Bridget's+Literacy+Event

ENGL 515 Literacy Event Paper: Bridget Pizzino

CONTEXT

Fordson High School is located in Dearborn, Michigan; the community surrounding the high school has experienced a rapidly increasing ESL population over the last three decades. In fact, Dearborn has the highest Arabic population in the world outside of the Middle East. According to 2006 Census Bureau information, more than 26% of Dearborn's total population is foreign-born; over 41% of students over the age of five live in households that do not primarily speak English. Fordson's student body is currently at 2340 students. English fluency is a major concern for the community and the school administration, because English literacy is tied to test scores, and thus federal and state funding. English fluency has far-reaching implications for this community as well, since test scores are tied to the perceived quality of the public school district itself, and subsequently the property values of the neighborhoods. There seems to exist a dichotomy in the educational status of Dearborn's young adult community: over 22% of Dearborn's population aged 18 to 22 years have not attained high school diplomas or passed the equivalency exam. Conversely, over 50% of this same population have some college or an Associate's degree. Fordson High School has not passed AYP in the last two years; in an attempt to curb this trend, the administrators have instituted a building initiative to increase the incidence and likelihood of reading and writing opportunities across the curriculum, regardless of the subject taught. One day a week, a mandatory “silent, sustained reading and writing” day must be incorporated into all building curricula. Contrary to many area high schools that are phasing out Technology Education programs, Fordson's Industrial Education program is thriving. For example, the Technology Education staff has recently added a Home Technology curriculum to their program, which teaches students the basics of minor electrical wiring, plumbing, and construction for residential buildings. Because shop accidents are much more likely to occur on Mondays and days before vacation breaks rather than mid-week days, the Technology Education Department has implemented silent, sustained reading and writing on those days. These reading and writing assignments focus on current trends in the manufacturing, automotive, carpentry, electronics, and graphics fields. Some instructors within the department typically assign a Core Values paper, which is based on the six core values that the Dearborn Public Schools has identified as being intrinsic to the educational integrity of their students, as well as the students' roles as critical citizens.

WRITER Ahmed Badaoui is a senior, and a first-hour student. He sits in the second seat of the middle row of Ben Harmon's Electronics One class. Since Ahmed is a senior, he exhibits a high level of maturity: he's quiet, not disruptive, participates in class, and does the work assigned. However, he does have a job which occupies a great deal of his time; his attendance is starting to indicate as such. In my interview with Ahmed, he indicated that he has not seriously considered attending a four-year university, but sees himself attending a local two-year community college. However, his response (“maybe Henry Ford”) seems to be reflexive, since Dearborn's young adult population chiefly attends this college. In short, “it's where everyone else goes”. His grade point average hovers in the high 2-point range, which he believes is more than adequate, although he did not say exactly what it was adequate for. This seems to suggest that Ahmed does not consider secondary education particularly rewarding or valuable to his future. He does not consider himself a writer; he says it's his worst subject. Ahmed works afternoons and weekends at a gas station that is owned by his father and two uncles. It is not their only business, so Ahmed often helps out at other locations as well. Work is his primary focus currently. EVENT Fordson's reading and writing initiative requires students to read curriculum-relevant texts and then to respond to them in writing. Students by and large see these assignments as busy work; they complain loudly, and they rush through them quickly. The particular assignment that this paper is based on is one such assignment. Students were instructed to read an article about Toshiba's possible decision to pull out of the HD DVD business, and the implications of this decision in the business world. They were then instructed to write a summary of the article in their own words. As a whole, the class spent much less time reading the article than they did writing the summary. It was clearly obvious through observation that these students were pulling out content from the article and putting it into a paragraph word for word. This raises several red flags, from problems in reading process, to issues in critical thinking skills, to problems defining the genre of summary, to plagiarism issues. Ahmed Badaoui is a typical example of the majority of students in Mr. Harmon's Electronics One class. He views these assignments as a waste of time, and completely removed from “the whole point of shop classes”. Mr. Badaoui sees these assignments as little more than time-fillers, and he feels that “nobody gets anything out of them”. He also feels that most of the reading and writing assignments “have nothing to do with what the teacher's teaching, and [he] doesn't get what they're saying”. The Toshiba article, for example, contains financial language that most people, let alone high school students, are not familiar with. However, instead of asking the instructor what this language meant, he simply regurgitated it into his summary. In his interview he also admitted that he “stopped reading like half-way into it”. Mr. Harmon offered no explanation or definitions of these terms either. As a student in his last few months of high school, Mr. Badaoui is just anxious to get his diploma and move on. Contrary to some of my peer's experiences, Mr. Badaoui was selected from a group of volunteers. When asked to volunteer for this project, several students were anxious to participate. Students appeared more than willing to engage in an activity that was different from what they were doing in class. As my observations continued, these students became increasingly curious about me, and asked questions of Mr. Harmon about me while I was in the room. Frequently, the question of my ethnicity came up: “Are you Arabic? Is she Arabic?” As a whole, Mr. Harmon's Electronics One class appeared quite interested in being interviewed, especially. Mr. Badaoui was selected because he was a senior, and quite frankly, the quietest volunteer in the room. While Mr. Badaoui was a willing interviewee, he was not, however, a willing participant in his own tutoring. After discussing the Toshiba article and his response to the assignment, he seemed to “check out” of the conversation. Because these writing assignments earn full credit regardless of how closely they follow the guidelines of the assignment itself, students have no vested interest in how “correct” they are. As Mr. Badaoui indicated in his interview, plagiarism apparently is a non-issue in Technology Education classes: “If it's important, I pay attention, but if not, I don't”.

