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.”

Reading is not a knee-jerk reaction to identifiable symbols. It is much more complex than that and must be structured accordingly. Often reading instruction consists of choral reading, fluency, and the ability to identify details and main ideas. Rather, I belive that reading is an event within a specific time and place. This event is the intersection between a reader and an author, a text, a linguistic code, a time, a historical understanding, prior knowledge, and situated perspective. Ten people will read the same text and NO TWO will experience the same event. This is the awesome part about reading. Likewise, one person can read the same text ten times, and NO TWO occurrences will completely correspond.

I suppose my main point is that like differentiation, it is not the student’s job to adapt to OUR teaching philosophy, but rather it is our job to adapt our teaching philosophies to our students. Because the truth is that we are not preparing them for our world, we are preparing them for theirs.