Dr. Ernest Morrell: Education, Empowered.

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0:00:09.7 Audrey Scott: Welcome to this modern education podcast that explores learning from the everyday exchange of thoughts and ideas, to the theories and practices behind entire systems. You think education is cool? So do we. So we pair two conversations. Learn about our guests, then learn from our guests. Share your takeaways and come back for more. You're listening to Think-Pair-Share with me, Audrey Scott.

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0:00:43.0 AS: Today, we'll be talking about literacy. My guest believes it's essential to our being, that it's what ties us to history, to community, to culture, and allows us to engage. That's very high praise and a pretty tall order. So I'm excited to jump right in. But first, allow me to introduce, Ernest Morrell. He's the Coyle Professor of Literacy Education, a member of the faculty in the English and Africana Studies Department, and Director of the Centre for Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame. Since 2015, Dr. Morrell, a well-respected leader in the field of English Education, the African Diaspora, and Media and Popular Culture, has been ranked among the top university-based education scholars. In an introduction to his biography, he says, "Words are power and freedom. Words are life and love. Words are seeds and the vista. Words, at least revolutionary ones, are the source of revolutions. I live for words. Writing is my service. My very words are love." We're so happy to have him with us today. Ernest, thanks for being here.

 

0:01:53.1 Ernest Morrell: Thanks, Audrey. It's a pleasure.

 

0:01:54.8 AS: Great to see you after all these months during the pandemic. How have you been keeping busy? I know you've got the kids there at the house. What kind of fun stuff have you been doing? 

 

0:02:03.2 EM: Well, we try to make it kind of a winter wonderland. We built an art studio over the summer, and so the kids have been painting on canvas. They've been learning music and recording music. They've been writing. My youngest son has been coding. And then also we just decided we were going to enjoy the winter and got snowboards, and we've been, you know, just trying to mix it up a little bit, and that's been fun.

 

0:02:28.9 AS: My gosh, it sounds like a winter wonderland.

 

0:02:31.2 EM: Yeah, it does. You gotta celebrate it, right? It's gonna be three months of the year. You gotta do something with it. So we got a lot of snow. Snowboarding works.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:02:37.9 AS: I think we're getting some more as we speak, actually too.

 

0:02:39.8 EM: Yeah.

 

0:02:41.1 AS: Thank you for joining me via Zoom, and we'll start with those sort of ice breakers. Some are quick answers, some are maybe not, some are I'm sure goofy, but I appreciate your participation. I think we'll start with a softball one. Are you a morning person or a night person? 

 

0:02:55.7 EM: We're night people. So when we went... We went into a very dark place when it was like no school. We were up to three in the morning, and then up at noon, I figured like 6:30-7 is mid-day in my normal biorhythm, so you get the same amount of sleep. But there's just something about it, I think, because we're creative types, and writing and reading and that kind of stuff. So 10 AM is morning enough.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:03:20.8 AS: I hear you. That sounds great to me. Hey, you gotta take the perks of this type of situation, so that's one of them. Okay, if you could only watch one genre of movies for the rest of your life, what would it be? 

 

0:03:32.8 EM: That's a hard one. I'm a... Like a... If there's a ball, I watch it. But in terms of movies, probably like histories, I really do like kinda well-made period dramas, particularly the Renaissance and the early modern... It just seems like such a, I don't know, sophisticated time, you know, compared to now. I really love the costumes of opera. It's just... There's just something about it.

 

0:04:00.0 AS: You're halfway there, I think, with the bowtie, so that was it.

 

0:04:01.9 EM: Yeah, see, that's what [0:04:03.1] ____.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:04:03.9 AS: I love it, I love it. Okay, great. This one might be a little silly, but what fictional family would you wanna be a part of? 

 

0:04:10.9 EM: Like TV or a novel? 

 

0:04:13.9 AS: Yeah, anything.

 

0:04:17.5 EM: Oh I think it'll be fun to be a Medici. They're not fictional so much, but yeah, you know.

 

0:04:23.6 AS: Hey, that's okay.

 

0:04:24.4 EM: Minus the head choppings and all that, yeah.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:04:27.1 AS: You get to pick or choose a little bit.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:04:27.9 EM: Run a bank, live in Milan, have Michaelangelo and Raphael painting for you in the garage.

 

0:04:34.6 AS: I love it. Can we come summer with you, please? 

 

[laughter]

 

0:04:36.1 EM: Exactly.

 

0:04:37.4 AS: Okay, great. What's the strangest compliment you've ever gotten? 

 

0:04:43.9 EM: Probably the version of, "I thought this was gonna suck, but then it was pretty good." Whether it's a student at the end of class or a keynote like, "I wasn't looking forward to this at all, but you made it. You didn't suck."

 

0:04:56.0 AS: You didn't suck. That's good. What's the best piece of advice you ever received? 

 

0:05:02.3 EM: I think, my father passed away a couple of years ago, so every day I play back something that he said. What doesn't take you out makes you stronger. Family is everything. Your faith roots are deep. Trust God. Love is the greatest strength that you have. Emotions are good to have but not to be ruled by. It's just some of the things that he says, if you let someone control your emotions then you become their puppet, but just a lot of maximums from my dad that just kind of pop into my head. Really, it's about family, faith, fidelity, kinda like God, country, and Notre Dame; those values are everlasting. I feel like my dad had eternal values. So it's just the constellation of those are kind of a... I don't know. It's my greatest hits. There's the gospel, there's my mom, dad, my grandma.

 

0:05:52.8 AS: Oh gosh, thank you for sharing that, actually. He sounds very wise.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:05:56.0 EM: Yeah.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:05:57.9 AS: I know that you've lived a bunch of other places and now you're living in South Bend. Can you tell me, for instance, something that you miss about New York and something that you like about here? 

