1. Autobiographical Sketch & Reflection
(EDUC 5323 - Forming and Reforming the Elementary Curriculum)
This was one of the first assignments that I completed for my Masters. In it, I compared two episodes from my childhood: listening to folktales from a family elder, and reading scary horror stories in my pre-teen years. The former was a “habitus” (Bartlett & Holland, 2002, p. 12), socially and historically relevant to the folk storytelling tradition in Pakistan, intersecting with urbanization and modernity, which relegated said activity to a story circle of family elders and children in the livingroom. That said, the beliefs and values entrenched in my grandmother’s storying were normative to the culture and times in which they were fabricated, embodying “cultural ways of utilizing literacy” (Barton & Hamilton, 2000, p.8), a means for the family elders to teach cultural ways of being to the children through storying motifs and metaphors. Both storytelling episodes in my examples were types of literacy events that captured the interests of those involved, and markers of the author’s culture shown in the narrative itself. The former used a remote backdrop of Pakistani hinterlands, while the latter presented an urban farmstead in America. In my assignment, I also reflected on the similarities in tone and impact of the stories, yet the stark contrast in character and setting. R. L. Stine’s stories contained templates of Whiteness, but these were less remote than the archaic figures of school-sanctioned texts, written by a distant deceased White author. They were crucial to my growing sense of awareness about reading the world (Freire, 1987) through stories that came from different traditions to mine. I do feel, at this point in my studies at Penn, that the books of Stine and others that filled the bookstore shelves did not contain protagonists hailing from similar cultural backgrounds to mine or my peers’. Back then, we found more in common with the writing than not, but I recognize how years of similar reading taught me more about a distant country that dominates the popular media than about my own context. I didn’t think my childhood was as “cool” as a childhood of an American preteen because I simply wasn’t reading stories of children from my own culture because of the economics of production and reception, in which American books overshadowed any others.
References
Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & Ivanič, R. (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 7-14). London: Routledge.
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Bartlett, L., & Holland, D. (2002). Theorizing the space of literacy practices. Ways of Knowing 2(1), 10-22.
Freire, P. (1987). The importance of the act of reading. In P. Freire & D. Macedo (Eds.),
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Literacy: Reading the word and the world (pp. 29-36). South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
2. Inquiry into Adolescent Writing
(EDUC 6329 - Teaching English/Language/Literacy in Middle and Secondary Schools )
This assignment was part of a lengthy process, with multiple stages to complete before submission. For Dr. Stornaiuolo’s course on Adolescent Literacies, we were required to get a sample of writing from an adolescent, engage in a descriptive analysis session with peers, in rounds of successive feedback and annotation, before synthesizing the experience and feedback to the adolescent in the form of this essay. The adolescent whose work I chose was a former student: I remember feeling anxious and protective of his writing when I went into the feedback session with my peers. However, once we started, the discussion was so organic, valuing the author making moves rather than the writing as an end. In summation, I believe Musa’s writing – a critical film review and exposition on Dr. Strangelove – exhibited what Lankshear and Knobel (2011) consider social dimensions of literacy: “the operational, the cultural, the critical” (p. 18). Musa’s writing is clearly critical of Kubrick’s craft, but it is also operational as it refers to technical aspects of film that even I (or my peer reviewers) were not familiar with. It becomes cultural, even though he discusses a WW2 film from decades ago, as he links the conflict and tensions caused by nuclear armistice with Pakistan’s current status as nuclear power. The layered subtext to his writing presents a nuanced take on problems of local and global significance (Street, 2003), hence emerging literacies in politics, film and literature. The assignment was accompanied by an interview with Musa, which allowed me to appreciate Musa’s ways of reading the world through the modalities he prefers, and hence writes passionately about. I include it here for all of the above, and finally because it offers insights into the work of a former student, allowing me to reflect on my critical stance throughout the process.
References
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New literacies: Everyday practices and social learning. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. [Chapter 1]
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Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 77–91.
3. Exploring Learning Environments
(EDUC 5300 - Literacy in Action)
My fieldwork placement for the 5300 course (Literacy in Action) was with the Philadelphia Writing Project. I had various responsibilities as an intern for a term, which afforded several opportunities for me to network and interact with teachers from across town – at the Penn Museum for the Celebration of Writing and Literacy (CoWL), and at GSE for the Day of Writing activities. The essay that follows was the culmination of a close study of artifacts gathered by me in field notes, gathered through interviews with stakeholders or collected from secondary sources, such as the PhilWP social networks online. I have included this artifact because I find the framing of the word artifact almost metacognitive for this assignment: various iterations of data collection and analysis went into the assignment, as field observations preceded field notes, which naturally came before the assignment. Now as I revisit the work, the assignment becomes a layered artifact with these dimensions. Secondly, literacy events and literacy sponsorship (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Street, 2003) were two key aspects of the work that I did with PhilWP, as they are primary means of outreach and social presence for the organization – two of which (CoWL, Day of Writing) I have mentioned earlier. By working closely with peers, mentors and facilitators in Philadelphia, I got to witness dimensions of work situated in community (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2021) where teachers have known each other for years, and harness literacies to the same social justice ends as their peers. Members of PhilWP became workshop facilitators, allowing me to witness critical literacies (Simon, 2015) aimed at local concerns – such as student debates around the Sixers stadium, and its impact on local Chinatown residents. This immersive internship allowed me to connect theory with practice, and engage in dialogue with teachers who are well-versed in the same ideological models and approaches towards criticality, justice and culturally sustaining literacies.
References
Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & Ivanič, R. (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 7-14). London: Routledge.
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Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2021). Inquiry in the age of data: A commentary. Teaching Education, 32(1), 99–107.
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Simon, R. (2015). “I’m fighting my fight, and I’m not alone anymore”: The influence of communities of inquiry. English Education, 48(1), 41–72.
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Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 77–91.