Response to "Other People's Words"

            I couldn’t put Victoria Purcell-Gates’s “Other People’s Words” down. The story of Jenny, a member of the urban Appalachian minority living in an Ohio city, and her drive to read is a very human tale of fighting against tremendous odds. In the book, Jenny finds her way to a university Literacy Center on behalf of her children, especially her second-grade son, Donny. Neither Jenny nor her husband can read, and she can tell Donny isn’t learning to either. At the center, she meets the author.

            At first, Purcell-Gates can’t believe that Jenny can read and write nothing. But as she comes to appreciate the true measure of the family’s illiteracy, she learns that the subculture to which they belong has the poorest educational outcomes of any in America. She also sees the family’s predicament as a stark demonstration that if children grow up in a home where print isn’t used for any meaningful purpose, its conventions are inscrutable. Donny has never seen anyone that mattered to him engaging with print; he doesn’t known it is a code that signifies meaning, and he doesn’t even “see” words around him, so-called environmental print.

Purcell-Gates agrees to work with both Jenny and Donny, and knows that a traditional skills-based approach won’t work. It has already failed both of them. She devises authentic tasks for each to help them see that print can serve their own needs and desires. Purcell-Gates’s chronicle of the two years she worked with the family provides a rich demonstration of various literacy tasks, their purpose, and results.

Slowly over that time, Donny acquires emergent literacy skills, and learns to read and write at a basic level. Jenny makes great strides through journal-writing, and later she joins the Jehovah’s Witness church partly because they have an organized program of textual study.

But this is not a story with a triumphant ending, at least not for Donny. Over the two years the book describes, Donny’s school shows the family no respect and demonstrates no interest in helping him bridge the gap. There is no suggestion the school would meet his needs any better as he advances. More significantly, though, because Donny is embarrassed by his mother’s frank talk about her shortcomings, and because he so strongly identifies with his father who shows no interest in learning to read and write, the boy resists these skills on a deep level. It seems unlikely that anything will break that connection.

This family’s story is a terrific frame for basic notions about literacy learning and for teaching techniques to help children and adults bridge profound gaps. Purcell-Gates effortlessly weaves in the ideas of many in the field, including Vygotsky, Gee, Freire, Durkin, Delpit, Taylor, Heath, and Sulzby. But above all, “Other People’s Words” is a human tale; we care about these people and hope for their success. The degree to which they succeed or fail reflects their own shortcomings, of course, but also stubborn problems in American culture and education.