Showing papers in "English in Education in 1989"

With Worldmaking, Planning Models Matter.

Abstract: As a graduate assistant serving as a university supervisor, I worked in a teacher preparation program that was attempting to address many of the traditional constraints placed on the thought and action of preservice teachers. Able field teachers were selected, preservice teachers had plenty of time to observe and plan, and the beginners were not hampered with a full day teaching load. Most importantly, the preservice teachers spent almost two years within a preparation program based on the goals set forth in NCTE's Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of English/Language Arts (1986). Yet, for some reason the preservice English teachers with whom I worked were not exercising their "worldmaking" capacities (Goodman 1978, 1984; Bruner, 1986). Instead of designing new versions of classroom life by integrating into their first unit plans sound theories and methodologies for teaching literature and writing, they often reneged and produced unit plans characteristic of the old-world instructional routine (Goodlad, 1984): giving the reading assignments for homework, discussing the questions at the end of the text, taking the quiz. Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading literature and writing process workshop methodologies never figured in their plans. So I was puzzled. Why weren't they planning rich learning environments, creating new worlds? The recent research (Clark & Peterson, 1986) on teacher planning gave me a lead. Robert Yinger's (1982) case study revealed that the good planner he observed did not plan as I had asked my preservice teachers to plan. Acting out of tradition, I had encouraged them to use a "rational means-end" (Clark & Peterson, 1986) planning model first advocated by Ralph Tyler in 1950 and used since then in adapted

Censorship and Spiritual Education.

Abstract: If you're like me, you twitch and go uh-oh when you hear someone say "spiritual" or "spirituality." Holy stuff from someone who's no better than I am. Or somebody who's just found religion, usually after years of wreaking havoc. Or the words simply sound too airy to mean anything. Or maybe we associate "spiritual" with mortification of the flesh, with superstition, with church corruption, holy wars, inquisitions, and, yes, censorship. Modern intellectuals have reason to distrust the word, and I certainly hesitate using it because it's apt to trigger associations that will smother my other words. But I haven't found any better term. So I'll begin by trying to refurbish it a bit. I think I can do this best if I distinguish spirituality from morality and religion. Morality concerns good and bad behavior. As the root meanings of both "morals" and "ethics" indicate, these come from the customs of some group, an ethos. Morality is caught, not taught. Knowing right is not so much the problem as doing it, and most reasons for not doing it are very extracurricular, involving, in fact, all the rest of the culture, some of which may very well contradict these morals, which at any rate hardly apply to treatment of outsiders. As its root meaning suggests, religion aims to tie the individual back to some less apparent reality from which he or she has been diverted by, presumably, people and other attractive hazards in the environment. However divinely inspired, any religion partakes of a certain civilization, functions through human institutions, and is therefore culturally biased. Precisely because of this partiality and even partisanship, our devoutly Christian founding fathers refrained from making theirs the state religion and rightly forbade any theocracy. Nothing fuels war so hotly as the word of God construed by the mind of man.

The Spectator as Theorist: A Reply.

Abstract: I am grateful for this opportunity to comment upon Joseph Harris's critique of my conception of "spectator role" (English Education, February 1988). While the conceptual "map" of language uses Mr. Harris outlines does, I think, with one important exception, plot the boundaries between forms of discourse in a way broadly similar to my own analysis, there are differences in the terms he uses to label these areas. Such variations in nomenclature may sometimes reflect conventional rather than substantive differences. However, although his category of speculative designates a viable range of language uses, it is not, for me, coincident with language in the role of spectator. The fact is, I believe and I hope I may say so without offence that I wish to emphasize a major distinction in forms of discourse that Mr. Harris's use of the terms would not distinguish. It is a deep-seated distinction, not unconnected with the difference between work and play. It is a distinction that most fully exhibits itself at the mature, fully articulated end of a developmental spectrum so that there are many uses of language in which it is diluted, disguised, partial. Our understanding of those uses, however, is in my opinion enhanced by seeing their relationship to the developed forms. The distinction has been the subject of many comments from readers, from writers, from critics. What is reputedly a Chinese proverb distinguished poetry from other forms of discourse by claiming that "in poetry meaning lies in and beyond the words." The topic of such introspective, casual or analytic, scholarly or conversational, comments will sometimes be designated as poetry sometimes literature, sometimes (rather indiscriminately) narrative but our concern here is with what is common with the added assumption perhaps that the features we find in poems we shall see in less marked forms in stories. We might begin by reminding ourselves that there is a problem here worth tackling. In the 1958 Interdisciplinary Symposium on Style in

The Helping Hand Strikes Again?: An Exploration of Language, Learning, and Teaching.

