Where I am and Where I Want to Go

Hello! My name is Gurkirat Singh and I am an indignant queer first-generation Punjabi American undergraduate student who studies World Language Instruction and Spanish and is seeking ESL certification (albeit the ESL certification is the most important part). I've created this blog for a course that centers on teaching and developing reading comprehension in content areas, though my goals for this blog transcend that which has been described in the course syllabus. I resolve to use this blog to begin developing my real-world ESL pedagogy.

Audre Lorde memes are pretty popular in feminist circles, lol.

Carribean-American journalist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde is famous for her quote, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." My pedagogy will be centered on helping students navigate their identities in the racist, sexist, ableist, and classist cultural context in which we all live. What this means is that I need to cultivate student understanding of intersectionality. While teaching students to read is and will be the primary focus of my pedagogy, the texts presented to my students will be tailored to the identities represented in my classroom as well as alternative identities which might parallel lived experiences of my students. Most emerging bilinguals are marginalized by their non-white bodies. Many of them are womxn, come from low-income households, and/or exist on the disability/non-normative ability status spectrum. In order to structure a socially responsible and significant education for these deviant bodies, I aspire to facilitate a learning space in which student funds of knowledge are developed in ways that are meaningful to the students through understanding identities and their intersections.

At this point, my pedagogy is mostly theoretical and underdeveloped; I've taken a few curriculum instruction courses and have had moderate field experience. I recognize that the radical curriculum that I aspire to compose and perform will be challenged and edited by administrative powers. I'm also still learning and developing my social justice and pedagogic perspectives. This blog is to be used by and large as a medium of exploration. I will not claim to be an authority on ESL education, reading comprehension, critical race theory, nor intersectional feminism. I will also assert that I don't need to be. My role as a teacher is defined by my capacity to facilitate a productive learning environment and to learn from that environment; my students' role is no different.

For the reading in content areas course requirement part of this blog, I will be challenging mainstream definitions of reading and literacy through presenting alternative forms of text and making meaning from them. I have little insight as to how alternative texts will cultivate reading comprehension, but I'm confident that I'll begin to develop a more concrete understanding of how this works as I read and write for this course. A few alternative text forms with which I aspire to work are video game footage/playthrough media, fanfiction writing, and comic books.

Here is a list of sources that have worked to inspire my experimental pedagogy thus far:

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/960000/950595/p20-gee.pdf?ip=129.89.130.91&id=950595&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&key=A1A99F259FE23D76%2EA1A99F259FE23D76%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35&CFID=526741690&CFTOKEN=36777637&__acm__=1436448370_7f6ca97eafb9d29b27946de8ab4a9cf3

http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol5/iss3/8/

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.5175/JSWE.2011.200900118

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=950583

http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=570716


Cheers to a new blog and pedagogical development!