Kyle D. Shanton, Ph.D., Associate Professor Elementary and Literacy Education ALBION COLLEGE

1. Nuevos Horizontesen la Práctica Ordinaria en la Alfabetización:Vulnerabilidad, Riesgoy Nuevas Posibilidades en Colaboración Kyle D. Shanton, Ph.D., Associate Professor Elementary and Literacy Education ALBION COLLEGE Albion, Michigan, USA kshanton@albion.edu

2. Introducción • No Child Left Behind/Reading First (2001)— • “… Through Reading First, states and districts receive support to apply scientifically based reading research—and the proven instructional and assessment tools consistent with this research—to ensure that all children learn to read well by the end of third grade….” (http://www.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/index.html); • Institute of Education Sciences 2008 Interim Report— • Reading First no ha producido un efecto indicativo para avanzar la comprensión lectora (April 30, 2008); • El papel de la maestra— • In response to that report, IRA issued the following statement: “The national debate on reading in the United States has never wavered on one clear point, that excellent reading ability is essential for the success of students. Furthermore, most agree on the critical importance of teachers in fostering student success in reading. What has been under debate is determining how to create excellent readers.” (Reading Today, vol. 25(6), June/July 2008)

3. Una situación común • La amplificación de la diversidad lingüística y cultural entre los niños; • La suposición de un dialecto normal (o estándar) de inglés; • La definición de la lectura como una serie de 5 destrezas; • La imposición de ciertas limitaciones en la enseñanza de lectura; y • La frustración de los estudiantes y las maestras.

4. En general: Acceso limitado a oportunidades de desarrollo profesional; Áreas rurales y remotas en el suroeste de los EEUU.; Diversidad lingüística y cultural entre los niños; La gran mayoría de las maestras son blancos y hablan sólo un dialecto de inglés; Una clase al nivel universitario para estudiar la alfabetización; Necesidad de cumplir un proyecto de acción acerca de su pedagogía; y Tres meses en la primavera de 2005. Explícitamente: Tres maestras del 3er grado de una escuela primaria; Seis niños quienes leen “bajo nivel apropriado” para 3er grado; Un educador de maestros de la universidad; El uso de análisis de inaciertos para evaluar el uso de lenguaje de los niños tanto en la lectura oral y al recontar cuentos; y Evaluaciones continuas de las maneras en que las meastras colocan el uso del lenguaje del estudiante en relación a su propio uso, y al uso del texto escrito. Esta situación particular

5. INVESTIGACIÓN PARTICIPATIVA DE ACCIÓN: Frustración de la maestra con la enseñanza—¿Cómo puedo cambiar mi pedagogía? No sé cómo empezar?; y, Frustración de la maestra con el logro académico de los niños—¿Cómo van a mejorar los niños su comprensión lectora? MARCO TEÓRICO: La base socio-psíco-lingüística del proceso de leer (Feirrero, 1990; Goodman, 1996); La selección y uso de lenguaje como función de la lectura y la enseñanza (Ruiz, 1984); y Alfabetización de la perspectiva de diálogo de Bakhtín (Haas Dyson, 2000) Diseño de la investigación

6. Las preguntas claves • 1) ¿Cómo es que las maestras colocan el uso del lenguaje del estudiante en relación a su propio uso, y al uso del texto escrito? • 2) ¿Cómo respondieron los alumnos? • 3) ¿Cómo cambiaron las evaluaciones de la comprensión con respecto a sus nuevos conocimientos?

7. Metodología: El proceso al macro-nivel

8. Metodología : El proceso al micro-nivel Asesoramiento de la evaluación de la maestra acerca del uso de lenguaje de los estudiante; Intento curricular y pedagógico para responder diferentemente;

9. Conocimientos • Primer intento: • “I talked a total of 4 minutes and 20 seconds, whereas [Tom] spoke 3 minutes and 28 seconds. This data is misleading. [Tom] paused quite frequently in his responses to my questioning or probing. I included these pauses in his talk time as occurred before he had finished telling me what he had to say. … I spoke 67 sentences. [Tom] spoke 28 sentences. Sometimes children can state important ideas or details in a few choice sentences. But, because I did control the talk time and the direction of the conversation (I even interrupted [Tom] quite frequently), this definitely affected his ability to tell me what/all he knew. Oops!” • Teacher—“So, did you learn anything else about tractors?” [Tom]—“That they, um, that they, um, they pick up cars with the …, with the different kind of tractor.” Teacher—“Okay, do you remember what kind of tractor that was?” [Tom]—…(5 second pause).” Teacher—“This is a pretty long book isn’t it? They talk about lots of different kinds of tractors, don’t they?” [Tom]—“Yeah.” Teacher—“And, the tractors can do different kinds of jobs. ([Tom] nods in agreement.) Did you know that’s kind of an important point about this book, right? That sometimes people are going to have different kinds of jobs. You talked about, um, people want to dig holes, that they want to pull weeds, maybe the farmer has something to do, you kind of talked about cutting grass, okay, and getting the snow off the road. Okay, why do you think people made tractors?” [Tom]—“So the, so they can, um, so they can help them do some, do, um, do all their stuff what they wanted to do.” Teacher—“Okay, so maybe people wanted to do some things.” (Karla Cushman)

