Julie Steinberg

October 9, 2014
C&T5037
Reflection
Trash by Dorothy Allison
Reflecting Again: As a Reader of the World

A month ago, I titled my reflection of my reading of Dorothy Allisons Trash as

Understanding Identities. Having read more of Dorothy Allisons stories in
Trash and Paulo Freires The Act of Reading, among the other articles and Jones chapters
that have challenged me to think critically about identity and literacies, I now return to
the idea of myself as a reader of these stories. My identity has not changed, but my
awareness of how my identity affects how I read has grown. My thinking has shifted
somewhat from importance of understanding an identity to the importance of
understanding how we bring identities to our reading and learning.
Friere says, Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent
reading of the word cannot dispense without continually reading the world (Freire 5).
Freir discusses that as readers, we will always come to the print with our own reading of
the world our own context (Freire). While I acknowledged the difference between my
experiences and Dorothy Allisons before, I now find myself more conscious of how my
own life my own contexts shape how I construct meaning of her stories. These
contexts make us who we are and make reading different for everyone (Freire). Reading
consciously, with the lens of considering contexts and identities can help me to better
understand Allison, my students, and myself.

In Girls, Social Class, and Literacy, Jones quotes Dorothy Allison. Allison writes,
I know that some things must be felt to be understood, that despair, for example can
never be adequately analyzed; it must be lived (Jones 27). Considering the stories I read
in Trash, I think Allison is connecting to her struggles with identity, especially related to
poverty and being understood by others. Allisons and Jones ideas, in addition to reading
the stories in Trash, have helped me think about the implications of the knowledge,
experiences, and cultures, that our students bring into the classroom. Jones says,
Experiences such as poverty may also be a concept that can never be adequately
analyzed, it must be lived to be felt, to be fully understood and to have the grounding
necessary to think deeply about the implications for school and society (Jones 27).
So then it is our responsibility and challenge as teachers to value the knowledge
and literacies of students in our classrooms, and to therefore value their experiences and
identities. Jones urges us, Teachers and researches have choices to make when we here
these stories: we can ignore them, judge them from one perspective, or we can hear and
sanction them. I argue for sanctioning these topics and valuing many ways of living
(Jones 43). We all come from different contexts and worlds, and to acknowledge our
students experiences and stories is to value the lives they live and the identities that
shape their reading and learning.