സ്കൂള്‍ ലോര്‍

School Lore
E P Rajagopalan
Translated by K T Dinesh

The institutions and contexts in which people intervene spontaneously generate a wide range of original knowledge. This knowledge is called folklore. A school is not just the building in which it functions; it is the conglomeration of learners, teachers, non-teaching employees and the visible and invisible presence of the wider society that supports them. Within this conglomerate structure, numerous formal events occur. The curriculum and the method of examination will reflect the interests of those who run the school and those who are in power. Althusser enlisted the school along with religion, family, art and media among the ideological apparatus of a state. We get the same idea from Foucault who stated that a school and a jail performed the same functions - enforcing discipline and imposing punishment. The fun and games, the songs and stories, and the graffiti on the walls that punctuate the uni-dimensional execution of these formal functions together form school lore. The collection and analysis of these are a part of the study of folk lore. This has not yet begun in our country. Euro-American folklorists focus on this area too. There are some websites on school lore on the net.

The school headmaster/principal is the representative of the state. So is every teacher. Their job is to condition the children according to the interests of the state. Therefore, how far teaching is subjective and creative is a legitimate question. The task they have undertaken, the dissemination of the ideology of the state overtakes their creativity and subjectivity. However exemplary and scientific such dissemination may be, it is fundamentally an imposition (Imposition could be beneficial – but what is good will be decided by the state). Protest will, therefore, naturally be the outcome. Students who are thus imposed upon will begin to exercise their creativity. This is a form of counter discourse, major source of school lore. Children often notice the physical features of teachers and weave stories about them. They create caricatures of teachers. The idiosyncracies of teachers also inspire such narratives. This is also the context in which nicknames for teachers originate. Sometimes the nicknames are conjured from the imagination of the students. Sometimes the teachers are assigned the names of characters from illustrated stories or films. Nonsensical words also become nicknames. These nicknames at times become more popular among students than the original names of the teachers. The nickname is sometimes added to the original name and in most cases it is added as the first name. In due course the original sign value of the nickname may vanish and it might even be used for referring to the teacher with reverence. The nicknames assigned to classmates may be comparatively less critical but more sarcastic.

The experiences in the classrooms are the main items of school lore. School lore is richer in co-educational schools. The reason is that they are more representative of society than school which admit only boys or girls. There are social contradictions in the classroom which inspire the pupils’ lore about their peers. But the teacher-stories they create are sharper. Such stories are not always cynical; children record stories filled with love and respect on teachers who are close to them too. But the more popular and the more beautiful ones are those that recount their vices. This is because vices provide for more drama than virtues. And vices require treatment. Such stories are often anonymous. Their construction and transmission are collective efforts. If a teacher is seen at a place where he is not supposed to be, a bar for instance, it will immediately lead to the creation of a lore. In a lore that has been created out of classroom experience one can sense a softening of cynicism. But no mercy is given for a teacher’s indiscretion. The teacher is severely taken to task. Without being aware of it, children seek a model in a teacher. If that image gets even slightly distorted, it leads to the creation of a narrative. Narratives are focussed more on male teachers than their female counterparts. This shows that the interventions of female teachers are quite formal.

Programmes in the school like sports meets, arts fests and exhibitions enrich school lore. Each of these programmes flouts the routine schedule of the school. Children generally participate in them with the enthusiasm generated by a carnival. Teachers’ behaviour also changes during these days. The presence of the general public in the school on such occasions is natural. This digression leads to a different set of experiences, thereby generating more school lore. Study tours involve the participation of new places and new people. So they too generate a variety of school lore.

The most attractive part of school lore is graffiti, inscriptions and pictures on walls. The ideologically subversive nature of school lore is exhibited more in them than in any other form. Most of the wall exhibits tantamount to what we generally mean by obscenity. The principles behind it are protest, assertion and demonstration. Their aim is to present graphically what cannot be expressed through words. The child who writes such graffiti might have the lurking fear of being tipped off if he speaks out what he writes (each school has its own system of policing and judiciary). Hence it is displayed in writing. Interests like ‘let more people come to know’, the obstinacy, ‘let others understand only my version’ are at work behind wall writings. Some risk takers sketch pictures and words at heights from which it is difficult to rub them off. Such ‘lofty inscriptions’ can be seen in almost all schools. It can be discerned that their adherence to the task is quite intense.

