Thursday, September 16, 2010
Week Five Discussion
Beginning this week, I think we're ready for more independence! :) In fact, I _know_ we are! Post about something of interest to you concerning Week Five's readings, including related issues, ideas, thoughts, questions, relevant news items, etc. Quoting from the readings is always good, as is directly responding to the posts of your classmates. Remember you can link to outside articles or texts if they are pertinent. Even though I'm out of town next Monday-Wednesday conducting an external review of the English education program at Central Michigan University, I will join in the conversation as well. I will see you Thursday in class, as usual. Enjoy!
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PART 1
ReplyDeleteAs one of my readings this week, I read chapter 10 (Constructing a Language of Learning to Teach by Rob Simon) in Inquiry as Stance. What I loved about this chapter was the discussion of transparency. When we think of transparency in the classroom (or in the realm of education as a whole), what exactly do we mean? How much is too much transparency? When it is relevant to further learning? This chapter helped me answer, and expand my thoughts on these questions and my own understanding of what it means to be transparent.
For those who didn’t choose to read this chapter, here is a brief synopsis -This chapter is about a group of student teachers who were challenged (by their university professor) to question the “social and political contexts in which they work…[and to] view their classrooms…as sites of collaborative inquiry” (Simon, p.275-276). By doing this, they defined and realized the need for transparency in the classroom.
In defining transparency, Simon writes, “transparency invites openness with the goal of fostering candid, productive, and ostensibly, more equitable relationships with students” (p.277). This is how I have always thought of transparency, but in terms of the classroom, the only ways I have every really considered the implementation is being open and honest (transparent) about goals for the day, about why we have to read certain texts (like Shakespeare in a US lit. class), about my knowledge (or lack thereof) on certain topics, and sometimes about my own feelings or experiences. This last one is where I think transparency becomes tricky – which is why we always need to consider what and why we share and in what context. In any case, this is how I have always considered this term. However, as I read this chapter, I began to think about transparency in other contexts.
One of the things discussed in this chapter is the idea of “faking it” and “learning to play ‘the game’” of schooling as both students and teachers. (p.280) Playing the game is just one more one way of being a part of “the system.” However, if we truly think about what it means to fake IT, this “requires that ‘it’ be made transparent” (p.281). I really liked this statement because it is a way for us (and students) to interrogate faking it while also (if necessary) taking part in it (though I don’t like this thought). Or, perhaps if we interrogate IT, we help start to break it down. This section of the chapter made me think of other ways we do/can view transparency. What are some other ideas, terms, phrases, concepts that we can and need to interrogate and make transparent? I welcome any thoughts on this.
While I am a proponent of transparency, it does set one up to become vulnerable – especially when transparent about one’s self, or challenging educational institutions and authority. As one of the students in the study asked, “’can we be transparent without being vulnerable’” (p,284)? I would argue it’s almost impossible. What do you think? And if we do become vulnerable, is there anything wrong with or problematic about vulnerability?
At the end of the chapter Simon writes, “Transparency is not about clarifying regimes of truth but about complicating them” (p.290). I really liked this closing statement because I think it is something we all need to consider. I think defining transparency in this way allows for a broader conceptualization of the term, which in a way relates to other readings for this week.
PART 2
ReplyDeleteFor example, In Price’s article Preservice Teachers Becoming Agents of Change, one teacher, Linda, “selected readings and developed assignments to help students consider broad social implications of classroom practices and school improvement plans (e.g., equity, fairness, cultural responsiveness, etc.)” (Price, 2005, p.64). While this may be a bit different than what Simon discusses, I think actions like this can serve as a way of helping students challenge norms and make them more transparent.
Other than my obsession here with transparency, I also wanted to write a little bit about how the Manning and Mitchell reading, and the Brown essay (from chapter 9 of Inside Out) discuss culture and “culturally responsive practices.”
Though we all know the importance of culture, our students’ experiences, and making them an integral (not add on) part of our classrooms, I don’t think it is always put into practice. Instead, we end up with “holiday multiculturalism.”
This holiday multiculturalism was something Mitchell chose to combat, and she was successful. Instead of having a designated day or week, after some years trying different things, she realized the need for constant integration of culture into the classroom/curriculum. Part of this was conceding control by having parents and community members come to class and be the experts/teachers in the classroom. This allowed for a dialogue among teacher, students and parents, and it also allowed for a challenging of assumptions about students and their cultures. While this is all wonderful, my question is, how would you implement something like this in a high school setting? How would this translate to different disciplines? Would this require a restructuring of curriculum? Of the school’s values? Etc. What are your thoughts?
