Creating a Reading Apprenticeship- Issues and Resources
Reading for Understanding is a description of a year-long Academic Literacy course given to ninth graders at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School. Their reading apprenticeship program is based on the assumption that academic literacy requires different skills than the reading skills taught at the elementary level. Chapter one of the text frames the problems and challenges that students and teachers face once they reach middle and high school. The authors refer to the literacy ceiling, which limits what a student is able to achieve and is based on the degree to which they are able to extract information from academic texts (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz, 1999) . Students with low literacy ceilings will use a variety of coping methods, which can include acting out or developing a disinterested attitude toward school.
Because many think that student reading struggles are simply issues decoding words, a common response by schools is to re-teach those lessons. The authors state that their experience shows that decoding problems are not the issue, and re-teaching those skills both ignores the problem and reinforces students’ views of themselves as poor readers (Schoenbach, et al., 1999). This is an example of not understanding the difference between learning to read and reading to learn, which is a framing question in our course. Other responses to reading difficulties that the authors cite include providing the content in forms other than text, and allowing students to not have to deal with difficult or so-called boring texts, essentially avoiding the issue entirely.
The authors believe that what is needed is instruction on making meaning of a variety of types of texts and assistance with some of the real challenges, namely “comprehension, unfamiliar vocabulary, insufficient background knowledge, reading fluency, or engagement” (Schoenbach, et al., 1999, p. 7). They don’t need protecting from boring or difficult texts, they need strategies for persistence and understanding.
The academic literacy class created by the authors is built around academic literacy as a Discourse with both social and cognitive dimensions (Gee, 1989) . Gee believes that literacy in a Discourse is only possible through enculturation or apprenticeship. Similarly, the authors designed a year-long extensive apprenticeship in which the teacher is the master learner and her students the apprentices. They also tap into the social element by using the student’s own social characteristics to create a safe and collaborative learning environment. The teachers first spend some time consciously recognizing the processes that they use when reading difficult texts, then share these processes with the students essentially making the invisible visible to the students. Then the students practice these processes themselves until they are internalized, making the visible invisible again (Schoenbach, et al., 1999). Thus these skills are scaffolded for the students until they become unconscious, and the students become fluent members of the academic Discourse (Gee, 1989) .
While this book was written primarily for middle and high school classrooms, I think that it would also be useful in certain college contexts, such as a freshman experience course or a college success course. My goal is to teach college success classes at CNM. Because community college students often arrive unprepared to be successful academically (Jones & Becker, 2002) and may not be fluent in academic Discourse, the strategies detailed by the authors can help me to create a similar program for apprenticeship in Academic Literacy. CNM’s college success class does include instruction on textbook reading, so this book seems to be a great resource for ideas and inspiration.
References
Gee, J. (1989). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction. Journal of Education, 5-17.
Jones, R., & Becker, K. (2002). Getting prepared for the underprepared. The Mentor. Retrieved from http://dus.psu.edu/mentor/old/articles/020415rj.htm
Kennedy, K., & Ishler, J. C. (2008). The changing college student. In V. N. Gordon, W. R. Habley, & T. J. Grites, Academic advising: A comprehensive handbook (2nd ed., pp. 123-141). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz. (1999). Reading for understanding: A guide for improving reading in middle and high school classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Reading for Understanding seems like a very interesting book. It seems as though it is used by students and teachers, is this correct? With you mentioning that 9th graders received this text, do you think it would be beneficial for younger students to receive this text since it is mentioned that the text is for middle and high school students? I don't fully understand the notion of literacy ceiling. I am wondering if you are going to further talk about this vocabulary later in your blogs. Is the literacy ceiling relating to the students' academic ability, classroom dynamics, assignments, etc.? I really enjoyed the statement of "the difference between learning to read and reading to learn." With the concept of providing the content in forms other than text it reminds me of the aesthetic to efferent continuum used by Rosenblatt and using a multitude of different types of material to have students learn. It also relates to the coal assignment from this course where we looked at different modes and how to organize them for the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI could also see the relation between this teaching method and Gee but it makes me question whether Gee would see each school year as a stepping stone to have the 12 years of school as the ultimate learning of the Discourse or if the year would be enough. This text seems very relevant to your goal of teaching a success course at CNM. That sounds like an amazing goal that I wanted to look into as well but at any college or university.
The book itself was not a resource for students. It is a resource for teachers describing the yearlong Academic Literacy course that they created, including strategies and sample activities so that teachers can replicate some aspects of the course, whether it be in a stand-alone course like this one, or integrated into content area classes. They coined the term literacy ceiling to describe the difficulties that students have understanding content area texts because they believe that those difficulties limit what a student can achieve in the classroom and in life. It seems to be a catch-all phrase for a variety of issues that can affect reading and understanding. Thanks for the comment and questions and the opportunity to clarify some things that I may not have made clear.
DeleteI appreciated the background and clear description of the study examined in your book. You clearly connect your piece with the previous articles read for class. I thought it was interesting how the idea of re-teaching was discussed as a negative reinforcement. I am wondering what the strategies will be that are recommended for literacy success.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like an interesting approach to working with students. The term "literacy ceiling" didn't sit well with me, simply because it seems like there is no way to move past a ceiling, but I do understand that that is the goal of the apprenticeship. I like the idea of making the invisible, visible with students. Often teachers give students assignments and don't really explain why students are doing what they're doing and what the learning strategy for the assignment is. They focus instead on the content of the assignment itself. Providing students with content and the learning strategy makes for meaningful instruction, and probably more student engagement. I look forward to reading more about this book and the project.
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