 

0:06:07.1 EM: Everything is close. I feel like South Bend is enough city, enough town, that... Just see what Notre Dame, the river, and the downtown, and it's... Everything's really close. So you can experience the city, you can go to a football game, you can go to a show, and the campus is wonderful, and then I feel like we're undersold on how much of a... Kind of a playground that is in the spring and the summer, and it's just kind of outdoors, and there's Michigan right there. I guess with New York, there is kind of a frenzy to it.

 

0:06:38.0 EM: There's just a lot of stuff to do, but I also feel like with DPAC and with a lot of things we have, we get that, but you kinda get spoiled in New York, the kind of access that you have to kind of, I guess what we call high culture, there's a tremendous diversity, the urgency of it sometimes. One of my mentors, when I got there, he says, you don't have to be good in New York, but you have to be fast. Somebody's getting on the subway, getting that seat at the restaurant, that sort of thing, and just kind of people watching. We get off the subway at 72nd and walk up to 110th and Broadway. It's about a 40-minute walk, but if you have the time for work, it's just unbelievable, and it's just the spectacle of the city, the Skyline when you're coming across to George Washington or the Throgs Neck. Whether you're coming from the east or west, it's pretty spectacular.

 

0:07:30.9 AS: Yeah. I actually worked out in New York right after I graduated from Notre Dame, so I do really enjoy visiting and getting back out there sometimes. But you're right, but there's positives about both places, so that's great.

 

0:07:43.6 EM: I think college towns are actually the best combination, because you have a lot of big city stuff, but it's in a small town. I've really learned to love the college towns where I've lived. They're special places in America.

 

0:07:55.8 AS: I agree, 100%. Thank you. Do you have a favourite childhood book? And, why? 

 

0:08:00.5 EM: There's 'The Little Engine That Could,' and there's some Dr. Seuss, like 'Fox in Socks.' And I think what it is, is it's the memories you associate with the book, 'cause your mom read it to you over and over again, and all the talk about the fire engine books and that sort of thing, it's like, "Oh yeah, you just made me read them over and over again." My grandma and one aunt lived on the same block, there were three of us on the same block, so I think that it's more of the memories, the associations that you make with the books than the books themselves, and the research brings that out that, kids don't necessarily remember the books, but they remember the experiences that they have around them.

 

0:08:35.6 EM: And so they're fun. We used to do Dr. Seuss, and we tried to make raps out of Dr. Seuss and do beats off of them and that sort of thing, but I think it was just fun 'cause you can memorise the words and they were pretty easy and they were silly, it wasn't much to the stories. But I was with Kwame Alexander, we were on a panel and we both chose 'Fox in Socks.' I remember before, I was like, "No way." And I guess it's 'cause it's a little bit... A little bit hip hop, it's a little fun and so of course, I had to give my spiel and then listen to Kwame Alexander just rap the whole book to the audience and I was like oh okay and it's a new book.

 

0:09:11.4 AS: I think that you would agree that every person has a story worth telling. Can you tell me a little bit about yours? 

 

0:09:16.7 EM: So I grew up in the Bay area. My mom, and dad were school teachers, and we were just kind of making our way in the world as they were a first generation to really move from a pretty southern working class aesthetic into being professional, so that was kind of fun to watch them. And I spent most of my formative years in San Jose, growing up playing sports, watching them do what they did, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go to college on scholarship, and I was gonna major in business and law. And that's what you do. And the more I got into that world, the more I really began to understand the logic and beauty of what my parents did.

 

0:09:53.4 EM: So subsequent to graduation, I actually ended up teaching in the Bay Area and doing a bunch of wild things in my classroom, got us on the front page in New York Times, got us almost fired, but it was really just ways of getting kids super excited about school and learning and some of the things that I do now and I get paid for them, they wanted to fire me. But what it led me to understand was, like, the limitless potential of kids, but also the importance of really doing academic research and trying to document how some of the beliefs about kids and learning were wrong.

 

0:10:25.0 EM: So I ended up going back to graduate school at Berkeley while I continued to teach in Oakland, and when I finished my coursework, my wife and I moved down to Los Angeles and I started UCLA and created this program for kids, and that kind of took off and I got my PhD, and then I've just been on the academic track and working with kids in communities for the past 20 years, 28 years an educator, my 22nd year really full-time in higher education. So that's taken us to Michigan, to UCLA, to Columbia, and ultimately here to Notre Dame.

 

0:10:55.0 EM: So I was reading back this weekend over papers that I've written over the last 20, 25 years, and it's still the same story for me. It's still... It doesn't get old, what literacy can do, why it's important, the potential of kids, the power of them interacting with stories, the beauty of being able to hear their own voice to contribute to the conversation, like what Walt Whitman says, the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. And it's really just putting them on stage and letting them go. It's been a beautiful ride, I've been just really blessed.

 

0:11:25.6 AS: Well, we are blessed to have you, and I'm not letting you off quite that easy though. I'd like to go back to where you almost got fired etc for just a quick second, because I think it matters why you were passionate about it. When you were growing up, you said maybe you would be a businessman, maybe a lawyer, and somehow you shifted to education, and obviously your parents were in that role, but can you pinpoint when it started to become a passion of yours? 

 

0:11:47.6 EM: So as a college athlete, I was involved in a couple of programs where we got to work with young kids. It was like a thing you did in college and it was pretty much... I was interning for Bank of America, and I was thinking of JD MBA and 44 Office and APG in the new building in San Francisco, overlooking the bridges, and where my bosses were, it sounded pretty cool, but it was... I knew I wanted to write, and I became really passionate about that. I became an English major in my junior year, I kinda switched from economics to English and no one at the bank had a problem with that.