10. Conocimientos (a continuación) • Primer intento: • “Before meeting with [Max] I read the book and did a written retell of my own. In my retelling, I certainly did not include all of the main ideas contained within this book. … Out of these topics, I only talked in detail about 2 of them. While there were some parts that were omitted, overall my summary covered the essentials. I did not anticipate that [Max] would retell as much of the story as I did, but I listed all of the key ideas and details from the text in order to see how much he shared in his retell.” • T—“We’ll have to look that one up, won’t we? Find that one for you. Can you describe…, one of things you didn’t do for me is describe what a leopard looks like. Can you tell me what the book told you about how they looked?” • T—“Let’s read the sentence and find what it means.” • M—“This quick, cunning hunter is the leopard, a member of the cat family that is found in Africa and Asia.” • T—“Yeah, thay didn’t tell us a whole lot about it, what it means. ‘This quiet, cunning hunter is the leopard, a member of the cat family that is found in Africa and Asia.’ What kind of a hunter do you think he is?” • M—“A predator?” • T—“Predator, that’s another word for hunter isn’t it? Do you think maybe he’s a smart hunter?” • M—“He’s probably a smart hunter.” • T—“Do you think maybe that? So, maybe it’s describing what kind of hunter he is?” (Theresa Voge)

11. Conocimientos (a continuación) • Primer intento: • “…I realize that open-ended questions go deeper, but some of my questions were ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers because she didn’t remember a lot of the text when asked a specific question. Many of my questions were meant to get different aspects of the story that she hadn’t mentioned. …” • [Teacher]—“Was she very happy about those little white things on the furniture?” [Melanie]—“No.” [Teacher]—“What did she want her to do?” [Melanie]—“She wanted her to dust the furniture?” [Teacher]—“Yes, she did.But, she took her LITERALLY, didn’t she?” [Melanie]—“Yes.” [Teacher]—Okay, what else did she do?” (Donna Sawyer)

12. Conocimientos (a continuación) • Segundo intento: • “Hadn’t I told the children I would retell the story, telling about an eagle’s life? Yet what had I done? I started asking specific detail questions. … I even went so far as to reject [Kari’s] initial answer. She had interpreted my question in a way other than what I had wanted. Why hadn’t I directed the retell from there, her starting point? Her interpretation spoke to my use of lengthier, and often confusing, discourse. …” (Karla Cushman) • “Unfortunately, I found myself leading them to the answer rather than guiding them through the steps to find it for themselves. For example, one student had miscued on the aquarium, calling it auditorium. The miscue was altering the meaning of the story because aquarium was essential to the setting which was also essential to the plot. I began by sharing what I knew about an auditorium then asked if that fit the sentence. The students realized that it did not fit the meaning. However, I then spent too much time using grapho-phonic cues to help them read the word and we lost track of the meaning.” (Theresa Voge) • “I said, ‘What does the group want to do?’ The blank stares at me led me to believe that the kids really are trained to do what I want. … [Andrea] asked, ‘What does that mean?’ … So, I wanted to know what they knew about deer, and what they wanted to learn. They came up with questions about deer. …This was a different procedure than I normally use. Every new book or story usually started with a pre-selected vocabulary list, pre-selected comprehension questions, and a retell of the story with specific details that I thought were important. …” (Donna Sawyer)

13. Conocimientos (a continuación) • Tercer intento: • “It was not surprising to me that I attempted to ‘back off’ and let the students tell me more of what they knew. This group had finished the book about bald eagles. I had experimented by letting [them] write the questions for each other for the ‘test.’ They enjoyed this and responded well in writing. The group was now learning about wolves. I wanted them to take the lead during the initial brainstorming session. … The ratio of teacher talk to student talk was 19:21, almost 1:1. However, the overwhelming characteristic here was the amount of silence in between utterances. The students were not used to open-ended questions or me waiting for them to respond. They were accustomed to me jumping right in and directing the discussion.” (Karla Cushman) • “One of the most significant observations I noticed during these talks was that the students [would] rarely look at another student speaker. They also would rarely react to or interact directly with what the other students were saying. A student would share his thought, and then everyone would look at me to find out what was next. I would then ask the group what they thought of the student’s idea, but it was clear that they were not really listening to each other in the discussion. At other times, if I had just asked a question, they would speak on top of each other to share their ideas but not notice anything another student had shared.” (Theresa Voge) • “Again the students were very shocked with my statement of, ‘[W]hat do you think we should do …?’ There was a lot of silence on the tape because every mouth was open wide. (I can relate to this because of my experience with this class.) So, again I guided them with sticky notes and how to use them. The students were to start reading the selection and put a sticky note in the story where they either wanted to share a detail or note a word they did not know.” (Donna Sawyer)

