Course Trajectory: the Socio-historical Occasion

There has been much positive response among the class to the Kaufman and Torda's article on book clubs, "On Not Being Only One Thing." If you haven't yet, read Kylie's response on her blog in which she shares her illuminating experience doing books clubs with her 114 class.

While I find their work beneficial in thinking about engaging students with their reading and understanding metacognitively the processes that they employ while reading and writing, Kaufman and Torda frame their coursework largely in expressivist theory which has its limitations. Expressivists privilege the reader, encouraging personal and subjective responses to the reading. In addition, there are no universal truths; the reader is free to make personal meaning out the text. I can agree with much that expressivists believe, but I think we can go farther and dig deeper.

I am interested in expanding an expressivist perspective into more of the work done in cultural studies. The reader is still an agent but has a socio-historical context within which to inquiry and challenge ideas. There are still no universal truths, but instead of the individual creating truth, we discuss how truth is agreed upon socially, a socio-epistemic perspective on meaning.

I may be adrift at sea here, but having taught at community college for the past three years, I think first-year composition classes are hungry for this cultural and historical contextualization. Students would embrace being an agent with a real context to challenge and question. The common research papers they currently write about Obamacare or immigration give them the space to comment, but they are largely unfulfilled, still hungry for the work they do in class to matter. And they are right. Students spend hours looking for research articles on EBSCO because we tell them that databases contain academic sources, and only academic sources have the authority to discuss important issues. Well then, that statement completely undermines why they would write a research paper!

This idea aligns with the inquiry discussion we had in class on Monday, and why we design inquiry-based courses. Students must use MLA citations in their papers. Therefore, we teach them how it's done, but what if they want to know why MLA works that way; why it's the standard?; who decides?; where did it come from? Without inquiry, our course has no purpose. But to expand that purpose so students finish our courses with knowledge they can transfer to any cultural situation: that is the philosophical engine that drives our purpose.

Now all I need is the pedagogy to make it happen. I'll be in the library ...

The Inquiry Paradox: How Do We Teach Inquiry While Valuing Individual Truths?

We have done a lot of reading and much discussion has been focused on treating students as colleagues in the social context of the classroom, even developing those ideas and accounting for data that demonstrates that giving students control over the meaning they make in the classroom is beneficial for their reading and writing processes. In addition, teachers invite students to participate in community-building and social exercises that build trust, not just between the teacher and student but among students crucially. In such a classroom, the ideal participation for a novice, first-year composition student would be honest academic inquiry in a multicultural context that elicits response and discussion from peers as well as creates meaning for her individual experience.

Given this, I have been struggling with a marginal, yet very important to me, implication of this classroom environment. As part of the multicultural classroom, teachers encourage breadth of perspective in inquiry and individual values influence those perspectives. When a student shares a perspective that is true for her, free inquiry prescribes that any other individual can challenge that truth (with evidence) and may conclude that he or she is not compelled to value what is true for the first individual.

In my personal view, I would support this inquiry and challenge. It's true that what one person holds true does not need to be valued by a second person, or by everyone else. As an ethical teacher, I would want to support community-building on a foundation of trust and respectful discourse in my classroom; therefore, my pedagogical stance would be to ask that everyone value the truths of everyone else to avoid a break of trust or offense.

However, this response violates the theoretical stance of my classroom by impeding dialectical discourse. Moreover, the classroom would be not be valuing what is true for the second student (among others) whose truth requires inquiry, doubt, and the freedom to do so. I would be acting unethically as a teacher if I disallowed free inquiry, critical thought, and the space to disagree--not to mention the imposition that everyone's truth must be valued as if it were one's own truth.

I am truly disturbed by this paradox, but I honestly want to understand it. When the time comes and I have to resolve this problem, I want to know how to do so fairly and justly and in keeping with the ethics of my classroom.

Theorizing Teacher A's Redesign: an Accidental Polemic

At the end of Wednesday's class, Jennifer asked us to theorize the following (we didn't exactly have time for it, but I was interested and kept it in mind):

"Based on data showing that this method improves students' interest in reading and therefore promotes learning, Teacher A allows students to choose their reading for the unit. However, the students all choose inappropriate texts, and Teacher A responds by redesigning a list of more appropriate texts that the student may choose to read for the unit."

Put simply, we are faced with defining "appropriate texts" for our student-centered classrooms. However, not meaning to be obstinate, I don't think that is the central problem when evaluating the given scenario even though it is an essential question for us all to answer before giving our students the choice of texts they will read for class. The problem is Teacher A's decision to revoke a choice the students had already made. I will outline a few of the theoretical points we have covered in our reading, and then come to my point.

