A response to Kathy Hibbert’s article “How must our approach to teaching adolescent literature change in order to engage the complex needs of at-risk students?”

This article can be found in:

James, K., Dobson, T., Leggo, C., eds. English in Middle and Secondary Classrooms: Creative and Critical Advice from Canada’s Teacher Educators. Toronto: Pearson, 2012.

I read Hibbert’s article, visited the blog of Tim Ludwig, an at-risk student, and then watched his TEDx talk:

I have to admit I was impressed with Tim’s courage to appear on a stage before an audience to talk about why at-risk students shouldn’t be ignored, or dismissed.

Something that struck me as a particularly good idea was the “open work” classroom that allows students to feel comfortable in their learning. There are times when students need to be paying attention and sitting still, but this style of learning should not take up the majority of a student’s time in the classroom. Going into university classrooms helped put into perspective how constraining some secondary school classrooms were.

Here is a list of some classroom norms I found enjoyable:

1. Not having to ask the teacher to use the bathroom.

2. Being allowed to take food and drinks (within reason) into the classroom, so long as I was paying attention to what was going on.

3. Being treated as equals.

4. Being asked our opinions on how we would like to structure our own learning.

5. Knowledgeable teachers who didn’t pretend to be the ultimate expert in their areas.

6. Being allowed to say “I don’t like this text” without judgment on your abilities or worth as a student.

7. Allowing students to disagree openly with teachers, and not penalizing them for doing so (I don’t just mean lower grades; I also mean that teachers don’t look at that student with contempt or dislike.)

I know that secondary teachers are encouraged to teach students multiple literacies and account for their multiple intelligences, but it also seems to me that teachers have the duty of telling students about university, and what university courses will be like. For a student like Tim, about 95% of all university classes would be deathly boring to him, and would not serve his purposes in life at all. A high school English teacher can very well incorporate dramatic reading, poster-making, and video-watching into their curriculum, but a student going into university-level English can expect to see none of these things during their 4-year degree. And although we are warned that essay-writing is over-emphasized in high school, is pretty much all you will encounter in a university-level course. Considering the percentage of students who move on to university from high school (many of them blindly), I think it’s a teacher’s job to de-mystify what university is all about, and let their students know that unless they are prepared to work in a very traditional environment, they won’t find university courses to their liking. I am not suggesting that we discourage students from going to university; rather, I believe we need to encourage students to see beyond university, and look at their alternatives.