#7 - No Man is an Island: Doing Education Together

Text:

“Chapter 8: Building Academic Success with Underachieving Adolescents,” by Jackson and Cooper, from Adolescent literacy: Turning promise into practice, edited by Beers, Probst, & Rief

In this post I am going to focus on the Beers textbook and look at it through the lens of relationships. While reading the chapter, I was impressed with the authors’ focus on the relationships between teachers and students to aid student motivation. It made me think of a son called “No Man is an Island” by Tenth Avenue North. The entire song is totally awesome, but the chorus says, “No man is an island, we can be found, no man is an island, let your guard down. You don’t have to fight me, I am for you. We’re not meant to live this life alone.” The artists are a Christian band, so they intend for the lyrics to point the listener toward the community of God’s church, but at the same time it has meaning outside of that. The point of the song is that if we want this world to be a better place, we need to be less selfish and focus on working together to make it through life (click here to see the music video for “No Man is an Island,” or click here to see lead singer Mike Donehey’s video journal about the meaning he finds behind the song lyrics). 

In their chapter of Adolescent Literacy, Jackson and Cooper, who are part of the National Urban Alliance (NUA), highlight the idea of making connections between students and teachers as the key to engaging students with what they are learning. They also focus largely on the equation L: (U+M) (C₁+C₂). To explain what this means, I’ll keep things simple and use their description:

“For learning and literacy to develop, students have to understand what they are expected to learn (L). There is voluminous brain research that supports an inseparable connection between understanding and motivation (U+M). Additionally, competence (C1) and confidence (C2) significantly affect motivation. Using this symbolic representation as the basis for planning literacy instruction keeps the focus on adolescent learners, engaging them in their own development” (249).

I love the way that Jackson, Cooper, and their colleagues at the NUA use this equation to connect the dots. In my experience, teachers rarely focus on the social aspect of school and the interactions needed by students that serve as motivation in their education. Through their equation, the NUA pulls together several elements – social, psychological, cognitive, emotional – needed in the lives of young scholars to succeed in their education. 

Key Words from the Chapter:

Engagement – comes through relationships with their teachers that 1) allow students believe that teachers appreciate their identity and honor them as individuals, 2) are built on genuine dialogue in which the teachers and students communicate what is relevant and meaningful to both sides, and 3) allow teachers to demonstrate their belief in the potential of their students by making the necessary information more accessible to students (please note that this does NOT in any way mean dumbing down the material).

High expectations – Jackson and Cooper often refer to their Pedagogy of Confidence, based on “the fearless expectation that all students will learn” (247). The goal of this pedagogy is for students and teachers both to truly believe in the possibility of the student’s success.

Literacy – defined as “an individual’s ability to construct, create, and communicate meaning in many forms” (248). This moves beyond simple reading, and even beyond basic comprehension. The idea of literacy as used here focuses on the reader’s ability to manipulate ideas presented to them, synthesize their own thoughts based on what they have read, and communicate those ideas to a wider audience.

Culturally relevant teaching – This is what happens when teachers can successfully “situate learning in the lives of their students, utilizing the culture of the students as a bridge between the content to be taught and what is real for them” (250-51). The idea is to engage students by making information relevant to them and the culture they inhabit. This adds a deeper layer of meaning and makes taught material important for something more than just a test.

Mediation – The focus here is once again on creating a teacher-student mentorship. Mediation is “an interactive process that bonds the teacher and the student in a nurturing relationship…The goal of mediation is to elicit from the students a personal motivation of learning” (251). Through this relationship, the student can realize that the teacher is genuinely vying for their success and is invested in their education.

“Codes of power” – This refers to the language of the classroom. Education often has a unique vocabulary that is not used in any other environment. Jackson and Cooper recommend the use of Thinking Maps® in the classroom to help students “develop both the critical thinking and language…needed to strengthen [their] ability to construct meaning from text and to communicate their learning” (252).