 

0:12:19.2 EM: They said it doesn't matter what you major in really, you kinda learn to be a banker here, but I went from a hobby to a real passion, and it wasn't... I had a good time with the bank, but it was just making that decision of what... Later on I heard someone say, "No one wants to spend their life doing their second favorite thing," and my favorite thing was writing and really trying to figure out how I might help people along this trajectory. As I said, in my life from the plantation to the palace, how do we get there? And that became more valuable for me than how do I get there? But how do we get there? 

 

0:12:56.0 AS: Yeah.

 

0:12:57.4 EM: And it wasn't... There were moments where... And I'd look over 'cause where I taught in Oakland, you could see the skyline of San Francisco. And facing what I was gonna face, I thought, "Is this the right decision? I could get back on that train and I could walk into the bank and they would hire me right away." So it was hard. But in retrospect, I have no regrets. It was really just... It was providence. Father Tumis, he talked about providence. It was providential. It wasn't so much a plan, but I just couldn't send the applications into the law school.

 

0:13:29.4 EM: And I didn't know what I was going to do and my mom said, "Well, you should come home and teach." And then I said, "Well, I'm gonna teach and then go to law school," and then, "Well, I'm gonna teach for another year," and then, "Well, I'll go to graduate school and get a degree in English," and then, "Well, maybe I'll do English and education." So it's just a series of steps that happened pretty quickly between, say, 21 and 25. By the time I was 25, I was pretty much on this track, but I can't go back and really pinpoint moments, it was just... I was called and I was just lucky enough to listen and to be surrounded by people in the bank and outside of the bank that really supported those decisions.

 

0:14:06.9 AS: As an educator, what did you see potential... Your mind went places that maybe other people's didn't. Were you driven by something else? Were you trying to teach them something? 

 

0:14:19.7 EM: I think, Audrey, we've come in the field to think about learning, where we first primarily thought about teaching. And I wasn't so interested in my teaching as I was in their learning. And I can remember a kid, the very first day that I taught in Oakland and I was going on about my syllabus, he raised his hand, he said, "Are we gonna do anything fun in here this year?" And he was joking. We got along fine, but it was... I guess what I wanted to do was to get them excited. And I was more addicted to their excitement than I was to anything I wanted to do. So I had British lit. And we started out with Beowulf. And Beowulf reminded me a lot of hip-hop. He's always bragging. They're in a meet hall and they're just like, "What songs are you listening to that remind you of Beowulf?"

 

0:15:06.9 EM: And they started bringing in really good songs and they got super excited about it. And we were talking about violence and the glorification of violence and a little bit of misogyny and just the... And some of the... Maybe the underbelly of the Saxon culture, but then the... The spectacle of it. And then I just had to kind of keep topping each unit. And they're like, "Listen to the Goodie Mob, and listen to this and that." And then we went into... Canterbury tales was the second unit. And I got this idea to have a court trial, and put Chaucer on trial for his portrayal of the pilgrims. And then I just kept rolling, Sir Gawain, and then like what are we gonna do for Hamlet? So that first year, we just had to throw away everything because they were... They had increasing demands, 'cause each unit was getting more and more fun.

 

0:15:49.2 EM: And so the part about the fire was really the combination of a poetry unit that included rap music, and that was just seen as a non-starter, teaching film and doing film study in the classroom. We did Godfather and The Odyssey, and then social action projects where kids had to come up with a project about changing the world. And some of that was things that they saw in their community, and some of it was things they saw on the school. It wasn't that, though. I mean, my administration was super supportive. It was making the newspaper.

 

0:16:16.2 EM: So it was fraught for being like 25, 26 and saying, "We're just trying to get kids excited," I don't really consider myself kind of a rabble-rouser. I always considered myself as a kid who takes out the trash for the neighbors. How did I get myself into this?" I asked myself that a lot, but it was really just the... How do you get them excited? I think I still ask that question a lot in the books and the articles and the talks. How do you get them to lean in? There's nothing like it, when they're all leaned in and they're totally invested and they're trying to talk over each other and their hands are up. And I'm willing to sacrifice almost any idea I have to get them to that point. You become addicted to it, you don't... You can't hear the crickets in the classroom anymore after that. So that's been just... Now, you have to add a bunch of theory and research on to that and why it's important and do that thing, but it was more instinctual at 22, 23.

 

0:17:16.4 AS: My hats off to every single teacher. And I think that's interesting that you said you used to be focused on teaching, and now it's focused on learning. Is that across the board, do you feel like? 'Cause I do feel like that's changed quite a bit.

 

0:17:29.0 EM: It's a more popular idea. I wouldn't say it's mainstream, it's average. But we're able to ask more questions now about how kids learn. We're able to talk about terms of disengagement, which I don't know that we would have worded it quite that way. My first year teaching was 1993. We have a lot more language to talk about, how kids are learning outside of school, and then they come to us as learners. What are the barriers to motivation? A lack of confidence and a lack of agency. Really, if there's something I can do and something that I like, I'm gonna be more motivated.

 

0:18:04.6 EM: So we're certainly injecting the language of learning in a lot more, even when we're talking about teaching. But how do you know kids are learning? It's not just what you get on a formative assessment or a summative assessment is what you see in them. So I feel like we've come a long way. I mean, the world of education has changed tremendously in the past 30 years. And regardless of the kind of contemporary rhetoric it's been, it's a pretty unilateral set of progress. And part of that, I think is really just unlocking this unlimited potential inside of them and just seeing what's possible for kids. The number of kids were able to go on and have two-year and four-year college experiences as opposed to what it would have been in the '80s, is just... It's really just remarkable.

