Charlin Bailey, Raquel Coy, and Margarita Kravchenko
ENGL C0856 Adult Learners of Language & Literacy
Professor Barbara Gleason
May 13, 2014
Book
Club Presentation on Lives on the
Boundary
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and
Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin
Books, 1989. Print.
Overview
For our
book club, we read Lives on the Boundary:
A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally
Underprepared by Mike Rose. In this book, Rose uses the genre of memoir to
present his argument about the education system and its failure to fully
realize the potential of marginalized groups of students. He maintains that
students are ill-equipped to succeed in the current education system because of
rigid sorting of students by socio-economic status and perceived capability,
and increasing emphasis place on standardization. By presenting his own
personal experience in the American education system as both a student and an
educator, he manages to uniquely illustrate the problems in the education
system in ways that humanize the students he discusses. In another, typical
academic book, this population of student would otherwise be rendered as statistics
and generalizations. Rose uses narrative to vividly paint the faces and lives
of the marginalized. This almost novel-like experience makes the theories and
arguments he presents extremely accessible to a broad audience. Although his
primary audience may be fellow educators and policy makers, his chosen medium
lends itself to a general audience of anyone interested in the problems in our
education system and possible solutions of fixing it.
Mike
Rose’s Life and Sponsors of Literacy
Mike Rose comes from a working-class family of Italian immigrants. Raised in a neighborhood in South L.A., Rose has experienced first-hand what it feels to be a part of the educational underclass. He was a part of that underclass for a long time but thanks to several teachers who, as he claims, gave him “the best sort of liberal education” (58), he was able to overcome his limitations. Those teachers could be considered his sponsors of literacy; they taught him the critical skills necessary to become a successful student. They also taught him, probably unknowingly, that education has to have a human face, which is something that the educational system lacks. Throughout the book, Rose makes several claims about educational system, such as:
1) students who do not do well in their classes tend to
blame themselves and “attribute their difficulties to something inborn,
organic” (31);
2) students need support and guidance at many points during
their college studies;
3) there exists a “rigid intellectual class system” (198) where
professors are interested more in doing research and publishing the results of
it than in actually teaching, and the students, especially underprivileged, are
struggling to keep up.
Freire’s
Theory of Literacy Education Made Human
While Rose’s
describes examples of sponsors of literacy, the influence of Paulo Freire’s
theory of literacy education in his work is also unmistakable. The way Rose
describes the education system in America is reminiscent of Freire’s banking
concept of education. Although he never uses the term “banking system” (and
instead uses the term “canonical approach to education” (237), Rose describes
our education system in a very Freirian manner and uses similar methods to
attempt to help his students. Here are two examples.
1.
In Rose’s discussion of a fellow vocational
education classmate, Ken Harvey, and his insistence that he just wanted to be
average, Rose writes, “If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational track,
the options you’ll have to deal with this will be constrained in certain ways:
You’re defined by your school as “slow”; you’re place in a curriculum that
isn’t designed to liberate you but to occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train
you, though the training is for work the society does not esteem” (Rose 28).
The product of this conditioning is what Freire refers to as the banking
system’s reinforcement of “men's fatalistic perception of their situation”
(Freire 85).
2.
While Rose was participating in the Teacher
Corps, Rose and his colleagues used a method very similar to Freire’s
problem-posing method. While teaching the English to Spanish-speakng adults,
Rose and his fellow interns would “ask [the students] what current problems
they were having in their communities or on their jobs and try to structure the
conversation accordingly” (Rose 130).
Possible
Solutions
Mike Rose argues
that education needs to be open to all, encouraging different contributions
from all individuals. Rose questions the traditional approach to education
because its nature to exclude students. Rose believes that the current
education system should be blamed for students being unable to function in the
higher education. Rose suggests that much of the conflict that exists between educational
institutes and society is due to a lack of inclusion of diversity in the education
system. For example, in the chapter “Reclaiming the Classroom,” he looks at the
struggles of veteran students trying to excel within the remedial classroom. In
this chapter he looks at the content and curriculum of the class as being one
of the key reasons as to why the students were not excelling. Rose viewed the
process of teaching the students through the traditional way of grammar drills
to be outdated and ineffective for producing critical literacy. He realized
that even though the structures were important, concentrating on the mechanics
of grammar would defer the students from accomplishing the dreams of why they
were in the program: the dream of becoming equal. In his book he suggests that
one of the main ways of addressing this issue of underprepared students is for
institutions and instructors to “think critically about the crucial transition
into college, what it is that students need to meet the intellectual demands the
freshman year makes of them” (165). He further suggests that along with
additional support, students need to be exposed to different types of writing
and reading early in their education. They need to cultivate skills beyond
summarization and memorization and be introduced to critical literacy. Rose suggests that students need to think
critically and gain confidence in themselves, while immerging them in reading
and writing. To educators, Rose recommends remaining constantly vigilant about
the ways in which we see class and culture and how our beliefs may restrict our
point of views.
Some
Questions for Discussion
o
What are some solutions for fixing the banking
system?
o
How can we balance the need for statistical
assessment with humanistic approach to education?
o
What did you think about the writing style/tone?
Additional
Videos
Mike Rose Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=240AJCoUOrA
Ken Robinson’s Discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zDZFcDGpL4U
