Bridging the gap between youth and school culture

Updated 11:00 AM March 6, 2006

Bridging the gap between youth and school culture

By Joe Serwach
News Service

Elizabeth Birr Moje has spent more than eight years following children in low-income, heavily Latino southwest Detroit, learning how they read, write and interact.

The U-M professor has studied what motivates and what bores them in an effort to help teachers connect with students on their level. So far, she's found they love popular novels like the Harry Potter series and "The Outsiders," while their enthusiasm often shrivels up and turns to frustration when they look at textbooks.

"We're looking at this on cultural terms, norms and values," says Moje, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in Educational Studies at the School of Education. "How do we connect those interests and values? Because that's where real learning occurs."

The students she studied—primarily Latino but also white and African American—tended to be most interested in books that reflected an urban sensibility, a racial/ethnic connection to their lives, and/or examined relationships and how people interact. The youths also nominated books that had some level of suspense, she found.

"As teachers, we need to re-think our rules about telling students 'go look it up' when they don't understand a word because it's interfering with their fluency when they have to look up every other word," Moje says. "What's the bigger goal here?"

Textbooks need to be written differently, Moje says. "They're often not well structured and they can be difficult for any kid to read. Textbooks are often written for a mass market so they are very general when they need to be more specific," she says.

Before coming to U-M in 1997 Moje studied kids in street gangs and similarly found they had sophisticated and even manipulative mastery of language in their own worlds that didn't come across in the classroom. Her latest work has followed groups of students from ages 11-18.

"As I have followed these youth, I've documented changes in their reading practices. The young women have started reading more and more novels," she says. "They'll come to me and say, 'I got this book on Saturday and finished it by Tuesday,' a common refrain because, to them, how quickly they made it through a book is an indication of how much they liked it.

"They might have a favorite book, perhaps one their mother introduced them to, that they just love. But do they like their biology book? No. Some will say they hate it, that they read one passage four times and don't understand it, and that it gave them a headache. Consistently, we've found prior knowledge of a subject matters when you ask someone to understand something they read."

A former high school teacher, Moje says she found that many people go into teaching because they love the subject area; students sometimes are secondary.

She has tried to figure out what motivates pre-teens and teens to persevere or to give up in the face of constant literacy challenges.

Her studies, financed by the National Institutes of Child Health and Development/Office of Vocational and Adult Education/Institute for Education Sciences, the William T. Grant Foundation, and by the National Science Foundation, examine the influence of peers, family, community and cultural factors on the development skills for both struggling and successful students.

Among her other findings:

• Despite popular assumptions that youths don't read books, 77 percent of the group said they have a favorite book and could name the title and describe the book;

• When asked, "Do you consider yourself a writer?," 86 percent said yes and described the writing they do as poetry, journal entries and stories;

• Cell phones, rather than computers, provided the biggest source of technology for the predominately low-income group, with text messaging a popular alternative to e-mail and instant messaging;

• Their families often had some form of cell phone, often ones with pre-paid minutes, but if they had computers, they were older models with limited ability to go online;

• When asked about out-of-school activities, those youths who were most highly engaged in a wide variety of activities also were the ones most likely to read newspapers, and most likely to read and write for pleasure. While many had seen Spanish-language newspapers, only the highest engaged students have read papers like the Detroit Free Press and New York Times;

• All of the kids surveyed watched a great amount of TV, but the highly engaged youths also read and wrote for pleasure and participated in school clubs, religious activities, sports and other organized social groups, suggesting that although all youths watch television, the medium itself is not necessarily the distraction from other activity it often is assumed to be.

Bridging the gap between youth and school culture

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