Example Student Literacy Autobiography #3

My Literacy Autobiography
Like so many American children, Dr. Seuss greeted me at the door as I made my way across the threshold into the world of literacy. For me there is life before Green Eggs and Ham and there is life after; I was in Preschool, at a doctor’s office, and I remember wood paneling. Crossing the threshold was the first step on a very long road that I continue to travel. My public education in many ways shaped my literacy and informs how I will promote the literacy of others as I assume the role of teacher

Six is a tough age for anyone, but it was a particularly turbulent year for me. When I was six my mom got remarried. I had to leave behind my best friends, Alex and Michelle, and we moved an hour away to a new city. The ultimate blow came when we went to enroll me in the elementary school I’d be attending; they wanted me to enroll in KINDERGARTEN! I was devastated! I’d already spent two years attending ABC preschool and I was ready to move on. My main point of grievance: I wanted to learn how to read!

I don’t remember not being able to read but I remember weeping bitterly as I left the building and stuttering through sobs, “But Mom, I want to learn how to read!” She looked at me and seeing at once my sincerity and despair she did what any good mother (who is literate enough in the public educational system’s language of power) would do: she grabbed my hand and we turned around and marched right back into the building. I guess they administered some test and I guess I must have done well enough on it, because that fall I entered into the first grade.

Mrs. Fisher’s first grade class was conveniently divided into reading groups according to skill level. Each group had their own workbook that was distinguished by a band of color at the top of the cover. It was no secret that the best readers in the class used the red workbooks. When I entered that classroom there was no red workbook for me. Not by a long shot I had to prove my worth from the ground up. Maybe my first workbook was green. I don’t remember because it wasn’t long before I could tell I was reading out loud faster and with better inflection and articulation than the other students in my group by the end of the school year I had caught up with the best readers in my class and moved on to the coveted purple workbook that was an even higher reading level than the red. The compliment was not lost on me, I was fully aware that I had been pegged a “good reader.”

This is a significant point for any child in their educational career. The time when they are first given the opportunity to express their abilities and as they succeed, or fail, begin to take on titles and labels that they will carry with them throughout their lives. Climbing to the top of my class in reading level, having started at the bottom, was no small feat for me. With confidence, I can say it had a deterministic influence on the rest of my education, perhaps even enabling me to become more literate than I would have been otherwise.

How was I able to read so well so fast? Was it the desire to read and to learn that I had felt so passionately when faced with the possibility of being denied access for another year? Was it a natural proclivity? In my case I think that one deterministic factor was my family’s value for reading.  

My step father made a rule that if we wanted to watch TV at night we had to read for one hour in our rooms after we got home from school. So every Saturday when my brother and I would go to Indianapolis to visit our dad he would take us to the bookstore where we would buy a new book for the week. By the time I was in fourth grade I had read the entire Goosebumps and Bailey School Kids series in those afterschool hours. My mother is also one of the most well-read individuals I have ever met and with her collection of literature we had a library at home. I had access to books. It was at home where I first found and read Animal Farm, years before I’d ever have to read it in school. It was in my home where I first found tomes of Anais Nin and Anna Karenina.

No amount of parental influence, however, could ever surpass my interest in free pizza. One reoccurring pattern in my literacy history was the use of extrinsic motivations. In elementary school I participated in the Book It program where you were rewarded for reading books with free personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut. For me this program worked like a charm.  When I entered middle school and high school, I think that grades became an extrinsic motivator.
Now as I prepare to step into my career as an educator my understanding of what it means to be literate has expanded and I sense a responsibility to assist my students in developing their own literacy. The important patterns I found in my own literacy history are, the powerful influence of labels and early experiences of children on their literacy, the importance of familial values, and most importantly the misuse of extrinsic motivation that does not foster an authentic literacy development. I say most important because as a Geography or a History teacher, I have most control over that part of the equation.

