Some years ago,  challenged a classroom of young, Southern white women to defend mainstreaming novels by black authors into standard courses rather than celebrating them during Black History Month.

“My point was that without both, some students might assume the authors are white,” says Fecho, Professor of English Educa­tion. “But I didn’t ask for people’s thoughts.” Instead, he says, he should have induced “wobble,” or just enough “disequilibrium” to prompt reflection.

Teaching itself is learned by wob­ble, argues Fecho, who taught English for 24 years in a big North Philadel­phia high school. In books such as and (both published by ¶¶Òőapp Press), he describes striving for class­es to “unpack texts for themselves” and “individually and collectively make meaning.”

Fecho once despaired of student essays about literature as either emp­ty or convoluted. But influenced by educator , he came to view reading as a “transaction” with “text” co-created by each reader’s experiences and ideas: “If I wanted my students to take greater interest in their writing, I had to take greater interest in my students.”

“We all belong to multiple cultures that include gender, sexual preference, class, interests in sports or the arts, and more. Culturally responsive peda­gogy should respond to them all.” 
— Bob Fecho, Professor of English Educa­tion

In the early 1990s, Philadelphia allowed its schools to divide into autonomous learning communities. Fecho’s group structured curricula around “essential questions” — for example, following clashes between Brooklyn’s blacks and Jews, the issue of how communities deal with change. The readings mixed journalism, fiction, poetry — whatever was germane.

“If you create a unit on dinosaurs, only some students will be interested,” Fecho explains. “But if you ask, ‘What does studying dinosaurs tell us about life today?’ they’ll see the cohesiveness of reading, writing, listening, speaking. They’ll learn about thinking and ethics” — a must for dis-affected teens who “could make money selling drugs and didn’t expect to live long.”

More recently, still interested in personal meaning-making, Fecho has taught the theories of the late , who argued that “to make an utterance means to appropriate the words of others and populate them with one’s own intention.”

For Fecho, true “dialogic teaching” entails understanding the many “cultures” that shape students’ responses to others’ utterances and their intersection in the “cultural contact zone” of the classroom. “In this country, we conflate ‘culture’ with ‘race’ — but we all belong to multiple cultures that include gender, sexual preference, class, interests in sports or the arts, and more. Culturally responsive peda­gogy should respond to them all.”

Tags: Arts Culture Language Unconventional Wisdom

Programs: English Education

Departments: Arts & Humanities

Published Thursday, Jun 15, 2017