To end my meager discussion of culture, experience, and home, I want to mention a statement from Brown about language, more specifically, our mother tongues. She writes, “the dialect of the mother tongue honors the personal, the subjective, and the different” (Brown, p.242). I really liked this statement because it illuminates the power and importance of language. It also struck me because language is something I’ve been discussing with my students over the past few weeks. We’ve talked about “mother tongues” vs. the language of schools/schooling in the context of classroom discussion and writing. I know their thoughts and mine, and I don’t want to take up any more space, so I put it to all of you. How do we speak to (and embrace) students’ mother tongues, which some view (but don’t necessarily need to be) as being in conflict with the language of school/schooling?
While reading both the articles assigned and the chapters chosen from Inquiry as Stance (Chapter 8: Can We read a Happy Book Next?...)and Inside and Outside (Chapter 7: Oral Inquires), I could not help but think of Peter McLaren’s theory of revolutionary critical pedagogy. Revolutionary critical pedagogy
ReplyDelete[M]eans acknowledging global capital’s structurally determined inability to share power with the oppressed, its implication in racist, sexist, and homophobic relations, its functional relationship to xenophobic nationalism, and it tendency toward empire. It means acknowledging the educational left’s dependency on the very object of its negation: capital” (McLaren, 2007, p.29).
Now, based on McLaren’s definition there are major differences between systems of education that are deemed progressive and systems of education that are deemed revolutionary. One simple way of understanding the difference (this is where the articles and chapters embody this philosophy) between the two is this: If you are a progressive educator and you wanted to instruct diversity in the classroom, you may choose to do this with a day focused on the Mexican culture; however, if you are a revolutionary educator, you would choose not a day to educate students on the Mexican culture, but an entire curricula makeover promoting awareness on the Mexican culture.
In both the Souto-Manning and Mitchell article and Chapter 8 in Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s Inquiry as Stance, practical implementation of this revolutionary theory is described and used. Souto-Manning and Mitchell use a culturally diverse preschool classroom to apply “ideas on how teachers, parent/families and curriculum (and their roles) can be modified to foster a more diverse classroom that honors and respects diversity” (p. 276). So, essentially, the students’ own personal diversity was celebrated and integrated into daily curricula (p. 276). In the Inquiry as Stance chapter, Kelly Harper teaches in a predominantly affluent white community and implements multicultural education that could be deemed revolutionary in a school that is progressive at best. Their use of multicultural education is a writing prompt “that invited students to reflect on examples of social justice they had experienced or witnessed” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 230). By using the curriculum and critical thought, Harper chooses culture rich texts to teach from in order to create a critical dialogue about multiple cultures, rather than settling for the school’s writing prompt.
In the end, both the article and the chapter found that research enacted change, like described in the Price and Valli article. And a critical approach was taken by both teachers when reviewing their classrooms, their students, and their teaching practices; like described in the Inside and Outside chapter on oral inquires. The discussion of a much needed makeover on multicultural education in both classrooms created a revolutionary dialogue. The teachers had a choice in both examples; no one asked them to fix anything; however, because of belief in their profession and basic curiosity, change was made. And, luckily, their current and future students will reap the benefits.
As far as I am concerned, that is a success in Teacher Research. Although there is not a policy change, there is a change in local and community mentality. These students, who were taught of differences in a nurturing and encouraging fashion, will never forget that. And as they contribute to society, these exposures to and experiences with a culture (or cultures) different from their own will continue to reverberate.
FROM SUDHA:
ReplyDeleteThe article on action research in a
preschool classroom provides an
excellent example of returning to basics
in allowing the students to educate the
teacher on curriculum. The teacher learns
how to teach the students by observing them.
This preschool teacher's dilemma entailed
how to teach students of different backgrounds
in one class.
It did help that she already had a rapport with
them since she had taught them in their very
early formative years. She observed that the
students' favorite times were when the parents
came in to share stories, activities or pictures
about their traditions. The students preferred
the time with the parents over the planned
lessons the teacher constructed from the
multicultural books she read.
The most important lesson the teacher learned
was to treat each student as an individual
because she had learned something about each
pupil's family life. Her students helped her to
create a classroom community that promoted
respect through education which fostered
dialogue.