I hope to avoid relying on extrinsic motivators. Instead, my goal is to help my students experience the joy of literacy. People want acceptance and to feel worthy, in my classroom I will help students see that being literate engenders self-confidence and self-respect. People want to feel a sense of power and control, in my classroom I will help students see that in knowing how to access and interpret information and make connections and understand their world in context with its history or geography they can tap into that power and control they are starving for. I’ll do this through carefully constructed curriculum that is driven by excessive use of primary sources and teaching students how to interpret and contextualize them. My goal will be to make the material important to them by connecting it to current events and things that affect their lives. 

Example Student Literacy Autobiography #2

Excelled Literacy:  A Help or a Hindrance?

I am six. The teacher has a long wooden stick that she uses to point at the words. The book towers in front of me, propped up on an easel, white and black and gleaming. The words fly from my lips with ease: red, blue, go, fish. I beam at the teacher’s praise.

My first parent/teacher/student conference. My mom nods her head seriously as my 1^st grade teacher tells her my dreams of becoming a writer and how to help me reach my high aspirations. I start producing my first chapter that very week.

My throat is large and swollen and pink. Today is the day I’m supposed to read my short story aloud to my 2^nd grade class during sharing time, and I have laryngitis. Worry flops around my stomach like a fish as I think of someone else trying to read it for me—they will get all the voices wrong, they won’t know where to put the right emphasis. I wrote 9 pages for a 2-page assignment and want all the credit.

            It is difficult to remember a time when I couldn’t read and write or when I wasn’t good at it. Even my own mother doesn’t remember, though she is pretty sure I just learned to read in kindergarten (it was my oldest brother who learned to read at two and a half, probably because he was the only child at the time. I was the fifth). Every teacher I ever had marveled at my supposed gift with words; I guess I just got used to hearing it. Because of the constant encouragement I received, I started to put more and more time and effort into my writing projects, which only increased the praise I received, which only increased my desire to keep succeeding. This cycle of praise and effort has pushed me throughout my educational career, for better or for worse.

            I was talking to my husband one weekend as we were driving through Sardine Canyon about what my life would have been like had I not been praised as a child for certain things: math, English, obedience. Would I have excelled at these things just the same? Or would the lack of praise and encouragement have stifled my motivation to learn? My husband talked about his own childhood—how the only thing he could ever remember being praised for was his ability to be happy all the time (quite a talent, indeed, though not one as readily noticed and encouraged in the  public school system). He said he never once was praised for his work in any one subject area in school, and from kindergarten through 12^th grade, he seemed to coast through his classes, not too smart, not too dumb. He is now planning on pursuing a combined Master’s/PhD degree in Physical Therapy and works hard to maintain an almost straight-A average. We did wonder though: would he have excelled earlier on had one single teacher noticed a talent and commented on it?

            I, on the other hand, received an almost embarrassing number of comments and compliments on my literacy skills throughout my education. For example, I have an enemy-turned-friend that tells me she used to hate me because my teacher used my spelling test as the key in 3^rd grade. In almost every English class I have been in, my teacher has asked to use my essay/poem/story as an example to show future classes (or current classes, which was always mortifying). I am sure that these early experiences only helped to encourage my love for the skills I was best at. But writing was not the only thing I seemed to excel at: partly thanks to external rewards offered for the most books read (like personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut) and partly thanks to my own affinity with reading, I read voraciously from the time I started school. In one particular year (I think I was in middle school), I read no less than 192 books.

            It would be easy for me to assume that it was just my “destiny” to become an English teacher or become a published author (although neither has happened . . . yet), but I know from my studies in psychology and my familiarity with literacy that it might not be so simple. I have learned in my education classes that children whose parents read to them show marked advantages in vocabulary, communication, and reading ability; additionally, these children also tend to get better grades and have a higher success rate in school. My mom read to me from a very young age, as did my older siblings. I remember that on long road trips, my mom would read to us in the car to pass the time—books like The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Twenty-One Balloons. We also had a house stuffed full of books—we had bookshelves in nearly every room of our home, filled with everything from picture books to easy chapter books to complex classics. I saw both of my parents reading for their own personal pleasure almost every day—each had his/her own stack of books piled up on the nightstand by their bed. Looking at even deeper issues, I grew up in a white, middle-class neighborhood that promoted the dominant culture in every way, so I never felt marginalized for my love of reading or for the fact that I excelled in school. These factors all contributed to an environment where my talent for reading and writing could flourish without obstacles.

