The authors mention a vital point that I believe relates to my own experience with higher education, “Although members of these oppressed and marginalized groups [African American and Latino] may be skillful readers of social relations and sophisticated problem solvers in community-based contexts, too often they do not experience success at navigating the processes of problem solving in school” (351). I know I experienced this problem, myself. Now that I have the capacity to recognize a literacy event, myself, I see where the system lost me. I was a skillful readers of social relations, I solved sophisticated problems (within my cultural relativity) and even though I maintained these this level of social reading, it did nothing for me academically.
I believe the reason for this is because no matter how much skill I had obtained, the skills I had obtained were ones that I enacted within my social ethos. In other words, they were designed by users who were as oppressed as I was, which means, even though I had a set of tools to socialize and communicate within a certain social circle, those tools would never allow me to gain access within the academic world, because the tools designed for that social group was available to me, because the assessors of my position assumed that I hadn’t the skill to utilize and integrate both.
Majors, Kim, and Ansari go on to say, “When their linguistic, social, and cultural tool kits are recognized, they are too often viewed as localized, impermeable, and harnessable only within context rather than across them” (351), which is to say that the sophisticated skills I learned to socially read my space was only valuable in that space, and these authors are arguing not so. Many instructors, administrators, and/or staff didn’t see my tools/skills as marketable for the space that the status quo had designed for me, so the skills I did have didn’t apply to the ways in which my skills were assessed.
When I took my placement exams for college, I was devastated to learn that even though I had fulfilled the curriculum guidelines and graduated with a sketchy 2.85, I was still unable to be placed in first year college level classes. Even though I felt that I did everything according to the books, on paper, I didn’t measure up. Even though I had maintained social networks that were complex and I did this across contexts, because the rules set in place for those who did live and breathe the “middle class” lifestyle were rules that those particular designers felt left me outside the norm, I was marginalized accordingly. So, in essence, we have been assessing skill sets in a way that only allows us to use a certain amount of them, but ideally promote the acquisition of many. This is a conflict that raises tension among many theorists and scholars, and in my opinion, rightfully so!
March 20, 2012
truebloodcreator
truebloodcreator 
2 responses to “HALR Ch. 22”
Becky M
April 7th, 2012 at 15:24
I think it is interesting that you talk about how the awareness you are gaining in this class lends you to have a heightened sense of what went missing for you and your literacy growing up. I have been experiencing that myself lately and one of the bigges things I have realized is that I missed out on the connection between reading and writing while trying to become more literate and I still struggle to find that “balance.” I say balance because I believe now that they go hand-in-hand, but still find it difficult to integrate much reading into my own classroom. This is something that is going to be a priority for me next year.
truebloodcreator
April 11th, 2012 at 16:00
Becky,
I could not agree more. I think the balance is finding text that our students can relate to and engage in. Not that I think we should do away with canons all together, but the balance is actually learning when to integrate innovative material into the classroom, along with what we already know works well.
In my response to HALR, I believe it came off sounding maybe bitter or resentful. I don’t feel that way at all. However, I can attest to the frustration and confusion that one feels in this position. I’m not saying that my high school is responsible for my inability to succeed at my first experience with college, but what I wanted to articulate is that because I was exposed to a variety of communication sources, I now see how the gap between what I thought I knew and what I truly needed to know in order to find a place in college level discourse were so very far apart that finding a connection for the two was something I had not yet developed the skill to do.
What I think is our responsibility, at this point in time, is something very similar we were talking about in class last night. We, as educators, need to facilitate this gap, sort of the way Ann Marie articulated that she was doing by identifying what her event’s student was developing. Ann Marie is very savvy, and we can be that way too, but we have to be willing to go well past the distance of what is expected of us. I believe the observations that we have conducted this semester is a great way to do this. I have always believed that good teachers don’t always need to lead, guide, or be the most vocal, good teachers also say little and watch. If I have learned anything this semester, that is one main point I will take with me 🙂