 

0:18:48.0 AS: It's exciting to me, and I almost wanna be a student again, to a certain extent. Was there ever a time where you could talk to those students who had been so inspired by maybe the unorthodox way you were doing some things to see what the difference was for them? Were you ever able to sort of have any assessment of that? 

 

0:19:04.6 EM: Yeah. It's how I taught from the beginning. Obviously, I had my own educational experiences. And I kinda do what my colleagues were doing. I've actually been in continuous touch with almost all the students I've taught to this day. So I still follow them, and we... Social media facilitates that. I think the conversations were really about like how the world sees them more than the pedagogy itself, it's more of the outcomes of it, and how they really wanted to continue that, a lot of them are teachers now, a lot of them got involved in local community kinds of things, they do everything. Just one of my basketball players. She just got elected to public office in this last election.

 

0:19:48.4 AS: Wow, nice.

 

0:19:49.0 EM: So the conversation is really with their lives, but there were moments when I told them I was gonna go back to graduate school and they started to kinda freak out, you're gonna leave. I was like, "No, I'm gonna stay here but what I really want is for everyone in America to be able to have what we have in this class," and they were like, "Yes." And so there were those moments like, well, these are the things that we think are really important. And so I would say, if you could speak to America's teachers, what would you say? Just know we want to learn. Know our passion, you know the whole sociology of youth was around deviance. Our expectations have been historically low for this group of people in terms of what their values are and what their investment is in their own futures, and so it's really... Look at the kids, let's see them as strengths, let's see them as additives to society, and see them as genius, there's a... I think the most widely read book this summer that came out, the new one, Gholdy Muhammad's 'Cultivating Genius.'

 

0:20:41.9 AS: Yeah.

 

0:20:42.8 EM: The part of the cultivation is recognising the genius, that's there. So I do think that was a really important part of the relationship with them, I was close to them in age, I was in my early 20s, they were in their late teens, so we weren't so far apart, and they knew I'd grown up part of my childhood in the city, my mom taught in the city, so we shared that and we shared this bewilderment that people saw us so differently than we saw ourselves, and some of that has come to a head very recently that it's kind of shocking 'cause you just see yourself as normal like everyone else, and not everyone sees you that way, and so there's a real problem. And they'd... They were so aware of it because the community was insular, but the more they... Kind of we looked at larger media and there's a referendum on us out there, and it's just not accurate, and so I think part of the conversations that they wanted to have about education was about being loved, and being seen as lovable and being regarded as good people, like the people who taught them, saw themselves.

 

0:21:50.9 AS: I can see why they've responded to you. I would like to give our audience some kind of a common framework to talk about literacy, if you had to give the simplest definition of what literacy is, what would you say? 

 

0:22:02.9 EM: So, the short one would be the power to read the word in the world, so that you might become authors of the word and the future of the world, there's five really small components of how you put that together. Since we're talking about education, I think about children and young adults, but that they can understand the text that they read, and I think about that in three ways, if they can decode them... To be a reader of the word, you have to be able to decode to understand the words on the page, but just how to comprehend, and you have to be able to ask meaningful questions about those texts. And the second would be how you learn to read the world you live in, how do you make sense of the news, how do you make sense of why some people live one way and other people live another way, and it's the same thing, you wanna be able to decode that environment and the words that we read in text whether it's newspapers or children's books, help us to read the world.

 

0:22:58.4 EM: So that's the third part, you become a reader of the word and the world, but then I think we've moved more to not just reading, but what do you do with that, how do kids and young adults develop unique identities in relation to that world around them, and how do they find their own voices, whether it's a speaking voice or whether it's a voice, in the digital literacies or their writing voice, how can they share their own stories as actualised beings and world changers, so it really kind of moves from this understanding the text and understanding the world and understanding my place in that world and then being able to make things, to do things, to write things, and so you can see literacy is kind of essential to our being, and it's what ties us to histories, what ties us to community and culture, it's what allows us to engage, I think of people like Thomas Jefferson or Socrates or Jesus, who've talked about the word and how important that is to our own understanding of ourselves, because Harriet Jacobs talks about in the slave narratives, to contemplate freedom, to read yourself as someone who deserves freedom, while you are enslaved to create a cognitive dissonance, and that's partly bolstered by her journey to literacy during her time as a slave. I think that we really want these kind of three moves; the reading, the kind of self-awareness and the social action.

 

0:24:30.2 AS: One of the things that resonated to me in that bio you just sent was words as seeds. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that? 

 

0:24:37.8 EM: Words help to bring ideas into being. Again, with the slave narratives, Harry Louis Gates, who is a professor at Harvard, talked about, we speak and write ourselves in the being, and I think of Robert Kennedy's eulogy of his brother Jack, and he says he just saw things that didn't exist and he wondered why not... So the words can be seeds, so you talk to a five-year-old about becoming a poet one day, and then she becomes Amanda Gormant. The words are a seed, you just say, you're a poet, you're a genius, you're beautiful, you're gonna change the world. And then they become ideas, 11 John, the word became flesh. Right, and it's like the idea is like the seed can become flesh, it's just this little thing you plant in the ground, it comes up as a pumpkin, as a carrot, as something that you can dig into, but at first it's a seed, it's invisible. Nobody can see it. And so the words are seeds, but sometimes they're not pumpkins or carrots, they come up as more like poison roots. You are no good. You don't belong. You are second class. You are ugly. You are poor. Your beliefs are wrong, so...

