Episode 27: The Social Science of Literacy with Dr. Amy Tondreau

3:17PM Sep 17, 2022

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Dr. Amy Tondreau

Alex Andrews

Keywords:

literacy

students

read

umbc

text

teachers

book

critical

classroom

writing

identities

pedagogy

story

experiences

talking

disabilities

social sciences

learning

education

study

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

If you're like me, you love the public library. Not only is my local library a great place to find a huge number of fiction and nonfiction volumes, I can also use an app provided by the library to access ebooks and audiobooks. It's also a great place to sit and read, you know, because it's quiet. And I only recently discovered that my local library has a ton of great programs for kids. Everything from reading circles to early literacy programs to cultural events and celebrations. You know, teaching kids how to read is an incredibly important task in any society. Reading is one of the bedrock skills that allows us to navigate, make informed decisions, earn and save money, and participate in a democracy. While literacy rates in America maybe aren't where they should be, there are many impassioned teachers and volunteers engaging in literacy programs all over the country, helping America to become more passionate about the written word.

But while literacy is something that we might all aspire to practice in our daily lives, critical literacy is a more specific subject, and one that is the current focus of much social science research. Critical literacy is one of the scholarly focuses of a new UMBC professor, who studies the subject using sophisticated qualitative research designs. Dr. Amy Tondreau is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Literacy in the Department of Education at UMBC. Her research focuses on teachers' and students' literacy identities. Critical literacy, writing pedagogy, professional learning communities, critical teacher education, and the cross pollination of universal design for learning, and culturally sustaining pedagogy in elementary literacy teaching and learning. She's currently co authoring her first book, "Universal Design for Learning and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the Balanced Literacy Classroom," set to be published in 2023 by Rutledge. I recently had a chance to talk to Dr. Tondreau about her fascinating critical literacy research. And I'm delighted to bring your conversation right now.

All right, I am really pleased to have in the podcast studio today, Dr. Amy Tondreau, of UMBC. Dr. Tondreau, I want to talk first of all about this concept that obviously is very important to your research. You'd call yourself a scholar of critical literacy. And you know, I like to think, you know, being a professor myself and somebody who does a lot of reading and writing for a job, at least some notion of what literacy is, but critical literacy sounds like it might be something a little bit different. So could you tell us a little bit about what this critical literacy concept is, and maybe how it informs our understanding of this process of learning how to read and write?

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as you mentioned, I think most people have a concept of, of literacy, but often, that can be a narrowed view of literacy. We often think of school of literacies, right? So things like writing a five paragraph essay or answering a multiple choice question about, you know, what's the main idea of this passage. But really, we're all engaged in multiple literacies all the time in our lives. So we can think about things like the rise of digital literacies, as we all figure out how to navigate zoom, and WebEx in the past couple of years. Or when I lived in New York City, there's a very particular literacy to figuring out the subway system in New York, which stations go uptown and downtown, you don't want to end up, you know, on the outskirts of Queens because you got on going the wrong way. And that's a literacy that you have to learn. So literacies are ways that we interact with the world. And being literate is how we're perceived as competent in any particular sphere. A common example that I use with my students is when you're going to order coffee, right in New York. Every neighborhood has a corner bodega. And so you would go in there and you'd say, you know, small coffee black. But if you walk into a Starbucks You're supposed to use a whole other vocabulary,

Right, what's a, what's a grande? What's a venti? Why am I being handed a barrel sized coffee all of the sudden?