Abstract: An anecdote may serve as a prelude to what follows in order to establish my deep-seated prejudice about help. In 1967, I was asked by the principal of my high school if I would take "Leaving Geography," a publicly examined subject for students in their fourth year of secondary school. When I protested that I had not gone beyond third year secondary school myself and therefore was in no way qualified, he persisted, indicating that the previous year's teacher had achieved the horrifying result of seventeen failures out of nineteen. He said I could do no worse. Thus it was that I became a Geography teacher overnight. On the first day with the class I asked them to indicate who had done well in third year Geography. Luckily, of the twenty-five, five showed confidence. I made them group leaders and assigned teams to each. I then explained that I would divide the course into two week units. For each unit, one team would research the information, do the teaching, set the test and mark the assignments. There would be a system of rotation. We would proceed in this way for two terms. In the third term we would all revise and sit the public examination together. To say the least, they were stunned, especially when I explained that I had not passed "Leaving Geography" myself. Next day, several very concerned parents challenged the school principal who stood firm, saying he had "great faith in Mr. Boomer." Meanwhile, I appeared confident while inwardly quaking. I need not have worried. It was for me a brilliant year of learning about teaching (and not teaching). The classroom was always a buzz

The Well-Told Teaching Story: A Resource for Teachers of English

Abstract: In teaching students how to read, write, and think about stories, teachers of English themselves use stories. They also draw upon stories in their discourse with other teachers, stories about their own teaching, about students and other teachers, about school, and about teaching English. Taken together, these stories constitute the narrative wisdom within which teachers work. Teachers' narrative wisdom can be examined systematically in a number of ways. Teachers' stories can be collected and analyzed in terms of content and the occasions of their use. Teachers can be interviewed about how they perceive and interpret the narrative components of their professional wisdom. Or, teachers can be observed in an effort to witness and document their use of narrative when they are talking with students, administrators, and other teachers. As a complement and stimulus to these more systematic forms of inquiry, this article describes an effort by five teachers and educators to examine the "well-told teaching story" through group discussion on a panel entitled "The Well-Told Teaching Story: A Neglected Resource in the Education of Teachers" during a conference focusing on the "narrative wisdom of teachers" that was hosted in September, 1987 by the Curriculum Study Commission of the Central California Council of Teachers of English. The Participants on the panel included Bob Boynton (a publisher and former English teacher), Miles Myers (a former English teacher who is now President of the California Federation of Teachers), Russell Hill (a novelist and high school English teacher), and Pfeter Stillman (an editor, writer and English teacher). Jon Wagner (a sociologist and administrator with the University of California) served as moderator and edited the following text of the discussion.

Working in the Classroom: Teachers Talk about What They Do.

Abstract: UCSB is a campus of 20,000 students. Here sixty lecturers, some parttime, teach the Freshman writing sequence, a loose amalgam of three quarter courses, taught in a wide variety of ways by these faculty members, who are very clearly a separate class, not members of the tenured or tenure-track English faculty This article is the first to grow out of a collaborative project by five of us. We hoped, by watching each other teach, to answer the questions, 'What is Composition?" and "What does it mean to be a teacher of it?" We are still exploring those questions together, but this article focuses on the collaboration itself and what it contributed to our vitality and sense of identity

Multicultural Education: The Opening of the American Mind.

Abstract: During the first class meeting of my course, "Children's Literature of Emerging Nations," I asked the 35 students all undergraduate elementary education majors to list the words or phrases that came to mind when they heard the words "developing" or "emerging" nations. I wanted to uncover some of the students' assumptions as well as their expectations for the course, which had not been offered at Central Michigan University for many years, and which I was teaching for the first time.

Mrs. Schuster Adopts Discussion: A Four-Week Experiment in an English Classroom.

Abstract: We were meeting over school lunch in a noisy high school cafeteria. Mrs. Schuster had only twenty-five minutes between classes, so our conversation would need to be brief and to the point. We had become friends or at least educational compatriots while conducting a study in which we had regularly observed her teaching for a period of six months. And yet it was difficult to open this conversation over a slightly stale cheese sandwich, lukewarm tomato soup, and a carton of 2% milk. "We've been listening to the tapes we made while we were observing your class." A pregnant pause. "Have you considered listening to yourself as you teach?" At that she smiled, looked up from her soup, and said, "You mean I talk too much in class, don't you?" Precisely. But, it was difficult to say it. At the beginning of the six month study in which we had observed Mrs. Schuster and one other English teacher, we asked them to indicate what teaching methods they preferred to use while instructing secondary school students in the study of literature. Mrs. Schuster listed discussion, recitation, paraphrase, and oral reading in that order. As her preferred method, she believed she used discussion frequently at least three or four times a week while teaching literature. But, our observations over a six month period failed to support this claim. Almost all socalled discussion time was really time spent using recitation. In practice, only five percent of class time was used for discussion, while forty-four percent was devoted to recitation and fifty-one percent to paraphrase and oral reading. Perhaps in Mrs. Schuster's mind there was little distinction between recitation and discussion: both methods require an active verbal interchange between participants. The interchange in recitation, however, is solely between a teacher and a student; while in discussion the interchange is predominantly between student and student. Also, as researchers, we had observed that the majority of students who were

Fighting Baptism with a Hose: Understanding Student Resistance to Liberation Pedagogy.