We have read composition studies theory and experimental data that supports the idea that student-centered curriculum stabilizes student motivation and keeps them interested and engaged in their reading process. Alfie Kohn describes many of the typical ways teachers ruin student motivation to read in "How to Create Nonreaders." He states convincingly that student autonomy "supports deeper learning and enthusiasm." Therefore, it is our responsibility grapple with this perspective and employ it to the benefit of our students.

In addition, Vygotsky among many others like Stuart Greene and Sugie Goen who have theorized composition studies contends that reading is a social practice. The work we do in our classrooms requires a community of students working together to discover meaning. To build such a community of social learners, the instructor facilitates the creation of trust between colleagues, instructor included. The classroom is a safe place where students can freely explore ideas, whether they are wrong, right, or hypothetical. Their colleagues support participation without judgment. This support and encouragement must be fostered by the instructor in order to give the student the confidence to take risks and improve their reading.

I feel obligated as a first-year graduate student among my colleagues to briefly address the uncertainty some of us feel with the idea of a student-centered classroom as a good learning environment. Here is the theory as I understand it. The institution of higher learning presumes that the teacher has a moral standard that they must attain for teaching student objectives in their courses. If a teacher designs a highly democratic, student-centered classroom, the institution (as well as her own moral foundation as a teacher) obligates her to lead the students toward the learning objectives for that course. It would be unethical for an instructor to knowingly let even a single student meander into a purposeless gulag of misinformation. 

Having now framed my point, I get to it.

Beginning with student choice, Teacher A undermined the purpose of her class. The students were given a chance at autonomy by choosing their own texts, but choice that can be revoked is not choice at all. There is therefore no support from the instructor in promoting student motivation and interest.

Secondly, by negating student choice, Teacher A betrayed student trust within the learning community. Students will feel as though they made a wrong choice, serious enough to have the curriculum redesigned. I imagine it would be difficult for students to recover their sense of community after that, and possibly even more damaging, recover their confidence in their choices. Student risk-taking would stall because of their crisis in confidence, making the possibility of learning much more difficult.

Finally, based on undermining the class and inhibiting student learning, Teacher A has made an error with moral consequences. Teachers make changes to their curriculum frequently, depending on what works well or whether time runs short. Teacher A unfortunately has destabilized the purpose of her class. With students now timid autonomy, they will struggle to make important decisions for the class. Teacher A's course objectives in question, what becomes of her moral standard for student learning? A significant part of her purpose for the class has changed, and it must be redefined to be at all ethical. This moral problem is compounded by the loss of trust and confidence the students experienced. It would have been better to begin the class with a list from which the students could choose texts than to give students the impression that their choice is meaningless by taking it away. She has done the students a moral disservice, and I sound so earnest because it may take some students a very long time to recover their confidence after sending them the message that they can't be trusted to choose a text that interests them. With so much at stake for the future of student learning, a teacher must understand the moral responsibility she has to her students. Otherwise, she has failed them.

I didn't intend to write a polemic, but I only discovered the extent of the stakes as I continued writing and my tone gathered mass as I went. I leave the defining of "appropriate texts" to other time or another colleague. I thought it was more important to discuss these problems first.

Book Club 1: "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys"

The authors of "No Chevys" claim that there is a problem with boys underperforming in literacy. They provide statistical evidence to support this claim, but the authors state their purpose oddly, in my opinion--that attention has been brought to the troubles girls have been having in math and sciences and now the time has come to address the problem of literacy with boys. Stated this way, it seems to be a response to recent feminist arguments on education, but the authors explicitly state that the "book is not another entry in the gender wars." Fair enough, but it does raise the eyebrows.

Nonetheless, the authors do competently enter a conversation, though it becomes a bit convoluted as they seem to address all possible ways of framing their study. Gender, violence, masculinity, critical theory, history, structuralism: all are used as entry points into the project, which is confusing until reading further reading suggest that they settle on traditional social contexts of boys' education. They then interview various students from different regions to collect data on their literacy.

The authors establish an integrated reading and writing perspective, using Vygotksy as a basis for literacy as a sociocultural model. The idea that students move from novice to expert is an improvement upon the labels "beginner" and "remedial." In any case, the authors discuss the importance of the idea of "flow" as conceived by Csikszentmihalyi. It is in line with parts of Sugie Goen's objectives from "Integrated Reading and Writing," that enjoyment, satisfaction, and confidence are a part of a student's literacy. For me, this raises the question of whether one must enjoy their literacy to be competent. I will come back to this question because I think it is worth discussing in the context of the stakes of literacy.

During their interviewing process, the authors uncover useful insights into boys' literacy. The students understand the importance of reading (and education in general) but mostly as instrumental in preparing for some future success instead of an immediate experience of successful learning. I think that this is the crux of the whole book. Are students interested in inquiry when it doesn't seem to inform their future vocations? The implications are similar to Alfie Kohn's ideas of creating non-readers. As long as reading is perceived as schoolish, there is a disconnect between its immediate value and its usefulness in getting a job. The students interviewed revealed interesting clues as to why this is. Characteristics that seemed important to them were 1)having clear goals 2) feedback and 3) focus on the immediate experience. It seems with reading, if we teachers can engage students as colleagues and read as a social act in conversation with something important in the student's immediate environment, we will have higher success in having them understand the value of reading in their lives.