 

0:25:44.4 EM: We... They're not innocuous and literacy is not just kind of a positive trajectory, if the stories that you're getting access to are poison or dangerous or harmful to you, so we want to plant seeds that are nutritious, that are sustaining, but words can do both. That's why literacy is so important. You have to be careful, you have to navigate a world that runs counter to a lot of the beliefs that we hold dear. And kids must do that as well. But when I say words are seeds in the bio, I'm talking about in the positive sense, how do you uplift, how can... I think I say in that same paragraph, my very words are love, they're me. I think that words can be love. And you wanna plant those seeds of love inside of our youth and let them know that they are loved, they are lovable and they are capable of love. And we can do that partly through the language that we use to communicate with them.

 

0:26:44.7 AS: How do you think is the best way to help these children and young people find their own voices? Where do you begin? 

 

0:26:51.8 EM: I think you begin with story. So, kids are natural storytellers, but they are first, story experiences. And we tell them stories, you say you tell stories through documentaries. We also tell stories around the dinner table, or on a road trip, and just exposing young kids to more indigenous stories of who we are and how we came to be who we are. Reading to children. And so they understand that the world is full of story, it's a big place. You come into the world able to listen and understand before you're able to speak, and that's for a reason because there's a lot to learn. But I do think as early on as possible, kids become storytellers, and there's this kind of multi-directionality of story, and the more you're able to tell a story, the more you become voracious with the stories of others. It never stops. There's not a point where, "Okay, I've heard enough story, I'm gonna go write some myself now." But it's a recursive, and we constantly want to continue to give kids access to more and more story and the skill set to be able to share their own story.

 

0:27:58.6 EM: And I think that's where education comes in, whether it's formal or informal, like setting up an art studio or the... Having a keyboard or piano, you can tell a story through the piano, but you have to learn the notes and so education is really important. How do you construct story, you think about the language of film in montage and long cuts, and just the realism of Italian cinema versus kind of like a Quentin Tarantino film, they can't be more different, but there's technique. It requires an education. How do we support that if we are educators.

 

0:28:31.8 EM: Sometimes what's absent is the space between hearing stories and really creating a learning context, how kids can do this powerfully. 'Cause you run the risk of moving from a didactic pedagogy to just a laissez-faire where you say, have at it, and that's not effective. I can remember, we brought in, when I was in LA filmmakers, 'cause kids we're doing documentary film, and there was this filmmaker, he was a cool avant-garde kind of guy, and he first taught me how to pack and unpack the film... He's like, hold on before you hold my camera, and he was like, he was in it, "You just, you can't come grab the camera," and he talked about how close you have to be in documentary and how to frame a picture, and then they were able to tell stories, some of them became really good documentarians, but he was hard on them, he's like, "Ah, you're so far away. That's like two dots back there, you gotta get up, you gotta know what they had for breakfast with the camera," and those sorts of things.

 

0:29:26.2 AS: Yeah.

 

0:29:26.6 EM: I think it's the same in other genres as well, it's just being awash in story though, and understanding that the story is really how we constitute ourselves as members of cultures and communities. It's like if you played a sport or you had a certain kind of art form that you followed. You can't see it enough, you need to see them, but you need your own blank canvases, and you need people who can help you be you. And I think that's the dilemma in education, because it's like either I'm hands off or I'm just like, I got a cookie cutter model. But how do I help you be you, is something that kinda keeps me up at night. How do I help them along this road, but kinda disturb them a little bit when they're too comfortable? But at the same time, how do I get out of the way? But how do I lead the way? 

 

0:30:11.1 EM: And I think that's part of the beauty of pedagogy because it's... 'Cause you're supposed to be active, but it's a gradual release model, because one day they're gonna become you, they're gonna become the people who are in control, and we want access, but we also want the skill set and the sensibilities, and we have that role as parents, grandparents, neighbours, parishioners, teachers, principals. The skill sets and the values are really important to transmit.

 

0:30:43.2 AS: How do you instill a joy of reading, a joy of learning, a joy of valuing oneself? 

 

0:30:52.0 EM: So, part of it is the relationships that you're building, and they have to be filled with story, so I think we've come past the moment where we took our most vulnerable kids and held story from them, and they just had worksheets, and it was not the story, it was complete this sentence or what word is missing, and that sort of thing, and so it's gotta be authentic. It would be being in playing scales and never getting to play a song until... I think that we've of solved that problem. We read aloud and all that stuff is back, but I think there are other elements to your question that are important, and you do want to go from the whole to the parts, and so part of decoding is not just reading the words on the page, but understanding genre, understanding form, understanding structure and technique. And you're getting it as you're reading these whole stories, and so the comprehension and the questions that you ask really do become about, how did the author put this together? 

 

0:31:46.0 EM: So Jody and I have this three-part model of reading, you're reading behind the text, you're trying to understand who the author is and where they came from, but how they're trying to communicate. You read within the text and what's their style? What's their prose? What's their diction? And so kids are asking those sorts of questions, and then they get out in front of the text and they think about what they might do, how they might improve, how they might write their own text, so you're dealing with these whole stories. I can think of my dad pacing behind the chair, coaching the TV during the football game, and we're watching the football game. He's like, "How could you run on third and eight? You gotta pass!" So, you're breaking it down and you're watching it, you kinda see the pattern of the game, but you understand you don't normally run the ball when it's third and eight. And so literacy is really about pulling the car apart.

