Reframing Literacy
by Steve Petro
Five years ago, I decided to leave my teaching job at a small Quaker school on the Main Line to teach in Philadelphia. At the time, I was rather proud of myself. In the previous four years, I had transformed my teaching and aligned my practice with the school’s “diagnostic and prescriptive” framework. At Delaware Valley Friends School, a school for students with language-based learning disabilities, we teachers identified students’ weaknesses and then, like surgeons, excised those weaknesses with “remediation” and “compensatory strategies.” Those four years made me feel like an expert, like a fixer. And while I didn’t think that I could just swoop in and save my “city students,” I did feel confident that I possessed the knowledge and skills to help them “if they wanted it.”
I remember in my first week at Swenson, I created and assigned, a six-page grammar diagnostic. I explained to the students that it was just a diagnostic: I wasn’t going to evaluate them, I wasn’t going to grade it right or wrong, I was just going to use it to determine what they knew and what they needed taught. I had one student , a very outspoken young woman, who said several times (each time more incensed than the time before): “Why would you give us a test without teaching any of this stuff???” I tried to explain again that I wasn’t grading it, but she was irate . . . and I couldn’t understand why. At the time, it seemed to me that this young woman was either so hard of hearing, so crazy, or just so stupid that she couldn’t understand what a diagnostic was.
What I didn’t do was put myself in her place and really listen to her. If I had, I would have seen that here was a young person, in her first week of high school. Like most of the students, she had no doubt travelled far to come to Swenson Vocational, way up in the Far Northeast. People she didn’t know, people who didn’t look like her, people that weren’t from her neighborhood, surrounded her. She was certainly nervous, nervous about how she would be perceived, nervous that she would be labeled, categorized, dismissed. She probably, in that first week, wanted nothing more than to demonstrate what she knew, to show me and everyone else that she had knowledge, that she was smart, that she should be valued and appreciated. But I didn’t give her an opportunity to show those things. What I provided was an impossible test, a test designed to discover how little my students knew, a test that, sure, at one level helped me discover what I would teach that year, but at another level would just confirmed the preconception I had that these kids weren’t as smart as those I taught in suburban private schools.
Partly out of a need to move forward and survive, and partly from a very real desire to suppress feelings of shame, I had buried most of my memories of that first year at Swenson. But over the last few weeks—as we have here at PhilWP, I have reframed literacy to include my students’ experiences and voices—these moments of dissonance have come back. I’ve realized that while the deficit model I learned at DVFS had made me feel confident as an instructor and made me feel that I had something to offer the students, it also made me deaf to my students’ voices, deaf to their experience of school, deaf to their experience of the world, and deaf to their knowledge. And the students knew it. They could recognize me as smart; they could see that I had knowledge of a world that they knew nothing about, but they also knew that I didn’t always respect their experiences, that I didn’t always respect their knowledge, and most regrettably, that I didn’t always respect them.
Steve Petro teaches English and Journalism at Parkway West High School. Steve joined the Philadelphia Writing Project in 2013 as a teacher consultant.