Bridging the Gap

by Caleb Alvarez

Now that we’ve agreed on the merits of critical literacy and place-based education in Appalachia, how do we make it happen in the classroom? This weeks’ class marked a shift from theoretical discussion about Appalachian identity and place-based education to strategic discussion about specific academic strategies to bridge the critical literacy and academic literacy gap. To start, we explored classroom possibilities for both a mostly neutral, historical research article, Ronald Lewis’s “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia,” and emotionally-charged, polarized articles, Amy Clark’s “Appalachian Hope and Heartbreak” and Kevin Williamson’s “The White Ghetto.”

Lewis’s Gallery Walk

            To begin our discussion, we did a small-group activity that Audra S. actually used with Lewis’s article in her 12^th grade English class. Each group first found the thesis, main points, and supporting evidence in the article and wrote them on color-coded post-it notes. Then, on a large sheet of paper, each group visually represented the paper’s organization of these components. When the groups were finished, we had a gallery walk around the room to view the groups’ finished products and compared them to their own.

            We shared our comparisons as a whole group. The first thing that we noticed was that, despite having common ideas, each group had identified a different sentence as the thesis of the paper. This gave us the opportunity to discuss the commonalities between our groups’ understanding of the main ideas of the paper: all of groups agreed that Lewis was trying to emphasize that the history of Appalachia is different than the popular idea of that history, and each group had tried to find a quote that emphasized that both the isolation and the homogeneity in Appalachian history are a myth. We also noted that Sam and Carmen’s group had drawn the organization of the paper differently to emphasize the causal markers in the organization. Explaining their decision to visually represent Lewis’s argument in a different way helped emphasize the importance of thinking about writing as a constructed argument that is organized to meet the writer’s goals.

            Visually emphasizing this article’s organization would also be beneficial to high school students when studying this (or similar) historical non-fiction. The structure of the activity appeals to different kinds of learners: it gives a guided purpose for reading, requires that students deconstruct the article in order to synthesize it, offers the opportunity for discussion in both small and whole groups, and provides a visual representation to make the complex ideas tangible.

 After discussing the benefits of the activity we had done, we brainstormed other strategies we would use to prepare students to summarize and evaluate Lewis’s article.

·          Read and analyze the fictional “local color” texts that Lewis had suggested were responsible for the creation of the isolation and homogeneity myths.

·         Research the author’s background and discussing his potential biases.

·         Write personal responses to establish a basis for student opinions, and provide students with sentence starters to help organize their thoughts.

·         Reform students’ outlines into narratives to help them condense the work into a summary.

·         Look at the text paragraph by paragraph, identifying the main point of that paragraph and what that main point contributes to the thesis, and highlight supporting evidence with color-coding for the main point it supports.

Many of these suggestions could occur at any point in this instructional unit. Depending on the reading development of your students, you may need to frontload instruction to help prepare them to navigate the layers of this difficult text.

Pairing Polarizing Pieces

The other two texts both assume Appalachian exceptionalism (see “Questioning the Illusive Appalachian Identity”) to make their claims. Clark’s article was a heart-wrenching account of the loss of Appalachian community culture due to the demise of local businesses, while Williamson’s article was an inflammatory description of the lives of people in the Appalachian “big white ghetto.”  Though they would not be difficult for students to comprehend, they present a challenge for students to move from having an emotional response to producing academic writing. The challenge of moving from an emotional to an academic response was one we had to overcome ourselves in order to discuss the possibilities for using the articles in the classroom.

Williamson’s article was met with unanimous scorn, yet we sought to discover what larger ideological goals Williamson had. Jen was enflamed by his “irresponsible use of a national platform” to “make loose associations by hyperbolically capitalizing on myths and stereotypes of underrepresented minorities, and not just Appalachians.” Yet, Sam suggested that his use of these stereotypes was merely “sensationalized writing with the purpose to entertain, because he was never interested in reporting actual findings.” Regardless of his intent, it was clear that he was capitalizing on the idea of Appalachian exceptionalism.

However, we could not deny that Clark also relied on this exceptionalism, even if we liked her perspective better. Brandi reminded us that “by looking at either side exclusively, you miss the whole picture,” and asked us to consider how we could use these polarizing texts in our own classrooms. Caroline suggested that these texts could easily be used to talk about arguments, appeals, and agendas. Additionally, they could be used to study connotation, because a “similar piece with a similar agenda [to Williamson] wouldn’t be so inflammatory.” Additionally, I mentioned in my quickwrite that articles such as these could provide a background for students to investigate the economy in their own town, and use their personal perspective to write a review like Williamson’s or Clark’s.

Ironically, we never really addressed how we would make the transition from an emotional to an academic response, because we were stuck on our own emotional responses for so long that we ran out of time. Does this suggest that it is necessary to have an objective discussion about how to make the mental transition from emotional to academic before reading a text like Williamson’s? Or, is it necessary to experience these strong emotional responses before seeking to make them academic? In many ways, these emotional responses are just as difficult for students to navigate as a dense historical text like Lewis’s. Yet, understanding how to do both is essential for students’ academic and critical literacy.