Athletic vs Atlético – a question of spelling

Tonight is the big game as Athletic Bilbao take on Atlético Madrid in the final of the Europa league. I’ve been watching Athletic through this tournament and like many aficionados of football have been impressed by the passion of this team from the Basque country. But it is a question of spelling that intrigued me more than anything. This is what I found out from a quick glance at Wikipedia

Football was introduced to Bilbao by two distinct groups of players, both with British connections; British steel and shipyard workers and Basque students returning from schools in Britain. In the late 19th century Bilbao was a leading port of an important industrial area with iron mines and shipyards nearby. It was the driving force of the Spanish economy and as a result attracted many migrant workers. Among them were miners from the north-east of England, and shipyard workers from Southampton, Portsmouth and Sunderland. The British workers brought with them (as to so many other parts of the world) the game of football. In the early 1890s these workers came together and formed Bilbao Football Club. Meanwhile, sons of the Basque educated classes had made the opposite journey and went to Britain to complete their studies in civil engineering and commerce. While in the United Kingdom these students developed an interest in football and on their return to Bilbao they began to arrange games with British workers. In 1898 students belonging to the Gymnasium Zamacois founded the Athletic Club, using the English spelling.

So much history in the spelling of a word, and identity too.

When literacy meets literature, the classroom wins

In the last post we discussed the different images and words that the terms Literacy and Literature conjured up for you. The findings so far are very interesting indeed…and THANKS so much for this

Literacy – languages, letters, consonants and vowels, writing, alphabet, syllables, literate, illiterate, chalk, black boards, handwriting books, spelling, pronunciation, grammar, reading, writing, understanding, spelling, comprehension, pronunciation, ability, well-read, underprivileged/ lower working class, unemployed, on benefit, angry, rude, jobcentre, hopeless, illiterate, Skills for Life Literacy Programme, phonics, systems, power, control, need, class, letters, words, science, decoding

Literature – poems/poetry (x 2), novels (x 2), short-long stories, fictions, non-fictions, literature review, romanticism, realism, folklore, culture, reading, writing, classics, plays, descriptions, manuals, manuscripts, guides, privileged, posh, undergraduate/graduate, better off, Shakespeare, educated, art, beauty, emotion, craft, joy/rage, enjoyment, pleasure

We can read a lot from these words, some points I think…

1. literacy is associated with ‘low culture’ while literature with ‘high culture’ – for comparisons of this idea compare and contrast e.g., tabloid / broadsheet newspapers, reproduced print / original artwork, Wikipedia / peer-reviewed journals and so on
2. literacy is associated with the ‘badly educated’ in contrast to literature which is linked to the ‘well-educated’
3. literacy carries negative connotations of control and poverty while literature points to positive associations of pleasure
4. literacy is a skill (the ability to read and write), while literature is an art, an individual and cultural means of expression
5. literacy is more generally associated with school or adult education classrooms while literature with higher education and outside classroom spaces

What happens when literacy meets literature in the school or adult education classroom? The answer to that one is that classrooms win, meaning…

…that whatever texts are brought into the classroom (whether they count as literature or not – a discussion for another day by the way), are reduced to classroom texts. The stories, the poems, the novels, the plays, the music, the nursery rhymes, become vehicles for an educational agenda which goes something like this…

a story becomes a reading comprehension

writing becomes a spelling test

a rhyme or poem  becomes a phonics exercise

a play becomes an argument-based essay

and so on…

I think we need new spaces in education that allow for students to engage with texts of one form or another whether stories, poems, music, art, mathematics and so on that don’t end up reducing their true value and transformative potential. What do you think?

Literacy and Literature

I’ve been thinking recently about two words and how they are understood differently and why. Moreover, I’m thinking about the implications the connotation of the two words has for education and society as a whole. So I was wondering if you could help me with a post I’m writing about this topic by carrying out the following (fun?) little activity, and then leaving your answer as a comment.

a bit of teacher-talk, sorry

You see the word LITERACY

now close your eyes and what images come to mind?

On a piece of paper, write down a list of words (as many as you want) to describe what you see and think of

now do the same again, but this time the word is LITERATURE

Please could you now write your words for each in the comments section and of course any comments of your own on this task, and what you think about the difference between the two words.

Thanks for your help.

