachers create a system where each culture is valued and still have students who can negotiate the predominant culture. Ultimately I question, can schools truly be transformed without creating new dichotomies of power? Or, is change possible in the current political context? A decision has to be made on what role teachers should play in helping students negotiate the codes of the dominate culture, but to what end. I still have questions and concerns that make me weary. However, I have found that the biggest mistake, I could make would be to allow these concerns and questions to stop me from challenging the status quo and helping my students to critically examine their role in society.
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.- R. Frost
I’ve experienced lots of wobble this semester. Perhaps the biggest question that has kept me from being wobble-free is this: How do we move beyond teaching for assimilation?
Our classrooms are filled with students whose cultural contexts are vastly different from the contexts of mainstream culture- the culture that dominates the traditional classroom model. So what do we do about that? How do we teach students to be successful in school without forcing a shift in identity upon them?
Gee (2008) concludes “good teaching is ultimately a moral act” (p. 114). Forcing students to privilege an identity over their own is certainly not a moral act. So, for me, the big question becomes one of how we balance our desire to see our students have success in our schools and our desire to allow our student’s identities to flourish.
The process of wobble is frustrating. It leads to questions that do not have easy answers. Sometimes the questions don’t have answers; however, just asking the questions and engaging in the process of wobbling leads to growth. And I have grown through this process. I know more about the role of culture in the classroom now than I knew in January. I also know I have A LOT MORE to learn. The answers I have come to through this process are tentative. Many of them have lead me to more questions. For example, I’m convinced, like Freire (1970), that we need to move away from a banking model and towards a school model that privileges dialogue. However, how we can make this shift is a complex question. I have some tentative answers that I look forward to wobbling with.
The syllabus said "Welcome to the World of Wobble." I'll admit, there was a little snicker inside when I read that. "I am interested in social justice. I am actively working toward culturally inclusive education." I thought I was doing pretty well. What, me wobble?
Nah.
About week 4 of our class I noticed the occasional knot in my stomach, the stray troubling thought as I was reading and writing. But I didn't realize it was "the wobble" until the spotlight switched on, and it shone on my own privilege. I was implicated in ways I had not realized. I could not help but begin to see it. And, even now, I am still beginning.
Wobble is an ongoing process. It has helped to have people who are with me, understanding through the unstable times. This group of fellow inquirers has given me a great appreciation for individuality as well as the importance of community. We will not always agree, but we have tried to listen and dialogue as much as we can.
Yesterday, I received an email from an educator that was supposed to make me "smile." It was a long list of comments that had been copied from notes to the school, supposedly from "Alabama parents." They were excuses for children who were sick, or absent, or had family difficulties. They were written by parents who, from the content and spelling of the notes, were likely not as "educated" as their children's teachers...teachers who took the notes and compiled them for a good laugh.
A few months ago I would have probably laughed right along with other recipients. But yesterday, all I felt was anger - at the condescension. How to tell people that this is unacceptable to me when I see it is the next task I need to learn.
Instead of avoiding the wobble and the discomfort it brings, I realize that the real challenge now is to keep it going, to actually seek it out. I am unfinished, and gratefully so.
The World of Wobble is, quite simply, painful. Your previously held beliefs are uncovered and suddenly you are naked in your own uncertainty.
Wobbling is work. Old ideas die as new ones are born – a labor of love, but labor nonetheless. The theories I have encountered have forced me to uncover and interrogate my thinking, and consider dramatically different, even antithetical, points of view.
Mourning the loss of old thinking as you integrate new ideas is no easy feat. The dissonance is unsettling at best, disturbing at worst, and always, always there.
If you are ready to push and be pushed beyond your limits, outside the containers of prejudice, privilege, ignorance and assumption, you are ready to Wobble.
After Wobbling, will you ever be the same? No. But maybe, just maybe, you will forever be grateful for the difference.
Part of my wobble in this course has related to how to be responsive and respectful to the culture of our students while still offering them access to the culture of power.
I fully accept that issues of culture cause non-mainstream students a great deal of discomfort and struggles within the walls of the classrooms. I also argue that these students do need to learn how to transact in mainstream institutions, such as schools.
How then can I be responsive as a teacher to embrace cultures brought by students when I am still desiring for them to adapt and switch to the discourse, language and culture of power?
I feel as though to not teach this culture of power to students is doing them a disservice. This ability to funtion well within mainstream expectations is necessary to access opportunities for advancement.
If I offer such knowledge and access to students, can it be done without deameaning or threatening their personal culture, beliefs, language and discourse?
For those of us who belong to dominant mainstream cultures and are also teaching in homogeneous group settings, we must still call upon ourselves to create classrooms that promote the process of multicultural education. Everyone benefits from tolerance and understanding if we are to truly work towards equal opportunities for all students. When any group in society feels marginalized, tension and violence can result. Everyone suffers when this occurs.
My question that remains is what do teachers do when a culture directly and strongly conflicts with part of our own that we feel strongly about?
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