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Midterm Reflection Paper
The readings, discussions, and activities in this course have led to an unanticipated amount of reflection and reevaluation on my part, primarily regarding personal integrity, interactions between teacher and student as well as between student and subject matter, and the influence of context on both of these.
Questions of Identity and Integrity
Many of the readings have dealt with the idea of identity and integrity of the teacher. Palmer (1998) speaks of teaching from the position of an “undivided self”; only from such a vantage point can we present an authentic voice to students. The Rogers & Scott reading expands upon this idea, asserting that such self-knowledge is only possible through a multi-faceted process of self-reflection, but pointing out that such development of a self-authoring, unified identity is often at odds with the administrative goals of educational institutions (p. 751). In such a context, where compliance and conformity is desired over innovation and individuality, a teacher’s integrity is under duress. Palmer (1998) points out, "To reduce our vulnerability, we disconnect from students, from subjects, and even from ourselves" (p. 12). This act of intended self-preservation eliminates the possibility of an undivided self, and in fact becomes an act of self-destruction.
This is the position in which I recognize myself to have been. As I posted in the discussion on Palmer (1998), “...having certain of my best-loved parts of being a teacher (individualized curriculum, independent classroom pacing) removed from my authority, I felt somewhat heartbroken and vulnerable.” I’ve known for the last two years that I have not been “reaching” students as effectively as I used to. Upon reflection, I realized that this degradation of connection coincides with my district’s mandated adoption of certain scripted curricula. Instead of creating units, I’ve had units thrust upon me, and the way that I teach them must match the way they are taught by other teachers at the same grade level. Administratively, this makes perfect sense; students are ensured equal access to material, guidance counselors may reassign students to different teachers without worrying that they’ll be interrupting the student’s coverage of required material, and teachers of the next grade up may feel confident that students have covered specific material in the prior grade. However, the adoption of scripted lesson plans interferes with my presence, as described in Rodgers & Raider-Roth (2006). Being less familiar with the content that has been composed by somebody else, and being expected to adhere to a completion schedule for each unit, puts me in a position of preoccupation with the material, which interferes with my ability to interact effectively with students and their interactions with the material. As we’ve moved out of the scripted units and into units where presentation of the material is not expected to be unified, I’ve experienced a sense of revival, and I can see that my interactions with my students are more constructive, less authoritarian.
I’ve been startled to have what’s been troubling me, but has remained elusive to my understanding, so clearly spelled out in these texts. This lack of self-awareness is similar to what Weiler (1997) points out in her interview with Ruth G. (p. 364). When asked about being forced to give up her career when she married, Ruth states, “But I didn’t want to teach then.” Apparently, she had incorporated society’s expectation into her recollection of a general period. However, she then tells the story of her honeymoon: “...I’d sit there and cry and he’d say, this is a heck of a honeymoon….I wanted to teach.” When remembering the details of a specific moment, she must admit the truth of her emotions, not her socialized desires. Through this example we see that we simply cannot take first-hand accounts at face-value, not even when they are our own. We must dig into the stories behind those accounts to find the truth.
Incidentally, seeing this account through the lens of an English teacher, I also think this speaks to the importance of literature in the English curriculum. The current fashion for pushing informational texts above all else fails to educate students in how to approach the unreliable narrator. The well-rehearsed and socially sanctioned voice of the informational text differs drastically from the fallible and genuine voice of a complex character. It is easy to see in Ruth G’s example which rings more “true.” In literature, a fine example of this concept is illustrated by Montresor in Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. Montresor hints at the numerous offenses for which his rival, Fortunato, must be punished, but by the time we reach the end of the text we doubt that there were any genuine offenses at all. This is the kind of exposure to human fallibility that simply is not provided by informational texts.
Questions of Teacher-Student-Subject Interaction
The discussion of teacher identity and integrity leads naturally Hawkins’s (1974) I-Thou-It framework; after all, is a teacher still a teacher if there’s nothing and nobody to teach? (Of course, identity and integrity also tie into context, but I’ll get to that more in a bit.) As Hawkins points out, “the first act in teaching, it seems to me, the first goal, necessary to all others, is to encourage...engrossment [in a subject]. Then the child comes alive for the teacher as well as the teacher for the child. They have a common theme for discussion, they are involved together in the world” (p. 57). This makes perfect sense to me, and the ability to create opportunities for engagement is the passport that tells a skeptical student, “Wait a minute, this is a _real_ teacher.” Being able to let students explore angles of interest that they discover indicates to the students that the teacher is confident in the material. They have a guide to get them to the trail, but they get to do the exploring themselves, and the guide knows how to get them out if they get lost. Here, Hawkins naturally connects to Dewey’s (year?) map metaphor: Dewey believes students must experience and engage with the subject for learning to occur. However, the map (the material of the curriculum) exists as a guide: "...it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort..." (p. 115). Dewey understands that there is no need for each child to reinvent the wheel. But there is also no need for the child only to memorize the "map" without having any expectation of actually interacting with the real terrain the map represents. In this regard, it is the role of the instructor not only to provide the material of the curriculum, but also to generate the instructional experiences that allow the student to have personal interaction with the subject matter beyond the existing material.
