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Reading Matters

Teaching Matters

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Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |

scira.org

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45

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made significant connections with complex texts outside

of the school curriculum. Joshua had come across an article

about a Qantas airliner that had suffered what was called an

“uncontained engine failure.” Although no passengers or crew

were injured, several media sources had referred to the airliner

as the “Titanic of the Sky.” Struck by the disparity between

Joshua’s literacies and his schooled literacy performance, I

wondered what would happen if literacy learning was structured

around not standardized test preparation but instead one

“disinterested” student’s interests. So, for the next six weeks,

we focused our attention back to 1912 and raised questions

about man’s relationship to advances in technology.

Titanic of the Sky

Joshua’s teacher and I discussed what a study of the

Titanic

disaster would look like and began to connect our ideas to

the state standards that she needed to cover in her class. We

purchased 20 copies of Robert Ballard’s book

Exploring the Titanic,

no longer in publication but available from Amazon used books.

We also sent notes home to parents, asking them to purchase a

paperback copy of Walter Lord’s account,

A Night to Remember

.

Some students came to class without the book, but I had

purchased a set of 10 (the books in mass market sold for around

two dollars). So, each student had a take-home copy. We launched

t he unit by handing each student a “boarding pass”when he or

she entered the classroom. We had done our homework (yes,

preparation for this kind of study is demanding, the first time,

for the teacher) and had chosen interesting passengers about

whom there is information online. Each student was given a

“valise” (a vocabulary word) made from plain white construction

paper. Over the next several weeks, they would decorate and

“pack” their valises with their Internet-researched journals and

their own creative writing, reflecting their roles as passengers

who shared the experience as the tragic events unfolded.

Our first day’s discussion surrounded the Qantas A380 incident

that had interested Joshua and the parallels we could draw

between

Titanic

and other technological disasters (Challenger

explosion, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear disasters).

We wanted to find out what students already knew about Titanic

(much of it, it turns out, came from the James Cameron film).

So, we lined the walls with KWL charts on large 3M chart paper,

intentionally leaving several “L” sheets blank, for students to add

new information that they learned from their reading and Internet

research. Students created character journals reflecting the life on

board the ship from the vantage points of their passengers. We

also had daily discussions of the cultural context in which these

people lived. For example, women’s suffrage was an important

political and social issue of the time, and in fact, some of the

commentary subsequent to the sinking of the ship questioned

“votes for women”when “boats for women”was reflected in the

final hours of Titanic. Indeed, Ida Strauss, wife of Macy’s co-owner

Isador Strauss, was lauded in several editorial presentations as an

ideal of wifely virtue (Mrs. Strauss refused a lifeboat seat, choosing

to remain aboard the ship and perishing with her spouse at sea).

Students in this class did not have good background

knowledge of women’s suffrage, having given little or no thought

to what it would be like for women

not

to have the right to vote.

This prompted one girl to suggest

Reading Lolita in Tehran

as

a good book for girls in America. These students continued to

surprise me. This was a remedial reading class, readying failing

students to try again to pass the state required reading test.

As days and weeks passed, it was clear that the students in

this class were motivated and engaged in reading and writing

about

Titanic

. They created their journals in creative ways. One

girl, whose character was a third class Lebanese mother with

two children, wrote her entire journal on paper napkins. She

reasoned that a third class passenger would probably not have

the money to invest in a personal journal. Her entries were

letters to her husband, whom she and the children were joining

soon in America. Two girls in the class had been assigned the

passengers, Edith Corse Evans and Caroline Brown. Ms. Evans

was a single woman in her mid-thirties. Ms. Brown had children,

so Ms. Evans gave up her seat in a lifeboat to Ms. Brown, who

was the last passenger to board a lifeboat before the sinking.

Ms. Evans perished in the sinking. When the two students

discovered this connection, they hugged each other and cried.

At the end of our time together, the teacher was able to

get school funding to take the students via school bus to a

Titanic exhibit that was being held in a city a couple of hours

away. The exhibit docents told the teacher that they had never

encountered a group of students who knew so much about

the sinking of the great ship. I recalled Joshua’s intimation that

he could not remember things he read and that his interest

in a real-world event had prompted the study that ensued.

Discussion

Adolescent Literacy

Adolescent literacy is about complicated relationships

between emotionally- and socially-driven adolescents and

their visual and verbal-rich environments. The beliefs that

adolescents hold about themselves are powerful influences

over their behaviors and vital forces in their success or failure,

particularly in school (Pajares & Schunk, 2001). Research on

efficacy perceptions links effort and persistence with perceptions

of capability, i.e. students who have low self-efficacy beliefs easily

give up on reading tasks even before they start, particularly if

they believe the only motivation is to complete an assignment

(Vacca, 2006). Struggling adolescent readers fuse their beliefs

of academic incompetence with their own identity, making

it difficult to separate self from belief. For this reason, it may

be that students’ beliefs about academic capabilities affect

more general beliefs about themselves as individuals. In

response to such personal assault, the strategy of such students

becomes avoidance (Wachholz & Etheridge, 1996). Moreover,

unmotivated readers may be the most difficult to connect to

reading because they do not value reading or people who enjoy

reading (Beers, 2003). Beers suggests that we must work from

student interests to foster motivation. From this perspective,

our work as teachers of adolescent literacy requires that

we must negotiate the territory where adolescents live and