            Until very recently, I had always attributed my successes in the language arts to good genes and my own personal hard work. Although these things have definitely played a significant role, I now know that having those other factors in my life (growing up in a middle-class neighborhood and having college-educated parents, to name two) significantly increased my opportunities for learning higher literacy skills. I also was blessed with teachers and parents and friends who praised and inspired my efforts in literacy. Although how literacy is gained and improved upon is a complex, many-sided issue, I am the first to admit that I have been blessed with almost every factor in my favor, which has helped me to become the kind of reader and writer that I am today.

            These positive early experiences in literacy skills will help shape my future as a teacher because they have inspired a passion within me that I hope will be contagious to my students. I know that from my own experiences as well, I will be able to create and give out more challenging assignments to those students whose reading and writing abilities beg for such complex tasks. I will admit, however, that I will need to learn more skills in how to reach out to students who are not so skilled at reading and writing; having come from the opposite end of the spectrum, my experiences with the language arts have been limited, so I will need to learn how to best help those students who struggle to improve and excel as well. In the end, I am hoping that my talents and background with reading and writing will help, rather than hinder, my efforts as a future educator in the public school system.

Example Student Literacy Autobiography #1

Literacy and my Life

My definition of literacy has expanded over the course of my life.  I used to believe that literacy was just the ability to read.  Although this is a part of being literate, over time I have come to understand that literacy is a complex journey that involves learning how to take the written word and internalize what it means to you.  It also involves the ability to express ones opinions and feelings through the written word.  Clearly, this is not something that is mastered (unfortunately, it is even overlooked at times) in elementary or secondary education levels.  I am about to graduate from college and I still feel like my literacy is evolving. The reason for this slow assimilation is greatly tied to my lack of experience.  I still have a lot of life left.  As I will demonstrate through this autobiography of my literacy, experiences gained through the process of “growing up” really do inform a person’s literacy acquisition.  In this article, I hope to draw some lines between my experiences with literacy and my level of literacy comprehension. I also hope to show how these experiences will influence my teaching approaches.     

My earliest memory of literacy was spending time as a young child, with my mother, reading the Little Critter book series by Mercer Meyer.  I loved these books.  In fact, I still do.  I do not remember many details about these reading sessions, but I’m certain that the funny pictures and everyday adventures that I could relate with were the reason I was captivated by them.  I can deduce from the impression these books had on me that this was the start of my interest in becoming literate.  Entertaining oneself through imaginative reading is certainly a good place to start.  After all, I do not know very many children who read scholarly writings as a starting point.

This brings me to my growing up years.  I watched plenty of movies and television (Saved by the Bell?) but also spent a lot of time in school, learning how to be literate.  We learned our alphabet, how to sound out each letter, how to use these sounds to create words, and eventually how to string these words into full sentences.  “My dog is named spot.”  I don’t remember specifics, but I’m certain that sentences like this one were commonplace in our reader workbooks.  My work at school was further supplemented by reading I did at home.  My parents played a big role (particularly my mother) in making sure that I was on task in my studies.  I progressed and became a very good reader.  In fact (this is not intended to sound boastful), I was “above-average” as a reader.  I could sound out just about any word and retain these words for later use.  I think that my upbringing in a religious home played a big role in this ability.  I often, in church and individually, read theological passages in the old King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Mormon (another Christian-based scriptural volume of Ancient-American writings).  Many of these scriptural accounts are not easy reading.  I remember having the goal or ambition to want to learn how to recite these passages out loud in a convincing manner.  My upbringing in a home that valued the written word in theatrical arenas (both musical and non-musical) further fueled my desire to read these scriptural accounts as I would a dramatic text.