The article on preservice teachers as agents
of change focuses on the purpose of teaching.
Teaching is described as a complex practive
worthy of study; teaching is a complex, ongoing,
moral activity, and cannot be separated from the
circumstances.
The preservice math instructor exemplifies this
when she was instructing the students. She
naturally enjoyed math but in order to teach
the students she had to learn to relate math
skills to their individual lives, learn to think
from each of their perspectives. This article
informs the reader of the importance of
action research, of how crucial it is to
education, of the importance of teachers
in the lives of their students.
Thank you
Sudha
I'm sorry this is short and late. I got hit with a whopper of a nasty illness on Tuesday afternoon, while I was in the process of writing about my reading, and I haven't been able to think straight enough to continue until this morning. I wanted to use my blog space this week to flesh out what I think I might like to do for my seminar project, as I was inspired by my readings this week.
ReplyDeleteI chose to read Chapter 8 in Inside/Outside, which is the chapter that features several classroom and school-wide studies. Within that chapter is a study by Kathleen E. Wunner entitled “Great Expectations” (beginning on page 230) which speaks to something that I have often thought about in regards to student teachers, and Wunner's study is in some ways an extension of the study of preservice teachers by Price and Valli. Whereas Price and Valli looked at the ability of preservice student teachers to become agents of change within the schools where they were placed, Wunner examines the process through which first year teachers are “professionalized” in induction programs. Similarly to some of the student teachers in Price and Valli's piece, Wunner found that novice teachers were overwhelmed by the expectation that they display the same level of skill as the most experienced and most effective teachers in the school, regardless of the fact that they don't have the same level of experience.
Wunner was particularly interested in how the older teachers' “experience” trumped the novice teachers' grasp of new theories and techniques when they came together in groups to plan. She quotes Little (The Persistence of Privacy), who says, “There is some evidence that such 'outside' knowledge [i.e. theoretical reading, in-services, etc.] is selectively discounted when decision making groups come together. A conservative bias is introduced when the most powerful warrant for action is personalized and localized in classroom history” (on pg. 237 of my text). In my own preservice experience and in what I have observed in my previous experience as a university supervisor, the latest research and theoretical texts take a backseat to what one's cooperating teacher (and to some extent administration) expect of the student teacher, and according to Wunner, this continues into the first year as new teachers are rushed toward “instant professionalism” (p. 232). I believe that these expectations are situated in the teaching philosophy of the cooperating teacher, which is seated within the larger history of the school culture. I believe that the members of our university's English teacher preparation program foreground post-modern theory and critical pedagogy, and I wonder how much of that student teachers feel able to cling to. I could study my student teachers now and possibly extend this into their first year of teaching if they are willing to stay in contact and communicate with me.
I also wonder what I can do differently that would provide them with the support they need to do what they can to maintain a critical stance while student teaching, even if they don't feel free to enact a liberatory curriculum (Bill Ayers' term – I should look that up and include him in my background research). The article about the preschool teacher mentions taking a “humble stance” (Friere's term). Would taking a humble stance and foregrounding the student teachers' experiences help?? Maybe creating a small group blog for their weekly posts so they can respond to each other?? I am open to more ideas if anyone has any – thanks!
Theorizing and Journaling:
ReplyDeleteWhile reading through the articles for this week and the two chapters from the texts (Chapter 13 of Inquiry as Stance, “Teacher Research as a Collective Struggle for Humanization” and Chapter 6 of Inside/Outside, “Journals”), I began thinking about the role theory does or does not and should or should not play in teacher journaling as a method of data collection. Although I began to pose questions about the relationship of these two while originally completing the reading, it was a class discussion in my course tonight that finalized my decision to focus on theorizing for this post. We read McLaren’s Life in Schools, a must read both from the critical and teacher research perspectives, and Nathalia explained to us how McLaren originally allowed his journal from while he was teaching in a poor suburban school in Canada to be published without providing any analysis or theoretical framework. McLaren’s book, which describes unbelievable daily atrocities at this school, became a best-seller, which please McLaren until he happened to hear on the radio the lead of a White-supremacist group encouraged all listeners to read his text as an argument against immigration because he claimed it showed how animalistic and violent these people were (he said it was proof that they should close the borders). Needless to say, Peter was enraged and refused to republish the book (which is on its 5th edition now) without providing the essential theory and framework that was needed for readers to understand the larger societal and systemic inequities that create these kinds of situations.
