RM Winter 2016 FLIP

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Reading Matters
Teaching Matters
Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 | |45|
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