Week 9, Post 4: In the Blender

In your second blog synthesize the readings into a single set of issues:
What do the readings, taken together, tell us about teaching and learning with students who are speakers of dialects? 
What teaching recommendations can you make based on the readings?
What ongoing questions do the articles raise?
What kinds of discussion questions should we tackle in class?
How does this group of articles tie to the articles in the previous round of presentations?

So Your Point Is?
Taken together, the readings tell us that some students, especially Black students, enter the classroom with a very low self-confidence in general and regarding home dialect in particular.  This may be because previous teachers or other authority figures or family members have ridiculed their speech.  This may be because there is a general barrier between Black people and White people, especially when the latter assume authority roles.  These issues have a great potential to add fuel to these students' affective filter, nullifying any efforts to help them.

What To Do?
From the literature, it's clear that, to reach out to Black students who are struggling to perform, a teacher must make much greater efforts to acknowledge them and how they identify with language.  To a limited degree, ethnographic interviews can level the playing field for all classroom cultures.  The next step is to recognize students who need extra help and to conference with them ASAP, being careful to strike a balance between showing compassion, but not "singling them out," which could be construed as denigrating them.  If all this fails, it may be necessary to make special time for such students, to speak to them about personal matters, to learn what sorts of family orientation, or other social issues may be impacting their effort to progress.

Where Is This Going?
It's wise to keep abreast of the ongoing controversy surrounding these students because it's such a delicate issue, with many key Black figures taking sides on both sides of the scrimmage.  In addition, there appears to be much ongoing research to draw from for teachers interested in breaking through the affective filters.

In Class?
The decision whether to discuss these topics with the whole class would probably depend on the number of Black students in class.  For example, if most of my students are Black, we would discuss these issues, perform ethnographic exercises and journal about the topic.  On the other hand, if the class is 99% White, as may be the case at Iowa State, whole-class discussion would probably alienate the minority 1%, so one-on-one conferencing with that student would be warranted.

Looking Back?
This batch of articles continues to spread the word that Black students, sincere as they may be in their goal to succeed at college, are educationally handicapped in many cases, as compared to the White majority: they struggle more with language, with self-esteem, with connecting to the "conversation."  They're often deeply conflicted in their desire to both succeed in school and to maintain their identity withing the Black community.  Indeed, some (consciously or unconsciously) willing sabotage their own academic futures in order to nurture this ambivalence. 

This group of articles is rather mixed in its remedies.  Articles like Fordham's further the notion that nothing short of total social revolution, along with a complete overhaul of the White psyche, will ever narrow the "achievement gap" between the races.  Coker's paper sees the problems as largely caused by the White machinery, but praises Black students for their creative maneuvers in coping with college.   The Gonzalves and Wallace/Bell articles make a very fair assessment of the situation, noting that, while many White educators are trying to serve these students fairly, the situation is like a mine field, and sometimes even the best intentions garner bloody results.  Far from making ineffectual blanket statements, as Fordham's do, these last two articles provide creative methods and case studies illustrating White educators' effectiveness with struggling Black students.