In chapter six of the Inside/Outside text, Strieb describes journaling as a way to “learn about, inquire into, collection data about, and enhance [her] practice as well as to learn about and plan for the children” (p. 121) but unfortunately did not describe or give examples of how to add a theoretical lens on this type of data (which I hoped they would because I’m very interested in journaling as a method of data collection for my own research someday). The entries provided were interesting, and I believe that they probably did help these teachers to reflect on their own practice and methods within their classrooms, but I believe what would make this interesting and relevant would be to add the next layer of theory.
When reading through articles with journal entries or even narratives, I often find myself questioning how the authors have gotten from point A to point B, from the direct words of the students’ or their journal entries to their explanations, conclusions, implications, etc. While I enjoy getting to hear these pieces and feel like they give a more authentic voice to the research, I also feel like researchers have to be careful with what they do with these snippets. What I mean by that is that that often we’re given a quote or two without more details about how the researcher inferred what he/she did about the intended meaning in what someone has said. For example, in the Price and Valli article, they take a statement by Gretchen about how she realized that she needed to change her classroom structure to conclude that her experience with action research “reveal shifts in understanding teaching and in constructing their [she and the other participants’] roles as teachers” (p. 64).
While I can see how this statement would lead them to believe that to some extent she this experience contributed to her “constructing” her role as a teacher, I also would have been interested to hear additional evidence of this. Were these conclusions reached based on this comment alone? They mention that Gretchen kept a “reflection journal,” but there is not more information provided about if there was other evidence of how she constructed her role as teacher specifically. That said, this article did offer more details than is sometimes provided.
Part II:
ReplyDeleteThe article I read in Inquiry as Stance, “Teacher Research as a Collective Struggle for Humanization” put another interesting spin on this topic because Compano argues for placing theory and practice “in a more mutually generative dialectic” (p. 326). His argument is that instead of applying theory as a way to “put students’ experiences in boxes, to develop generalizable laws…, or to discover an underlying cultural logic of behavior,” adopting an “inquiry stance involves a larger, metatheoretical position where theory takes on a pluralistic quality and pragmatically exists in a dynamism with practice in order to unleash student (and teacher) potentials” (p. 332). Essentially, for teachers, theory and practice become constant and inseparable. I love this idea and think that for teachers it’s just that added step of continually checking our knowledge and practices against one another and adding language of theory as lenses on our initial reflections, taking the time to go back and consider possibly interpretations and implications of our observations and being careful not to jump to conclusions or make assumptions based on something we think we may have seen. I think this will benefit not only our own personal classroom practices but also the larger conclusions and implications we draw as well as the field of teacher research.
I often think about the potential of teachers and schools as sites of cultural change, and, so, I found the Price/Valli article very interesting. I think we have already touched on this issue in class before, but I think it is an important one to come back to. This article hits on the main issue with this subject: the tension between teaching students to be agents of change in their classrooms and schools, and then sending them out into restrictive systems whose regulatory functions do not accept such change. With this in mind, I really appreciated the authors comments on p. 70 where they offer two "important lessons for teacher educators." The first bit of advice being that teachers should not be afraid to be agents of change--thinking that it is too controversial or above their abilities. And, second, that being an agent of change starts right in the everyday practice of the classroom; it is "deeply embedded in everyday pedagogy" (p. 70). I think that this advice is exciting, and it makes me wonder if a lot of potential change has been stifled because teachers thought they didn't have enough influence to make a difference. This also makes me think back to our previous discussion about cultural change and a point that I shared that comes from professor James Hunter (UVA). Hunter studies cultures and how they change, and has found throughout his research that change does not happen because of laws or other types of top-down restrictions, but, rather, change happens through the everyday interactions and relationships of people. For teachers, this means that what do in the classroom is already significant for changing culture--at the class, school, district, and beyond. Knowing this, it seems, allows us to take positive steps towards increasing things like equity in our schools. The question is no longer "what can I do? I'm just one teacher." Instead, teachers should ask: "What must I do within my own sphere of influence to improve my students lives?" If all teachers asked this question and then acted on it, then, perhaps, the larger culture would begin to change as well.