Knowing that I’m the kind of person who would choose a movie over a book any day of the week, I rarely read for pleasure.  The only times I would read novels was in school.  During Middle School and High School, I read a few standards of American literature, including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, and Grapes of Wrath.  Although I did not care much for the idea of reading for pleasure, I really did enjoy these books (even The Scarlet Letter!).  Unfortunately, these reading assignments led to little more than some fanciful discussion and maybe a short book report.

I feel that literacy became implanted in me because of all the writing I did throughout my schooling.  When I was in 6^th Grade, I had a caring English teacher who took the time to get some grant money so her students could learn how to write their own short books.  I still have these books at home.  I wrote a short book of poems, a story about Christmas (with illustrations), and many other imaginative works.  This teacher stepped out of the box and looked for ways to interest us in being literate.  It was a great idea.  I also had other teachers, mostly English, who took careful steps to make sure that I was learning how to write persuasively.  At the time I didn’t understand why they weren’t teaching us more grammar, but now I do.  The truth is that grammar is something that is acquired and learned by experience.  The real trick is learning how to organize thoughts and put those thoughts on paper.  That is what many of my teachers were trying to do.  I especially have fond memories of my last English teacher in High School.  Her southern drawl and gentile-like personality made class time interesting.  It was in her class that I received a C+ on one of my papers! This was unheard of! I was appalled and thought she must be nuts.  After all, who wouldn’t want to read a descriptive paper on vanilla ice cream?  It turns out that she didn’t, and I suffered the consequences.  I did recover though, and I’m happy to say that I learned many great things about writing in her class.  Although I didn’t think it at the time, she was a very influential teacher. 

                If I were to name the place where my literacy took off to a whole new level, it must have been in my English 2010 class (a writing class that I was required to take for my bachelor’s degree).  My initial feelings toward this class were hostile, but I found that the course really helped me to learn how to write about current issues.  This was the start of me becoming critically literate.  The course was an eye-opening experience for me.  My writing took on a whole new persona. I am indebted to the teacher of that class (I forget her name now, but her hippy-like personality is unforgettable). She was flexible, knowledgeable, and genuinely concerned about each of us.

I am now a writing fellow for a Music History Class in the music department of Utah State University. This means that I help students, as peer tutor, to revise their papers.  The professor for this course told me that he wanted me to do this job because of how well I write.  My thought was, “Have I really become that good?”  After so many attempts and tries at being a descriptive and interesting writer, it appeared that my forte in writing was academic prose.  How boring!  Nevertheless, I am constantly striving to become an interesting writer.  I have placed a lot of stock in figuring out how to write about musical academia in a way that won’t put readers to sleep.  This is yet another step that I hope to take in my literacy identity.  Similar to my previous experiences with becoming a dramatic reader, I hope to inject a dramatic writing style into my academic prose.  I’m working on it! 

I feel that there is an important lesson to be learned from my childhood literacy experiences. I spent a fair amount of my early childhood investing my imagination into the Little Critter books. Perhaps we, as a society, could learn how to invest our imagination into scholarly writings as much as we do into fictional novels. Such a technique would be tantamount to critical literacy, or internalizing, within each of us, how we could change the world for better.  I didn’t really learn about critical literacy until I was in my English 2010 class!  Imagine how much deeper and poignant my young adult thoughts would have been had I been taught how to be critically literate in elementary school! However, as I slip into my teaching loafers, I realize how difficult teaching critically literacy to young children can be. The biggest hoop to jump through is not being afraid or self-conscious about broaching their students opinions and feelings.  Sometimes teachers are unwilling to ask their students to think out of the box because they are afraid that they will lose control and have a class full of ruffians. This is simply not true.  I believe that students would more than live up to these higher expectations and would come away from such classes feeling greatly enriched.

