Innovative Practice in Teaching the English Language Arts: Building Bridges Between Literacy in School and Out

• In Event: Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Innovations in Selected Standard Practice: Action Principles for State and Local Education Agencies

Abstract

Research grounded in a variety of theoretical perspectives, including cultural-modeling, New Literacies, multiliteracies, and schema theory, has established the promise of innovative teaching practices in the English language arts that recognize that what students do outside school can be a critically important resource in helping them do what they need to do inside school. Unfortunately, this resource is too seldom tapped.
In my paper, I will examine the barriers that interfere with adopting innovative practices that draw on adolescents’ out-of-school literacies, focusing especially on the Common Core State Standards and the instructional ideas promulgated by their authors and proponents. Drawing on my recent study (Wilhelm & Smith, in press) of the nature and variety of pleasure adolescents take in their out-of-school reading, I will argue that that those barriers are unjustified.
The data for that study are multiple extensive interviews with 14 middle-graders who named themselves as committed readers outside school of texts not taught nor approved of in school. In each interview participants were asked to explain what they had been reading and how they felt about it. As part of these interviews they brought in a favorite book and were asked to “think aloud” while they were reading.
After being transcribed, the interviews were parsed into content units, that is, a segment of discourse designed to make a single point and coded them using the qualitative software program atlas.ti. Drawing on Dewey’s (1913) delineation of four kinds of educative interest and Feldman’s (2004) philosophical examination of pleasure and the good life, three coding families were employed: the nature of the pleasure; the conditions that give rise to it; and related constructs, such as attitude toward reading, reading interests, motivation to read and so on.
That analysis reveals the power of students’ out-of-school reading and the extent to which that reading can help achieve traditional academic aims. Our participants employed sophisticated strategies for entering a story world, made nuanced thematic generalizations and used them as a lens for examining their lives, and rendered thoughtful aesthetic judgments about their reading. In short, our study establishes that the division between in-school and out-of-school literacies is an artificial one and benefit both suggest the benefit of devising innovative practices that break down that division.

Dewey, J. (1913). Interest and effort in education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press.
Feldman, F. (2004). Pleasure and the good life: Concerning the nature, varieties, and plausibility of hedonism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Author

• Michael W. Smith, Temple University