Negotiating comprehension

I just had to include this entire blogpost from Academomia (written by my cousin,) because it's a fantastic example of negotiating for meaning--for sense-making. I'm afraid that a language learner might not be as persistent as 3-year-old Charlie:

On our way to church this morning Ryan and I were talking about our university's quarterback situation in which we lost a bunch of games, our starting QB was injured and taken out of a game that was not supposed to be that big of a deal but that we were barely hanging onto, our second string QB was put in, and we scored like a thousand points inside one quarter.
Ryan made the giant mistake of saying "Poor starting quarterback, that's a tough deal."
Charlie piped up from the back seat. "Wha happened to him?"
"Uh, our quarterback got hurt playing football."
"Wha happened to him?"
"He fell down during a football game and got a booboo. Now he is all better but the coach has to decide which quarterback is going to play the rest of the season."
"Wha happened to him?"
"Our quarterback fell down and hurt his leg, Buddy. He's fine, but now there are two good quarterbacks and the coach has to decide who gets to play."
"Wha happened to him?"
"Charlie, why don't you tell me what I've told you so far?"
"I don't know."
...
...
Ahhh.
"Wha happened to him?"
Sigh. "Our quarterback fell during the football game and hurt his leg. His mommy wrapped him up in a quilt, gave him some milk, and let him watch TV. Now he feels better."
"Oh."
Later after we picked him up from Sunday School Charlie skipped down the hall saying "The football player fell down and got a booboo and now there are two quarterbacks and his mommy wrapped him up in a quilt and let him watch George and that was SO NICE of her and now he feels ALL BETTER!"

Now that is real sense-making related to the experience of a three-year-old--comprehensible input, as it were! How do we recognize when our students haven't been able to make sense of what we're saying? A high school student is much less likely to persist, so we may not discover the problem before a test, unless we do careful and constant formative assessments.

Reflections: Chapter I: Identity and Empowerment

Chapter I analyzes how identity is related to empowerment, exemplifying the topic with 2 case studies. The first shows how a Latino community, Pajaro Valley was given empowerment over the local school and brought great changes through a literacy project. The following quote from the project report, is particularly illustrative about how empowerment and identity are linked:

Another mother said: 'Ever since I know I have no need to feel ashamed of speaking Spanish I have become strong. Now I feel I can speak with the teachers about my children's education and I can tell them I want my children to know Spanish. I have gained courage'...
(Cummins, p 7)

The second tells about one of innumerable instances where children of "inferior" backgrounds were sent to boarding schools or assigned as foster children to well-standing citizens, ostensibly to train out their inferior qualities, but actually to remove any sense of empowerment their culture might have retained in their identities. The example is of a First Nations residential school in Canada, where, according to Cummins' research, "Eradication of of Native identity was seen as a prerequisite to making students into low-level productive citizens." (Cummins, p. 9)

The process of identity negotiation in schools is a reciprocal one between educators and students. For example, in the case of First Nations students in the residential schools, educators defined their role as dispenser of salvation, civilzation and education to students who necessarily had to be defined as lacking of these qualities. In other words, the self-definition of educators required that students and their communities be defined as heathen, savage and without valid form of cultural transmission... This devaluation of identity was communicated to students in all of their interactions...
(Cummins, p. 10)

Schools of this sort were run, mostly by various church organizations, into the 1970's. Cummins goes on to report a newspaper account of a conference focused on the treatment of First Nation children,

after the community started to conquer widespread alcoholism and social problems in recent years and realized that the self-destructive behavior had been masking the pain of the residential school experience.
(Cummins, p. 11)

The pain these people had felt was described recently in a "Health" article The sting of social rejection, in the LATimes.

The hurt of social rejection or exclusion is emotional. But there must be a reason why we so often experience it -- and talk about it -- as if it were a physical pain. One feels "burned" by a partner's infidelity, "wounded" by a friend's harsh words, "heartache" when spurned by a lover.
(Healy)

The article goes on to explain that a particular class of brain cells, called my opiod receptors, which not only dampen pain when an opiate drug or the body's own painkillers are present, but also "play a key role in physical and social pain. Thus it is no wonder that this pain, which most of us recognize as causing depression, would cause people whose identity has been removed to dampen their pain with alcohol and to feel depression. The " low-level productive citizens" that were expected have become non-productive in the extreme.

Of course this has happened all over the world: Native American, Australian aborigines, Greenlandic Eskimos under the Danish colonial power (where children were sent to Denmark for middle school, and many ended up alcoholics,) to name just a few. See the next entry for some literary and real-life examples from England and Ireland.

Cummins points out that these coercive relations of power such as these assume that there is a fixed quantity of power, using zero-sum logic. However, the example from the Pajaro Valley Literacy Project demonstrates that cooperative relations of power are additive.

