We are freer than we think

One thing I’ve been thinking about this week is what it’s like to be a teacher. You have to be careful to walk this line – You don’t want to assume you know what’s what. You want to challenge yourself. But you also have to be real. Recognize not only your own personal limitations, and the constraints of the “system” so to speak, but also the impossibility of doing it “right.” There is no right way that will catch everyone where they are. Every time you teach you will learn something that you can learn from. Things that work great one day or with one class, totally flop in a different context. It’s hard on your heart. I’m thinking about all this not because I’m curled up in the fetal position crying about you guys – but because I literally DID do that sometimes as a younger teacher. Teaching this class is challenging – though in completely different ways than your contexts. And other aspects of my life that are important to me compete with the imaginary vision of the super teacher I’d like to be. Those things continue to be important – and I want you all to remember that while you are a teacher – you are a lot of other things too and that is real and valid very important.

I think having a child helped me reframe this a bit – the pressure can be so huge you have to just realize… the kid will find a reason to go to therapy. You can’t do it “right.” All you have to do is be the “good enough” parent. The best I can do is teach him what matters to me, teach him what I know best, and try very hard to understand where he’s coming from and not assume he’s just like me. Then I just cross my fingers. And trust the universe.

Teaching is like that. Teach some. Learn some. Repeat.

On a completely different note… In my Critical Ethnography class we are reading this wild book called Getting Lost by Patti Lather. She’s writing about poststructural approaches to research methodologies… which has little to do with this class, but it kept making me think about critical pedagogies. About sort of the irony and paradox of going into education, a system that’s pretty notorious for reproducing oppression. Like going IN to it – to become an actor in it. We are choosing to become a part of The Machine. But we do it for a reason – because that’s where the kids are. That’s where the work that needs to be done is located. So how do we reconcile this knowing that whatever we do we will be doing harm (colonizing, gatekeeping, standardizing etc.) with the desire to make things better. Well this is where poststructuralism helps me out – on p9 (if you happen to have the book lying around) she says this (replacing ethnography with teaching):

If, as Foucault (1998( states, we are freer than we feel, how can we feel freer in this space? How might we think [of teaching] as “an art of in between,” of finding ways of using the constraining order, of drawing unexpected results from one’s abject situation (de Certeau, 1984, p30), of making the dominant function in another register, of diverting it without leaving it.

So schools get in our way, but they also offer a way. And we have to accept the impossibility of our task if we are to accomplish anything at all.

Finally, Matt’s blog about the art of writing and the damage done by standardizing, mechanizing, making things more streamlined, made me think about how teaching writing in certain ways is a social justice issue and how streamlining, standardizing and assessing in certain ways evacuates agency, forbids thinking, is anti-justice. We should be teaching students to create writing is more than just filled with grammar and correctness. (note I wrote this before our classroom talk and wasn’t really thinking about it in particular during that discussion)

My question then, combining all this stuff I’ve been writing about is – how can we assess our limitations (time, emotional energy, knowledge, prejudices, implications in various oppressions, standards, colleagues, too many students etc.) and ask – what can I do in this space? We are freer than we feel.

(Incidentally as I was posting this I recognized that I'm using a genre from my own life, not any of those taught at school. Without thinking of it this blog follows the format of many UU sermons - a mix of apparently independent reflections on a text, a personal story, another person's story and a conclusion that attempts to pull these things together. Who knew I'd internalized this way of making an argument? What would I have thought if a student turned in something like this? .... )

Connecting theory to practice (right now please!)

Some of you may be wondering about the connection to what we do in class and your actual practice in future classrooms. (In fact one of you was brave enough to ask). Let me give you a little window into my thoughts about the issue and how I've planned the course. Feel free to comment, asking questions, making suggestions, etc.

First we started with some theory and history of writing pedagogy. This wasn't just to give you theory in some vague "it's good for you" kind of sense, but rather for a very practical purpose. As I mentioned in class, schools are time machines - but they are not detached from cutting edge research, they are connected in very logical ways. I think it's helpful for new teachers to not only recognize what they see in their school sites, but to see how it is connected to the pedagogy they learn in their certification programs at the university.

Second, I think it's important that we think about what writing is, and what is the role of the writing teacher. I think this is particularly important because so often writing is not taught but just graded. This approach is frustrating for students and teachers, and does little to narrow learning gaps. This has very practical significance in terms of deciding how you will use class time, what kinds of questions you will ask your self when planning lessons, developing assignments, and creating assessments.

I included Atwell because she provides some very concrete ideas of at least one way of running a classroom focused on writing as a process. It is interesting that so many of you were frustrated by her tone, her apparent one-size-fits-all prescription for a "good" classroom. You were frustrated by her oblivion to the needs of diverse students, to culturally relevant pedegogy, to modern technology. These frustrations are an excellent illustration for why we spend less time on the nitty gritty day to day "techniques" for teaching. When we say that teaching is situated, different for every teacher, school, student, classroom - we aren't just being annoying - we're addressing the practical realities of things. We could, theoretically, have spent the whole 7 weeks teaching you "how to" do things. Some of you would have walked into settings where this worked beautifully, and others would be completely disarmed by facing a pre-existing curriculum that didn't match, or by students who needed different kinds of teaching.

I think sometimes what new teachers are looking for is really curriculum - lesson plans. You will find that a lot of this will be pre-existing in your sites. You will have textbooks, your cooperating or previous teacher's files, etc. There is an infinite web of resources on the web, and books are available in bookstores.What we are teaching you in these classes is methodology - what to DO with curriculum. How to decide what is needed and how to meet those needs.