14. Conocimientos (a continuación) • Cuarto intento: • “... Hence, we are backed into a corner. We, along with our students, have experienced the painful conflict between the actual and the ideal. … I realized a conflict existed between how I wanted to interact with my students and how I was in fact interacting with them.” • “… Although he is not part of the bilingual program at [NES], and has English listed as the primary language spoken in the home, he does exhibit traits of the ESL child. …The Navajo language does not name nouns specifically, but rather describes an object based on its characteristics and relationships to other things. For example a chair is not called a chair; it may be described as the large or small, colored, soft/lumpy/uncomfortable/comfortable thing that someone is sitting in or resting on. The Navajo language does not use suffixes to denote plural or possessive nouns or to differentiate between past, present and future tenses with verbs/action words in the way the English language does.” (Karla Cushman) • “While students occasionally took the lead in sharing their thoughts and ideas about the text, overall I found that they followed my lead, allowing to direct and control the conversation.” • In one conversation about facts and opinions, the students were sharing their examples. After hearing someone’s examples a student would state if they thought it was fact or opinion. On several of the examples a debate broke out among 2 or 3 students. One of these debates prompted a student to back to the text to explain his idea and why he believed the sentence was a fact. At times, they couldn’t solve their debate and would decide to say it had elements of both fact and opinion.” (Theresa Voge)

15. Conocimientos (a continuación) • Cuarto intento: • “I hoped to focus on putting kids in charge of content discussed and vocabulary connections to be made. I also believed, and still do, that students explore text differently. I have often thought students wanted what they didn’t have access to: These students had been reading leveled texts yet chose stories in the ‘off-limits’ basal. It was the talk that filled the gap ….” • “I found myself thinking about language related to talk time most of the time. This was difficult for me, because it boiled down to changing my existing patterns of talk. Even though knowing the importance of the structure of talk time, I have become consciously aware of the way I state my questions and opinions during reading group time.” (Donna Sawyer)

16. Conocimientos: Resumen

17. Conocimientos: Resumen (a continuación) • Pregunta clave #1— • Al prinicpio, aún con muy buenas intenciones, las maestras imponían varios límites en el uso de lenguage del estudiante en relación a su propio uso y al uso del texto escrito, pero poco a poco intentaron reconocer las varias maneras en que el uso del lenguage del estudiante señalaba conocimiento y entendimiento. • Pregunta clave #2— • Entablaban en ambos observar los límites de las maestras y responder extensivamente con su propio uso del lenguaje, es un proceso complejo de movimiento hacia adelante y hacia atrás. • Pregunta clave #3— • Se fijaron en la importancia de las construcciones culturales, y la plena participación, en el uso del lenguaje del estudiante.

18. Discusión • Vulnerabilidad: • Un complejo de condiciones y procesos que engendran una disposibilidad para estar dispuestos a …; • No reconocer el uso del languaje actual del estudiante— • Las maestras tenían una perspectiva peyorativa de la cultura y lenguaje de los estudiantes, e • Imponían límites a ellos en términos de tener oportunidades para participar. • No reconocer los límites de la ensenañza— • Las maestras practicaban una superfluidad inútil. • Darse cuenta de sus prejuicios contra el uso del lenguaje de los niños— • Las maestras se dieron cuenta de la variedad de estructuras gramáticales (los estudiantes, el texto, sí mismas), y • Darse cuenta de unos inaciertos pedagógicos— • Se fijaban en posibilidades diferentes para la interacción con los estudiantes. • Riesgo: • Examinar sus prejuicios e inaciertos pedagógicos en diálogo público; • Considerar alternativas para la ensenañza; y, • Entablar a la incertidumbre de prácticas alternativas.

19. Discusión (a continuación) • Nuevas posibilidades: • Un espacio de afinidad— • Los intentos colaborativos que tienen diferencias, fomentan varias maneras para contribuir intereses y destrezas, involuncran la ensenañza entre par-a-par, y en los cuales cada participante se siente como experto y aprende de sus iguales (Gee, 2004); • “Affinity spaces are highly generative environments, from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge.” (Jenkins, 2008); y, • Una transformación en perspectiva desde las mejores prácticas hacia las próximas prácticas. • Una cultura participatoria— • “A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).” (Jenkins, 2008); • “This process of observing my own teaching and my students’ learning has been discouraging at times. Listening to myself say things in ways that are less than my ideal frustrates me. However, each painful realization has been an opportunity to grow and learn.”; y, • 3 asuntos quedan: acceso desigual (i.e., a las oportunidades, experiencias, destrezas, y concocimientos que los prepara para plena participación), transparencia (i.e., el desafío de ver con claridad las maneras en que el poder influye las percepciones) y el imperativo ético(i.e., la nueva responsabilidad con el objetivo de balancear la fluidez de poder en la ensenañza).

20. References Feirrero, E. (1990). Literacy development: Psychogensis. In Y. Goodman (Ed.), How Children Construct Literacy. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge. Goodman, K. (1996). On Reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Haas Dyson, A. (2003). The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Read and Write. New York: Teachers College Press. Jenkins, H. (2008). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. An occasional paper on digital and media learning. The John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal. 8(2), pp. 15-34.