In Reading the Word and the World by Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, the importance of being able to read the world is stressed. As a teacher, it is an absolute necessity to really see where your students are coming from—we must begin to look beyond our own personal boundaries by opening our eyes to the events happening around us. I remember reading this chapter on the subway on my way up to school a few weeks ago. The subway is normally a place for me to catch up on readings or current events by reading the newspaper. I rarely, if ever, pick my head up to see what’s going on around me. However, as soon as I read “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world,” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, pg. 35) I picked up my head and I began to see a whole underground literacy campaign taking place all around me.
The subway car was filled with different forms of literacy going on all around me. From the ads plastered all over the walls, the graffiti-ridden seats, and the people smashed in against me, I was in a world that I seemingly have never taken the time to truly investigate. My first observation was that everyone was doing something, even if it meant just reading those ads. There were, however, three people that stuck out to me: a young child with his mother, a high-school student just leaving school, and pregnant woman.
When the young child began to fuss, the mother began telling him a highly animated oral story about a boy who cried all day long on the subway and after all his tears filled the subway car, he floated away. The boy was listening intently and throughout the entire story and after, he remained silent, gazing at his mother. The high-school male ran onto the car with an ipod in his ears and a gadget in his hands. After some investigating, I noticed that the gadget was really a cell phone and he sat, eyes fixated, texting the whole ride, never once lifting his head or taking his fingers off the phone. The pregnant woman sat with a pregnancy magazine, gently flipping through the pages and folding down some that must have been important to her.
By opening my eyes to the world around me, I noticed that literacy is all around me, even on the subway ride up to Columbia. In one form or another, each of the people were engaged in some activity requiring the passage of words. I was intrigued by what I saw and have since allocated 50% of my subway ride to observing other people’s literacy’s, while the other 50% remains on focusing on my own reading of the word!
The subway car was filled with different forms of literacy going on all around me. From the ads plastered all over the walls, the graffiti-ridden seats, and the people smashed in against me, I was in a world that I seemingly have never taken the time to truly investigate. My first observation was that everyone was doing something, even if it meant just reading those ads. There were, however, three people that stuck out to me: a young child with his mother, a high-school student just leaving school, and pregnant woman.
When the young child began to fuss, the mother began telling him a highly animated oral story about a boy who cried all day long on the subway and after all his tears filled the subway car, he floated away. The boy was listening intently and throughout the entire story and after, he remained silent, gazing at his mother. The high-school male ran onto the car with an ipod in his ears and a gadget in his hands. After some investigating, I noticed that the gadget was really a cell phone and he sat, eyes fixated, texting the whole ride, never once lifting his head or taking his fingers off the phone. The pregnant woman sat with a pregnancy magazine, gently flipping through the pages and folding down some that must have been important to her.
By opening my eyes to the world around me, I noticed that literacy is all around me, even on the subway ride up to Columbia. In one form or another, each of the people were engaged in some activity requiring the passage of words. I was intrigued by what I saw and have since allocated 50% of my subway ride to observing other people’s literacy’s, while the other 50% remains on focusing on my own reading of the word!
1 comment:
I love reading the world on the trains. I especially love the live texts. In one ride, I saw a man who constantly ranted and a Dominican woman ranting for him to shut up much to the entertainment of some other Dominican youth. She also had a plastic bag over her head because of the rain. Then on the next train I transfered to, a young woman sang a rousing rendition of "On the Radio" dressed in tight yellow spandex. So 80s. Then, a tall black man entered the train, and another black man engaged in a conversation with him about what basketball team he played for. The man was from Senegal and did play for a college team. You can certainly do a lot of reading of everything from social interactions to literacies, as you observed.
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