Multiple Literacies in the Content Classroom: High School Students' Connections to U.S. History

On May 31, I met with Erika Price for the last time

. All year I had been a researcher in her high school U.S. history class twice a week. I enjoyed my time, learned a great deal, and was trying to figure out what to write about her fascinating students. Erika and I discussed some possibilities, and she closed our meeting with these words, "Jane, the most important thing is to connect to the kids."

Nine months earlier, prior to the first day of school, Erika started these connections; she phoned and e-mailed her urban students, saying hello to as many as possible. Then, on the first day, she created a collegial environment. At one point Erika displayed an outline of the U.S. on the smart board and ran up to Cartier Roadster Replica move her home state of New York into place. Then she asked the students to choose a state and run up to move it into place. The room filled with energy. The students laughed and talked; they heard their own voices, they heard one another, and Erika heard them. They counted; they existed. They had fun.

During the final few minutes of that first class Erika picked up from their tables, one by one, sticky notes with the students' names on them. She had placed the sticky notes on the tables before class, and now she engaged in a brief conversation with each student, sometimes referring to the class session they had just enjoyed, and sometimes referring to the contacts she had made the previous week. The connections between these 26 general-track students and their teacher had started to gel. The class consisted of 16 boys and 10 girls. Sixteen of them were African American, and 10 were white. In these grades 912 school with 1,350 students, this white teacher and her mostly African American students had started their yearlong journey.

In this article, I write about three types of connections Erika fostered in her successful classroom: the students' emotional connections to U.S. history, their personal connections to history, and their connections to the state test. In a more general sense, this article is based on the notion that secondary-school content instruction may be in need of a new orientation. Instead of being framed in a cognitive perspective, if it can be framed, instead, within an adolescent literacy perspective, then it will encompass learning processes that are both cognitive and social (Behrman, 2003).

In particular, content instruction would then not be dependent upon a single print text. In accordance with adolescents' daily use of multiple literacy skills to navigate multiple sources of print, instruction would include Cartier Replica Watches the use of various texts and varied language experiences. Thus, the definition of content literacy is to be expanded beyond engagement with a single textbook to a variety of sign systems, including the use of writing to learn.

In the case of this article, you will often see the students write. As a researcher in Erika's classroom to study her students as writers in U.S. history, I analyzed my notebooks of field notes with this research question in mind: In what ways do the students use writing to enable various connections to U.S. history I learned that writing helped these students to emotionally and personally connect to U.S. history. Plus, writing enabled them to understand the demands of their state test. All of these connections helped them to appreciate their roots, their current lives, and maybe their future.

Multiple Literacies in the Content Classroom: High School Students' Connections to U.S. History

By: FIRELEAVES

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