  As a music educator, I’m always thinking about how arts education can complement other subjects and be taken seriously as legitimate coursework.  Looking at my own literacy, it is clear that my efforts to be dramatic in my reading were paramount in creating my literacy identity. Could one say that this example is a plug for arts education?  I think it could be.  This is particular poignant when speaking o of my emphasis, choral conducting. Teaching students how to project their voice and create real drama (in a musical format) could be extremely beneficial for reading comprehension and retention.

I described in the autobiography above some of the ways I was taught to appreciate literature in school.  Many of these efforts involved a read-through of a novel followed by some discussion and maybe a class presentation.  Many of these literature assignments asked us to glean life lessons from the books we read.  As good as this tactic was, none of these teachers asked us to take it a step further and ask, “How can I make sure I become this kind of person?” or “How can I make sure that these events never occur again?” I realize that, had my teachers taken the time to make us really internalize these pieces of literature, my personal literacy identity would have been greatly enhanced.  I feel like reading a piece of literature without internalizing it is like buying a fly fishing rod, taking private lessons on the techniques of fly fishing, learning how to tie flies, but never stepping into the river to fish.  As a teacher, I really hope that I can help the students to ask the difficult questions.

Writing is the inverse of reading.  When people first learn to write, they inadvertently use what they have read to form their own prose.  However, as time goes on, the apparent “borrowing” of material hopefully starts to dissipate.  What is left behind is that person’s writing style, their own person coming out in the pages.  As I stated above, my literacy was greatly enhanced by my learning how to write well.  I went through this process of becoming my own writer.  It was difficult and required many growing pains, but the end result was and is very satisfactory.  We have already discussed how important it is for each student to become critically literate.  I believe that one of the important steps that must accompany this internalization is being able to decode these ideas, organize them, and then lay them out in writing.  A person with a good idea usually doesn’t orate their ideas to a select few and then leave it at that.  Doing this would not create any sort of permanency.  Only when good ideas are written down do they become invaluable.  What would the world be like if Beethoven’s landmark 9^th symphony wouldn’t have been written down?  Sure, oral transmission is possible, but who knows how many ideas would have been forgotten or lost along the way. It may have evolved into a totally different piece of music!  Although these examples way seem extreme in conjunction with student prose, I can’t ascribe to allowing a student to think critically without asking them to write it down. Anything else would be a half effort. Every teacher should encourage thoughtful discussion and critical thinking, followed closely by assimilating those thoughts into prose.

It seems that my identity as a literate person was greatly influenced by my own desire to become better at it.  This begs the questions, “Where did I get that desire?”  Having reflected on this question, I feel that my desire was greatly fueled by the examples I had around me.  My parents were educated people, my older brothers were educated people, and most people that formed my social circle were educated.  All of them had literacy going for them.  It’s no wonder I had aspirations to become literate. The people who surrounded me shaped my identity.  This makes me think about students who don’t have those kinds of examples surrounding them.  It must be so difficult for them to cultivate a desire to develop a positive literacy identity. This is where a good teacher can really make a difference.  If a student respects their teachers and sees those persons constantly reaching for new literacy levels, they will also start to reach.  A good teacher can change a student’s affective outlook on literacy.  Imagine a student that leaves school having read about, thought about, and wrote about life issues.  Such a student would have a rich literacy identity. This should be the goal of education. 

I'm your instructor and this is what I think...

Hey...

Welcome to my class!

My name is Melanie and I'll be your instructor for this fine semester as we discuss language, literacy, and learning...I teach for many reasons, but perhaps the most important is because I want to make a positive impact in my community...and this is how I do it:

As both a doctoral student and an educator, when asked to provide words to describe how I view what is most important in teaching, my answer has been primarily that it should be deliberate and intentional. These two words are carefully considered, especially in consideration of the complex work that is involved in integrating effective literacy instruction with disciplinary teaching, attention to a multiplicity of texts, and honoring the diversity of teaching contexts and the situationality of classroom instruction.