All that being said, the rest of the term will be focused more on the nitty gritty. This week we will be discussing creating assignments - not just assessments, but how to creating learning experiences that help students develop their writing skills. We will also begin discussing response and evaluation of student work - opportunities for teaching or torturing students! I will also start asking you to connect what we're discussing in class to the real life situation you will be encountering in your own classrooms. Hopefully it will start to be more clear as time goes on.

The trick is you will never feel "prepared" to teach. There is always more to know and problems that arise. It is really experience that will fine tune your practice. Remember you know a LOT about writing already. You have ideas about how to teach it - you know more than you think. I want to send you out into the world with the tools to ask the right questions of yourselves and the resources available to you.

Make sense? Talk back :) Lemme know!

Subversive teaching of citation and the 5P

I was inspired to rough-out a unit/units based on a combination of our conversations/readings about the 5P, citations, and teaching writing skills/strategies in context AND readings from another class I'm taking about (among other things) corporate/political control and manipulation of media in general and text books in particular. This unit would include critical reading, critical writing and critical consideration of the functions of both in maintaining hierarchical and oppressive structures of power. What I like about this is that it manages to both teach the things we have to teach (citation, assessing credibility of sources, research, critical thinking, 5P), and engages them in critiquing these very things simultaneously. In my work as a scholar of education this is one of my goals - how can we both do what we are forced to do AND engage in the kinds of emancipatory education we firmly believe in. You all are much closer to the ground though in terms of what is actually possible in schools. What do you think of this possibility? Could this be mini-lessoned? Writer's workshopped? Could it also serve the needs of the machine? Here's my brainstorm (which has torn me away from the assigned work I "should" be doing.)

1) Teach about citation, not only the mechanics but the functions of citation including engaging in conversation with what you have read, respecting and recognizing the work of others and yourself AND upholding a system of credibility that favors those already in power who have the resources to produce what counts as credible

2) Have students bring in a textbook from another class and ask them "Who wrote this?" Pushing them to consider how this knowledge was produced, how credibility was established, who benefits from the production of the object of the book and its contents.

3) This seems like a pretty decent place for teaching the 5 paragraph essay, it components, utility, limitations, capacity to reinforce and contest hierarchies of power etc. Then they can write a 5P on some question of authorship, citation, textbook industry, the 5P itself etc.

Walking the walk with you

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In the effort to walk the walk, I'm blogging along with my students. This week my blogging is mostly inspired by your writing (and my own foibles). The process of doing this (not to surprisingly) felt useful and not like a time-suck as I'd feared before I began. Hopefully you find yourself wrapped up in the opportunity to reflect as well.

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Reading over the blogs I am really enjoying the variety of interpretations of the genre.  I am really enjoying the titles and various formats people are using. Some people are really well versed in imbedding text or using images and other content to build on their ideas (for example the horse jumping over a fence). These things are beyond me in terms of making it happen, but as a reader the seamless inclusion of multimedia text increases both the pleasure and often the effectiveness of communication. Most of my favorite blogs use this juxtaposition of text with images to make points and to get a laugh.

Dan said in his blog that students in this program not treated as having knowledge. This is a very fair critique and one I hope to address in this class. This results in a class in which the majority of the use of time is on you – your language will fill the space, your ideas, your prior knowledge, your understanding of the texts. The fact is you are experts – experts at being a student, and scholars of what it mans to be a teacher. Pay attention to how it feels, as a student, to be considered knowledgeable. Does it feel like more or less work? More or less rewarding? Or am I in fact dominating after all, not making space for the development of new knowledges. A number of you made reference to walking the walk, and I took notice. Your discussions lead me to realize, for example, that I need to write my own blog. As this short term progressive, we will see how successful I am in walking the talk of my own pedagogies.

I was very interested in Katie’s idea of considering the possibilities for encouraging students to imagine the administration as an audience for their work. I am very excited about this idea – it is very radical! I’m wondering about the considerations teachers must make if they wish to be critical, to teach their students to be critics of power and to be activists themselves. What if the students all did really decide to rise up in some way – and you were the instigator? This is exciting and something to really ponder.

I found an article about this possibility, Developing an Activist Writing Program: Possibilities and Challenges

I also noticed that a lot of you liked and agreed with the more free-choice approach to choosing a topic. Yet a lot of you struggled with being given this choice yourself. Open ended assignments can produce anxiety (which can certainly be complicated by unclear instructions – but in a way open ended assignments are deliberately unclear). If you think about how this assignment felt to you, how can you use that feeling to improve your development of similar assignments? Another take on this question of choosing your own topic comes from my days of teaching at an Alternative School. Many of my students tole me they didn’t want to give me what they cared about. Why don’t you write about skateboarding I’d say. Because it’s not FOR you they’d say. They didn’t want what they loved to be colonized by the teacher, though they didn’t use this language. They would rather write about what I wanted to read. I saw this most vividly with a student who kept a notebook with him always and wrote poetry and fiction, for his own purposes but would never let me see it. It was gang-related writing – but not what one might think. It was about family, mentorship, support, safety, love etc. (He did let me see it once but not even hold it – not read whole pieces – certainly not grade it) It made me think of Elizabeth Ellsworth's Why doesn't this feel empowering? 

Along these lines, what are the risks of inviting out-of-school genre’s into the classroom (hip hop?). What does it mean to teach students through hip hop vs having them teach each other AND the teacher. I think of the times I’ve tried to teach using rap – always a HUGE flop. Even though I am a consumer of rap I am not truly “of” rap is an appropriation – if perhaps a less violent one. But while I can consume it I cannot truly teach it.