ReplyDeleteBefore I begin, I want to apologize in advance for the disarray that my thoughts are being displayed here. I'm still really thinking through some of my thoughts and questions about the reading.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the article by Price and Valli, I had a lot of questions about pre-service teachers as action researchers. Do you think that pre-service teachers can be action researchers/teacher researchers? Is this different for novice teachers?
I know that the article demonstrates that this is possible and that there isn't really any barrier standing in the way, but I want to know if you should have some experience in the classroom before trying to become an agent of change. If action research is defined implies change and the definition of an action researcher is an agent of change, how does one know what needs to be changed if he/she has not spent time in the environment?
This is not to say that pre-service teachers do not know what the issues are in education, but is there something to be said about having direct contact/experiences with those issues to better determine what needs to be changed? Isn't this one of the main tensions in most schools? I think back to myself as a pre-service teacher and first year teacher and think that I might not have even known where to begin in conducting my own action/teacher research. Putting the lack of experience aside, I would think that time would play a big factor in this as well. Most experienced teachers have difficulty doing research and teaching.
I hope that this doesn't come off as being negative or against pre-service teachers doing action research. I'm really curious as to how this works and would love to see more examples of this. Has anybody had experience with this as a pre-service teacher? If so, did you feel confident in conducting your research? What did you research? What were the results? Are they still meaningful after having more experience in the field?
The following thoughts are a reflection on the discussion of oral inquiry found in Chapter 7 of Inside/Outside by Cochran-Smith and Lytle.
ReplyDeleteAs a student of history interested in collecting the oral narratives of individuals, the chapter title oral inquiry intrigued me. I selected the chapter because I wanted to know Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s take on teacher stories as educational research. As practitioners in the k-12 setting, we have circled around the declaration in our class discussions that teacher talk does contribute valuable knowledge to the field of education. But beyond myself and my own classroom, how can I transform teacher talk into oral inquiry?
Documentary reflective processes, a method developed by Patricia Carini to conduct an oral inquiry, was presented as open-ended and systematic. Initially I found the statement to be an oxymoron as anything systematic cannot be open-ended. The negative connotations of systematic bring up images of a tightly-coupled education system where the expectation is that all students end up the same, producers of high test scores. Schools are to be efficient and the only way to maintain and increase efficiency is through a tightly-closed system where there is little room for variables to have an effect. Perhaps this is overboard, but I found it difficult to associate systematic with being a responsive, reflective practitioner.
As a quick overview, there are six steps to Carini’s method:
1) Convene the session
2) Describe the Child (also called descriptive review)
a. Physical presence and gesture
b. Disposition
c. Relationships with children and adults
d. Activities and interests
e. Formal learning
3) Restate the themes found in the description
4) Other Descriptions
5) Questions about the student
6) Recommendations
By the end of Kanevsky’s contribution to chapter 7, it was my opinion that TLC stood for Tender Love and Care in addition to Teachers Learning Cooperative. Although the process was systematic, the body of knowledge Kanevsky gathered through observation and revealed through oral inquiry for the purpose of understanding how to support a child as a learner was open-ended and valuable. Kanevsky described the TLC meetings as a place where,” Our lives as thinkers and teachers become integrated.” In an environment where teachers possess the common goal of being reflective and responsive, they are focused on constructing a mental image of the student being described in steps one through five and then contributing to a list of recommendations for the presenting teacher. The systematic approach allowed the image of the child and her learning styles to be revealed and as participating teachers listened to the descriptions, they could write questions to ask during step five and a list of recommendations for step six.
Descriptive review expands vision and becomes another way of looking. (p. 162) The conversations that took place through descriptive review on one child expanded the knowledge about children, classrooms, and schools for the participating educators. By focusing on one, these teachers contributed to a body of knowledge that can help many. Kanevsky contributes this to the “power of descriptive knowledge: knowledge and vision becoming one,” and to what Himley (1991) calls “deep talk,” a constructing of knowledge that values many ways of knowing – spirit, will, imagination, intellect, emotion. (p. 162)
I think deep-talk is what makes this process open-ended. All of the recommendations contributed during step six are accepted during the meeting. The list that is generated comes from multiple perspectives and experiences. By preparing the description, the content for the meeting, and then accepting the questions and recommendations, the presenting teacher is conjoined and separated from the situation simultaneously. Biases are sifted out and valuable information that contributes to the body of knowledge we have about school emerges.
Maybe systematic is not such a bad word after all, at least not in this context.