The stories we tell

I want you to read an article posted up on D2L - it's under "Literacy and Schooling" and I've named it "Cognitive development/basic writing" - it's short and relatively accessible, though quite dated.

I put it up there not because I agree with the writer (Andrea Lunsford, who I suspect doesn't agree with this article herself anymore) but because it is suggestive about a relationship I want you to become aware of as a teacher, which is: the stories we tell about our students are the stories that shape how we teach them. So I want you to read Lunsford, in part, for her narrative about "basic writers." Who are they? How did they come to be "basic writers"? And according to Lunsford, what are the things we should do with them because of who they are and how they became basic writers.

There's an article I thought about having you read - called "IQ and Standard English" by Thomas Farell - that puts forth an argument that you can see within the grammatical structure of AAVE, because of the "copula deletion" (you remember: the absence of the "to be" verb), a sign that the speakers of AAVE have a lower IQ than speakers of Standard English. It is a silly argument, and it was rightfully pilloried by linguists and teachers of writing after it came out for getting the basic facts wrong (basic facts, by the way, which you would recognize as wrong based on the work we've already done this semester). But if you read Farell's article and took it to be a good theory, it too would tell you a story about your students who spoke AAVE that would necessarily shape your practice, a story that would start with the idea that the speakers of AAVE were "less intelligent" than speakers of Standard English. Of course this would effect (or is it "affect"? Do you know right away?) the way you teach those students.

So, for Friday, read Lunsford and come prepared to narrate the story she tells about basic writers and the ways that story shapes what she does in the classroom.