Respecting students’ cultural literacies
Educational Leadership, Vol. 61(2) 80-82, October 2003. Teaching All Students.
Recognizing students’ out-of-school literacies helps create inclusive environments and meaningful educational experiences.
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Reading to fly: Access to reading across diversity
Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice, Vol. 23(1): 46-50, Spring 2010.
When we focus on responses to reading rather than to the act of reading, it doesn’t matter if the student has read every page or if she liked the book, if the she is rereading a book or what ‘level’ the book is on, whether only the action parts were read or only the dialogue. Independent reading is ultimately about some form of thoughtful engagement with a text and the personal treasures (learning) we pick up during reading. Responses to texts in any format are learning outcomes that reflect these treasures and can be viewed from an inclusive perspective using an abilities approach across the diversity of students: we can assess what each student was able to learn and/or take away from the text. Every student responding to the text achieves success, and when students associate reading with a positive, pleasant, interesting experience, reading comes closer to the heart.
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Raising voices through the arts: Creating spaces for writing for marginalized groups of women.
With Limor Pinhasi-Vittorio, Ph.D.
Perspectives – New York Journal of Adult Learning, Vol. 7(1), 2-15, 2008-2009.
This article is focuses on the use of various art forms to prompt written expression as segue to liberating voices of adult women learners who are marginalized in society. The goal is to demonstrate the development of personal voice and written expression as it progresses over time and experience.
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Portraits and possibilities: Empowerment through literacy.
In Dr. M. Miller & Dr. K. P. King (eds.) Empowering women in literacy: Views from experience. Information Age Publishing, 2009.
Raising student voices begins with letting them take authority of their own life stories: becoming aware of the powers they have to define their own reality and tell their lives, valuing themselves and their experiences, dreaming and expecting better. One of the ways we work together toward these goals is through self-portraiture: different ways by which our class participants present and represent themselves and their experiences in writing and in art.
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Literacy and Power: The Shiyour as a site of subordination and empowerment for orthodox Jewish women
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 27(1), Spring 2011, pp. 53-74.
Once a week, late at night, a group of otherwise very busy Jewish women of the orthodox Jewish Chabad community, leave their children, husbands and homes to attend a shiyour- a religious lesson given by and to adult women. Within a situation of restricted access to literacy, the teachers use specific texts and language to reproduce cultural knowledge regarding group and personal identity. Deconstructing the shiyour will demonstrate the function of these literacy events in reiterating group borders and creating social and temporal networks, while covertly serving to uphold the traditional gender hierarchies that allow only males of the community access to public power and formal status positions. The women, however, manage to turn around this literacy practice into an empowering and equalizing experience
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