The Struggle to Connect

By Gloria Kauffman with Krish Boodhram, Armand Bronqueur, Bindoo Caullychurn, Kim Han, Elizabeth Caselton, Dini Lallah, and Laura Burgess

As I read aloud Miss Rumphius (Cooney, 1985), the children listened intently with huge smiles, clearly enjoying the book. I closed the book, waiting for their responses and connections, but only heard silence. I asked if they liked the book and received nods and polite statements. I tried again, “What did you think of the story?” and received a few more brief statements. Few children responded without further prompting from me.

After receiving this same response from eight classes of students who came to my literacy lab in a primary school in Mauritius, I knew we had a problem. I began the literacy lab fully expecting children to be able to make personal connections to our read-alouds. The routine of each hour-long session was that I read aloud a picture book to the entire class, threw out the question “What do you think about the story?” to initiate a short whole group sharing about the book, and then sent the children off to continue responding in drawing or writing before engaging in further discussion of the book in small groups.

I struggled with what to do when children do not connect with text. I realized that the children in this school did not have a history of being read to and discussing books or having many books in their classrooms for wide reading. Many of the books in the library were informational texts that related to class units or leveled readers from an old British reading series. Krish states, “Reading is hardly encouraged in classrooms. Children read mostly textbooks or comprehension texts and answer pre-set questions. That type of engagement does not allow children to explore their own thoughts or non-literal meanings in text.” Culturally I was aware that books were not read in most Mauritian homes as enjoyment but rather as words to memorize or facts to extract and copy for research and language assignments. “It was not part of my family culture to have books read to us as children. Literature books were read at school only for exam purposes, not really for pleasure,” shares Kim. Despite the diversity of the children’s backgrounds, ranging from Indian, French, Chinese, and African heritages that reflected the history of the island, they shared a similar instructional history in schools with a traditional lecture approach of reading and memorizing facts from textbooks.

Children were familiar with providing retellings, either as written pieces or in response to oral questions, after reading. They knew how to write summaries, fill out worksheets, and answer questions posed by their teachers. When asked to talk, they dutifully took turns. Each would make a statement that was often a retelling of something from the book, and then wait for the next person to make a statement. After taking their turn, they had fulfilled their part of the task and did not see themselves as responsible for listening to their peers or paying attention to the content or others in the group. Laura’s fieldnotes of her observations in the lab state, “I take notes while Samantha says, ‘Adrien, you start.’ Adrien reads out his reflection while the others wait and then rotate around the table reading their own reflection out loud. Each child takes a turn reading with no one really listening to the one reading their reflection and so there is no building onto another’s thoughts.”

I am the staff developer and curriculum coordinator in an International Baccalaureate primary school on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. As part of our professional development, I run a literacy lab where teachers and their students, Years 3 to 6 (Grades 2-5 in the U.S.), spend time learning how to dialogue about personal and cultural issues with children’s literature from around the world. Each class comes once a week for an hour to the literacy lab and then teachers meet once a week for three hours in a study group after school to discuss our observations, questions and understandings. We have been discussing and preparing engagements to encourage dialogue about issues relevant in children’s lives as well as to figure out how to move children from passive to critical readers who are more aware of the world.

Our read aloud for the second week of lab was Luke’s Way of Looking (Wheatley, 2001). This story immediately pulled children into sitting alongside Luke in his art class. Luke is yelled at and demoralized by his teacher because he will not draw like the other boys or follow the teacher’s example. For his classmates and his teacher, the world is black and gray, but for Luke the world is full of vibrant colors, patterns, shapes and movement. He decides not to go back to school but instead takes the bus to an unknown destination, eventually finding himself in an art museum, where he finds others who think and see the world as he does. When he does go back to school and the stifling art assignments, Luke decides to paint what is in his heart even if his teacher does not understand.