ANALYSIS The goal of writing in technology classes does not pertain to the Technology Education curriculum per se, but rather it is part of a broader building imperative. As such, writing in these classes should focus on developing deeper cognitive connections to the hands-on work that students do. Because reading and writing outcomes have not been established for the Technology Education Department, it is difficult to ascertain if students are exceeding, meeting, or falling short of goals. The reading and writing initiative at Fordson High School is based on a similar model adopted by the only Title One school in the Dearborn School District, which is a middle school that neighbors Fordson. The test scores for Lowrey Middle School have increased significantly over the course of one year after implementing this silent, sustained reading and writing program across the curriculum. The primary goal of all CTE programs, however, lies in real-world trades experience, and preparing non-college-bound high school graduates for jobs after leaving high school. Many of the teaching positions in Technology Education departments in high schools across the country are still funded by a government program begun as part of Roosevelt's New Deal from the 1940's, as a financial response to the Great Depression. Most instructors in these fields strongly believe that if student interest wanes, so will the departments themselves. Therefore, these instructors must adhere to local administrative pressures while still maintaining the original purpose of these classes. Mr. Harmon has also explained to me that students enroll in Technology Education classes //because// of the hands-on aspect. Often, these students learn and process information differently than other students, and those that possess learning disabilities and have difficulties in other classes actually thrive in the Tech Ed department because they utilize different skill sets. These students are usually not in a college preparatory high school program.

IMPLICATIONS The Toshiba article that this assignment was based on, I believe, was not a well-planned assignment. First, the article is about the business end of Toshiba's decision to get out of HD DVD market. The article discusses market share and stock value, which is much more appropriate in a finance class rather than an electronics class. Secondly, the article is from the Detroit Free Press, so it is formatted to be read and digested easily into bits. In fact, the article is a long series of two-to-three line long paragraphs, which then makes a cut-and-paste summary treatment of the article that much easier. In the future, I would suggest reading material that is denser in quality, with longer paragraphs, which would then require the student to read more actively. However, I would encourage Mr. Harmon to incorporate reading material that contained jargon that pertained more closely with his subject matter, since the Technology Education classes prepare students for jobs in the respective fields. This, I believe, would be helpful in that endeavor. I also believe that perhaps a class discussion of the reading material before administering the actual assignment is necessary. Students need to be aware of the genre conventions of a summary, so that they are fully cognizant of instructor expectations. Students need to instructed as to what constitutes plagiarism, and told of the consequences of plagiarism. Consequences should be tied to the quality of writing assignments turned in as well. I would suggest a scale of incremental credit units (0, 50, 75, 100, or something close), so that students understand what is expected. Because the reading and writing initiative is meant to be silent, and sustained, there are certain limitations to changes Mr. Harmon could make in structuring his assignments; however, incorporating genres other that the summary would probably be received well by his students. I believe that retooling these assignments to allow for more creative or poetic responses to the readings would invite more classroom discussion about the readings, while still staying within the policies of the initiative. I also think that students, given an opportunity to be creative, would stay engaged longer with the assignment itself, and would be forced to read the text more actively. Lastly, I would encourage Mr. Harmon to engage students throughout the entire hour with these assignments. His students seemed to hustle through the work, and disconnect early, because the reward of sitting and talking is always there on these days. Group discussion or presentations of creative work could be built in; a slide show of related physical workplace projects could be shown and a free write or opinion paper could then be subsequently administered. But this “free time” is currently ineffective. To be fair to Mr. Harmon, however, he isn't an English teacher. Some of the instructors in the Technology Education department have been out of school for years. Because of this, and as we discussed in class, Professional Development should be more interdepartmental, or among each department itself, so that each department can discuss issues of efficacy that are unique to them. This would provide them with the opportunity to discuss the implementation of learning objectives as they pertain to building initiatives. Unfortunately, the Dearborn Public School District often structures Professional Development around a guest expert lecturer for a fee. These lecturers often engage staff in group activities that model certain aspects of the classroom. Dearborn teachers, by and large, dislike these Professional Development sessions, because they feel condescending, trivial, and a waste of time and money. These teachers often express these feelings during the sessions themselves. In the end, I believe that constructive changes to Dearborn's Professional Development, as well as changes to reading and writing assignments in the Technology Education department as a whole, and especially in Ben Harmon's curriculum, are necessary to increase the effectiveness of the reading and writing initiative that is currently underway at Fordson High School.