"Education is the most powerful weapon that you can use to change the world." -Nelson Mandela
I believe that effective teaching can only occur after the establishment of a classroom community that provides students with a place where they feel safe taking risks.
Reading is a kairotic event–an intersection between a reader and an author, a text, a linguistic code, a time, a historical understanding, prior knowledge, and situated perspective.
For students to attain fluency in the world’s “universal language,” it is imperative that they learn to manipulate the relationships between absolutes to recognize and make use of the negative space that exists.
This lesson is designed as a workshop for fellow teachers in my district.
I am a firm believer that the linguistic code of a learner plays a direct and powerful role in the educational opportunities available to that student. The idea of linguistic capital, proposed as a subset of cultural capital by Bordieu, essentially states that a person possessing the linguistic codes of the higher-class can exchange this (like money) for social and economic capital. This has obvious implications for our system of education.
Ladson-Billings calls for a “culturally-relevant pedagogy,” and insists that reading and writing must be done for real purposes. Such teaching, she claims, “…is designed to help students move past a blaming the victim mentality and search for the structural and symbolic foundations of inequity and injustice.”