My inquiry into this book will continue, and I hope to be able to contend with their data for strengths and especially weaknesses and unanswered questions. 

Student Colleagues

After immersing myself in the abstract readings of composition theory, I am suddenly at ease when I engage with the pedagogical practices of an honest teacher--one who truly wants the best for his students. Alfie Kohn's essay, "How to Create Nonreaders," was a drink of cool water. It contains helpful and contemporary strategies for guiding a successful classroom by engaging students' autonomy. Speaking from his honest and reflective experience in his own classroom, Kohn takes on students assessment (in light of "No Child Left Behind") and is self-critical of his own urge to impose curriculum upon his students.

Kohn exposes some common classroom practices as the reason for student apathy. Students decide against engaging with reading communities if they are forced to quantify their reading, report on it in isolation, focus on testable skills and suppress their choices. These ideas agree with the predominant perspective of literacy pedagogy that we have discussed in class: independent learners and dialectical discourse. Smagorinsky alighted briefly on this point, and it can also by found in Woerkum's "The Active Reader."

In essence Kohn's central idea is that teachers should view their students as colleagues. He argues that a teacher cannot motivate a student to read, but the teacher can create the learning environment necessary to promote reading and dialectical discussion. The teacher does this by establishing a discourse community in which the teacher asks students to choose rather than dictates lessons. It's the difference between a totalitarian classroom in which rules are imposed, and a classroom that allows democratic and individual freedom.

It's not amorphous and Montessori-like in Kohn's proposed classrooms, as it may sound. Students are given an academic space in which they can generate ideas and actively engage with the curriculum by offering response questions, or test dates, or essay topics. The instructor still has a job to do by guiding student inquiry to meet course objectives.

Why is Kohn's article relevant to current pedagogy and practice? A teacher's major obstacle is getting students to engage with their reading. If we replace condescension in the classroom with the idea that students are our colleagues, they will be empowered to join the discussion and make educational choices that fit their needs. Let them tell us. Then, they will be doing the same work as us as teachers: motivating themselves to educate.

Questions for Elizabeth King

1. How do you design and redesign your reading curriculum for the range of socioeconomic backgrounds represented in just one class?

2. How do you approach instruction on irony and other non-literal reading?

3. How do you balance the goal of creating self-sufficient learners with avoiding condescension?

Does the Scaffolding Hold Up to Inquiry?

In the few years I have worked with city college students, I have learned from more qualified and experienced teachers than I that the best method for providing a student agency over their writing and inquisitiveness in their work is to back off from teaching writing as a skill with dozens of procedural steps and allow the student to organically discover her own path through the hedge of composition. As I read Smagorinsky's instruction on scaffolding, I cringed to think of barraging one of my students with such a lengthy exercise of modeling and following, even if it was to be supported as Smagorinsky suggests with judgement and evaluation of student need. I don't necessarily disagree with his idea of scaffolding, but his example lesson on response logs strikes me as burdensome for a student's creativity in handling an inquiry in a way that is compatible with her method of learning.

In one sense, Smagorinsky contradicts his own idea of the benefit of scaffolding by illustrating his point with the analogy of the carpenter. The carpenter allows his apprentice to be self-sufficient in a way that we don't see when Smagorinsky turns to the classroom. Is apprenticeship therefore a different style of teaching than scaffolding?

Despite my challenge to Smagorinsky's scaffold, he retains an ethos that I can agree with: writing is a tool used to discover what you have to say. When teaching concepts and critical reading, allow the student to be independent in thought and not rely on the teacher for interpretation. This idea stirs in me a question that I hope to answer for myself in the coming months of this program: What is the compromise between teaching a need-to-know style as opposed to commando style? By need-to-know I mean providing a student with only enough information to get through the task at hand (however I am not sure if the intent is to ease the burden of too much information [which seems condescending] or to allow for their own inquiry to develop). Commando is the point of view that the teacher equips the student with more information than she needs, to be used if and when she encounters a problem or feels courageous enough to explore something they have never tried (like a spy or MacGyver type who is trained to handle multiple situations or improvise to complete a task). It's a question that I has troubled me in the past, and I hope that through inquiry I can answer it, or possibly even discard it as inapplicable.

In any case, I know that modeling works in the classroom, and it is required as part of the apprenticeship model. I am also aware that I have much to learn and explore before I am a qualified college teacher; therefore, I should give more thought to Smagorinsky as part of the conversation. How does scaffolding differ from modeling? When might scaffolding be appropriate for a lesson and how do we retain and encourage a student's independent work?