As I closed the book, instead of connections once again only silent faces stared at me. I asked if they liked the book and received nods and statements that Luke was different and did not do what he was told. A few children raised their hands, as a yes, when I asked them if they had ever been yelled at for not doing the “right” thing, but the discussion went no further. Because we had been looking at different kinds of journeys, I then asked students to create their own personal journey maps after listening to this book, hoping this response engagement would encourage them to recognize and talk about personal connections to literature.

My beliefs and assumptions about literature and response to literature grow out of Rosenblatt’s (1938) theory of reader response and her focus on the importance of readers making connections in order to create their interpretations of a text. As a classroom teacher, I always provided students with large amounts of reading and talk time around high quality children’s literature and encouraged the talk by asking children to first draw or sketch their ideas. I wanted students to have that “lived through” experience with literature and to have multiple opportunities to construct meaning as they read. I encouraged them to relate to literature by making connections to their own lives and the world, and not to think about reading as a task of extracting details and spewing back facts and information that were irrelevant to them as readers and human beings.

Given these beliefs, my goal in the literacy lab was for children to move from passive readers to critical thinkers. I was faced with a huge hurdle of how to help children make that first initial sharing response to literature and eventually move from talk into dialogue around relevant and significant issues. Rosenblatt (1938) argues that we need to attend to our inner state as readers, responding first from an aesthetic stance, sharing our feelings and connections to a book without fear of judgment or the “wrong” answer. This first response is necessary to become aware of ourselves and others as thinkers who have ideas and opinions that matter. Taking on an aesthetic stance provides space for thinking aloud and sharing thoughts that have the potential to create new understandings.

This initial response time is not enough for us to become critical thinkers. We need time and support to develop our discussion and opinions by critically examining our thinking with other readers and then reflecting and analyzing that thinking and those responses. Readers eventually need to take responsibility for their views and thinking through considering multiple perspectives that go beyond their initial responses. Rosenblatt also discusses intertextuality and the need for readers to make connections between texts. She states that we construct new understandings when we make new connections between a previously read text and the text we are discussing.

We are an English-medium school so all instruction is in English even though the majority of children have French and Creole as their mother tongues. Each lab session was held in English but children were encouraged to speak in French if they felt that would help them express their ideas. Most of our classroom teachers are trilingual, speaking French, Creole and English and so children are easily understood. Elizabeth notes, however, that, “Although there is no doubt that many of the Mauritian students feel more comfortable speaking in their first language, the difficulty to connect and respond runs much deeper than just language.” Laura continues, “This language issue affects the vast majority of students here, not a small minority. Teachers are constantly reflecting on where is the evidence of thinking vs. what language is spoken or do children need to be taught better communication skills.”

Kim always held the discussions in French with her students and recorded the following conversation.

Ryan: Et où tu vas partir? [Where would you go?]
Adnan: Peut-etre, c’est à toi. [Maybe…, it’s your turn.]
Ryan: Moi, je veux savoir comment faire une aventure, comment visiter les autres pays. [I would like to know how to start a Journey and how to visit other countries.]
Kate: J’ai choisi cette table pour savoir comment commencer une aventure, quand j’ai besoin d’écrire dessus. [I have chosen this table to know how to start a Journey and when it will be time for me to write about it.]
Ishika: Miss, on dit plus??? Moi j’ai choisi cette table. Ici c’est plus difficile et je vais apprendre beaucoup. [Miss, do I need to say more? I have decided to be at this table. Here it is more difficult and I will learn more.]