 

0:32:32.0 EM: You know and like seeing what the carburetor does and what the battery does, and so there's these techniques and these skill sets, and then there's this beautiful language that Toni Morrison talks about. There's the vocabulary, but it doesn't make any sense unless you see the car run or you hear the song, or you watch the game or you see the story. Right. And, so we kind of deconstruct those and then they can reconstruct them in ways that makes sense for them, and that's that deconstruction and reconstruction. It's really a work of literacy education from elementary on up through graduate school. We're doing that at different versions for different age groups.

 

0:33:04.4 AS: Okay, I know we just came off of World Read Aloud Day, and I know how important it is to have stories read to you and to be part of that, but is there a joy of reading that got lost somewhere along the line, and is it a newer focus these days? 

 

0:33:19.2 EM: So that's a really... It's really important. There's a bunch of questions inside of that, I think a part of it is reading versus schooling. And how reading is taken up in school has been a challenge. There's a lot of research that says when students choose what to read, they enjoy it more, and so you take a... What a perfect reading life would be outside of school, like a summer where no one's asking what the lexile level is of that book and you're just at the beach with Judy Blume upstairs in your bedroom, reading, you know the crossover and imagining yourself making up your own lines, or playing basketball. That sort of thing. And so that's still a pretty, I think pristine experience. The joy of reading on your own at your pace, something that you choose and with access to the right books, again, where kids can see themselves, and it's not just kinda see yourself in terms of this person looks like me, but maybe you're a baseball player and there's a bunch of biographies on baseball and you love it, or you like Nancy Drew, the Mysteries or Harry Potter. And you kinda see yourself in Hogwarts whatever, the Defence Against the Dark Arts.

 

0:34:25.9 EM: There's something special about that, or watching the kids go through 'The Chronicles of Narnia' and it's just a genius of literature. So I've had an opportunity in my life to talk to authors about just the joy of it, but then they're also really good books to help kids develop academic skills. And so reading is something that has to be taught in school, so then it becomes more fraught, it's tested, it's regulated, and there's hierarchies, and you might not have seen yourself as a bad reader until you got into school and all of a sudden, you know Cindy's just kinda reading those sentences fluently and I get stuck on every third word. So you develop an identity, then interrupts your reading outside of school. David Pearson's colleague, he's been in this field for almost 50 years, and he talks about reading identity as being the thing, and so when the identity gets disrupted and you say, "I'm a bad reader." You don't wanna be at the beach with Judy Blume. You don't wanna see books, you don't wanna do homework. You just kind of push it away. So there's a real challenge because part of the reading instruction happens in schools has to be a little didactic, and has to be a little bit remediating and has to push you and challenge you, and so does the joy get lost? 

 

0:35:36.5 AS: Yeah.

 

0:35:37.8 EM: It's complex, because you really do need to push kids and challenge them, but you constantly have to be coming back to keeping these identities sacred as readers, and so a lot of work that I do and with colleagues, the work I do with Pam Allen and some of things that Jody and I have come out and see, you can do both, and it can be rigorous and it can be engaging. And I think if you look at game theory or if you just looked at social theories of learning, the challenge isn't necessarily a barrier, kids wanna be challenged, but they wanna know that they can face those challenges. They don't want it to be easy. They just want there to be a pathway through, and so if we continually come back to pressing here but then there are moments where you're just writing a story, like Donald Graves is a writing researcher and in one of his books he's like. "Just let them write." So it's gotta be moments of that where you can play and yes, I'm gonna teach you perspective in an art class but home, I just want you to play with canvas.

 

0:36:34.7 EM: And so we have to balance that, or else, we'll lose the joy. We have to keep it authentic, or else it won't make any sense, but we do need to push children and challenge them to reach their higher selves, and we just need to think about how best to caricature that challenge for them. This is why I think that people have done that the best in this health battle that I've been fighting my football coach, checks him with me every Friday, and we kinda reminisce on what it was like 30 years ago, and he was hard, but he says, "I'm hard because I believe that you are capable of so much more than what you know." And when we do that with kids and there's the pay off, we're going to have... You're gonna write a one-act play. You're gonna present your poems, you're gonna go talk to the mayor, and so they understand that, and then there's more joy in the challenge, but I think that when you lose your joy in the challenge is when your identity becomes disrupted.

 

0:37:30.0 EM: And so we can, as David Pearson would say, "We can keep the identity sacred and we can still challenge," and you need various kinds of reading lives, you need moments in class where there's independent reading where you're reading a book below your lexile for fun and fluency. You need moments where there's a read aloud and you're just kind of curled up collectively in the teacher's lab, and then you need to be kinda hit in the face with the challenge and text and 10 questions that you're struggling with. And all of that needs to happen and you need your own stories, and so it's just gotta be like a studio where all these things are happening, and then I think those moments where you are being stretched make more sense for you. The other part of your question, I've really been thinking about this more and I worry sometimes that the directions that we give to parents or asking to be like teachers, and I want parents to only be doing the joy part. I don't want parents to be the homework helpers necessarily, it's just... If we just read with kids for 15-20 minutes, or created a quiet place for them to read for 15-20 minutes and talk to them about what they were reading and have really good relationships with librarians and teachers about how to choose books for kids and had access to those books that would do much more value than correcting the homework at home.

 

0:38:43.7 EM: And what parents say is, I don't have the skill set of the teacher to be able to guide them through this homework, but I can certainly read stories to them and talk of that story and that's better. I'd like for there to be less of that kind of engagement at home and more in the school, in the home, really just be... How to be a great interlocutor around text and how to have better access to books that I can have in the home, and just some simple guide points for me to be a parent having a dialogue with my kids. Then in school, there are gonna be those places where you're doing language work and you're doing grammar work, and you're expanding your vocabulary, you are increasing your level of comprehension. Hopefully, there's enough of the authentic story that's around that practice, and much of the curriculum I see now is really, you are guided by good stories and good questions as you're developing those skills or not, discreet from the practice of getting into story and making your own story. So, I think we're moving in the right direction Audrey. If there's one quip I have, it's I think we're not using parents in the right way, and we need to bring that work back in the school and have the work at home be much more joyful and authentic for kids and parents.

