Week 7/8 Toliver Articles

The Apartheid of Children’s Literature by: Christopher Myers

• "Recognizing oneself in a text, from the understanding that your life and lives of people like you are worthy of being told, thought about, discussed, and even celebrated" (Myers, 2014, p. 2)
• I belong to the Cherokee nation and being able to recognize myself in texts has been limited to the disney film Pocohantas and with the history books we read in school. 
• Our history books are written by white people
• Native Americans portrayed as savages 
• I did not read a book written by a Native American until I was in college.
• "Children of color are at best background characters, and more often than not absent, is in fact part of the imaginative aspect of these books" (Myers, 2014, p. 3)
• White-washing structure in literature

Critical Indigenous Literacies by: Debbie Reese

-"Unlearning stereotypical representations of indigenous peoples and replacing harmful narratives with accurate info" (Reese, 2018, p. 390)

-Textbooks written by white people

-Teachers have choice over the books that they include in the classroom

-"The key ideas are to choose books that are tribally specific, written by native writers, set in the present day, and relevant all year round, keeping native peoples visible throughout the school year" (Reese, 2018, p.391)

-Riding the Trail of Tears Cherokee Nation & Georgia author Blake M. Hausman

Five Steps Toward Successful Culturally Relevant Text Selection and Integration by: Sue Ann Sharma, Tanya Christ

-Culturally responsive teaching uses students cultural knowledge and ways of being in the world to support learning, offers a way to address the issue (Sharma, Christ, 2017, p. 295)

-Teachers should make an effort to get to know all of their students in order to teach based on each individual student.

-"Unfortunately the scarcity of texts for nonwhite students is the norm. The lack of accessibility to culturally diverse childrens' literature in todays classrooms is an alarming injustice" (Sharma, Christ, 2017, p. 397)

-Ted Talk with Kandice Sumner

-Texts need to be relevant to students

References

Myers, C. (2014, March 15). The Apartheid of Children's Literature. The New York Times, 1-4.

Reese, D. (2018). Critical Indigenous Literacies. The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy,             251-262.

Sharma, S. A., & Christ, T. (2017). Five Steps Toward Successful Culturally Relevant Text Selection             and Integration. The Reading Teacher, 71(3), 295-307.

James Gee articles week 6

James Paul Gee Good Video Games and Good Learning

• Correlation between engagement and games
• Good Video Games capture players through identity (Gee, 2013,p.34)
• Video games are interactive in a way that books are not
• Players of games have the ability to engage with a games production by making choices (Gee, 2013,p.35)
• Games encourage students to take risks, explore, and try new things (Gee, 2013,p.35)
• Games give students autonomy 
•  

Gee chapter 1

• We each have a core identity that relates to all our other identities (Gee, 2007,p.4)
• Revelations (Gee,2007,p.9)
• 1.    Games require players to think in complex ways
• 2.    Learning from video games can be frustrating and life enhancing
• 3.    Good principals of learning
•  
• Two controversies of gaming violence and gender (Gee, 2007, p.10)

References

Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J. P. (2013). Good video games good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. New York: Peter Lang.

Week 3 Practicum Reading School Talk

Major points from the School Talk reading by Mica Pollock

-Inequality of opportunity is a process that accumulates over generations

-"Living in poverty just like living in a wealthy household is part of an opportunity context" (Pollock, 2017, p.75).

- Opportunity context application to my life: think about this opportunity context in the way that schools are set up. Schools are districted in such a way that students from urban areas are given less opportunities than those in wealthier schools.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

-As a teacher we need to understand our own opportunity contexts. 

-I went to school in a wealthier school than those that were districted across town.

-Thorough inequality talk seeks to understand this cumulative history and its opportunity consequences for young people (Pollock, 2017, p.82)

-"Immigrants plug in to neighborhoods and schools with existing patterns of economic advantage or disadvantage" (Pollock, 2017,p.84)

-Schooling is affected by other domains of opportunity examples health care, lack of food, lack of resources. 

-As a teacher one small thing that I can do to bridge this is provide snacks to students that are hungry. 

-"Analysts say the most important steps to take to conunteract disparities and inadequacies in baseline opportunity across domains would be to invest in living wage jobs for parents" (Pollock, 2017,84).

-Talking about the opportunity contexts that exist can help students push past these power structures. 

References

Pollock, M. (2017). Schooltalk: Rethinking What We Say about--And to--Students Every Day. The New Press.