In "Appearing Acts: Creating Readers in a High School English Class" (Harvard Education Review, Vol. 64, No. 4, Winter '94), Joan Kernan Cone, from El Cerrito High School, California, chronicles her efforts during one school year to motivate her students to read for pleasure as well as learning. She was initially challenged by a friend, a Tom Clancy fan, who chided her for assigning books her students did not want to read. The criticism stung Kernan Cone, who was trying hard to supplement the assigned curriculum with different kinds of literature. Her discomfort turned into a realization that, "For all the attention I pay to literature in my classes, I am not producing readers: that is, students who choose to read on their own for pleasure and for knowledge." Her account of the different activities she tried in the classroom is engaging and thoughtful. Of particular interest to ABE teachers is the way Kernan Cone's learners saw themselves as readers. She had asked each of them to write a description of a "reader" and how they placed themselves in that definition. Many of the learners could remember a defining moment in their educational history that had made them become readers or non-readers. One student wrote: "When I was in the fourth grade, I was in a class for the gifted or whatever. Our teacher read us a book called Never Cry Wolf which she thought was so good. This was my first taste of literature and I hated it. I didn't want to hear about some man in the freezing cold, studying some wolves. That turned me off from books."
One of the tactics that Kernan Cole tried in her classroom was to ask each learner to choose a book that they wanted to read. They had to convince several classmates to read it as well. If a student's book was chosen, he/she would lead the group. Bakari Chavanu writes of a similar twist on the reading circle idea in "Exploring Black Cultural Issues" (Rethinking Schools, Spring 1997). A teacher in Sacramento, California, he uses thematically-based reading groups to explore African American literature. Chavanu organized the reading list into six general themes: Fighting the Power: Traditions of Resistance; Growing Up in the Hood; Ain't I a Woman: Struggles of Black Women; Learning to Love: Black Male/Female Relationships; Growing Up Black and Overcoming Obstacles; and In My Opinion: The Black Essay. A list of books with a suggested film for each category is appended to the article.
The latest issue of Rethinking Schools also has an interesting article on "Gay Issues, Schools, and the Right Wing Backlash." The author, Eric Rofes, looks at the battle that is being waged around issues of homosexuality in the schools of heretofore unlikely places, such as Salt Lake City and Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Rofes suggests that is a calculated tactic by the right wing to garner support for other items in its agenda. Gay rights is used as a "wedge" issue that attracts citizens who have a broad range of dissatisfaction with their public schools. Religious rights activists have been getting elected, often by very narrow margins, onto the school boards of towns away from large urban centers. Conservative boards then tend to go after other issues such as multicultural curricula, whole language instruction and cooperative learning. Rofes writes of the paradox in this situation: "Never before has so much activity emerged in public schools which challenges educators, school boards, and communities to come to terms with issues which were all-but-imaginable 25 years ago." Some of us take heart in the new possibility for a dialogue as long as it doesn't turn into a shouting match.
"Out of the Closet and Into La Calle" by Amy Lind in the March/April NACLA Report on the Americas informs on the unprecedented presence of gay rights groups in several countries of Latin America. Fifteen hundred marchers showed up at last year's Gay Pride March in Buenos Aires, timed to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots. Other very public events have taken place in Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. The price of coming out in Latin America, however, can be high. Lind writes: "The Gay Group of Bahia says over 1,200 lesbians, gay men and transvestites have been killed since 1982 in Brazil by death squads like the 'Group for Hunting Homosexuals.' Lind makes the point that many more are saying "Basta" because continued silence means more deaths.