Multiple texts 2014

EDLL 5341/EDLL 5344
Module 8
March 2014

Agenda:
• RTI and “Struggling” Readers
• A Synthesis of Research on Causes for
“Struggling Readers”
• Teaching “Struggling” Readers with Multiple
Texts

“Struggling” Readers:
• Think about students you know who you would
consider to be “struggling” readers.
• What attributes do they possess that places them
in this category for you?

What Research Says about Attributes of a
“Struggling” Reader:
•
•
•
•

Cultural Mismatch Theories
Deprivation Theories
Difference Theories
Normative Theories

•Cultural Mismatch Theories
Students who do not have previous experiences
with “school” expectations for reading including
linguistic and metalinguistic experiences. These
students are deemed to be behind their
counterparts who come from backgrounds that
mirror school definitions, values, and
expectations for reading. As these students get
older, they are often identified through their
attitudes towards school reading tasks and may
simply cease to participate in school reading
curriculums.

•Deprivation Theories
Students who do not perform well on reading
tasks as measured by standardized,
performance-based, or informal tests and
teacher observations. These are students who
are deemed to possess cognitive processing
problems that interfere with their ability to read
successfully in school settings.

•Difference Theories
Students who have the potential to perform at
grade level with reading tasks but do not because
of the type of instruction they receive. These
students may be deemed to struggle with reading
because of developmentally inappropriate
reading instruction or because of culturally
unresponsive reading instruction. The bottom
line is that these students need different
instruction in order to be successful.

•Normative Theories
Students are arbitrarily placed into the position
of being a “struggling” reader based on a social
need to label students’ reading ability relative to
an arbitrarily determined norm. Someone has to
be a “struggling” reader in order to identify
“successful” readers.

As you consider this
list of reasons why
students “struggle”
with reading, which
reasons do you feel
apply to the students
you have known?

How might a “struggling” reader respond to the
following text?

The Dust Bowl:

For eight years dust blew on the southern plains. It came in a yellowish-brown
haze from the South and in rolling walls of black from the North. The simplest acts of
life — breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk — were no longer simple. Children wore
dust masks to and from school, women hung wet sheets over windows in a futile
attempt to stop the dirt, farmers watched helplessly as their crops blew away. The Dust
Bowl of the 1930s lasted about a decade. Its primary area of impact was on the
southern Plains. The northern Plains were not so badly effected, but nonetheless, the
drought, windblown dust and agricultural decline were no strangers to the north. In
fact the agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose effects were
felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains was also profound. As John
Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed
were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and
Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless
and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two
hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless
as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything,
any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants
scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." Poor agricultural practices and
years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply
plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the
land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the
farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that
held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising
billowing clouds of dust to the skys. The skys could darken for days, and even the most
well sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some places the
dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads.

Multiple Texts About the Dust Bowl
Instead of teaching this topic from one type of text
(e.g., a textbook), imagine teaching with multiple
types of text such as the following:
•Timeline
•Historic Photographs
•Children’s Fiction Chapter Books: Out of the
Dust,Esperanza Rising
•AP Article from the AJ
•Oral History from Cesar Chavez
•Documentary
•Music from Woody Guthrie/Children’s Picture Book

Let’s explore different genres of text on the topic
of the Dust Bowl.
As you view each slide, please pay attention to
what stands out to you from each text/excerpt of a
text.

Comparative Events in History
The
Mexican
Revolution

World War
I

1910-1920
1914-1918
(with sporadic
war
continuing
until 1929)

The Great
Depression

The Dust
Bowl

World War
II

1929-1939early 1940’s

1931-1939

1939-1945

Historic Photographs from the Dust Bowl:
Images of Children

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
“Tested by Dust”
While we sat
taking our six weeks test
the wind rose
and the sand blew
right through the cracks in the schoolhouse
wall,
right through the gaps around the window
glass,
and by the time the tests were done,
each and every one of us,
was coughing pretty good and we all
needed a bath.
I hope we get bonus points
for testing in a dust storm.
April 1934

Esperanza Rising
“Is there any more talk of striking?” asked Josefina.
“Things are quiet now, but they are still organizing,” said Marta’s aunt.
“There is talk of striking in the spring when it is time to pick. We are afraid
there will be problems. If they refuse to work, they will lose their cabins in the
migrant camps and then where will they live? Or worse, they will all be sent
back to Mexico.”
“How can they send all of them back?” asked Hortensia.
“Repatriation,” said Marta’s aunt. “La Migra—the immigration
authorities—round up people who cause problems and check their papers. If
they are not in order, or they do not happen to have their papers with them,
the immigration officials send them back to Mexico. We have heard that they
have sent back people whose families have lived here for generations, those
who are citizens and have never ever been to Mexico.” (p. 170-171)

