Reading Response: Wilhelm Ch. 6

In the section titled, "Toward A Critical Literacy," Wilhelm brings up a couple issues that I find worth reflection. First, he asks, "Why do we teach the language arts? What do we hope to achieve for our students and for ourselves through this enterprise?" (151) For me, these questions also tie back into a question he posed earlier in the chapter, regarding "what our purposes are as teachers: to teach texts, or to develop readers who can and will want to engage with and know texts in personally powerful ways throughout their lives?" (145) In my special methods class this semester, I reacted to the idea of teachers having a responsibility to the text. At the pre-college level, I don't believe that teachers are responsible to anyone or anything but their students. Their success, in and beyond our classrooms, is our job (success being measured by actual learning and performance, not grades). The text is a tool to be used in whatever way it is most effective towards getting the job done.

But I digress. Regarding the initial question, I wrote earlier this semester that my goal as an English teacher is to create "effective and fluent communicators." Wilhelm, like me, sees the skills nurtured in English classes as reaching beyond the classroom, and beyond reading and writing. He writes, "Literacy is both the willingness and the ability to evoke, conceive of, express, receive, reflect on, share, evaluate, and negotiate meanings, in the various forms that meanings may take." (151) All of those things, in my mind, fell under my umbrella of "communication." As I read this section, I actually thought again about Frankenstein (the book this time). When I first read Frankenstein in the seventh grade, I was struck at how eloquently the monster was able to describe the experiences of his life before he learned (or re-learned) to speak and write. I wondered if, without knowing the words for what he was seeing and feeling, he would really have been able to commit those experiences to his memory with such detail, to be recounted later when the proper words were there.

Whatever the answer to that query, I do still believe that our communication skills, our comfort with language and its use, can enrich our experiences and enhance our engagement with the world around us on many levels. Working with figurative language teaches us to think abstractly and make comparisons and connections, to think if not in metaphors then perhaps in analogies that help us make sense of the new and unfamiliar. English classes, ideally, teach students to ask questions and think critically to answer them, to consider motivations and character, to interpret what isn't said as well as what is. In this way, students learn not only to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others or to receive and interpret communication from others, but also to communicate to themselves the full significance of their experiences with richer detail and deeper meaning.

Why do we teach language arts? To allow our students access to the world around them, to help them break down the mysteries, build understanding, engage their environments, and improve themselves.