The Circle of ELA Life

Shapes and teaching: I've learned that the circle is tops in the field of education.  Seriously, there are so many circles involved in good pedagogy.  Lit circles, now culture circles; they're what makes the culturally relevant, student-centered world go 'round.  I think that Souto-Manning's explanation of culture circles seem to work perfectly with a workshop based classroom situation, and they are the best way of setting up a critical inquiry unit.  While all the steps sound fairly basic and approachable (generating themes, problem posing, dialogue, problem solving, and action), the one issue that struck me is how difficult this culture circle set-up would be in practice.  The student generates all of the discussion and content, but the teacher has to be constantly listening to pick up on themes of social issues that the students bring up naturally through conversation in order to guide her unit.  After that, she'd have to be the ULTIMATE discussion facilitator to ensure that discussions are productive and safe.  Even before she could become a facilitator to guide instead of direct conversation, she would have to teach students what good dialogue is and how to have those kinds of conversation (there's a great article by Robert Probst about teaching talking in the classroom that addresses this issue).  And while we would like to think that all of the students would want to take action on their own and figure out their own way of action, I think you'd have to provide some scaffolding there.  On top of all of this, the author mentions that the teacher would have to be constantly reflective and questioning of her own practices the whole time.  We definitely need to practice reflection throughout any kind of unit, but man, Souto-Manning kind of makes the concept seem completely exhausting.

Also, the example that Souto-Manning gives of her first graders utilizing culture circles is crazy.  I'm sure that some classrooms work like that, but I honestly think it would be hard to get the entire classroom involved in the same kinds of conversation, especially in high school.  That's probably the reason why Valerie Kinloch only focused on two students in her Harlem book instead of 20!

Still, knowing about culture circles, that there's a name and steps involved in this "literacy for social action" practice, is definitely helpful for thinking about framing a critical inquiry unit, even if I can't utilize all of the steps that Souto-Manning espouses in her version of culture circles.  Freire even says that we shouldn't just "import" pedagogical practices without re-writing and re-creating them for ourselves.  In other words, even when your teaching methods are grounded in best practices and culturally relevant material, you're still doing your students a disservice when you mindlessly copy someone else's methods.  I have to keep this in mind for myself sometimes.  When I observe a great teacher, I want to immediately copy everything I see her doing.  When I inevitably find that I can't do that (because I am a different person with different sensibilities), I consider my own efforts to be less successful.

I have to keep Freire's admonition in mind this upcoming month, when I'm on the docket to teach a lot more!  The test-prep unit is done, they're STAAR testing next week, and then it's on to the bigger and better world of real reading and writing.  AND April is National Poetry Month!  So we'll see what I can do with poetry and almost-done-with-middle-school eighth graders.  What a scary thought.