 

0:39:54.2 AS: I think many parents are now breathing a sigh of relief.

 

0:39:56.8 EM: Yes.

 

0:40:00.5 AS: We're speaking about this sort of being a unique moment in time. Why is this an important conversation to be having right now? Is there an equity and justice element that you believe is critical in literacy right now? 

 

0:40:11.0 EM: I do, I do think that it is a unique moment in time for us. Even outside of this moment that I have often said that literacy is a civil rights issue of our time. And I think about it in a couple of ways. One question that I ask is, "What can education do or what kind of education do people need to live faith filled lives of decency and dignity in the 21st century?" A lot of the problems we have in terms of inequity, in terms of life outcomes, have their origin in inequity, in terms of educational input. And the more literacy skills that people have, and the more they're able to read the word in the world and do things we've been talking about the last half hour, the more likely they are to be authors of their futures, and the more likely they are to have lives of decency and dignity. And sometimes we see inequity and we say it's because the people are unequal, when what really is inequitable is the distribution of resource, the literacy education.

 

0:41:06.8 EM: And so, you see in some of these social movements, people are talking about this unemployment and ghettoisation and segregation, a lot of those problems are caused by unequal access to education. And they become exacerbated in a time like COVID where you have unemployment, and here in South Bend, we consistently hovered over 25% employment, you can map that right on the education. And we know that across every demographic group, the more educated a person is, the healthier life outcomes they have, longer life expectancy, the health and wellness of their children, so it's a real issue for us, and it's one that... It doesn't have to be a problem. There's another part of the literacy, and you think about the meta stories in the news in the world, and the harm they cause, and so in this particular moment, you can read the news and begin to see yourself as lesser, and so how do we help kids to be able to read the world in a moment like this and not become people who are filled with hatred and bitterness and rage, but to bring a love and understanding even as you're insisting on your own right to your own dignity.

 

0:42:13.7 EM: And that's a challenge. I've taught across the elementary to graduate school, and reading the world can be hard sometimes, because you don't want to reciprocate the hatred, but you wanna be aware of it, and this is a test we all share. I talk about critical media literacy and law, but part of that critical media literacy is being able to understand how to engage these stories and how to keep yourself safe from the harm those stories can cost, but to engage the world where these stories proliferate. How do we give our kids access to better stories is also an important part of literacy in this time. The books that we choose, how do we help kids understand their place in the world? How can we expose them to authors who might share a different way of looking at the world? How do we tap into our own family stories in our own histories? 

 

0:43:03.0 EM: So, there's some... A lot of places where literacy can intervene really powerfully. I think of justice as a word you used. Justice is access to our true selves, and it's an imitation to true being in the world, and there's a lot of ways that we can talk about it kind of arbitrarily or tangentially, but it's really about what access kids have in schools and outside of schools. And so we have to talk them through interactions, and we have to talk them through brutality, and we have to talk to them through crises and health, and talk to them through the struggles that we face in families and communities, and in the Seven Strengths work that Pam and I do, we end with hope, but you want an audacious hope, not an unreasonable hope.

 

0:43:48.8 EM: Why should I be hopeful for my future? And one of the reasons you can say is because you're receiving an excellent education. It's because we have access to the kinds of products in the home and in the community that are gonna help you to learn. You've got a platform where you can talk and share your opinions and grow and we can help you here, we can help you in school, you can get help in your parish, and we wanna make sure that we have those supports in place. This is not a country where anyone needs to drop out of high school, it's not a country where anyone needs to walk into a classroom and there aren't books on the back shelf. It's not a country where anyone shouldn't be able to go on foot to a library and there's a treasure trove of books that are free for them. And we have, we have moved the needle, I guess... So, the high school graduation rate now is 85%, it was probably 20% lower when I started.

 

0:44:35.0 EM: So we're moving in the right direction, but there's so much more that we can do instead of saying it's a shame that the world is like this. How do we get more books in the hands of kids? How do we become reading ambassadors to the people in our neighbourhood, in our parish, in our home? How do we become reading advocates for the local school? How do we as adults take better care of the stories we share with children? These are things that we can do better and more, and to me, that's what adds up to equity in justice. You just talk about those terms, and they just seem like Mars and Jupiter, but I can figure out how to make sure every book in my local Catholic and public school has a classroom library. I can figure out 15 minutes a day to FaceTime with my nephew and read to him, and have him read to me.

 

0:45:15.9 EM: And these are the things that matter. And so, when I drill down and work with parents, it's like it's very tactile, let's do these things, and that's what's gonna get us to equity and justice. When you're talking to teachers and principals, let's do these things, that's what's gonna get us there. And then it doesn't seem like Mars and Jupiter could just be down the block, could be Meijer's and Martin's. Those are grocery stores in South Bend by the way, closer than the planets.

 

[laughter]

 

0:45:38.7 AS: Can we walk through a few more of those things? What can people do? They're like, "Well, I'm just one person."

 

0:45:44.1 EM: So first and foremost, I would go back into the reading of being a reader and an audience's reader, whether you're parents of school-aged children, or you've got nieces or nephews or neighbors, "Who are the people in my life that I need to read for and be read to from?" are really important, and just understanding that and just being, "How can I get them books for birthdays or whatever? But I want to be a reading friend to these folks, family, and neighbour." And then I think being a reading advocate, the beauty of the American education system is that we can almost all walk to an elementary school. And you can walk to that school and say, "How can I... What can I do to be a reading advocate?" And it could be volunteering a certain amount of funds to contribute to a classroom library, it could be volunteering to read to kids.

