Thinking of the Missing Link: A Report from the 5th CalADE Annual Conference (Part Three)

We have all been guilty of making reading irrelevant to students' lives. At the last session I went to at the CalADE 2014 Annual Conference, two presenters from Mt. San Jacinto College recognized the problem, but they seemed to chalk it up to a top-down system where required reading textbooks have become a risk of alienating some of our students with irrelevancy, not to mention the underwhelming critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that should be learned in our classes.

Dr. Aja Henriques and Jennifer Escobar prefer to serve what students need rather than appeal to what they, as teachers, like. They conceptualize a framework for evaluating and choosing readings in terms of class demographics, students' interests and experiences, learning goals set by both students and the teacher, length of a reading, genre, complexity, time needed to engage with the text, among other criteria.

In practice, Jennifer shares how she preselects up to 50 readings, conducts a first-day survey to find out students' hobbies, majors, etc, and then pares the reading selections down to the ones that can serve the students' goals for the entire class in the current term. In fact, this kind of reading selections adjustment is on-going. She also uses end-of-class surveys to evaluate the readings' effectiveness.

Education - and curriculum - is never neutral. One of the fields whose concepts the presenters apply is Critical Race Theory. Critical race theorists believe that race and racism are pervasive and permanent and that educators should focus on the intersections of racism with other forms of subordination. Thus, according to CRT, reading selections should discuss race/racism's role in U.S. society, provide an opportunity to challenge dominant ideology, exhibit a commitment to social justice, and incorporate interdisciplinary approaches. All students benefit from experience in reading "their world" and becoming an authority during the course.

If we don't bring student needs to the center of the process of selecting readings, we would continue to have students who are able to read but choose not to. Imagine using Shakespeare in a freshman comp course in a community college where students are comprised of many underrepresented minorities from lower socioeconomic statuses. It is this spirit of relevancy that allows teachers to even try letting students select their own readings as well as their own vocabulary words to learn. It is imperative that all classrooms develop 21st-century learners and leaders, students who think critically and creatively, among other measures. As reading selections resonate with students, we can expect to electrify and accelerate that awesome development.

This concludes my three-part report on the 5th CalADE Annual Conference.