Re: Best practices (and Classroom community)
Ellice A Forman (ellice+ who-is-at pitt.edu)
Fri, 2 Jan 1998 21:05:52 -0500 (EST)
Dear Mike and others,
The exceptions to the norm in low income communities do need to be
documented and understood--I agree. The issues that Beth Warren and Ann
Rosebery are dealing with--fostering high-level experimentation and
explanation in low-income, bilingual students (Haitian Creole speakers,
for instance) through classroom discourse (among other things) are very
difficult. It's hard for the teachers to see much of their talk as
"science", it's hard for the teachers to examine their own talk (how many
of us do that in our teaching), it's hard for the teachers to understand
scientific investigation themselves (how easy is it anyway?). Yet Warren
and Rosebery and their colleagues are documenting the successes (as well
as the failures).
And Carol Lee's work is equally fascinating--having African American
adolescents engage in deep text analysis of "signifying" texts such as
those by Tony Morrison. She helps them see that the language of the
street that they know well is indirect, metaphorical,
figurative--precisely the kind of language understanding that is seen as
the most sophisticated by literary analysts. So she shows them that this
kind of language is in texts that one can read in school and that they can
understand better than most of us. This approach isn't too different from
that of Warren and Rosebery and their other colleagues at TERC--but they
do it in science.
Ellice Forman
University of Pittsburgh