“There is a form of blockage which starts much before the students even think about speaking,” shares Elizabeth, connecting to experiences with students in her drama classes. Dini’s notes state that Darren and Sheeana were speaking in English. “When they begin to talk about the book, even though it is retelling, Darren seems to have difficulty explaining things in English. He switches to French. Sheeana switches to French too and seems more comfortable. If Darren and Sheeana are having difficulty retelling in English, it is not likely that they will be able to talk about journeys from the book in English. It may be above their level of understanding. The criteria here is not accuracy in language, it is fluency of thought. The ideas and thinking processes are more important than the language the children are speaking in. It is acceptable for children to speak in the language in which they feel most comfortable and are proficient in so long as they can communicate their ideas. We have to remember that children are learning language as well as learning concepts. These are happening at the same time. We may be able to reduce the disparity between first and second language speakers by making children more at ease so they express themselves in their mother tongue in situations where we are not working on accuracy.” We wanted children to feel more confident with any language and be able to pull from a range of thoughts to express their ideas.

Once the children had brainstormed journeys, listed their personal journeys and created journey maps, as a study group we created sets of books from the themes about journeys that emerged from all eight class webs and discussions of the children. Our six themes were Beginnings of Journeys, Multiple Perspectives about Journeys, Overcoming Obstacles and Fears, Remembering Journeys, Cultures Meeting Cultures, and Journeys as Dreams and Hopes. Focusing on these broad themes we could then explore each theme through conceptually related books grouped as text sets, each containing a variety of picture books of different genres and reading levels.

After browsing and being introduced to the sets, children signed up for a theme to read and discuss in depth each time they came to the lab. The cultures meeting cultures group read such books as: A Day’s Work (Bunting, 1994), Amelia’s Road (Altman, 1993) A Handful of Seeds (Hughes, 1993), The Island of the Skog (Kellogg, 1973), War and Peas (Forman, 2002), The Conquerors (McKee, 2004), Tusk Tusk (McKee, 1978), Dia’s Story Cloth (Cha, 1996), Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport (Sharmat, 1980), William’s Doll (Zolotow, 1972), Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998), Stellaluna (Cannon, 1993), Widget (McFarland, 2001), Amber on the Mountain (Johnston, 1994), Building a Bridge (Begaye, 1993), and If the World Were A Village (Smith, 2002).

For several weeks children read the books and shared in their small groups by retelling or webbing out the journeys and issues from their books. The talk in each group appeared to be the same each week. Someone in the group would decide who would start and then each child made a statement about the book, usually a retelling, until all members took their turn.

Teacher: Maybe talk about other journeys now.
Naomi to Anjulie: Now your turn.
Anjulie:  She went to the library, to work.
Navnish: How many places?
Naomi: She was sick.
Rishab: She went to a hotel near a beach.
Naomi: Mountains.
Navnish and Naomi: Mountain, seaside, island.

Yash: It’s like an objective map. What her objectives were. First it’s an island as she wanted to go there.

Teachers reflected and found that children were having this same difficulty of expressing ideas in their homeroom classes. “In my experience as a multilingual teacher I can state freely that students have difficulty in sharing their thoughts, wonderings, imaginings and opinions in whichever language they speak,” shares Elizabeth.

I knew the children needed to move their talk from explaining something about the book to exploring the ideas in the book. Taking one book from their theme sets I asked them to talk in their groups by having each person share one personal connection to the book. Time and time again each class remained silent. I repeated the instructions and again there was silence. I pulled the class together in the rug area to give some examples of connections. I asked my parent helper to share a personal connection and then the classroom teacher shared a connection after I shared mine. The children still remained silent.

Taking a moment to reflect and to encourage them to share connections, I asked them to think about what would be the worst thing that could happen if they shared a personal story. Slowly a hand went up and, in a quiet voice, Tommy stated, “You might get laughed at.” We continued to list all the ways one could be made fun of for sharing personally — the story isn’t funny and yet people laugh, the story might not seem important to anyone but you, no one in the group looks at you and listens while you tell the story, or the group talks or reads a book while you are telling the story. Children from each class opened up and created long lists of what might happen if they revealed anything personal about themselves. They were afraid. We finally agreed to take the risk and try to tell each other personal stories but first we created a few essential agreements to protect ourselves:

• We will really listen to each other tell a story no matter how long.
• We will not laugh at each other unless it is a funny story.
• We will not repeat the stories outside of this class.