Teachers also create school lore. Their powers of observation also lead to the creation of many a narrative. Though there are anecdotes on ‘good’ events, a major chunk of them are often about the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly.’ The disagreements emanating out of their profession and the criticism against the activities other than teaching they indulge in are the favourite topics of such stories. All these stories are a nice mixture of reality and fantasy. The stories are born during the idling hours at the staff room. Though the majority of the stories are without any malice the contradictions related to teaching are latent in them. The characteristic features of some teachers lead to narratives which have the nature of caricatures. Yet another source of school lore is the Parents’ and Teachers’ Association (PTA). Peons also are subjects for school lore. Peons sometimes also create stories about teachers. Akbar Kakkattil’s ‘Teacher Stories’ represent all these categories. Vyloppilli describes an incident in his ‘Kavyalokasmaranakal’ (‘Reminiscences of the World of Poesy’): ‘It cannot be said that none of my teacher friends are envious. Once a scholar at a school told me straight on my face that it was not yet time for me to receive any amount as remuneration for my poems.’ This story must be in the air at that school as school lore.

Continuity is the reason for the dynamism of folk lore. School lore too traverses from people to people and from generation to generation. It might break the barriers of the school and reach the society at large. One, who lives within the region where the lore is in currency, cannot help remembering these informal narratives along with other things when he/she hears the name of the school. In recent times, children are not as keen in constructing school lore as they were before.. This can be attributed to a tendency to overlook schoolmates, classmates and teachers and turn themselves to the selfish structure called textbooks - examination. Lore is generated when people are looked upon as individuals. If they are seen as mere instruments, no interesting contexts will arise. The new school walls remain ‘unlettered’ because of this change. Earlier there were many narratives about inspecting officers like AEOs and DEOs. Such narratives have become extremely rare. This can be considered as evidence for the school becoming mechanical and for the untrammelled reign of the hegemonic ideology of the state.

Structuralism is a favourite tool of folklorists. If studied in the light of this reductionist science, school lore also limits itself to a few narrow structures – structures that can be identified in any school. But this is an approach which wipes out the variety and the interests of school lore. The right approach is to study the lore considering each school a different space and the lore a collective of characteristic resources. It is an informal, parallel history of every school. Even the architecture of a school is imprinted in it.

Praxis of Reading: Curriculum Reform at Secondary Level in Kerala
K T Dinesh, Research Officer SCERT, Kerala

Dr. Johnson referred to England as a nation of readers in the eighteenth century. In Kerala’s context however the formation and such a dramatic rise in the size of the reading public happens after Independence. Because, even though attempts primarily initiated by missionaries had prepared the ground for the spread of literacy and consequently of the reading habit, conditions that facilitated the formation of a large reading public did not become a reality until after Independence. It is noted that literacy in Kerala which stood at 45% at the time of Independence rapidly grew until in the nineteen eighties it reached the stage of what is called total literacy. Kerala has been maintaining a big tradition of reading habit consistently over a long period and considers it as one of the reasons of Kerala Model of Development. This reading tradition is widely acclaimed world over.

The barber-shops, tea-shops, tailor-shops and reading rooms annexed to libraries had been the secular spaces in an otherwise caste-ridden Kerala society of the 1940s and 50s where people gathered for reading newspapers and magazines. The practice one could observe there was that one person would be reading aloud a piece of news/article and the others would be listening to it and responding to it according to their points of view. Heated arguments would ensue if the issue discussed was political in nature. It was quite amusing to notice that in some of these secular spaces bills prohibiting the discussion of political issues began to appear in 1980s and 90s. Such was the nature of discussions that were being taken place.

Against this socio-cultural backdrop have we to analyse the reading practice followed in the secondary classrooms of Kerala where English is taught until the curriculum revision process initiated in 2007. The reading model schools put forward grossly overlooked the collaborative and interactive scopes involved in the process of reading. A banking model of education was practised and learners were never considered as individuals with their own concepts and ideas. The method teachers followed did not have any faith in the analytical or critical skills of the learners. Comprehension was the sole aim of all reading. To ensure this all reading tasks were replete with comprehension questions.