Exactly, yeah. And so you need a whole different literacy for that. So we're all sort of navigating and moving sort of in and out of these different literacies all the time. And we're also reading all different kinds of texts. So books, textbooks are obviously a text, but movies, the songs that we listen to the people that we care about, right, we learn to read them and their body language and what their facial expressions mean. So all of that is a part of our literacy. And that's connected to critical literacy, because critical literacy is grounded in the work of Paulo Freire A. And he sort of argued that education shouldn't be what's commonly known as the banking model, right, which is this idea of like, the teacher knows all of the information. And the students are kind of blank slates. And we just sort of like open their brains and pour the information in. And it's this one way exchange, but really, very argued that education needed to be dialogic. So the goal of education and critical literacy is, is developing critically conscious learners who have them the ability to act on their world in meaningful ways, Prairie really framed it in terms of liberation. And so it's this humanizing pedagogy, and it really acknowledges the political, social, historical, economic forces that are working on students and teachers and classrooms. And so far, he talked about reading the Word and reading the world, and that those two things are interconnected. So the act of reading can't really happen disconnected from the world that we're in. In the beginning, when a student is learning to read, they need to connect the things that they're seeing on the page with the world around them to give it to give the reading meaning, because the reading is to make meaning, right. And so we want to make these connections between text and experience. And critical literacy is some of the tenants and the practices, our understanding that anything that is constructed through language has perspectives, and ideological beliefs embedded within it, it's not neutral, right, the author who writes something chooses sort of what to include and how to present the information. And so if it, if it's constructed, it can be deconstructed, which means that we, as readers can push back on the text, we can question it. And so that can help us then perhaps reconstruct the text and use it for new purposes. So in that way, critical literacy is really connected to social justice. And so some of the questions that we might ask them a text or things like, whose voice is being heard here, and whose voice is missing? Who has power here? How is power maintained? So we're really thinking about power and privilege, and perspective, and thinking about texts as ideological rather than Utah? That's sort of the heart of critical literacy.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And such an interesting, I think, exploration of the variety of ways in which something as seemingly sort of straightforward as just learning how to read write is itself. So embedded in so many aspects that are critical to the social sciences, right things that we're thinking about in all these disciplines, from political science, sociology, anthropology, all these critical disciplines, really, really fascinating insights. And speaking of the social sciences, I want to ask a little bit about a recent study that you've conducted with a co author. And the title of that study was collaborative inquiry to support critically reading children's literature. And so in this study, took a look at the abstract a little bit, it sounds like you were talking to K 5k, through five teachers, about their experiences doing read aloud, so their classes, which obviously sounds like that's very central to the kinds of critical literacy discussions that you're just introducing. So I want to ask you a little bit about the study. So what were you trying to learn with this sort of study? And maybe how did you perform this research into the children's read? alouds?

Sure. Yeah. So in this study, we were specifically focusing on children's literature that centers characters with disabilities. We talk a lot about it. Um, as you mentioned, you know, read aloud central practice to elementary classrooms, and often a really valuable way to introduce ideas to students and to engage them in conversation about new topics. And one of the things that is so important in classrooms is representation. And so, Dr. Ruden, Simmons Bishop developed this terminology, back in 1990, about books as windows and mirrors, uhm...

Windows and mirrors. Very interesting. Yeah.

So that we can, we can read a text and we can see our own experience reflected back to us like a mirror, we can also read a text and be able to look through it as a window to someone else's experience and experience that's not like our own. And then she also talked about them as sliding glass doors, right? That it can help us sort of stand in someone else's shoes, right, the concept of sort of developing empathy and understanding someone else's perspective. And so, in classrooms, it's really important that all of our students have both windows and mirrors. Same as bishop talked about, if we only have mirrors, we, you know, have this sort of overinflated importance of self. And we are, you know, not prepared to interact with the diversity of the world. And if we only have windows, right, we were sending a message about whose lives are valuable and who's worthy of inclusion in the curriculum. And students who are not seen in the curriculum, right are sent this this message that they don't belong. And so that is important for for students of all. Diversity in the broadest sense of the word, right. So thinking about gender, right, and who is represented, who's the hero of the story, who's solving the problem, thinking about race. And if we, oftentimes when black characters are the main character, the stories are often historical and set in times of oppression. So most stories are recentering, where our black characters are experiencing joy. And disability is another area that often doesn't get as much attention in that span. In that kind of consideration. Right? Often when we're talking about representation, we think in terms of gender or race. But ability is another form of diversity. And so in the study, we were asking some of our graduate students to use critical literacy practices, to question the way that characters with disabilities were represented in texts. And so the beginning of the study was actually a part of their course, they were asked to take to choose a text and do some analysis of it, and then share it with a small group in their class. And we interviewed them about that experience. And we were able to kind of analyze, okay, what were they able to sort of understand and critique in the text in their paper in their class discussion, we asked them to reflect on that. And one of the things that we found was that the conversation with other teachers was one of the richest parts of it, right, and that they noticed certain things about the text on their own. But once they got into conversation with their peers, that was really they started to notice things that they hadn't noticed on their own. And so our follow up was we took all of the participants and asked them as a focus group, we gave them a new text, and asked them, we sort of developed a prompting guide, because one of the other findings was that it's hard to critique something in a text, if you don't sort of know the meta narratives, or the assumptions that you might be bringing to the text. So in the example that I gave before, right, if you don't sort of have a concept that like in fairy tales, the prince is always the, you know, the hero and the problem solver, then it might be hard to notice that pattern and critique it. And so we sort of developed a prompting guide where we sort of gave the the teachers a couple of things to look for two things like who was solving the problem, was it the character with disabilities or was someone else solving it for them and you And so we gave them this prompting guide, and we asked them to analyze the text together. And so we were sort of able to get that access to their thinking process about the text. And we also asked them how they would use it in the classroom.