Scientist Unearths Possible Cause of 1930s Dust Bowl
BY BETSY BLANEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Will-Allen Jameson still remembers the sound the huge, rolling wall of dust
made before it reached her family's West Texas ranch. "You could kind of hear a
faint roar, and it would get real quiet," the 76-year-old Plainview woman said as she
described one of the many dust storms she witnessed as a youngster. "Birds were
alarmed. They could sense something was coming up." In the Dust Bowl days of
the 1930s a single dust storm could linger for days.
In a study published recently in Science magazine, Siefried Schubert
determined that slight changes in the surface temperatures of two oceans created
atmospheric conditions that caused the Dust Bowl from 1931 to 1938. It was the
Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, a time when drought choked the Great Plains
stretching across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado. Soil from
America's breadbasket filled the skies. The storms were the result of a severe
drought — beginning as early as 1931 and not ending until the fall of 1939 — and
poor agricultural practices. Grasslands, which held soil in place, had been plowed
and replanted with wheat.

Associated Press Article
Continued:

With rain, the crop was abundant. But when drought struck in the 1930s, farmers continued to
plow and plant. With no ground cover remaining, the winds whipped the soil skyward.
Now, more than 70 years later, a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration studying moisture and air patterns in the atmosphere believes he may have
stumbled upon why the drought occurred in the first place. Siegfried Schubert, a meteorologist
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wrote in a study published last
month in Science magazine that slight changes in the surface temperatures of two oceans
created atmospheric conditions that caused the Dust Bowl. "The 1930s drought was the major
climatic event in the nation's history," Schubert said. "Just beginning to understand what
occurred is really critical to understanding future droughts and the links to global climatechange issues we're experiencing today."

Associated Press Article Continued:
In the 1930s, tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures were cooler than normal and tropical
Atlantic Ocean temperatures were warmer than normal, producing a weakened low-level jet
stream that sent it further south, he said. The variation in sea surface temperatures were only a
few tenths of a degree centigrade. The jet stream normally moves westward over the Gulf of
Mexico before turning northward, bringing moisture and rain to the Great Plains. The weakened
jet stream in the 1930s also carried less moisture, and farmland on the Great Plains dried up.
For the next nine years, yellow-brown dust blew on the southern plains; walls of black dust
rolled across the northern plains. Breathing became a chore. Children donned dust masks to go
to and from school, and wet sheets were used to try to stop dust from getting into homes.
Farmers looked on in despair as crops blew away.
Schubert said his study was aimed at evaluating an atmospheric circulation model NASA
devised using satellite observations. He and his colleagues used data taken from ship records to
create starting atmospheric conditions for the model. They then let the model run on its own
and used only observed monthly global sea surface temperatures. "Right now what we need to
do is find out what caused those sea surfaces temperatures," Schubert said. "We need to
understand the whole system, the ocean and the atmosphere." The study also found that
droughts can be localized because of soil moisture levels, particularly during the summer. When
rain is negligible, less evaporation occurs and that leads to even less rain.

Associated Press Article
Continued:
John M. Wallace, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of
Washington in Seattle and one of those who reviewed the study for Science, called the
findings invaluable — the first to make a persuasive case between rainfall on the Great
Plains and the sea surface temperatures in the tropics. "It doesn't make any
exceptional claims, but it just identifies one of the factors that can influence the
summer rainfall over the southern United States," Wallace said. "Their paper is really
quite modest in claiming what this will give us. It won't enable us to say, 'This is going
to be a drought year.' But it will enable us to get a feeling for the odds, the
probabilities. "Anything that can get a leg up on what's coming next summer is going
to be useful." Jameson, who has written "Too Tough to Die — Too Poor to Leave,”
fictional story about a Texas Panhandle family in the Dust Bowl era, also found the
study interesting — but inconclusive. "I think it's good to think about it," she said. "I
think it's one of many, many theories. Nobody really knows."

Oral Histories of the Dust Bowl From Hard
Times (Terkel,1986):
Cesar Chavez (1927-1993):
“Oh I remember having to
move out of our house.
My father had brought in
a team of horses and a
wagon. We had always lived in that house, and we
couldn’t understand why

Cesar Chavez continued:
“we were moving out. That must have been
around 1934. I was about six years old. It’s
known as the North Gila Valley, about fifty miles
north of Yuma. My dad was being turned out of
his small plot of land. He had inherited this
from his father, who had homesteaded it. I saw
my two, three other uncles also moving out. And
for the same reason.”

