In the 1990s, I taught middle grades in an all-Black boys’ school on Chicago’s West Side. I was the only English teacher, left to stem students’ past education struggles and create interest in the world of print. After a few false starts that no doubt felt familiar to what they had already experienced in school, my students and I figured something out about literacy—it really does emanate from the personal: personal connections, interests, uses, etcetera. Because of that, anything that happens in school must begin and build from there. 

With this idea in mind, my students and I went full tilt. We made the literacies students already knew and used (and typically I didn’t know or use) essential course content and the starting place for learning other literacies. English class drudgery faded, and there was never enough time to do what we were doing. Many of the students went on to selective high schools, a few to elite private schools. I went on to become a teacher educator.

It’s an understatement to say I read Illinois’s new Comprehensive Literacy Plan with apprehension. As a teacher and teacher educator, I had experienced the disconnect between what the State mandates and what students experience in schools. As I read the Plan, though, I grew optimistic. It sensibly advocates for high quality, evidence-based instruction of the myriad skills that shape literacy development. More importantly, it speaks to issues of equity and opportunity, recognizing that any plan’s success hinges on being culturally responsive, i.e., making it personal. 

However, my caution flashed red, and memories of my students burned bright, when I read this claim on page 24: 

“…it’s important to recognize that there are situations in which alternative methods, such as constructivist or discovery-based approaches, can contribute meaningfully to the learning process. Constructivist methods, which focus on interactive learning and student-driven exploration, can deepen understanding and foster critical thinking skills. In instances where students have already acquired a solid foundation through direct instruction, incorporating discovery-based activities can further enhance their ability to apply and extend their knowledge (italics added).”  

These sentences undercut my optimism. They’re the proverbial placing the cart before the horse. Let me explain.

First, there’s more to constructivism than interaction and exploration. Constructivist methods can be any method, including direct instruction. What makes it constructivist isn’t the interaction or exploration it offers; it’s the experience it provides and what that experience means to students and how ties into their prior experiences. 

Second, interaction and exploration are essential to all literacy learning. To suggest direct instruction must happen before constructivist practices minimizes the value and power of literacy as a meaning-making and communication tool. By claiming direct instruction primary, the State fails to recognize that literacy is multifaceted, complex, and context dependent, that in fact there are multiple literacies.  

The idea there are multiple literacies, or we read and write for different purposes, has underscored literacy studies for decades. Children of color and children from low-socioeconomic backgrounds come to school with ways of using language and print often at odds with the essayist literacy valued in school. Yet, they have literacy and language skills that serve them well in other contexts.

For example, how a child might tell a story outside of school can differ from what’s expected in school. Differences are reflected not only in the vocabulary and grammar but also in what counts as evidence, how the child understands audience, and the purpose of the telling. Those children who come to school with literacy abilities not valued in school often struggle and are viewed as under-performing. They’re prime candidates for years of direct instruction and little if any interaction and exploration. This was my students’ experience on Chicago’s West Side when they landed in my classroom.

Fearing I was offering them nothing of relevance and losing their attention in the process, early in the year I set aside forty minutes each week for students to read or write anything they wanted, with one caveat—they had to share with the class what they were doing. Many of them didn’t like that, until they saw classmates doing it. 

All the students wrote and read about hip-hop culture. I went with it. Once we got past the often profanely explicit lyrics of rappers like N.W.A. and Wu Tang Clan (remember, this was the 90s), students, with a nudge from me, homed in on themes reverberating in their lives. These included poverty, gangs, and crime as well as family and community solidity. Our forty minutes per week turned into forty minutes per day, of half of our block schedule.

Within weeks, students started to relate to authors like Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. DuBois. They used what they knew and experienced outside of school to explore these new voices. The voices provided a new depth to those experiences. They traced similarities among authors and lyricists. They learned, for example, to see the symmetry between Tupac Shakur and James Baldwin, two artists writing in different genres and media but speaking to common issues. 

For students like Da’Sean, Baldwin’s words, “The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decision,” resonated in Tupac’s lyrics:

Da’Sean saw in Tupac’s words an effort to give credence to his own experiences. He spent a week identifying similarities between Tupac’s narrator, Baldwin’s narrator in “Sonny’s Blues”, and his own experiences in and out of school. In the words of “Sonny’s Blues’” narrator—words like, “These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities”—Da’Sean recognized similar themes in Tupac’s work and in his own young life, the difference often a matter of language use.

Other students, too, identified different ways language can be used and to what effect. For example, their ability to code switch, such as knowing when to use the habitual be verb, and when to substitute the adverb often or usually, became a point of pride. They also learned to recognize more acutely misogynistic lyrics and their effect on the pursuit of justice and equality.

Our education system has always valued specific cultural and historical understandings, which legitimize or prioritize some literacies over others. I appreciate how the State’s Comprehensive Literacy Plan challenges these understandings and realities. None of the components of the Plan, however, is of much value if students don’t recognize what school offers as relevant and meaningful to their lives. 

The Literacy Plan excerpt at the beginning of this blog is a refrain of how we have failed so many students over the years. It reflects our continual perpetuation of the misconnect between student lives and what is valued by school. In fairness, the quote is a small part of a largely compelling literacy plan, but it’s a part that rings of the same misguided practices of the past that created the need for the Plan in the first place.