And a couple of really interesting things happened. One is, so the book that we use is called HelloGoodbye. Dog. And in the book, the main character is in a wheelchair, but it's not a main aspect, the story isn't about her being in a wheelchair, the story is actually about her dog filling up at school, because he wants to be with her. That's great. And so ultimately, they decided to get the dog trained as a therapy dog. So that be in school with the main character cool. And so as this, the teachers were talking about this story, it took them probably a half hour or more into this story into the conversation about the story to surface that all of them had assumed that the dog was a service dog.

Until finally, it's revealed that that's kind of the plot.

They sort of assumed that because the main character was in a wheelchair, that she would need the support of a service dog, when in the book, the environment is depicted, like in these pictures as very accessible, she has a ramp to get in the car, she has tables at school that she you know, is able to move her wheelchair under, she's moving through the world, or really independently, and it's the job, right? Not it's just a pet. Exactly. So it took them about a half hour of conversation where they kind of were like, Oh, it's just her dog. And so we kind of asked them in the in the focus group, like, Why do you think, you know, you assumed it was a service dog. And, you know, they were able to sort of point out like, oh, like, that's just a stereotype, right? That's an assumption that I was bringing to the text that there's no evidence for in the text. And so this practice of talking it out together, really helped them to unpack their own assumptions and see the text in a new way. And the other really interesting thing that we found is really the fear that the teachers had about talking about disability in the classroom. And there were a couple of sort of aspects of that. One, I think, is we're sort of in a climate, where, you know, there's a lot of news stories about parent pushback, right, where there's a lot of book banning happening, and, you know, very active school board meetings, and things like that, where there's a lot of conversation about what's appropriate to discuss in the classroom. And so some of their fear came from potential parent pushback, or lack of administrators support. Some of their fear also came from the idea that students with disabilities would want to hide that or not acknowledge it in the classroom. So rather than this idea of windows and mirrors, right, and that they would feel positively represented in the classroom, the teachers were more concerned that essentially they were acquainting disability with Shane, right, this idea that if I have a disability, that's something that I don't want to discuss, I don't want to, to have known. Which is tricky, right? Because some disabilities are invisible, and some disabilities are visible, right. And even one of our participants identified as dyslexic and shared with us, a student in her classroom, who was dyslexic and proudly discussed that with the class. And yet still, that fear was there. And so we really felt like this prompting guide and this practice of teachers reading texts critically with one another, really helped us surface those conversations and hopefully helped us to address that so that they were more prepared to bring that into their classroom and have those discussions with their students and ways that acknowledged the variations that brains and bodies have in a way that didn't associate that with shame. Well,

There's really two things that I especially love about this study I first first is the notion that this is such a pedagogically layered sort of research project, right, is that you've got graduate students who are sort of contributing to the design of this study, through their own investigations into the subject and then contributing to these discussions that the K 12 teachers are having or the K five teachers are having. And then the focus group methods that you're bringing to the table to draw out these insights that will eventually go forward and be of practical utility to practitioners is such an incredible, sort of a testament to how cool this this research really is. And the other thing that, of course, the other thing that I think is really cool about this is just the qualitative methods that you're using, right? The way that you're able to draw out these insights that, you know, you come into the project without a lot of really strong priors about this, you know, what's going to happen when these these educators get, you know, actually read the book and have this discussion. So I wanted to ask sort of a follow up question about these qualitative methods. And maybe if there are some other studies that you're currently working on that maybe use these kinds of qualitative approaches that you're excited about?

