From the Secondary Section

Meet Me in San Antonio!

Diane Waff University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA [email protected]

September is defined by the start of a new school year. Teachers and students feel the excitement of new beginnings and the opportunity for a fresh start. For many teachers it is a time to begin building community, creating a safe environment for students to cultivate relationships with peers, and a time to share their confusions and difficulties with texts and to recognize the diverse perspectives and resources brought by each class member. Henry A. Giroux suggested that educators need to develop a “politics and pedagogy around a new language capable of acknowledging the multiple, contradictory, and complex subject positions people occupy within different social, cultural, and economic locations” (235). In particular, he noted that teachers play a critical role in interrupting the inequities experienced on a daily basis by poor and minority students who are denied the opportunity to see their own realities reflected in the literacy classroom. The failure to provide a curriculum that offers students both “windows into the realities of others and mirrors in order to see their own realities reflected” (Style 150) can deny some students the opportunity to develop their stories and see themselves as actors in the world. Emily Style argues that teachers must develop pedagogical structures that provide students with the opportunity to use their experiences, their history, and their culture as a basis for telling their story in their own words. This year’s Secondary Section events at the NCTE Annual Convention are aimed at helping us all provide these kinds of opportunities in our classes. Award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, this year’s Secondary Section luncheon speaker, uses poetry as a way to explore aspects of his identity

and self-awareness as a reader and a writer. He has devoted his postprison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love, and beyond. In an interview with Gabriel Melendéz originally published in Las Americas Journal, he said that The change before coming to language, the change before becoming a poet and the result after writing and becoming involved with language was so marked, that when I came out of the joint . . . I went to visit my sister and she showed me some pictures of me when I was sixteen . . . and I went to the joint when I was nineteen. So, it was only a difference of three years . . . you know, when I went in. But I came out six years later, six and a half years later. But the change was so marked, that I didn’t recognize the person in the photograph. I knew it was me, but my mind had taken such cosmic leaps through language, and consequently those leaps entailed a sort of immolation, a sort of ritual burning of the past . . . and language, the vowels, the consonants, the syllables all became a sort of pyre which the past was placed on, and burned in the flames of language. (par. 2)

Baca discovered the power of language to reshape perceptions and build identity-affirming connections to the rest of the world. The power of poetry to give students new ways of seeing themselves and the world is also found in the work of Patricia Smith, one of our High School Matters keynote speakers. Smith, a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry slam and winner of the 2007 Hurston/Wright Legacy award, sees the classroom as a place where language, literacy, and power are braided in ways that make the English Journal 98.1(2008): 13–15

Copyright © 2008 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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Meet Me in San Antonio!

classroom a place where all students can be successful. She specializes in innovative ways of bringing poetry to underserved communities, and she has designed workshops for teachers looking for ways to incorporate poetry into their classrooms. Given the critical need for secondary teachers to gain deeper understandings of the ways power, equity, and social justice transact with literacy, I encourage you to attend the Secondary Section Luncheon and High School Matters. Baca and Smith will not only deepen our understanding of our students’ social contexts but will also serve as catalysts for curricular change and transformation. Transformative teaching helps students shape their academic identities and abilities. Such teaching requires us to help students from all backgrounds build from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to help all students open a window into the broader literary landscape from the known boundaries of their culturally shaped, everyday lives. To do this, Carol Jago— another High School Matters keynote speaker—argues in her book, With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary Students, we must move beyond solely choosing books students can “relate to” and teach the classics. Jago defines the classics as works from antiquity as well as contemporary novels, and she will offer this year’s attendees a rich list of book recommendations and practical suggestions for overcoming the problems we face in teaching the classics. Francine Prose, this year’s Secondary Section Get Together speaker, supports Jago’s call for teaching literary masterpieces. In an essay entitled “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read: How American High School Students Learn to Loathe Literature,” she writes, “Teaching students to value literary masterpieces is the best hope of awakening them to the infinite capacities and complexities of human experience, of helping them love and respect the language that allows us to smuggle out, and send one another, our urgent, eloquent dispatches from the self” (83). Prose will discuss her recently published novel, Goldengrove, and she will describe the use of close reading as a way to tackle difficult aspects of writing she identifies in Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. This year’s Convention theme, “Because Shift Happens: Teaching in the Twenty-First Century,” calls our attention to changes on the social, cultural, technological, and political landscapes. Two more of 14

