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Amish Literacy: What and How it Means

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Teachers are always looking to improve their instructional methods. Reading professional journals, taking graduate courses, and networking with colleagues are the ways most teachers find out how to refine their techniques. Andrea Fishman did it differently. In the early 1980s, she got a chance to visit a one-room Old Order Amish and Mennonite schoolhouse for a semester as part of her doctoral work. The resulting book details her ethnographic study and the changes she herself made in her own English courses upon her return to the classroom.

You need not know a lot about Amish society before opening these pages, because you'll quickly learn about the demands that special community has on an individual's life. And even if you were raised in the "Amish country" of central Pennsylvania like I was, you may still find some surprises here. Reading and writing are important parts of daily life for Amish people. They read a variety of books and magazines and write letters and newspaper account about their congregations' activities. Even if you're not a teacher, you can catch intriguing glimpses here. One example is the circle letter, where each recipient writes an entire page about himself/herself, then sends it on to the next person in an eventual circle of friends. Whenever the letter returns to the originator, he/she removes the previously written page and writes another...after reading everyone else's pages, of course.

Though the one-room schoolhouse environment has some merit to it, Fishman is far from saying that we should return to it. Some things she saw mirrored her own practices so much that she questioned their relevance in a more contemporary and diverse classroom. Some lessons were better; some seemed to stiffle student individualism -- but then again, the scholars and their teacher had to answer to their deeply-ingrained religious background.

Though published in the 1980s, this book still has ideas to offer to contemporary teachers interested in perking up their kids' literacy. At the very least, it'll make them think.