Community Learning

I was quite perplexed by Django Paris David E. Kirkland’s notion of AAL as a vernacular literacy and a form of resistance against DAE. I was skeptical about this approach and felt uncomfortable reading through their work mainly because I felt a sense of sensationalizing of minority culture. I constantly found myself thinking about how their description of AAL made it seem like this paper was for an upper-class White audience. Although I felt this way, I found their concluding thoughts to be quite useful in applying student life experiences into the classroom. The student vernacular literacies, being able to bring them into the classroom to help students better interact with their educative experience appears to have so much potential but also presents other interesting challenges. Although students could become more engaged in their learning by using their own learned syntax, it might be difficult for them to apply this syntax in their future education which would mean they would be prone to falling behind in higher education and have a hard time assimilating to the academic environment.

The idea of using student lived experiences is a common theme across this week’s readings and Sleeter and Keenan contribute another dimension in which student experience can be brought in. I thought Keenan’s use of student stories and teaching to multiple intelligences as a particularly impactful way to bring in student experiences into the classroom. This not only makes the classroom a space of learning, it also makes it a community space where students and teacher learn and teach from one another with less of an aggressive authoritative figure. Sleeter also brings in life experiences as Freire framed it through the banking model. By drawing attention to the inconsistency in education specifically the interaction between administration and student home life Sleeter calls out necessity to learn about student lived experiences. I think this is a powerful point that would do wonders to create student and institutional community which is stifled by public school bureaucracy and of course the necessity for teachers to teach the subject without necessarily needing to learn from their students. I also think Sleeter’s experience with trying to institute multi-intelligences education and students fighting among themselves because of it is another dimension to the idea of bringing student experiences to the classroom that shouldn’t be ignored. This might stem from a student not feeling a school identity caused by this lack of conversation between student and teacher and I feel that through bringing in more of these stories and working on framing school as a learning and community space, education would be strengthened.