Student Connections

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Part 3 – Students’ Correspondence with Francisco Jimenez

Sandy Kaser, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Dear Mr. Francisco Jimenez,

    I’ve read all of your books and they are all so great! It made me disappointed how some of the people treated you and your family. Like when your girlfriend took you home to meet her parents and they were angry because you were a Mexican.
    I liked the part when you asked Roberto if he’d dance with you because you wanted to learn how to dance. And Roberto was afraid that someone would see you dancing together.
    I admired how you didn’t care what other people thought of you. You were brave and devoted and kept going even after someone insulted you or put you down.
    I also liked how your books were so descriptive, everything stood out in my mind. I could picture the people you described and the places you went in my mind like I’d actually seen them before.
    I loved your books. They were all so wonderful.
    Sincerely,
    Madeline

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Part 2 – Reading the words of Francisco Jimenez

Sandy Kaser, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Gordon Wells makes a case for spontaneous dialogue and its relationship to community and to society in the March 2009 issue of Language Arts,. He states that “the beliefs, values, and knowledge that are attributed to society remain abstract and disembodied until they are brought to bear in particular interpersonal situations.” He argues that “dialogue within a classroom helps to create community while simultaneously building a bridge between individuals and the society of which they are members.” As we read the books of Francisco Jimenez, our class engaged in dialogue that brought us together as a community, and that also enabled us to reflect on current issues and values in society.

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Part 1 – Discovering the words of Francisco Jiménez

Sandy Kaser, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Many teachers look for ways to make books meaningful to students. Sometimes we go about this in a deliberate way. Perhaps we have a unit of study coming up and so we look for books that offer different perspectives on this particular topic, or we have “umbrella” themes that cover an entire year and find books that support students in making connections and asking questions all year. In pulling books, we are careful to have a range that reflects the identities of the students entrusted to us.

But sometimes, we happen across a book that has an unexpected effect for both our students and ourselves. When that happens, we want to climb up on a roof top somewhere and shout, “This one! Read this one!” But then we discover that other folks have been shouting on that roof top and we just didn’t hear it. And we are all the more amazed. How did we miss it? This is what happened in my classroom with the books of Francisco Jiménez, specifically The Circuit, Breaking Through and Reaching Out.
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Families Matter: Combining Literacy Reflections – Part IV

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

    “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of the world that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange… A window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.” (Rudine Sims Bishop, 1990).

Sharing family stories with children and their families offered eight classroom teachers a window into students’ most powerful literacy environment – their homes. Weekly written conversations in Family Message Journals helped teachers consider the potential for combining home and school literacy communities. In this fourth and final post, I return to our dual goals of valuing families’ life experiences (windows) while also looking outward to the larger world of diverse families (mirrors).
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Families Matter: Reaching Out to Reluctant Parents –- Part III

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

Although celebrating student success comes naturally to teachers, tackling student struggles and facing tensions takes a unique kind of willpower. My first two posts considered the usefulness of journals where students dialogue with family members about family stories. One teacher, Anne, noted, “When families participated through regular correspondence, it sent the message –- Parents valued their child’s work.” Family participation also sends a subtle message to teachers that this family values teachers’ work.

Out of the eight teachers using Family Message Journals, five experienced considerable family response. Three, Alicia, Joanna, and Alisa, struggled with a lack of response from their urban families. This week’s post focuses on how these teachers dealt with the resulting tension and made necessary shifts to their journals. Continue reading →

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Families Matter: Expanding Our Community of Readers –- Part II

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

This week, we journey inside a third grade classroom to explore how Anne, a Westminster College graduate student, started using Family Message Journals in spring. Her goal focused on developing more dynamic home-school partnerships with students’ families. She first sent home monthly newsletters and home surveys to share her beliefs and gain an understanding of her families’ home interactions. Her rural school in western Pennsylvania consists of families from predominantly lower socioeconomic backgrounds with over half of the children receiving free or reduced lunches.

During weekly after school sessions, Anne and a small group of reluctant third grade readers collectively explored six different family story books and wrote about the books in their journals. Following each session children shared the book and journal with a parent, grandparent, or sibling at home, who then wrote a response in the family journal before sending both back to school.
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Families Matter: Family Stories and School Literacy — Part I

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

Their story, yours, mine — it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

– William Carlos Williams

“Reading is life!” Laura began as she outlined her view of reading for a colleague. This succinct declaration from a literacy coach in western Pennsylvania contains marvelous implications for teachers, especially those intent on understanding children’s distinct ways of understanding their world. When teachers value students’ resources developed through family and community life, they use these insights to make well-informed literacy decisions. Thus reading events, evolving not from curricular mandates but our student’s rich life experiences, hold the most relevance for children as readers.

Building on Laura’s expansive view of reading, this month’s four blogs focus on building connections across our students’ home and school literacy lives. Throughout this past school year, classroom teachers, graduate students, student teachers, and I explored Family Message Journals (Wollman-Bonilla, 2000) as one possible avenue for creating conversations between children and families. During several weeks in February and March we focused these weekly written exchanges around children’s books depicting family stories. Our intent was to invite students’ first literacy partners, their families, into our conversations about books.

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Invitations and Negotiations: Reflections on a Month of Mondays

By Marie LeJeune & Tracy Smiles, Western Oregon University

This month in WOW Currents we explored theoretical intersections and instructional challenges to using multicultural and international children’s literature with students of all ages. We began by creating a framework that articulated the theoretical frames that inform our practice and reflection, and provided examples from our teaching experiences in schools, in “out of school spaces,” and with preservice teachers. We heard from a variety of readers who have pushed us as teachers and researchers, and engaged in discussions with each other on the complexity of teaching literature, and our personal journeys as literacy educators. For this last blog entry we’d like to reflect back and respond to some of the issues raised for us around multicultural and international literature as we wrote for WOW Currents this month. Continue reading →

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Invitations and Negotiations: Preservice Teacher Education

By Marie LeJeune & Tracy Smiles, Western Oregon University

As teacher educators we believe we must engage future teachers in the important work of finding quality children’s and adolescent literature students they or their students might not find otherwise. We encourage students to read a wide variety of recent texts and discourage students from using overly popularized texts, not because we necessarily dismiss the quality of these texts, but because we believe that often texts with the richest possibility for critical, social, and intellectual richness may not be a part of the popular mainstream. Furthermore, we want to expose preservice teachers to texts that portray diverse groups that mirror the students with whom they will eventually work.

This week, following our theme of “Invitations and Negotiations,” we use the framework we created week 1 to discuss our beliefs, challenges, and tensions around sharing international and multicultural texts with preservice teachers.

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Invitations and Negotiations: Informal Spaces

By Marie LeJeune, Ph.D. & Tracy Smiles, Ph.D., Western Oregon University

Again we draw upon our framework that “reflects a mixture of our past experiences as literacy teachers, teacher researchers, and teacher educators, and our current perspectives on literary and pedagogical theories and how they might play out in practice.” Our framework revolves around three main aspects of the literacy invitation — the texts we choose, the literary theories we employ and ground our work within, and the actual pedagogical strategies and methods we engage in with students. This week we consider a new context for invitations — working with students in out of schooled spaces such as after school book groups, literacy clubs, and collaborative research.

This week’s blog focuses on Marie’s past work with a voluntary, after school book group for girls at the high school where she taught. Students met weekly over a semester, to read and discuss young adult literature related to issues of body image and embodied identity. All literature was self-selected by the group of girls and Marie drew on her past work with literature circles (Short, Harste & Burke, 1996) in her classroom to guide her role in the book group and with the girls.
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