 

0:46:34.0 EM: I think it's also kind of a faith community question, "What can we do to be advocates for reading?" That there's always books in the parish or... That we've got a way to do that very tangibly, right? Because these are the institutions right in our neighborhood. Promoting really positive stories of the past and present, being a storyteller, sometimes we talk about is counter-storytelling. And how do we tell a story very explicitly to those around us? And how do we keep those... We're in the public discourse, accountable for the kinds of stories that they tell. And we can go a long way in helping those in our families, in our communities to be more positive receivers and tellers of story. Like I see what you're seeing on the television, but that's not how we do it, right? And so when Pam and I talk about the strengths, and practicing kindness, and friendship, and if our kids or our neighbors, or our nieces and nephews, grandchildren see us enabling our humanity and unlocking the humanity in others, they will learn from that. Just like I could rat off a bunch of things that I learned from my father, it's very tangible, so... And our sphere of influence is large.

 

0:47:51.1 EM: And then finally, practicing the seven strengths, belonging, being someone who kind of welcomes people into a community and forming a community. I think our communities are so afraid, the churches are empty, the markets are empty, people are behind closed doors, and... Talk to the neighbor, talk to the people around you, have a sense of curiosity and asking questions, "And what can we do?" And practice friendship and kindness, and think about what that means from just shoveling an extra half block of snow to volunteering to virtually sit with a kid in your family or a child of a friend while the parent has a meeting, and saying, "Well, we'll FaceTime and I'll read to them."

 

0:48:25.6 EM: And then practicing courage and hope, "What would I like to have happen? What would I like to be a part of?" One of the things I think I've learned with kids is the gap between their hopes and their confidence is what determines whether there'll be world changers or not. But they all have those hopes, but they don't always have the confidence to like, "I can do it." We have to drill down and say, "You know, who's gonna hold me accountable? Who can I walk with?" We have to become re-tethered. And that's why we start with belonging, just... In some ways, document it, write on the back of an envelope, "These are all the people that I can touch, and this is my world, and this is what I'm gonna be responsible for. These 25 people, they will hear from me, I will pray for them, I will read to them, I will fight for them, I will love them, I will be kind to them. I'll pass on the wisdom of my grandmas and grandpas to them." Right? We all have that reach. And we just have to kinda challenge ourselves to dig in.

 

0:49:15.5 AS: Very well said, of course. There's hope in being able to change that voice inside, in someone's head. Does that make sense? 

 

0:49:22.0 EM: It does, you know? And I think it's a question of reach and access. That's why I say being re-tethered is important in thinking about those kind of immediate experience. But you're right, some people will get lost in that. And I don't know how far we go down this road, but I... You can't have a complete community without stronger faith communities. We've... The government can go so far, and schools can go so far, and families can go so far, but we... It could be a parish, it could be a synagogue, it could be a mosque, it could be a church, it could be a community-based organization. We probably want to think about how we live in community. I think about the call of the Holy Cross is to live in community, and it's a big deal. It's not an overnight thing, because a lot of industrialisation has led to us being pretty atomised from one another. And that's become clear to me just through the cancer and the COVID, how atomised one can become. But we have to challenge ourselves to find these people. We can find ways to be more connected to others.

 

0:50:32.0 AS: You have a unique perspective, right now, tell me where you find your sources of hope? 

 

0:50:38.2 EM: I think I find my sources of hope, really, in my ancestors and those who came before me, and who maintained hope and dignity under far more dire circumstances than I find myself in. And you know, there are a lot of pictures of our immediate ancestors around the house, and it just... What I see when I look at them is dignity. I want them to be proud of me. I want my dad and my grandma, and those who come before me, I look at them, and I say, "I hope you're proud. I hope I make you proud." I also find hope in the next generation who will look to me and who will follow me. And I think, "What kind of example have I set for them, for my sons and for my students?" I find hope in my faith. And you have to... You know, when you're down and the odds are against you, you say, "I've been blessed and I owe." Right? 

 

0:51:28.8 EM: I mean, we have a debt, and I think it's a beautiful debt. We're giving grace, but our debt is that we share love. You be love, you live love. Every day that you get to do that, there's hope. Yeah, I don't know, I count my days on my hands now. And I think that it's a privilege because I just... There's not time to waste. I think sometimes the discourses of the world lead us to believe that we've all been beaten down and we haven't been given much, and we don't look at what we've been given. We've been given life, we've been given sunlight, we've been given air to breathe, and flowers to smell, and people around us, and neighbors, and... We have to be better caretakers of that hope. We have to be more humble in the grace that we've been given and the mercy that's been shown to us. Even though many of us have faced things in our lives that are unfair, we still have a debt to pay. And so that's kind of where I am. I don't worry about myself so much, I just worry about what can I do with the time I have left to reach people, to make my grandma proud, and to move us one step closer? What can I do to repay what I've been given? I can't repay it, but I can do everything that I can to move toward that goal. And that's kind of... That's... My life belongs to people I love as it should.

 

0:53:01.6 AS: Something tells me all those people will be very proud of you, so... And thank you so much for your time today, I really appreciate it. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.

 

0:53:11.5 EM: Thank you, Audrey. Likewise.

 

0:53:14.6 AS: And thank you all for joining us for Think-Pair-Share. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. It's very much appreciated. Check out our website at iei.nd.edu/media for this and other goodies. Thanks for listening. And for now, off we go.

 

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