Children then moved back to their small groups with the request that they tell personal stories about one of the books that each had read. The noise level rose and the room came alive with giggles, laughter and smiles. As soon as children began to share their personal stories they immediately started speaking in French. I stopped the class and asked if the adult note takers could sit in their groups to hear the stories and the entire class yelled, “NO.” So we watched from the side lines and enjoyed the freedom of children finally opening up and sharing a small part of their lives. Dini points out, “Over the last four to six generations following immigration, stories in Creole and Bhojpuri have been lost. They were oral stories told through Sega song and music but due to the attitude towards these languages, as being that of slaves and servants, the stories have not been passed on.”

The following week, we continued with sharing personal stories related to the books but also started thinking about how we could build understanding from the personal stories to the issues in the books within each theme set. Children tried listening to group members and following each other’s line of thinking in order to build on the ideas shared but it became apparent that we needed more experience with extending ideas through talk and being more flexible in trying out half-formed thoughts.

Children were still proceeding straight to making fully organized final draft statements and bypassing using language to think with others. In reflecting on the children’s talk, I realized that the problem was much more than the inability to make connections. Barnes (1976) states that “language is not the same as thought, but it allows us to reflect upon our thoughts” (p. 10). I realized that the children needed to increase their interactions and genuinely extend their work together by learning to talk to understand. Kim shares, “In my experience we use language mainly to communicate with our friends and relatives. We explain and recount, but we do not use language to give our opinions, to think. This was repressed at school because we are task oriented and exams were more important. Speaking French in my literacy lab group did not help. I was faced with the same difficulty of children struggling to push their thinking into more than just retelling.”

In looking back at my previous teaching experiences with children, I realized that I usually began a literature discussion with time for children to share what they thought about a story and what they liked and didn’t like. Many times there wasn’t a focused topic but rather the talk meandered from topic to topic. Barnes (1976) writes about this as “exploratory talk.” He describes exploratory talk as “groping towards a meaning” that includes hesitations, rephrasings, false starts and changes of direction. During this type of talk, learners take an active part in their learning and sharing their current experiences and understandings as well as personal views. This is an opportunity for their talk to be tested against existing views, to see how things are in the world, and an opportunity to think aloud and take responsibility for formulating hypotheses and then evaluating opinions through the group discussion.

Looking back, I realize that there wasn’t much exploratory talk in the literacy lab from any of the eight classes of children. Even though each class shared some talk together before breaking into small groups to brainstorm possible topics and issues to discuss and to respond through story maps, sketches, or free writes, they were not engaging in exploratory talk. They were talking to each other at a presentational level.

Barnes (1976) describes presentational talk as “interactions which establish each participant as a unique and separate identity” (p. 110). If we perceive others as threatening critics, ready to judge us and show up our inadequacies, we concentrate on the external acceptability of what we say. When we are in an unthreatening environment, we are more likely to share our views with an openness to collaborate with others. In the lab students were taking turns and stating facts, retelling part of the text, remaining silent, or looking around, rather than actively listening to each other, probably worrying about what the group might think of them.

In rereading our transcripts, I noticed that even when children shared their favorite parts of the story, the talk sounded like a retelling, a sharing of facts from a book, but not an opinion or response to the book or the illustrations. Children were not engaged in hesitant responses to the text as a way of working out meaning as they shared, but responding as if there was a right answer. Turn taking and making a comment or statement was new to the children so they also did not refer to other books, TV, movies, games, or their own experiences in order to make sense of the books they were reading or to connect to the ideas and issues in those books.