As I have come to realize more and more the effect of a teacher in the classroom, both my effect in my own classroom and then the effect of the students I teach as they enter their own classrooms, I have to acknowledge that effective teaching is not accidental. It is well planned in response to both qualitative and quantitative measures that inform instruction, and with attention to the complex and contextual variables that shape each classroom interaction, while also conceding that these variables shift over time and with the learning that occurs in each classroom. It is an iterative process that requires the best from us as educators of educators, pushing us to create more complex and contextualized definitions of literacy and learning ourselves, even shifting those definitions depending on the purposes of the courses we teach and the goals of the students who attend.

With these ideas in place, some key features characterize the literacy instruction courses that I teach. The first feature is an emphasis on helping students to become aware of their identities as teachers, the assumptions they hold because of their own learning experiences, and the ability to critique these assumptions when they promote narrow definitions of literacy and learning that promote “accidental” teaching, or teaching that looks like what they’ve always seen, but have never considered in regard to how it promotes literacy acquisition in different disciplines for their own students. This attention to heightened consciousness leads to discussions of critical literacy which promote deliberate and intentional analyses of ourselves as teachers and how our own identities and beliefs influence the instructional and curricular decisions we make. Given the attention that is currently being given to how literacy differs from discipline to discipline, and how a lack of attention to this idea has promoted resistance to literacy integration in content area instruction, literacy instruction can no longer be solely viewed as teaching students how to comprehend and interpret texts. Instead, it must also include teaching students how to actively challenge and “talk back” to texts, especially those that perpetuate false assumptions about a discipline and more importantly, social injustice on the basis of gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, language, and race. In accordance with this belief, I design activities and discussions for my students that encourage them to think about their own stances on social issues that they have developed as they have begun to attain a teacher identity, how these stances affect their classroom instruction, how they encourage students to read a variety of multimodal texts from critical and empathetic perspectives, and how they can use reading, writing, talking and listening to effect change in the world. I encourage them to be more deliberate in their choices and reflections about who they are as teachers.

Along with situating literacy instruction in the context of social issues, I also situate literacy instruction within larger debates about theories of reading and writing. Within this context, a second key feature of my courses is that they are extremely pragmatic, with each lesson designed in response to the question, “What might this look like in actual practice in classrooms?” For example, in the Teaching Language Arts in Elementary Schools course that I am currently teaching, many classes begin as I model a brief lesson based on the component of literacy instruction that we are studying (e.g., oral language, reading and writing connections, connecting assessment to instruction, etc.). My students typically evaluate the model lesson, noting what they liked about it, how it could be improved, and how it did or did not align with the principles that they read about in that week’s assignment. Working in small groups, students also develop and teach model lessons to the rest of the class. After debriefing these model lessons, they plan and implement instructional activities that they will use in their practicum experiences, and then reflect on those. By modeling this cycle for them and labeling what I am doing in my teaching explicitly so that they can critique it, I encourage them to be more intentional in the instructional choices they make.

Many of my students are often working in or placed in schools with predetermined curricula that strictly adhere to literacy programs or to multiple-choice worksheets designed to improve standardized test scores. Consequently, a major goal of my teaching has been to prepare students to be “creatively compliant and selectively defiant,” (Hoffman, Assaf, Paris, 2001) operating as deliberate and intentional professionals who can work within the constraints of institutions and political systems while still advocating for their students. Ultimately, I want pre-service and practicing teachers in my classes to develop a deep understanding of several domains of literacy instruction, both theoretically and through reading research, and how they can be applied in different social and institutional contexts. I hope that with this understanding, my students are able to enact deliberate and intentional instruction that encourages meaningful reading and writing while building the metacognitive awareness of learning processes that will help their students to effect change in in their worlds.

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From Hoffman, J. V., Assaf, L. C., & Paris, S. F. (2001). High-stakes testing in reading: Today in Texas, tomorrow? Reading Teacher, 54, 482-492.