Richard

Why identity matters – a true story

This goes story goes back to classroom experiences as an English language and literacy teacher to adult learners of ESOL in the UK. Many of the learners in my classes had been denied an education as children for one reason or another, perhaps war, poverty, or simply the fact that she had been born a girl. The implications of missing out on schooling are profound for an adult learner in a mainstream educational context such as ESOL in the UK. The most significant of these is literacy. In other words they ‘have problems’ with reading and writing, at least this is the identity that is given to these learners and indeed one that the learners construct for themselves as adults in the English language classroom. An identity of being incapable, a failure, of no use to society.

This identity was visible not only in the actions of the learners in class but in the physical environment. For instance why were these learners (the one’s who couldn’t read and write), in the worst classroom, (a meeting room in the crypt of a church which was being used as a hostel for the homeless). The classroom with no computers, no board, no books, 200 metres away from the main college building? Why were there 100s more of such students on the college waiting lists without even access to THIS.

BECAUSE THEY CAN’T READ AND WRITE, SO THEY CAN’T PASS ESOL EXAMS, SO THEY EITHER GET KICKED OUT OR DON’T EVEN GET ON A COURSE IN THE FIRST PLACE, THAT’S WHY!

(By the way, most of them spoke at least 2 other languages quite fluently)

So what did I do about this? Well my first objective was to improve the ‘real conditions’ for the learners, never mind learning English and how to read and write. Every week I would book the computer suite in the main college campus, simply as an excuse to get my students into a nice classroom with a whiteboard! Of course I had to remind them to wear their ‘ID badges’ so they could get through the barriers at the doors to the college. For the first few weeks I would have to spend the first half of the lesson negotiating with the college door staff, that my students really were college STUDENTS and they had just forgotten their badges. So the college ‘front of office’ staff would then request their names to look up on the computer. I think you can imagine what is going to happen next, can’t you?

FOS – ‘Lets look you up on the computer then, right what’s your surname?

St – Surname?

FOS – Family name

St – Bashir (I’ve made this up by the way)

FOS – Sorry, I couldn’t get that, could you spell that out for me? (oh no here we go)

St – B

FOS – V?

St – Yes

FOS – ok so V and then

St – A

FOS – I for igloo

St – no A

and so on and so on until

FOS – Sorry I don’t seem to be getting anywhere here, look here is a pen and paper, just write it for me will you? (back to square one)

I don’t mean to paint the college staff in such a way, in fact they are very nice, helpful people, doing their job, but you get the picture I’m sure.

So we all discovered the joy of this warm, quiet computer room. And I really can’t put across to you the sheer happiness expressed by the students. Given that we were in the computer room, I thought that we’d better make good use of the technology, and there was me thinking, now this is going to be tricky (and there were major challenges, the first being PASSWORDS – aaaah), but oh my.

I dished out the passwords, put the learners in pairs so they could help each other out a bit. We were starting on a project to create a class ‘ book’, where the learners were going to put together a few sentences about themselves, with a picture, which we would later compile together and use for future lessons to build on. Anyway, I was very busy with one pair and didn’t really notice what was going on behind me. A few moments later a student signalled to me for help and I went over. He was having a bit of problem accessing the BBC news page in Kurdish and wondered if I knew anything about what to do. So I sat and helped him for a bit, when he was happy he had found the page, he then clicked an audio icon and listened to the news in his own language. I returned to the class book with the others.

It was then that it hit me head on – hang on a minute, this guy can’t even carve out the alphabet with a pencil but he can log onto a computer, use a keyboard, mouse, windows, web-browser, find a web page and then listen to the news!

This experience turned my whole world of understanding literacy on its head, everything clicked into place. Besides discovering what ‘literacy’ really meant i.e. people are not literate or illiterate, they make use of different literacies, with different technologies (including pen and paper) in their everyday lives, in ways that meet their needs, I also discovered why this student was always so tired in class – because he spent all night, every night on his laptop listening to the news and chatting to his brother back home.

But more importantly I realised that for people to construct an identity of who they are, they need access to resources to do so (which they often don’t have in education and hence ascribed as ‘illiterate’, but when able to relate their lives through new resources i.e. digital literacies here, a new identity is constructed).

I believe people construct an identity of ‘who they are’ through ‘what they do’. So for example an identity as a mother does not come about from being a mother but more in what you do as a mother. However, I think this is only half the story. What I think is as important, is not only what we do that is significant but rather what we say about what we do to other people. So in order to construct an identity we need to be able to relate our experiences to others, which we do through texts of one form or another, spoken or written. Language and other ways of making meaning, not only represent who we are but also construct it. And this is what I think blogging is all about, after all an experience that isn’t shared, isn’t an experience at all.