All About Moje

What I really like about Moje is her acceptance of individuality.  She isn’t trying to create a mega plan for curriculum brainwashing (sort of like our current plan) with the teacher lecturing to a classroom of uninterested kids.  In fact, she is actually trying to make individual kids more interested in their education.  “We focus on the motivating (and demotivating) features of the texts” along with “relationships between print and nonprint forms.” That seems pretty powerful when approaching literacy.

It seems as if Moje is verbalizing everything we have been talking about.  Ideas such as “teachers of content areas need to provide young people with opportunities to examine the discourses of the subject-area texts in relation to the discourses of everyday life” and  focuses on positive notes such as “many young people are able to read across a variety of symbol systems, including print.”

I like the idea of educational models in such a positive light– starting with what kids do know, rather than stressing about what they don’t.  It gives a basis for forward motion: “we need to look more closely at the texts offered to young people in school, and at the ways texts are offered (i.e., how texts are assigned, discussed, and used in classrooms), rather than simply ascribing low motivation to youth when it comes to reading this type of material.”  This is basically the text vs. textbook model I researched in my article group focusing on adolescent identity.

The super fun parts of this particular article concern what I call ‘terribly wrong associations of literacy.’ For example, Moje states that “race and gender were not significant predictors of achievement in this model, nor was youths’ home language. We also tested the relationship between school achievement and weekly online access (reading e-mails and websites and writing e- mails, chats, shout-outs, and blogs outside of school at least once a week or more), and found no relationship.”

Another interesting part of the article are the results of her studies, focusing on what interests adolescents.  More students were focused on literacy that reflected their interests.  Either these adolescents are just like adults (shocking,) or I am still an adolescent because I feel exactly the same way.  If we incorporate these interests into school curriculum, we may see interest levels rise and knowledge increase.  Essentially, Moje is “referring to engineering new types of classroom texts, ones that recognize the need to situate reading and writing within social networks and invite young readers into a relationship with the text and the work of the discipline.”  I think education is all about relationships, whether it is between teachers and students or students and texts.  This relationship, (sponsorship, access, agency) is what will foster success.