With the current government funding available for private companies or community resources for supplemental educational services this is a very important area of comprehension instruction to consider...TEXT-TO-WORLD connections...need to be considered. We need to explore and include community resources for that diverse communities have befitted from to learn to read. We often overlook these resources and just impose mainstream reading practices upon students from diverse communities. However, I doubt this will be an easy area to research you may have to use alternate research avenues such as oral histories to find information in this area...maybe a simple study of interviews that ask "how did you learn to read" or what resources from your neighborhood helped you to learn to read...
In their article entitled, The role of the Black Church in growing up literate: implications for literacy research, Catherine Dorsey-Gaines and Cynthia M. Garnett exemplify the falsity of one of the negative connotations of discourses considered to reflective of an oral style of literacy. Freire said it best in an interview when he flat out dispelled the myth that “the worse you write, the better you are, scientifically speaking” (Bruss & Macedo,1985). Their beautifully written publication, which began with a vignette, reinforced that their community discourse is not coming from a position of deficit and that its inclusion in the curriculum would greatly benefit the mainstream discourse and s chool essay-text literacy. Through the use of this type of narrative which is typically considered to be characteristic of oral cultural backgrounds they clearly communicated the urgent need for an understanding of how a culturally diverse student's discourse is essential if schools are going to make what they teach engaging and meaningful. In the vignette called the Reading Lesson, the author reveals that it was not for the teacher but for her Grandma Dancy that she pursued reading. “It was she who had invited my reading practice, been critic and audience at my rehearsals, given me greens and peach cobbler for incentive, and allowed me to feel the pleasure of reading well in front of others” (Hicks, 1996, p. 249). Similarly, the Black Church and various other diverse community resources should be acknowledged instead of undervalued in terms of their literacies. -----Original Message----- From: Nadia Johnson <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 9:25 am Subject: [MOSAIC] Communty Resources to Teach Literacy What are some strategies used to incorporate community resources to teach literacy?Thanks, Nadia Johnson _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Store, access, and share your photos. See how. http://windowslive.com/Online/SkyDrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_CS_SD_photos_072009 _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
