Teaching Discourse in School: Narrowing the Gap

To attain education requires collaboration between seven entities: The District, The School, The Community, The Teachers, The Student, The Parents, and the Peers.

The teacher is the glue between them all.  Teachers can have influence over school policies decisions, and certainly the atmosphere at school.  When opposition or recommendations are needed, teachers can influence the district.  Teachers are responsible for reigning in peers to behave and work well together and learn together. Teachers are also responsible for keeping lines of communication with parents open, and for trying to keep parents involved.  Teachers are needed to make community ties, organize community projects, bring members of the community in to the schools and reach out to the students.  Teachers have the opportunity to teach students day in and day out for one hundred eighty days a year. 

To be successful, first in education, then in the professional world, one must be literate.  What exactly constitutes literacy? The topic is one of great debate.  To be academically literate, I believe one must be able to read and write at a grade-appropriate level.  Being socially literate is something far more complex. Gee tackles this complexity in his essays Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction and What Is Literacy? And Gee says that Discourse in his terms cannot be taught in a classroom. “If you have no access to the social practice, you don’t get in the Discourse, you don’t have it. You cannot overtly teach anyone a Discourse, in a classroom or anywhere else” (Gee, 527). Gee asserts that there are many Discourses, many are divided up by social class, and if one is part of one Discourse, they cannot to use a different one.  He compared it to second language acquisition, which is extremely impossible to master without immersion (sink or swim) into the whole culture. 

Gee’s entire outlook is quite dismal.  His exclusionary beliefs keep our society stratified.  It makes “climbing the social ladder” virtually impossible. If his assertions were true, that literacy cannot be taught overtly by a teacher, why would students of lower socioeconomic status even attend school? Why would students whose parents speak AAVE even attend school?  Should schools be separated? Channeled based on the type of Discourse one has? Should certain jobs only be for certain Discourses?  Certainly someone who is speaking anything other than Standard English would not be an attorney standing in front of a court of law arguing a case (successfully).  If Gee’s theory were true, thousands of families would be pouring false hopes and dreams into their children; telling them they could be anything they wanted to be, when in actuality they are limited by their Discourse, and there is nothing that can be done. “Beyond changing the social structure, is there much hope? No, there is not.” (Gee, 531).

Gee even claims that teachers whose sole job is to teach Discourse (ESL, English teachers, language teachers, composition teachers, and others) are wasting their time, and fail at their jobs (because it is impossible).  There is however, another side of this story.

Lisa Delpit argues that literacy can in fact, be taught. She refutes Gee’s claims in her essay, The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse. Delpit does not dance around the issue; she states that it does take both dedicated students and exceptional teachers to make this learning possible. “...these teachers put in overtime to ensure that the students were able to live up to their expectations” (Delpit, 549).  

Often, students do not succeed simply because the teacher sets the tools in front of them. “There can be no doubt that in many classrooms students of color do reject literacy, for they feel that literate discourses reject them” (Delpit, 550).  It is a teacher’s responsibility to make the material come to life for students.  Teachers have to make the students want to learn.  Delpit provides an example on page 550, “The renowned African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier also successfully acquired a discourse into which he was not born. Born in poverty to unschooled parents, Frazier learned to want to learn from his teachers and from his self-taught father.” If teachers show the benefits of learning, and present learning in a welcoming atmosphere, students will be excited about it. If a minority student doesn’t feel content is accepting to who they are, they will not learn it.  

Teachers possess great power over student attitudes. “Perhaps more significant than what they taught is what they believed. As Trent says, “They held visions of us that we could not imagine for ourselves.  And they held those visions even when they themselves were denied entry into the larger white world. They were determined that, despite all odds, we would achieve.” ” (Delpit 549).

That the teachers held their students to a high standard and believed in them is a probable reason for the students’ success. The phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy works either for or against teachers.  If a teacher pre-judges their student and believes they can’t learn or perform, the teacher will give up on, or give less effort to that student. The student (even subconsciously) will pick up on the cues from the teacher, and will in turn perform poorly. Conversely, if a teacher believes in their student (regardless of any disadvantages supplied by the students home life or past performance), and continues to hold that student to high expectations, the student will again, pick up on the cues from the teacher and perform well.

This phenomenon supports the idea that it is a teacher that is the glue between all parts that come together to educate a student. Teachers show up every day and supply the tools students need to learn.  The dedication level and attitude of the teacher makes all of the difference. With literacy at the foundation of education, and the gap in achievement widening, if teachers really can make a difference, as Delpit has proposed, why is this not occurring? The achievement gap speaks to the difference in performance of minority students and those of low socioeconomic status versus their white, middle-class counterparts.

The students are not performing well due to several factors.  Some of these factors have to do expressly with their home lives.  Additionally, their Primary Discourses are often not Standard English.  This gives the students many disadvantages upon entering the school building each day. 

It is a given that teachers cannot make up for all deficits at home.  Schools today are understaffed and underfunded.  Teachers are under paid, overworked, and overwhelmed. Class sizes are too large.  Teaches cannot devote large amounts of time to specific students.  They can however, do the best they can.  Teachers can and should notice issues specific students are having and attempt to address them.

In the quoted text, teachers did individualize their teaching.  They taught students the basics of grammar they should have already known.  They even spent time working on hygiene issues like trimming fingernails.  This goes above and beyond a teachers written job description.  However, it doesn’t go above and beyond the conceptual job description.  A teacher’s job is to teach: to assist learning. 

These students who are struggling are doing so often times because their basic needs are not being met.  It is an assumption, but I’m sure it is awfully difficult to focus on grammar, spelling, reading, writing, etc. if one hasn’t eaten in 2 days, or one doesn’t know where their mother is, or one doesn’t have a winter coat and they had to walk to school.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there are five levels of needs: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Education and learning fit in somewhere in the esteem category.  Children cannot focus on learning if they are starving, if they feel they are in danger, or if their parents are fighting all of the time and no one pays attention to them.

I believe that schools can help if a student wants to come each day and put forth effort.  Schools can be stable. They can provide food, a safe area, and a teacher can provide caring attention.  With the right atmosphere, these struggling students can learn.  The biggest variable is the effort of the teacher.  The student’s effort hinges on the quality of the teacher. 

Delpit explains several efforts teachers can put forth to help students acquire literacy. “First, teachers must acknowledge and validate students’ home language without using it to limit students’’ potential” (Delpit, 553).  If teachers show they understand that a student’s Primary Discourse is part of what makes them who they are, and respect it, it will make the student feel comfortable.  Teachers (especially in urban areas) should explain when it is appropriate to speak and write in any way they choose, and when and why it is appropriate to use Standard English. If teachers make the classroom as comfortable as possible for students of many different backgrounds and languages, it will entice learning.  Teachers should embrace diversity by having students learn about one another.  All students of every back ground have something positive to offer the classroom.  It is the teacher’s job to identify opportunities to unite the classroom, believe in every student, and make the extra effort to help struggling students.

If the teachers are going the extra mile, and truly believe in their students, they can learn various literate discourses and become successful in the demanding society of today.