Introduction
In this book, Carol Lee brings into play her experience as a participant viewer to offer an exceptional and detailed opinion of both planning and employing a cultural receptive strategy to enhance learning and teaching in a particular subject.
Through clear reports from real classrooms, Lee explains how AAVE helps students motivate themselves and learn. She describes the way students respond to improved scheme and the way teachers modify the cultural background of the language or English arts program. As the book emphasizes on literacy of African-American students, Lee assesses the role of culture in supporting learning.
She provides approaches of changing cultural knowledge to support the issue, particularly the educational learning. Lee argues that attainment gap to some extent is affected by the restrictions of knowledge based on hypotheses which enlighten decisions concerning pedagogy, curriculum, evaluation, teacher qualification and situations which teachers follow while working.
In this book, Lee reports on her three-year program while teaching students how to respond to literature at Fairgate High School; she states that teachers can achieve their targets if they realize the discourse, practices, and content of their field. Teachers will also succeed if they have precise understanding regarding the cognition, language, incentive, culture, and social certainties of urban learners.
Cultural Modeling
The approach which the author employed is based on her practices on cultural modeling, which serves as a learning plan to facilitate solving the issue in learning institutions. This helps both learners and teachers discuss the differences between the school-based and community-based standards. For example, African American learners are supported to generate clearly their understanding and responses of their cultures which are used outside the school.
Their knowledge and answers are then implemented in the sphere of educational learning. In this manner, learners are offered support to create their culture applicable in the school environment and classrooms. They use certain languages to address the problem-solving lessons which help them create links between what they have done and what they are expected to perform with school based issues.
When teachers and students assess the function of satire in literary understanding, cultural modeling contains outlines of this issue which students practice daily using oral traditions, songs, television, and film. Students create clear approaches of distinguishing satire set up in music lyrics, film, and television.
They may keep on looking for satire in African canonical performances and in non-African, American canonical performances which help them improve their knowledge. Another issue for students is to distinguish the functions of symbolism in literary reasoning. Lee starts with students examining closely the cultural relics of their daily practices, such as hip hop lyrics, hip hop records, etc., observing and intuitively interpreting the difficult views in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Most influential are the transcripts which are there in classrooms. These disclose discussion of student and teacher in interpretive reasoning articulated in AAEV. They also reveal daily language used by students, method of thinking, and significance of complex text applied in classrooms. Lee, in her book, describes the readers a classroom where animated discussions concerning the significance of satire and symbols prosper are aroused, and students experience a great desire to express their understanding openly.
Correcting the Way Students Talk
Lee persists that teachers can attain better outcomes and success if they only appreciate the strength of instructional talk derived of the standards of AAEV. They should put more focus on supporting students’ reasoning in a perspective of literary rather than correcting the manner they are used to communicate.
Lee chooses not to correct students when they are responding to literature and states that they should feel that their views are well-considered and taken into account. She argues that selecting a student who will speak should not be regulated by the teacher. Lee continues to state that teachers should have both the content and educational understanding, and these two issues needed for the effective teaching are both valuable and compound.
The teacher in this situation should be able to teach using various approaches which will help students struggling against literary problems. Lee argues that teachers should be aware of what students understand and value. Teachers should hear and respond to a wide range of students’ debatable questions with proper understanding.
Additionally, Lee shows some important pedagogical understanding including some abilities, such as possibility to evaluate what students know and do not know. Other abilities include understanding several ways to capitalize learning and the way to know developmental progression.
Lee considers that teachers should enter modern reading areas susceptible to the usual range of social and developmental issues displayed by students who are identified as incompetent. She considers that this is a requirement which almost all learning institutions or schools disregard.
Lee specifies her instructional choices in many examples in her book. She uses Taquisha’s conflict to discuss this issue. Taquisha seems to be reading a newspaper instead of attending to Sax Cantor Riff. This is evident when Taquisha questions the function of the film in their study programs. Lee mentions that she employs her understanding of adolescent growth as a basis for managing the conflicts which Taquisha have.
Lee also states that she uses her knowledge of Taquisha as an individual African American communication experiences to reconstruct the condition. Moreover, she offers the readers and students six guidelines for teaching which clearly create a precise reasoning to difficult theme or issue as well as provides interesting instances. Her example is re-voicing learners’ expressions to guide students to huge plans within the area under discussion.
Lee favors responsibility but is uncertain of problematic evaluations which are not genuine and rigorous in corrective reading at the resultant stage. Hence, these do not bring about students to find out ways to participate in very complex and analytical reasoning concerning the theme. In chapter seven, Lee offers instances of the post and pre evaluations of literary learning, and I hope Lee will add example of students’ essay. This could portray the language of literary reasoning.
Several books and journals are used by teachers so that they can improve the students’ language through the application of literature and culture. Lee’s book can be recommended since it addresses this issue. The book begins with an issue concerning literacy, culture and learning, then it suggests values of student’s culture and understanding in the service of attaining educational success.
Lee proposes that achievements in urban schools are not easy for the teachers to gain and need plainly a profound understanding of the theme of the book, language, language socialization and the way students learn. They should also understand the process of the children and teenagers’ maturation. Teachers should improve their teaching skills and knowledge used in urban schools.