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This review has been accessed times since December 18, 2008

Campano, Gerald. (2007). Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering. NY: Teachers College Press Pp. xvii + 134         ISBN 0807747327

Reviewed by Michael D. Boatright
University of Georgia

December 18, 2008

Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering by Gerald Campano enters territory where few educators dare to tread: their students’ memories. Through powerful vignettes shaped by the relationships Campano forges with his fifth-grade immigrant students in a California city school, this book offers narratives that explore the possibilities of an education foregrounded by the experiential nature of student histories. By carving a space in the classroom for student narratives to flourish as valid forms of knowledge and learning, Campano’s book urges educators to rethink their classrooms as sites of collaborative inquiry in which shared narratives complement rather than subvert the traditional curriculum, thus providing a textually-rich, engaging environment that empowers students to think critically about their words and their worlds.

Campano, a teacher researcher who self-identifies with a Filipino immigrant heritage, writes from a critical inquiry perspective in tandem with Fecho’s (2004) collaborative inquiry with working class, African American high school students and with Jones’s (2006) research on working class and working poor White elementary school girls. To situate himself firmly within this scholarly community of critical inquiry as well as to instantiate his work with immigrant populations, Campano writes, “My main research question was the following: What would happen if I invited children from immigrant and migrant backgrounds to read, write, and speak from their own experiences and the realities of their lives?” (2007, p. 31). By inviting a discourse of experience into the classroom, Campano’s research attends to his assumption that the scripted, monolithic forms of curricula rampant in most U.S. schools fail to connect with students for whom school knowledge has scarcely any direct relation to their lived experiences. Since educational systems predicate themselves on privileged knowledge of the past, students concede that their own past has no currency in schooling. As an alternative, when students’ memories have purchase in the classroom, their knowledge exists simultaneously with the codified knowledge of schools, which enables students to engage these two epistemological systems critically and provide multiple perspectives from which to study history and language, a crucial component of critical pedagogy.

To establish an educational environment amenable to a pedagogy based on student experiences, Campano theorizes what he refers to as the second classroom. The second classroom refers to the discursive spaces outside the confines of the regular school day. As Campano recounts in his study, “I realized that I had been teaching in two classrooms: the first mandated classroom and a second classroom that occurs during the margins and in between periods of the school day” (2007, p. 39, emphasis in original). This second classroom exists between class periods, before and after school, on the playground, and on weekends – improvised moments during the day free from the traditionally rigid structure of schooling. These moments, Campano observes, allow for the development and nurturing of relationships with students imperative for carving out opportunities in which student histories and experiences become safe, educationally productive narratives worth sharing in the classroom. While Campano justifies the legitimacy of the second classroom, he also emphasizes that it must exist concomitantly with the required first classroom. Both classrooms, Campano argues, must have recognized status in schools since the relationships cultivated in the second classroom affect the opportunities for experiential transactions in the first classroom. In other words, the dialogic interaction between the two classrooms promotes student engagement with official school texts while also encouraging the sharing of student histories as a critical platform for analyzing and contesting such academic texts.

At the heart of Campano’s study lies a fundamental belief in an accountability that transcends commonsense notions of the term as described by such federal mandates as No Child Left Behind. Instead of an accountability predicated on ensuring that all students meet an arbitrarily defined level of content mastery, Campano offers a counter definition of the concept of accountability. Campano writes that “to be accountable means – at its simplest – to be mindful of engagement with others, to learn productively from and respond to the experiences of others, and to cultivate mutual empathy and understanding. It is about relationships” (2007, p. 46). Examples of relationship-based accountability constitute the bedrock from which Campano situates his study. Campano’s students bring to the conversation such frequently taboo topics as family members who have protested migrant workers’ rights, who have suffered debilitating illnesses, and who have died due to a lack of access to medicine and low wages. In each of the narratives conveyed in Campano’s research, these experiences are espoused by his students with deftness and authority. Campano responds in kind to his students’ histories by holding himself accountable to them and to their experiences, and he celebrates the potential these experiences hold for generating critical writing and reflection in the classroom.

Campano’s book, while practitioner in orientation, addresses multiple audiences in its approach to critical pedagogy. It speaks to pre-service literacy teachers being apprenticed into an occupation that requires an understanding and validation of student experiences in creating meaningful relationships with students that in turn can produce engaged learning environments. Likewise, teacher educators either working directly with pre-service teachers or embarking on teacher research projects of their own can benefit from reading this account of making memory and experience viable instructional resources. Also, novice and veteran teachers alike might find in Campano’s work insights into the potentially risky subject matter of student memory and find applications to their own work in teaching students from diverse backgrounds.

What Campano’s Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering ultimately has to offer to the field of education is an invitation to restructure literacy classrooms differently. If we adhere to the messages communicated in this book, by acknowledging the reservoir of memories and experiences students bring to school and by securing a safe haven in the classroom for these narratives and histories to be shared, explored, and validated, educators increase their fund of resources for connecting the texts of student lives to the texts of standard school curricula. In doing so, teachers can augment a static and unidirectional canon with the polyvocal experiences of their students, voices that have for too long remained trumped and trampled in the educational enterprise.        

References

Fecho, B. (2004). Is this English?: Race, language, and culture in the classroom. NY: Teachers College Press.

Jones, S. (2006). Girls, social class, and literacy: What teachers can do to make a difference. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

About the Reviewer

Michael D. Boatright is a graduate student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. Drawing from his experiences as a college ESOL instructor, a high school ESOL teacher and department chair, a Reading First external evaluator, and a teacher educator working with preservice high school English language arts teachers, Mr. Boatright’s current research interests focus on reading as a democratic enterprise and American pragmatism.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman

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