Books and talk were always readily available in my home growing up. I remember looking forward to receiving my monthly Dr. Seuss selection in the mail and visiting the local public library with Daddy. I also remember that the books that were read to me as a child were not the ones I selected at the library or received via mail. The literacy of home was predominately Portuguese. The literacy of school would be in English. I came to know the world around me, first in Portuguese, second in English. There were many similarities between my worlds but there were also differences.
The dominant discourse at home, with my parents, was, and still is today, Portuguese. The dominant discourse of all my formal schooling was obviously English. What I actively participated in at home and in social contexts within my local community as a young child did eventually translate into my school settings and English speaking community; I feel home helped start to prepare me for sharing my knowledge. Many literacy events from home prepared me for events at school; I would however have to be taught or assisted to translate these events and add on to them using at first a lingua franca. If I were going to succeed in my school career, I would have to become literate at school. You see, I had literacy, my Portuguese language and culture, my school teachers did not!
Heath wrote “Familiar literacy events for mainstream preschoolers are bedtime stories, reading cereal boxes, stop signs, and television ads, and interpreting instructions for commercial games and toys” (259). These at home literacy events are deemed normal and mainstream in many places around the world. Heath points out that these events are sometimes similar for students at school and other times may be in conflict with them. We, as teachers, know that not all our students come to school with the same set of skills or literacies. We may see this daily in our classrooms when dealing with ESL students, LD students, gifted students and for the lack of a better world “average” students. In fact, we may have experienced this ourselves when we began school. Heath notes that “as school-oriented parents and their children interact in pre-school years, adults give their children, through modeling and specific instruction, ways of taking from books which seem natural in school and in numerous institutional settings” (258). Parents help to foster and develop their children’s literacies and thus these literacies are dependent on what is being modeled and specifically instructed. Everything stems from something, every understanding and every misconception.
I agree with Heath’s belief that “children growing up in mainstream communities are expected to develop habits and values which attest to their membership in a “literate society” (260). However, it is important that we understand that children growing up in mainstream communities will be exposed to many things that will help develop their literacies. Social situations call for different discourses to be used and we know that discourses are related to the distribution of social power. Gee, in Discourses and Literacies, points out that “a person’s primary Discourse serves as a ‘framework’ or ‘base’ for their acquisition and learning of other Discourses later in life” (141).
There is and always will be sociocultural differences in the use of Discourse between speakers of the same language. Therefore, it is important that we, as educators, understand that the literacies of our students at home may differ from the literacies that are expected of them within their school community. Also the literacies we may understand personally and socially may differ from the literacies we are exposed to professionally. Therefore, what is important? Shouldn’t students learn in meaningful ways? As educator, we can agree that students need to be engaged in their learning so that different practices of literacies are understood and truly valued.
Teaching and learning are not the same thing. The role of a teacher is an important one. Barnes, in Transmission and Interpretation, compares the teacher as transmitter versus the teacher as student aid to interpretation. The literacies we, as educators, are comfortable with will place us in one of these two categories. What literacy is valued when it is the teacher under the microscope rather than the student? Does a good teacher transmit or does a good teacher aid? We as educators are divided! If learning is to be meaningful to students, if the goal is to engage students in their learning, then it becomes evident to me that a good teacher should step away from the transmission model and engage students and aid them interpreting the world around them. A good teacher will do all they can to understand the literacies their students will bring to a school setting to engage them in learning.