During the last three decades Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has placed greater focus on the process of reading as a major source for the acquisition of a second language. Reading, the art of meaning making from texts, has been the greatest source of acquiring knowledge, especially in the process of learning. The relevance of reading is all the more important when it comes to learning a language. In the case of second languages the process of meaning making is always challenging for the teacher and the learner. The lack of motivation to read is the major hazard in the case of learners. For the teacher, it is the ignorance of how to motivate the learner and how to process reading meaningfully in the socio-cultural context of his/her learners bothers the most. At secondary level learners are expected to be independent readers, even in the second language as envisioned by the curricular objectives. But the practice of reading carried out in the schools of Kerala falls much shorter to the objective envisioned in the curriculum.

Social constructivist perspective theorises that knowledge is not passively received but built by the cognizing subject and is constructed through creatively intervening in social issues. Social constructivism, categorically conceives learning as a process of constructing knowledge and sharing it through individual and collaborative efforts. Critical pedagogy illuminates the relationship among knowledge, authority, and power. (Giroux, 1994). It enables learners to "recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded.”

The conventional practice of reading in the secondary classrooms of Kerala grossly disregards reading as a meaning making process. Most children read under compulsion and are not intrinsically motivated to read and for most children it is not an enjoyable activity; neither does it sustain as a lifelong activity. Reading is confined to the information within the text and it does not go beyond it. The reading materials produced, the classroom process followed and the teacher training given are not helpful in making the learners independent and meaningful readers. The practice of reading overlooks the need for breaking the conventions of reading and make it a meaningful, creative and to a certain extent political process that has to be done carefully.

The praxis or ‘the theoretical practice’ of reading at the secondary level has to be redefined in the light of critical pedagogy and social constructivism. Each reader comes to a text with very different histories of engagement with that particular cultural form. They read through and against a social history of encounters with other texts at other times (Buckingham, 1993). Reading is also a socially situated and context specific activity. Construction of meaning of a text is always dependent on the knowledge of a particular group at a particular time and about that particular text (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999). Students‘ interaction with texts is never static but always changing depending on the particular participants that they are with and the social setting. Gee (2001) argued that we all have multiple identities which are connected not to our internal states but to our social performances. The kind of person one is recognized as being, at a given time and place, can change from moment to moment in the interaction, can change from context to context, and, of course, can be ambiguous or unstable (p. 99). What‘s more, he pointed out that identity is very much a discursive practice and has to do with one‘s own narrativization of oneself as well as how people talk about you, and how much you resist or inhabit what they say about you. Hence, identity is constantly created and recreated in our interaction with people and it is very much shaped by collective discourses around us (Sfard & Prusak, 2005). The predominant focus on production rather than reception fails to see what has been read into a text by particular reading practices other than some pre-given textual or ideological reality. The effort, as Patterson (1997) pointed out, should be on locating the intertextual and situated meanings. Besides, multiple interpretations from students of different social backgrounds and history of literacy practices should be encouraged. Bearing in mind that there is no unmediated access to truth, different individual responses should only be the starting point.

The move away from conventional model of reading to a critical model of reading based on social constructivism and critical pedagogy demands a changed conception of teachers as the sole holder of truth. What this implies is that instead of an all-knowing critical pedagogue, what we need is a self-reflective practitioner-researcher who learns as s/he teaches. The Freirean perspective which emphasizes the centrality of learners and their communities, and the integration of research and pedagogy that starts with learners‘concerns is needed. It is imperative that a second language program address students‘ social and affective needs in their acquisition of the new language and culture so that their language learning becomes an additive rather than a subtractive experience rendering them in self-doubt and shame about their heritage, language and culture. The range of activities we initiated in the new textbooks at the secondary level attempt to affirm students’ identity. Cummins (2001) described the relationship between identity investment and cognitive development as a reciprocal one - the more positive students feel about their linguistic, cultural and personal identities, the more investment they will have in their learning.