The lack of exploratory talk was probably due to a range of factors. One is that children did not know each other well personally and had not negotiated equal status and mutual trust to encourage thinking aloud and risk inexplicitness, confusion or dead ends because they could not trust the tolerance of others. The lack of comfort with sitting in mixed gender groups also influenced their dependency on presentational talk. Because of schooling history and cultural backgrounds, presentational talk was more valued than sharing and thinking with each other. It didn’t feel safe to engage in exploratory talk in a school context. Armand reflected, “These were difficult sessions for children as well as for teachers. We had to really stretch our thinking to truly be able to participate fully in the different sharings. At the end of each lesson, I can honestly say that we were mentally tired but it was worth it.”

Children had not had experiences with sharing personal stories or engaging in exploratory talk to work at constructing understanding with each other. Even when they began to feel more at ease in sharing a personal story, the talk was still not exploratory. Each child took a turn telling a story, making comments, but not really listening or connecting the story to issues in their books or to other children’s experiences as a way to understand the issues.

Our analysis of the children’s talk has helped us realize that we need to continue our focus on exploratory talk in the lab through encouraging free responses after each read aloud both orally and through multiple response strategies, such as sketches, maps, charts, and free writes. Our class charts will record our personal connections but with an emphasis on how these stories help us understand the issues that pose problems and questions that we find significant. We will have to practice following each other’s line of thinking and being willing to tolerate half-formed ideas as we make meaning, find our voices and develop opinions that can be valued by our peers. Exploratory talk will allow children to take control and responsibility for their own thinking as they make sense of the world rather than just accepting the world imposed on their thinking.

References

Barnes, D. (1976). From communication to curriculum. New York: Penguin.
Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, and the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Rosenblatt, L. (1995). Literature as exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Children’s Literature

Altman, L. (1993). Amelia’s road. New York: Lee & Low.
Browne, A. (1998). Voices in the park. New York: DK.
Bunting, E. (1994). A day’s work. New York: Clarion.
Cannon, J. (1993). Stellaluna. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich.
Cha, D. (1996). Dia’s story cloth. New York: Lee & Low.
Cooney, B. (1985). Miss Rumphius. New York: Puffin
Forman, M. (2002). War and peas. London: Andersen Press.
Hughes, M. (1993). A handful of seeds. New York: Orchard.
Johnston, T. (1994). Amber on the mountain. New York: Dial.
Kellogg, S. (1973). The island of the Skog. New York: Puffin.
McFarland, L. (2001). Widget. New York: Scholastic.
McKee, D. (2004). The conquerors. New York: Handprint.
McKee, D. (1978). Tusk tusk. London: Anderson.
Miller, W. (2001). Rent party jazz. New York: Lee & Low.
Sharmat, M. (1980). Gila monsters meet you at the airport. New York: Aladdin.
Shook Begaye, L.(1993). Building a bridge. Flagstaff: Northland
Smith, D. (2002). If the world were a village. Toronto: Kids Can.
Wheatley, N. (2001). Luke’s way of looking. Ill. M. Ottley. LaJolla, CA: Kane/Miller.
Zolotow, C. (1972). William’s doll. China: Harper/Collins.

Gloria Kauffman was the staff developer/curriculum coordinator and a PYP International Baccalaureate curriculum trainer at Clavis International Primary School in Mauritius. Currently she is the curriculum coordinator/language specialist and PYPIB curriculum trainer in Batam, Indonesia.

Krish Boodhram is a year 5 (grade 4) classroom teacher; Armand Bronqueur was a year 5 (grade 4) classroom teacher but currently teaching year 4 (grade 3); Laura Ponder Burgess is a parent volunteer and resident horticulturist;Elizabeth Caselton is a drama and movement teacher; Bindoo Caullychurn is a year 5 (grade 4) classroom teacher; Dini Lallah is the English as an Additional Language teacher for years 3-6 (grades 2-5); and Kim Han Wai Sang was the French teacher for year 3 (grade 2) but currently is teaching French in year 4 (grade 3). All are with the Clavis International Primary School in Mauritius.

WOW Stories, Volume II, Issue 2 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/stories/storiesii2/.