Justin Moore, Undergraduate, California State University, Sacramento: Learning to Read and Write During the Time of NCLB and Common Core State Standards

I have a hunch that Justin Moore’s story as a literacy learner in public schools during the 2000s and 2010s in California mirrors in broad strokes the contours of the stories of many young Americans. The proverbial pendulum has been swinging like crazy during these early century decades as pockets of child-centered progressivism take hold only to be crushed by reverse momentum toward a medieval view of the manufactory. Justin lived it in cycles, sometimes sequentially, sometimes concurrently, on a roller coaster ride as he describes it.

Justin Moore is a student, a sophomore this year, in the Honors Program at CSUS. He was a student in Jeff Brodd’s Honors 2 course, the subject of an earlier ltRRtl podcast. Here, Justin narrates experiences in classrooms beginning at a school in a high-poverty elementary school in a Sacramento school district and moving to a new school in the Elk Grove district during his later intermediate years. He rounds out the picture with tales from high school and most recently college and then ruminates with me on the ambiguity of the privilege of education, a theme he is working with in Honors 3. School improvement is important to him. He is a teacher in training, planning to study history and the social sciences and then earn a credential to teach at the secondary or community college level.

In this podcast Justin makes visible an early learner who took up the childhood dream of one day being an author, who loved reading and writing so much he wrote a book at home in imitation of the books he was reading in first grade. His parents were thrilled. Justin credits his early teachers with giving him the freedom to explore his imagination through stories. One quick swing of the pendulum and Justin found himself in fourth grade in the land of Reading Counts where he had to pass reading tests on a computer on self-selected books and answer random questions about the plot to accumulate points to save himself from being stuck in a classroom reading a book during recess. Similar wrenching swings take place in middle school and high school, eye openers for sure.

A theme Justin illuminated for me throughout this talk is the double edged sword, the power, pedagogy inherently is and has apart from the curriculum, the tests, the materials—and the care teachers must take to bring out the best in children, the ease with which instructional decisions and discourse can crush their young spirits and alienate them. His willingness to talk about being lifted up and then crushed repeatedly also illuminates the resilience of children and the joy that lives in school and evokes deep learning.

Clearly, Justin is thriving, taking it all in, willing to work and think hard for satisfying understandings of effective practices in teaching reading and writing within the discipline of history. Justin’s vision of the possibilities of schooling is refreshing and inspiring, especially now, knowing that he knows what he knows about the realities of now. We are blessed as a field that young people like him are in the teaching pipeline. Local instructional leaders, take heart that Justin believes there are more like him coming along.