Power...can be generated in interpersonal and intergroup relations. ...
participants are empowered through their collaboration such that each is
affirmed in her or his identity and has a greater sense of efficacy to create
change... The power relationship is additive rather than subtractive. Power is
created with others rather than being imposed on or exercised over others.
(Cummins, p. 16)

It is obvious from the Canadian example here, and the Irish examples in the next blog entries, that coercive power is subtractive. Instead of productive citiizens, society is faced with more crime, child support, hospital bills, etc. that could have been avoided with cooperative power. If the children's own identities had been supported, rather than attempted to be annihilated.

Educators and identity negotiation

As educators, we must be very careful to help the students retain their identity, while encouraging them to add to their identity in ways that will help them achieve their potential in the society they intend to live in. If education is student centered, it is much easier for us to help students achieve this potential. In large classrooms, teacher-centered instruction becomes more dominant, as the teacher has very little opportunity to get to know each student personally. As Cummins points out:

Our interactions with students are constantly sketching a triangular set of
images.

• an image of our own identities as educators;
• an image of the identity options we highlight for our students...;
• an image of the society we hope our students will help form.
  (Cummins, p. 17)

Our teaching then includes our own image of our students' future. We must be very careful to let the students form their own future, but we can provide them a view of our version, as well as the opportunities they need. But if we force our image on the students, we are being coercive, which will only subtract from the students' own identity. The micro-interactions between teacher and student, Cummins says, "form an interpersonal ...space within which the acquisition of knowledge and formation of identity is negotiated. ...[They} consitute the most imediate determinant of student academic success or failure." (Cummins, p. 19) Cummins concludes by discussion the two lenses through which these micro-interactions can be viewed:

...the lens of the teaching-learning relationship... required to promote reading development, content knowledge and cognitive growth; ... [and] the lens of identity negotiations ... communicated by the students regarding their identies - who they are in the teacheer's eyes and who they are capable of becoming.
(Cummins, p. 21)

We educators must always be aware that our wishes and concerns for our students must include their own understanding of their identity. A student's identity is not carved in stone. It is flexible and pliable. But we do not want to break our students by removing coercively a vital part of the student's identity. It is up to us to help the students negotiate their identity between their understanding and our understanding of the world they need to be prepared for.

Negotiating my own identity

gathering in the kitchen
Originally uploaded by bonbayel

This picture shows a part of my identity that only my family knows. I am sitting in a cottage kitchen by a lake in Maine together with my husband, my mother, my daughter and my sister-in-law.

Mom and Dad lived by this lake for almost my entire adult life, while I was living in Denmark. Their home was our home in America, and it looked sort of like this.

I sometimes wonder how I could end up in California. (Hint: that guy on the left moved here and then asked me to join him.) But I think that being by a lake in Maine is hidden deep inside me.

My life has been a constant renegotiation of my identity. I went to 4 schools in 3 states (NJ, OH, PA) before college in OH, and Mom and Dad added 2 more states (TN and ME) while I was in graduate school in a 6th state, NC. And then I lived in 5 different towns in different parts of Denmark for 29 years. Moving requires a change of identity every time, even within the same state.

• I went from saying "tomahto" to "tomayto" when we moved to Ohio, to avoid being laughed at.
• Moving from HS to Oberlin College meant moving from a school where I was one of the top students to a school where everyone had been that. I no longer got straight A's, which was required a lot of renegotiating of who I was.
• I went from a future physicist to a nobody in the science department, because my competition had increased dramatically.
• So I majored in German, and became a linguist during graduate school at UNC.
• I moved to Denmark, where it took a while (at age 25) to learn the language and the culture, and where I never entirely fit in.
• I became the wife of a man who had grown up a farmer, quitting school after 7th grade, but through night classes ended up a Ph.D. from U.N.C. He had to constantly renegotiate who he was throughout his life because of class culture differences, and then later because stroke left him not able to teach or be as active as he'd been. I will write about his struggles with his identity elsewhere in this blog.
• Strangely, in Denmark, I became the scape-goat American, who was expected to defend the Viet Nam war, which I had petitioned against in 1965, to pollution, even though I have always been an avid environmentalist, to whatever else people held against Americans:
  "Just because you're an American doesn't mean you can teach English well."
  "'English' means the language of England, not the U.S.," was a battle I ran as a teacher (and my daughter, later, as a student.)
• This was aided by my becoming the mother of 2 children, who taught me the culture as they learned it in school.
• In Denmark, I was a HS teacher of German and English - grammar, which is sort of like math, but also literature, a subject I'd avoided all my life, so I constantly felt that I wasn't preparing my students properly in that area.
• I dropped that for the world of business - for which I started dressing more appropriately and had my ears pierced, so I could wear a bit of "no-fuss" jewelry. But business in Denmark was not ready for a mature, foreign woman with a university degree in the humanities, so I had to hop from one temp job to the next doing things like translations.
• I became a small business owner, developing and running a diaper service for about 5 years, never making a profit.
• This lead to studies (and a few jobs) in environmental management.
• And finally a move to California as a new wife, with a whole new barrage of identity negotiations.