September 2008

our High School Matters speakers, John Golden and Jason Ranker, will team up to discuss using technology to improve students’ inquiry and literacy learning. Ranker writes, “struggling students—as much as any other students—will need to develop digital literacies for a rapidly changing society in which new ways of using literacy and technology are a necessity” (77). Golden and Ranker will demonstrate that working with new literacies yields significant benefits for students across the ability spectrum. They will share insights with High School Matters attendees that will help teachers provide effective instruction in multimodal, digital literacy practices. High School Matters will conclude with Jim Burke, author of numerous books including The English Teacher’s Companion: A Complete Guide to Classroom, Curriculum, and the Profession; Writing Reminders: Tools, Tips, and Techniques; and Tools for Thought: Graphic Organizers for Your Classroom. He will articulate what it takes to be an English teacher today: working to meet the challenge of preparing a wide variety of learners to meet high-level 21st-century literacy demands. Please join us at the NCTE Annual Convention in November in the beautiful, canal-ringed city of San Antonio, Texas. You’ll remember more than the Alamo if you do!

SEC ON D A RY SEC TION 2008 N C TE A N N U A L C ON V EN TION OFFERIN G S AT A G LA N C E High School Get Together Thursday, 5:00–6:30 p.m. Featured Speaker: Francine Prose High School Matters Friday, 2:30–5:15 p.m. Keynote speakers and roundtable sessions include • Patricia Smith • Carol Jago • John Golden and Jason Ranker • Jim Burke Secondary Section Luncheon Saturday, 12:30–2:30 p.m. Featured Speaker: Jimmy Santiago Baca Celebration of Former EJ Editor, Louann Reid For detailed information on Secondary Section offerings/presenters, see the Secondary Section website at http://www.ncte.org/second.

From the Secondary Section

Works Cited

Giroux, Henry A. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge, 1992. Jago, Carol. With Rigor for All: Teaching Classics to Contemporary Students. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000. Meléndez, Gabriel. “Carrying the Magic of His Peoples Heart: An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca.” Modern American Poetry. 2 Apr. 2008 .

Prose, Francine. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read: How American High School Students Learn to Loathe Literature.” Harpers Magazine (Sept. 1999): 76–84. Ranker, Jason. “A New Perspective on Inquiry: A Case Study of Digital Video Production.” English Journal 97.1 (2007): 77–82. Style, Emily. “Curriculum as Window and Mirror.” Seeding the Process of Multicultural Education. Ed. Cathy L. Nelson and Kim A. Wilson. Plymouth: Minnesota Inclusiveness Program, 1998. 149–56.

Diane Waff, Secondary Section Steering Committee Chair, is a Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Graduate School of Education. Previously, she was Director of Secondary Innovative Programs for the Trenton Public Schools in Trenton, New Jersey.

horae it was not the Seasons he worshipped— and no prayers for Justice or Law or Peace— although he toyed with the lure of still water but it may have been the changing of seasons— that another season was coming—springing forth as if from his thoughts or his head things blossoming to be plucked things becoming again to be consumed because we trust in that thing coming next— he pretended to have the Faith of a farmer but walked with the doubt of a desert dweller— nomad among migrant workers pausing to look as he cut through the billowing fields their faces the color of a sandstorm— their hands and knees planted in the soil and this was all a dream—or a lie— the truth remained buried in him not yet come to fruit—nothing to harvest— the seed of him unknown to their Judgment hiding beneath the surface—denied the Sunlight— shaken by the rumble of arid Thunder and Lightning —P. L. Thomas P. L. Thomas has published articles and books on literacy as well as poems, two of which appear in a new anthology, Still Home: The Essential Poetry of Spartanburg. Formerly a high school English teacher, he now teaches teachers at Furman University in Greenville, SC. English Journal

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