Turn up that radio, Teacher- Duncan-Andrade & Morrell

While Idon’t diagree with the premise of this article, that is to respect the diversity of knowledge and experience of our students, to bring in culturally relevant material to the class to engage students and that popular media can be used to teach academic skills (e.g. research, essay writting etc..) I think the article makes teaching students from disadvantaged backgrounds seem simple.  From reading this article it seems the only thing you need to do is to bring in egaging material in the voices of our students.  I don’t think it’s that simple, how do you move a student from disecting a piece of rap music to writing a sucessful statement of purpose to enter college?  These are two very different and distinct discouse styles.  These different discouse styles carry with it our idenities, the way we think, and feel about our environment and kids, young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds (may) use a discouse that in the end is not valued by the education system.  I think the article makes it seem like academic language will come naturally if you just bring in the right kind of content.  I think academic language is very awkward, has a very defined genre and is not a natural process for many students no matter what background you come from.  Not only is it awkward, it might just not feel right.  For example I had to teach (English) academic reading and writing to my students in South Africa, learning things like essay structure and paragraph structure were really uncomfortable because of the discouse style.  In many African langauges (and I am really simplifying here) it is considered rude to tell someone right away why you came to tell them a story, but the first thing we ask students to do in academic writing is to tell us why you are telling us this story in the form of a topic sentence and/or thesis.  I would get beautiful essays from students that had no paragraphs, very few sentence markers and a thesis statement at the end.  Why?  Because this kind of academic literacy was not natural, did not respect the kind of discourses that take place in the community, my students did not have a lot of experience with academic text and could not identify with why you would ever be so disrespectful to someone and be as rude as to state in the first paragraph why you were there.

Another reason why I don’t think just brining in popular culture into the class is enough to engage students in academic content is the emotions that students have around learning.  If students have had a lifetime of negative experiences with learning at schools by the time they get to highschool it is really hard to move beyond these emotions.  I had many students in South Africa who didn’t trust me or believe me that they could be sucessful students, to the point that they would not even try to do an assignment or engage in class no matter what the content was.  They were so use to failing, so use to being told that they couldn’t be good students, that they had very low expectations of themselves and were afraid to even try.  Then I had very good students, who didn’t identify with being writers and would turn in plagerized work because they thought they couldn’t write or that anybody was a better writer than them.  Even after several student/teacher conferences of helping students formulize thier ideas on paper, showing them that they had great ideas a thoughts etc.. some students would still in the end turn in plagerized work.  Not because they waited till the last minute to turn something in, but because they still doubted thier ability to be writers and identify with being a writer that had something worthy to read.  Anyone who has worked with disadvantaged students knows that the emotional side of learning is most of the battle.

I could go on here with more examples of why I think that brining in the right kind of material to class is just the start and a good start at that, it is just not that simple.

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