Yeah. So I think in terms of qualitative methods, the the biggest thing for me is hearing teacher and student voices. You know, I was a classroom teacher for a lot of years. And, but there's nothing like being in the classroom to know what it's like to be in the cluster. And so, you know, our teachers are, are the experts, right? They're the ones who are there every day. And so often, I think, in research, particularly as, I think quantitative research, but often in qualitative research to there ends up being almost a blame placed on teachers, right? It's like, these are the things that are not happening. And then the recommendations, you know, the discussion and the findings, or science or kind of will teachers need to do this. And our teachers are, are burdened with a lot, right, we're asking them to do a lot. If we think about the past couple years, especially right, they're pivoting from virtual instruction to in person back to hybrid and trying to mitigate the influences of students having disrupted schooling and weighing all the pressures of yet we're still administering standardized tests that measure to a norm when we're not living in a norm. Not at all. So teachers are doing so much work, right, we're asking so much of them. And as you mentioned before, when we were talking about critical literacy, right, this is a, a multi layered practice. And so I think one of the best things about qualitative research for me is that I don't really like the expression, like give voice, the teachers really have voice, but it's sort of bringing attention to their voice, it's centering their voice in a way that they get to tell their own own experiences. And we get to acknowledge the complications and the nuances of that work. And so for me, I really love narrative methodology.

Yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah.

So really thinking in terms of the stories that we tell. So a lot of my work also has to do with identity, right? And the way that we develop literacy identities, right? So something as simple as you know, I teach a writing methods course. And my students come to me and they'll either say, oh, my gosh, I love writing, right? Like I'm a writer, or they'll say, Well, I'm just not a writer. Yeah, this is very binary label for ourselves. But really, all of our writing identities are so much more complicated than that. We use writing for functional things like our grocery lists, we use, you know, email and text and social media. We're writing all the time. We have positive writing experiences, where we've gotten good feedback, we've had negative writing experiences or terrible feedback. And so these identities, right are developed in in through the stories that we tell. So if I tell you the story, that I am just not a writer, right, that becomes my identity. And so, you know, in schools that happens all the time we put labels, on kids or on teachers, or schools. And those identities get laminated over time, right if you're a kindergartener who's at risk. And you know, that label and that story that we're telling about you as a student, has concrete implications for your life, right? What curriculum Do you have access to, you know, which Where are you getting pulled out of the classroom? Just so that, you know, you're having intervention, but you're also missing things, you know, in, in the classroom, and it can impact your confidence or your engagement or your motivation. And so these stories that we tell right are so are creating our identities, right in interaction with, with our environment, we're called into these different positions. And that can then sort of shape our reality. And so for me in research, getting to know people's stories, and being able to present, not sort of decontextualized bits of data, but narratives helped to really, like I said, before, center the voices of teachers and students in ways that honor their experiences and their identities.

That's fantastic. So are there any projects that you're currently working on that sort of employ this methodology?

Um, yeah, so we are there to kind of two I'll talk about quickly. So one is, I'm working on a book. And it's about so elementary literacy pedagogy. But how do we do that in a way that incorporates both culturally sustaining pedagogy, so attending to students, cultural identities, and sustaining those in the classroom, as well as Universal Design for Learning, which is a pedagogy that helps support students with disabilities in the classroom. So how do we both attend that? You know, students brains are different, and they might need different things as they're learning to read. But how do we do that in a way that is culturally sustaining and attends to their multiple identities, and our book has spotlights written by many of the classroom teachers that we work with. So the text is really multifocal. You know, we really, again want to be centering teachers who are using these practices in their classroom. And so they're able to share some of their student work and, you know, share some of their own experiences, the books that they use in their classroom, the things that they're doing, that are working, to be able to share those with other teachers. So we're really excited about that. We're hoping the book is supposed to come out next year. And

I love that term, multifocal. I think that's a really great way of expressing the way that you're trying to bring these voices into the conversation, right?

