Cultural Identity and Reading

There are some things in life that shape who we are and how we view the world, though we may never notice their presence or effect on us, like socioeconomic status, gender, race, and culture. To some, the definition of culture may be as simple as our ethnicity or society we live in, but to me, culture is all of those things and more, ranging from age to education. When I think about my personal culture, I notice that it takes me a while to form my identity because culture is so multifaceted. I am female, white, from a middle-class family, where both parents work for a car company, my parents are still together, I am a college student, I am an Ohioan, more specifically a Toledoan, I am Catholic, I have an extremely close extended family, I am an oldest child, and I am a musician. Based on that description of my culture, I think you can find many of my identifying qualities, and you may also notice that there is no one with a cultural identity quite like mine. This identity affects everything I do, how I do it, and how others see me. One effect is has is how I read.

To be completely honest, most of my reading is academic, which comes from the “college student” part of my cultural identity. This means that generally speaking, most reading I do is for information at this place in my life. Looking back, however, there were times when reading was more than a means to pass exams and write papers. Even a few years ago in high school, I genuinely enjoyed reading, even for classes. I went to an all-girls high school (another part of my cultural identity), but we still read all of the classics—white, male literature. Occasionally, my teachers would make their best effort to throw in anything of literary merit written by a woman, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We, as a class, noticed that we were more excited and more engaged when reading books by female authors. We appreciated the characterizations more and the descriptions of emotions. Unfortunately, this was not the norm, meaning that most of the time, I am reading something that I am not particularly culturally connected to as a girl, which makes it less exciting to read and less relatable. Why is it that all of “the classics” are written by white men? Are there other works we should add to the classics to make reading more culturally relatable to everyone?

Another aspect of my cultural identity is that I am a future Math teacher. That being said, the Introduction to Ivey and Fisher’s Creating Literacy Rich Schools for Adolescents connected to me personally because of the many references to Math teachers regarding the phrase “Every teacher is a teacher of reading.” I did not like how they played the Math teachers as the enemies of reading in every class because to me, that is unfair stereotyping. In my opinion, Math can incorporate reading, writing, and speaking, it is just more difficult to involve it than it would be for a Social Studies class. It is my hope that I can bring reading into my future classroom by having students write explanations or story problems and share them with each other, as well as by bringing in creative projects that could even involve interviewing people about how they use math in their jobs or brief history presentations about where the math we’re learning came from. It is also my hope that English teachers can promote Math, and Science teachers can promote Music. All the subjects have their connections, and it would be beneficial for the students to have that intertextuality in the back of their brains to take their learning outside the classroom.

Ivey, Gay and Douglas Fisher. (2006). Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents. Alexandria: ASCD.