“The bank had foreclosed on the loan. If the local
bank approved, the Government would
guarantee the loan and small farmers like my
father would continue in business. It so
happened the president of the bank was the guy
who most wanted our land. We were
surrounded by him: he owned all the land
around us. Of course, he wouldn’t pass the
loan.”

“One morning a giant tractor came in, like we
had never seen before. My daddy used to do all
his work with horses. So this huge tractor came
in and began to knock down this corral, this
small corral where my father kept his horses.
We didn’t understand why. In a matter of a
week, the whole face of the land changed. We all
of us climbed into an old Chevy that my dad had.
And then we were in California, and migratory
workers.”

Oral Histories in Video: Surviving the Dust
Bowl

“It looked like it was just a thing that would never
end,” says Melt White, son of a Texas farmer. “So
they abused the land; they abused it something
terrible… we don’t even think what the end results
might be.”

“When those dust storms blew and you were out in
them, well, you spit out dirt,” recalls
Imogene Glover of Kansas. “It looked like tobacco
juice, but it was dirt.”
http://www.pbsorg/wgbh/americanexperience/films/dus

Documentary
“The Plow that Broke the Plains” (1937)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCwhjWNcH8

Children’s Books
• Hoping for Rain: The Dust Bowl Adventures of
Patty and Earl Buckler
• Surviving the Dust Bowl
• Voices of the Dust Bowl
• Woody Guthrie: Poet of the People

Folk Music from the Dust Bowl: Woody
Guthrie
So Long, It's Been Good To Know Yuh (Dusty Old Dust)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2YDK0GJaF8
I've sung this song, but I'll sing it again,
Of the place that I lived on the wild windy plains,
In the month called April, county called Gray,
And here's what all of the people there say:
So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh.
This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home,
And I got to be driftin' along.
A dust storm hit, an' it hit like thunder;
It dusted us over, an' it covered us under;
Blocked out the traffic an' blocked out the sun,
Straight for home all the people did run,
Singin':
We talked of the end of the world, and then
We'd sing a song an' then sing it again.
We'd sit for an hour an' not say a word,
And then these words would be heard:

Children’s Picture Book/Song Lyrics:
Woody Guthrie: Poet of the People
“This Land is Your Land”
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island,
From the Redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving, and dust clouds rolling;
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting:
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief office I saw my people—
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking my freedom highway.
Nobody living can make me turn back.

Now, let’s go back to the first text we read about
the Dust Bowl and imagine this text was our
“target text,” the one from mandated curriculum
we had to teach.

The Dust Bowl Text Revisited:
For eight years dust blew on the southern plains. It came in a yellowish-brown haze from
the South and in rolling walls of black from the North. The simplest acts of life — breathing,
eating a meal, taking a walk — were no longer simple. Children wore dust masks to and from
school, women hung wet sheets over windows in a futile attempt to stop the dirt, farmers
watched helplessly as their crops blew away. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted about a decade.
Its primary area of impact was on the southern Plains. The northern Plains were not so badly
effected, but nonetheless, the drought, windblown dust and agricultural decline were no
strangers to the north. In fact the agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression
whose effects were felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains was also profound. As
John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were
drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families,
tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand
and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the
mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push,
to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no
place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." Poor agricultural
practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been
deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the
land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the farmers
kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place
was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the
skys. The skys could darken for days, and even the most well sealed homes could have a thick
layer of dust on furniture. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads.

The Dust Bowl through Multiple Texts:
Let’s examine the following:
• Scaffolding students’ ability as readers in terms of text
readability/difficulty,
• Reading multiple texts leads to multiple perspectives on
topics
• The effect primary source documents has on student
understanding of a concept/topic, and
• The ways that taking a multiple genre approach towards
reading instruction can address the theories cited in research
for reasons why students “struggle” with reading.

Readability:
• What happens to the difficulty of text when
students read multiple genres of text on the
same topic?

Multiple Perspectives
• How does reading multiple texts foster critical
literacy through the examination of multiple
perspectives?

Primary Source Documents:
“Students who read primary documents on a
fairly frequent basis, as often as at least once per
week, have higher achievement scores than their
peers who see these sources rarely” (Brozo &
Simpson, 2007, p. 256).

Reasons Why Students “Struggle” With
Reading:
How does taking a multiple text approach to reading
instruction address the following reasons why
students “struggle” with reading?
•
•
•
•

Cultural Mismatch Theories
Deprivation Theories
Difference Theories
Normative Theories

Final Thought About Teaching with
Multiple Texts:
“If we want students to understand what they
read in our courses, we must encourage them to
read beyond what they are assigned to read in
our classrooms” (Graves, 2004).

Multiple texts 2014

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