Yeah, exactly. That, you know, it's sort of going right back to the theory, right? And Paulo, Frary, that it's, it's not dialogic, it's not that my co author and I have all the knowledge. You know, we're all sort of learning together, right. And then the other project that I'll mention quickly is, I got to work with some elementary school students via zoom in the pandemic, to do some critical writing, pedagogy. And so typically, we think of critical literacy, often it's used in relationship to reading like we talked about, but the critical writing piece sort of picks up. So if a text is constructed through language, we can deconstruct it, we can also reconstruct it. So the writing piece picks up the reconstruction. And so I read some postmodern picture books. With these, with these elementary schoolers, and postmodern picture books are ones. The most commonly known ones are things like fractured fairytales, okay, yeah, sure. So, you know, you think the story is gonna go one way, you know, the traditional story, but it surprises you. Often postmodern picture books have, like multiple narrators or multiple storylines happening at the same time, or the illustrations might contradict the text. So there's all these types of surprising pieces as you read through it as a reader. And you as the reader are really making a lot of decisions about how to sort of keep the narrative threads together, to different people might read it different ways. And so we read these, these picture books, and then I invited the students to think about a story that they knew well that they might want to rewrite. And I asked them, we sort of started by making identity webs and talking, you know, as a way both to get to know them and sort of build some rapport at the beginning of the study. But also I asked them once we made the labs, what parts of their identity had they seen reflected in the books that they read, and what parts of their identity were not. And so as we rewrote the stories, we talked About Okay, so you know, you mentioned that you wanted to see this thing represented in a story, how could we put it in the story. And so one example, a student that I worked with, saw a counselor, and she said, I never, I don't see that in, in stories. And I like, I know that it's okay that I have a counselor, but sometimes I feel embarrassed about it. And so she wrote a story in which the main character was afraid of the dark and had to see a counselor who helped her overcome her fear of the dark. That's great. Exactly. And so, you know, she was, you know, I did a follow up interview with her and kind of asked her to reflect like, okay, so what aspects of identity of your identity are in the story? You know, why did you include them, and she was able to name very clearly like, I think that if other kids read this story, then they would feel okay about having counselors shoe. And so this ability to rewrite a story, right, and put ourselves into the story is an empowering practice, and can help us to rewrite our own narratives, right, and the narratives that we tell each other, which, you know, gives us an opportunity to sort of see ourselves differently, right. And so in rewriting the stories, we rewrite our identities, and that can be a really empowering thing for kids who might not see themselves represented for a variety of reasons.

Mirrors, windows, and doors, right. Exactly (Dr Tondreau). And I think that's, that's really fascinating. Before we let you go, Dr. Chandra, we just want to ask you one more, very brief question. And that is obviously something that you would presumably have some things to say about right as, as a an educator and as a scholar of education, right? Obviously, you know, we've got some students who are listeners to this podcast, and I just wanted to ask you a little bit if you had maybe just one brief piece of advice for students who maybe hope hoping to go pro at some point in their careers in the social sciences.

Yeah, I think, um, you know, in line with my research, right, is this idea that texts are questionable. Yeah. Right, that so often in, you know, as a student, right, we're being asked to read a text and summarize it, you know, what are the main ideas? What's the author's point of view that kind of a thing. But we're not always invited, invited to push back. And so I think that that idea that any text that you're reading, is, is an argument, right? Is, is someone's perspective and point of view. And so it's always important to be a critical reader. And question, you know, whose voice is centered in this? Who has the power here whose voice is missing? And understanding that you have the ability to reconstruct, right, you have the ability to synthesize what you're learning and draw your own conclusions, and build your own arguments. And that if something is missing, you can add that? You know, that's, that's, I think, the most fun thing about social science research, right. It's an ongoing conversation. Absolutely. We all have something that we can add.

Absolutely. And speaking of conversations, I just want to thank you again, so much for taking the time to talk to us today about your incredible research and best wishes with the book. I hope that all of that goes smoothly, and we're able to read that very soon. Dr. Amy, Sandra, thanks again, so much for being with us.

Thanks so much. This was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Now it's time for Campus Connections, a part of the podcast where we connect today's featured content to the work of others on UMBC's campus, and today I'm delighted to welcome a new voice to Rretrieving the Social Sciences, our newest production assistant, Alex Andrews. Alex, we're delighted to have you. Welcome to the program. What connection have you come up with for us today?

Hello. In this week's installment of Campus Connections, we'll be taking a look at a paper written by Dr. Jiyoon Lee. Dr. Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Education at UMBC with a PhD in educational linguistics. The paper I'm discussing is called "Assessing Language Learning in Virtual Exchanges" and was published in April of 2021. Its focus is on improving language assessment literacy for virtual practitioners who are trying to teach a language and assess the progress of their students through a virtual environment. In the paper, there was even a guideline made to help practitioners in virtual environments figure out the best ways to assist their students. The work of Dr. Lee highlights the importance of literacy, as well as one of the many facets in which literacy seems to be a part of our daily lives.

Thanks so much for that great segment, Alex, and welcome to the podcast. And thanks to all of you for tuning in today. Don't forget to keep questioning

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Jefferson Rivas. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent UMBC events. Until next time, keep questioning.