Social constructivists see reading, like learning, as social practice. The social context affects when you read, what you read, where you read, who you read with and, of course, why and how you read. Luke and Freebody (1990, 2002) define four different reader resources: code breaking, meaning making, text using, and text analyzing. The most fundamental resource is code breaking, which is deciphering text at letter, word, and sentence-level. For many students decoding text is synonymous with ‘reading’ because this is the social practice they have been taught in schools. Decoding practices are usually the main focus of school reading classes. They include guessing meaning from context, predicting, using background knowledge, and using text structure, looking up unknown vocabulary in a dictionary or glossary, working out sentence grammar, and deciphering reference chains. Classroom reading practices in reading are focused on students’ development of reading skills. However, if students are not encouraged to go beyond these strategies, they may learn reading habits which are over-focused on decoding to the detriment of other reading resources.

The reader has to listen and to struggle to make sense in their own minds of what the writer is saying, which is intermental dialogue in Vygotsky’s terms. In listening to the author’s words, students need to construct their own representation of the author’s message – intramental dialogue. Rarely do readers understand exactly what the writer had in mind (Lewis & Slade, 1994). For example, in a recipe the author may write ‘Cut the carrots finely.’ This apparently simple phrase can be understood in many different ways, as different readers will have different interpretations of the meaning of ‘finely,’ different conceptions of what sort of knife should be used, how the carrots are to be held while chopping, and so on. Reading in a foreign language is particularly hard, because the words and grammatical structures, the text conventions, and the cultural context are all less than familiar. In fact, there can be no perfect way to understand most texts. Even something as apparently factual as a train timetable can be interpreted through different cultural lenses. Students need to understand that all readers construct meaning from texts differently, depending on their purpose for reading, their background, and even their state of mind. There is usually no single, unequivocal meaning in a text. Thus, reading entails constructing meaning from text through intermental and intramental dialogue.

Readers also have to know how to use texts. They can be used for pleasure, for gathering information, for writing essays, and for language learning. Our students have expectations of how texts can and should be used based on their prior experience of texts as social practice. As teachers we need to encourage and facilitate students’ use of texts in new social contexts. Finally, as text analysts, students need to gain text awareness. This is in order to build their own skills as writers, by observing how language is used within different genres to achieve different purposes. They also need to develop a “suspicious eye” (Wallace, 1995,) detecting bias, and identifying the author’s stance. They need to learn how writers use language to persuade, entertain, inform, and influence their audiences.

The following strategies are proposed to show how the social constructivist theory can be translated into action for teaching reading in an ESL classroom.

Providing a Context and Purpose for Reading

Students need to have a clear idea of why they are reading and to know how the text relates to other aspects of their course. For example, before processing a reading passage in a textbook, establish the context first by using visual cues, discussion questions, or a link to students’ own lives. Make sure that the students know which reader role you want them to adopt, whether that be making meaning, exploiting the text for useful vocabulary, looking at the text as a model for some other task, learning some new information in preparation for an assignment, finding out the author’s opinion on the topic, or do you expect them simply to enjoy the story? Is the text meant to be used as a language resource, or is it meant to stimulate dialogue? Students also need encouragement to move beyond this teacher-textbook controlled situation into reading texts which they themselves have selected for their own purposes.

The processing of the text also involves relating one text to another and guessing the meaning of difficult words. It can demonstrate that reading is not necessarily a linear process, but involves jumping forwards, linking back, and re-reading sections which are problematic. This kind of a process helps students to see what it means to enter into dialogue with the text.

Asking Questions

Not enough research has been done in ESL classes on the role of questioning in teaching reading. The art of asking questions which are easily within the students’ grasp, but which lead them to engage more interactively with the text is very tricky. After all, the students will not have a teacher by their side asking questions forever. The goal is to enable them to become independent readers. Social constructivist theory emphasizes that we need to encourage students to create their own meaning from text, rather than to impose a teacher’s interpretation of the meaning upon them. Of course teachers may help as resources to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap that students experience in reading a text. Too often, however, reading teachers dominate the lesson by ‘telling’ students the meaning of the text rather than assisting them to create meaning themselves. The questions teachers ask need to show a genuine interest in the meanings the students construct rather than insisting on pre-conceived understandings. Perhaps the most effective text awareness questions are those which help students gain insight into the way texts are structured. “What words tell you that the author is introducing a new point?” “In this paragraph, how many times can you find the word X (the topic of the paragraph)?” Similarly, questions which allow students to identify the author’s stance are useful. “Do you think the author admires Gandhiji? How do you know that? What other words could the author have used?” Above all, however, we want to encourage our students to ask such questions for themselves. To scaffold this ability, one possible activity is to get students in groups to write questions for other groups to answer.