Abstract: One thing that most teacher training programs fail to take into account are the factors of student resistance that oppose advances in liberation pedagogy. Despite teachers' attempts to change from what Bakhtin calls an "authoritative" (1981, p. 342) mode of teaching to the role of a senior learner, we often encounter resistance from students who come into the classroom with preconceived ideas about what a writing class is and how teachers should teach. Yet despite awareness of the lingering effects of students' early socialization, teacher trainers sometimes encourage teachers to transform their classrooms into a site of Freirian pedagogy by painting simplistic portraits of North American students, portraying them as analogous to the South American peasants about whom Freire writes. The dominant picture of these students, as represented in journals like Radical Teacher and College English, is not only one of individuals who are dissatisfied with the regimentation of school and eager to assert control in a world that they feel oppresses them. It is of people who, if shown a crack in the veneer of school authority, would virtually jump at the chance to question that institution's authority and try to "liberate" themselves. What I wish to argue is that this characterization is both inaccurate and naive - it operates at a simplistic level of logic which we would not hesitate to criticize in student texts. The assumptions made by teacher educators, and by some of the well-intentioned practitioners of Freirian pedagogy, about education's ability to change the power relations that exist in the world send sometimes misleading, sometimes hypocritical, and often conflicting messages to students. While I do not mean to condemn Freirian pedagogy by some of the 1 This essay began as a paper presented at the seventy-eighth Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. Its present form owes much to the advice of my colleagues Mike Rose and Melanie Eckford-Prossor who were generous with their time and attention.

The Micropolitics of Supervision.

Abstract: I am relatively new at supervising student teachers. This is my third year. I spent most of my first year learning the lay of the land and watching myself make plenty of honest but naive errors in judgment. My biggest error that year was making a disastrous placement with a supervising teacher whose name appeared on a list provided by my predecessor. This twenty year veteran swore at his high school students, threw pencils at them, and chatted with his surfing club members while his student teacher attempted instruction. The best action I took that first year was to insist that he stay out of the classroom when his student teacher was teaching. By battling to keep the student teacher already a more effective teacher than his mentor in a class that respected him, I learned that I am the only protection a student teacher has, his or her only advocate in a system where student teachers haven't the perspective to realize they are being treated unfairly and haven't the power to do much about it when they do. I also learned how critical it is to know my supervising teachers and to negotiate placements wisely. Basically, I learned that my job is exceedingly political, and that I had better become politically adept very quickly, because my students' welfare depends upon me. It depends upon my ability to negotiate within a practice teaching placement system that frequently relies upon supervising teachers who are not by training or personality well suited to supporting student teachers. Although I chose to become a supervisor of English teachers in training to help influence who enters the classroom and what they do there, I am at heart and by training a classroom teacher, having taught English for eighteen years at various levels, from junior high to university. I cannot emphasize enough that I am a teacher, not a politician. Politics have always seemed shoddy to me, and politicians' motives suspect. Yet, political processes are necessary ways of con-

Liberal Ironists and English Teachers The philosophy of Richard Rorty

Abstract: (1989). Liberal Ironists and English Teachers The philosophy of Richard Rorty. English in Education: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 1-11.

The case for “multicultural literature” in the largely white school

Abstract: (1989). The case for “multicultural literature” in the largely white school. English in Education: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 51-55.

Becoming Students to Learn about Teaching.

Abstract: For a number of reasons, preservice teachers find it difficult to incorporate current theories of reading and writing processes into their ways of operating in the classroom. Although they may find these theories sensible and appealing, these theories also appear to directly contradict the principles preservice teachers have abstracted from their own experience as students with the folklore of English teaching. Furthermore, opportunities to test out theoretical positions often involve disagreeing with advice from assisting teachers: "I wouldn't try small groups with these kids. They'd just see it as an invitation to fool around." Finally, Curriculum & Instruction courses in English often inadvertently undercut the very principles they wish to promote. Preservice teachers are told, for instance, about the importance of attending to process in teaching writing and reading (and all the changes in attitude and procedure such attention implies), but rarely do they experience such a shift in their own courses a course on collaborative learning, for example, can proceed almost entirely by lecture in the interests of covering content material. My own attempts to help preservice English teachers come to terms with current theory have occurred in a course I have taught for several years, entitled "Language in the Secondary Classroom." After introducing preservice teachers to theory and research on language development in the first half of the semester, I ask them to formulate their own positions on language development and develop a series of classroom tasks that is consonant with their theoretical position. Then in the second half of the semester, the preservice teachers become observers and researchers in their own classrooms. In this real world setting they are able to carry out their tasks with small groups of high