Picturing Possibilities
Through TSE, these young women and men have revealed much about what they believe about the writing instruction practices that are one focus of our professional lives. In city schools, where many youth reject traditional literacy opportunities as questionably relevant interruptions in their lives, English educators might contemplate any avenue through which we can promote student engagement. Visually based methods can serve both as sources for helping students and teachers to understand the points of view of urban youth and as tools in our writing activities.
By providing this project’s participants with a means to see what enables and impedes their school and literacy achievement, we hoped that our English teaching practices might become more relevant to these city students’ lives. This research has extended studies of how teachers can consider the cultural contexts Cartier Replica Watches of urban youths’ lives in their instruction and has illustrated theories of multimodal literacy. We believe that these findings demonstrate both how and why t is imperative that English teachers allow youth to share stories of their relationships to school and its literacy practices, and also that we build our curricula and pedagogies upon such fluid, student-centered processes.
Our quest was to help youth to value writing, other literacy activities, and school in general, and to see their success in these tasks and institutions. Asking students to picture and write about their relationships to school is one way to begin to make this happen. Such practices represent challenges to current forms of writing instruction, and the realities of school schedules and assessment pressures might make such practices seem difficult to implement. But Samantha’s image of and reflection on a young man sitting on a bicycle and holding a book bag suggests that these pedagogies offer potential for our youths’ school and writing task engagement and achievement:
“There Are Possibilities”
This young man is an artist in the community. He is living proof that not everything is bad in our society. He is an inspiration, not only to me, but to the younger kids. He shows us that there are possibilities out there.
In response to this project and these youths’ perspectives we now more often integrate issues of schooling and social justice—including analyses of our communities’ tenuous relationships to school— into our curricula. School is as real a topic as any for our students, and they know a great deal about their own and family and community members’ attempts to navigate its complexities. The use of images clearly supported these young adults’ abilities to paint pictures with words, so digital photography has taken a more critical role in our teaching, especially Cartier Replica with those students who are reluctant writers. Finally, regular writing conferences that allow us to make repeated and long-term personal connections with youth have become a common practice as we work with their images and ideas: Our students have responded to these intimate adult coaching experiences with writing products and levels of engagement that we could not have anticipated. They—and we—have seen some important new possibilities.
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