Integrating Reading with Writing

Other people’s texts serve as excellent models for students’ own writing. Close analysis of a reading text can enable students to emulate the text in their own writing. For example, if students are required to write a tourist brochure, it is a good idea to have them analyze other tourist brochures first gathering useful vocabulary and sentence structures, observing the format and layout, comparing texts to see which ones work best, or which ones achieve the sort of effect they would like. This does not mean uncritically applying models as in the behaviourist approach, because it involves the students in informed and analytical choice of language for a defined purpose. Students’ own writing can benefit greatly from borrowing liberally from model texts in creating their own texts: which is a skill essential for ESL students.

Creating Awareness of the Author behind the Text

Text analysis can develop a strong understanding in our students that texts are written by real people for a range of different purposes, and that some are more successful than others in achieving this purpose. An interesting exercise with secondary level students is to compare two reports of the same news item from different sources and see how reliable they are. What sources have been used? What has been picked out as the key point? What verbs have been used and to what effect? Which one concords most with their own perceptions of the situation? Obviously, this sort of activity is not only more motivating, but also leads to a much better appreciation of text, its participants, and its purposes than the traditional assignment of summarizing the article. Using Peer-Scaffolding

Although teacher support is essential in scaffolding, it is also essential to unleash students from the teacher-fronted classroom setting. Peer-scaffolding is a step toward independent use of the four reader-roles. Working in collaboration with peers on reading tasks can expand students’ use of these roles, helping them to become more effective decoders and users of text, more participatory makers of meaning, and more aware of how authors manipulate text. Small group work exercises include information gap exercises (decoding), comparing texts (text analyzing), comparing notes students have made from texts (meaning-making), or co-constructing a paragraph based on the information in the text. An effective group task teachers can employ is to have students read texts on a given topic first, and then prepare a group presentation by making a visual representation of the topic. It is very enlightening for students to see how differently they all visualize the topic.

Setting the Students Free

Allowing your students to work independently is an essential aspect of social constructivist theory. Setting tasks which allow students to read in areas which interest them and for purposes which are important to them is the best motivator. However, freedom without support is a recipe for disaster. Once again, scaffolding before and during individual or small group tasks is essential.

Using the Internet

Internet comes in very useful both as a source of reading material and as a publishing tool which reaches out to a wider audience. For example, having the class set up a web resource for other students in the school or beyond can be a great motivator. Web quests can be an end in itself, but are better embedded into a more substantial language task. Some possible tasks involving a reading component are:

1 Produce a web-based magazine for the school

2 Plan an excursion for your class, and act as tour guide (Making use of the internet resources)

3 Write an article for a tourist magazine and submit it for publication in the classroom blog

4 Write a script for a play or movie and produce it for the school (publishing them in blog/website etc)

5 Make a documentary/CD Rom on a subject you are passionate about and get it uploaded to U-tube.

6 Prepare a mini-conference (including poster presentations, individual and group presentations)

7 Conduct an advertising campaign

8 Compile an anthology

Conclusion

In conclusion, the social constructivist approach and critical pedagogy to reading offers tools and principles for ESL teachers to draw students into energetic participation in text events, entering into active dialogue with texts and their authors, not as outsiders, but as active participants. In many ways this approach may challenge the traditional beliefs of ESL teachers.

References
Apple, M. W. (2000). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Barnett, M.A. (1989). More than meets the eye: Foreign language reading theory and Practice. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: CAL & Prentice Hall.
Bernhardt, E.B. (1991). Reading development in a second language. Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Giroux, H. (1997). Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory, culture, and schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Kincheloe, Joe L. (2008). Critical Pedagogy. 2nd Ed. New York: Peter Lang.
Smith, F. (1986). Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning Read. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Vygotsky, Lev (1926) Educational Psychology
Vygotsky, Lev(1934) Thinking and Speech
Vygotsky,Lev (1934) The Problem of Consciousness
Vygotsky,Lev (1934) The Problem of Age
National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005
Kerala Curriculum Framework (KCF) 2007