What is English?

I am reading Bob Fecho's What is English? which philosophically recalls his high school teaching in urban Philadelphia and I am in love by his text and his complete honesty about being a white male who landed a position in a school district where he found his white, male pedagogy to be challenged and inspired by the students he taught.

What I love about his text is two fold. For one, he found a way to promote his students' roles in his room to be active and engaged with reading and writing the world. Second, I relate to his story: a coalition school, working with the National Writing Project, having a love for creative writing, and finding the traditional canons problematic for many of the populations he taught. Fecho turned his room into a laboratory for language and sought ways for all students to think about the way they communicated in a world where all languages, dialects and ideas are not valued nor supported. For those of you who read my quirky blog, you might find this book to be an interesting text of one teacher who kept his voice by supporting theirs. To me, that is what education is all about.