In my on-line comments regarding Hawkins, I pointed out, “This is the kind of engagement with subject that I love to be able to engender in my classroom. The difficulty is, in part, finding the right subject matter. If the material is not sufficiently engaging, students don't commit to it. If the material is too concrete in meaning, students find the ‘right’ answer and decide that they are done with discussion or exploration. If the material is too challenging, students who have not developed sufficient grit are likely to give up because they ‘don't get it.’...I know one thing I want to pursue is how to support and encourage those students who have not yet developed much in the way of grit or intellectual curiosity, so that they can begin to trust themselves to engage with subject matter in a meaningful way.” In response to this, you suggested that I engage the students in the process of this inquiry. I like this idea, and in keeping with the understandings I gained from Weiler, I’ll be sure to incorporate opportunities for narrative into that process.
It seems to me that this knowing and understanding of each other’s stories is part of how we get to the cross-categorical knowing described by Kegan in In Over Our Heads. It is not simply enough that we know what happened, or that we know how we feel about what happened, but we need to know and care about the feelings that others have about what happened. There is no way to inspire a student whose default response remains, “I don’t care,” and it’s equally hard to engage with and respond effectively to students’ lack of engagement if I don’t care about how they got to that point. We need to be able to identify and care about how others’ needs and identities interact with our own, and thus see ourselves as part of a larger social entity. For that knowing to be deep and genuine, we need to get to the knowledge through stories, which tell us so much more than simple facts.
Here is where English-teacher-me is scrambling onto the soapbox, again. As I posted online: “I was especially struck by Kegan's description of cross-categorical knowing. ‘The capacity to subordinate durable categories to the interaction between them makes [adolescents'] thinking abstract, their feelings a matter of inner states and self-reflexive emotion..., and their social-relating capable of loyalty and devotion to a community of people or ideas larger than the self’ (pp. 29-32). It is this stage of development that makes me feel that fictional literature is absolutely critical to the creation of healthy adolescents, and why I think the increasing focus on non-fiction texts in the CCSS is a gigantic mistake. Non-fiction texts (such as Obama's Nobel Prize speech or Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) reinforce the ability of the student to categorize and interpret, but not to examine the interactions of personal understanding. Fictional texts, however, allow students to examine the identities, priorities, and needs of people unlike themselves, and to begin to care about the other. Many times I've had students finish a book and turn to me in frustration because they need to know what happens next for the characters; they have invested their concerns in the outcomes of others. This is absolutely what Kegan is describing as a necessary way of knowing to be developed during adolescence, but the increasing limits being placed on fictional literature in the English curriculum provides fewer and fewer opportunities for this development to happen within the structure of formal education.” I am passionate about this point; sadly, it got overlooked online as the discussion of Tatum overwhelmed that thread, so I have no feedback from my peers on this. Still, it will play a part in how I approach developing my final project.
Storytelling can also backfire, as Nussbaum (2010) points out. Children’s stories often use oversimplification to establish and maintain the norms of the society: “the world will be set right when some ugly and disgusting witch or monster is killed” (p. 35). If storytelling is used only at this level, is viewed as a “childish” form of material, then those oversimplified views will stand. This, again, points out the need to expose students to good literature that reveals the complexities of realistic characters. Once students are able to understand and empathize with those unlike themselves in fiction, they can begin to approach diverse peoples in real life with a measure of curiosity and value, rather than fear and loathing. This is essential for developing compassionate and healthy humans, and is critical in the effort to free individuals from the environments that may restrain them.. “For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality” (p. 23). It is difficult to develop such a sympathy from informational texts, whose voices are accurate, refined, and not reflecting emotional stress -- students need exposure to complex and diverse characters in recognizable positions of struggle, doubt, failure, and triumph in order to develop any sympathy for those who are otherwise different from themselves.
Questions of Context/Environment
Of course, all of these issues of teacher, student, and material inhabit various contexts, and several of our readings have focused on issues related to context. Among one of the earlier readings was Tyack & Cuban (1995), who astounded me with the description of the Carnegie credit structure and how it came to be developed. This is a perfect example of a system being so deeply ingrained into the context of education that its origins have become invisible. As I wrote in the the discussion on this text, “To discover that the notion of course credits was developed as a method of creating an educational elite among those who might apply for retirement pension from the Carnegie Foundation (p. 91) was quite an eye-opener. The assumption that college attendance is the natural goal of all high school students is insular and ivory-tower-ish, but that's exactly what this crediting structure demands. This express expectation, coupled with the ‘batch processing’ (p. 90) of graded schools, continues to damage the self-esteem of multiple generations.” This “batch processing” is again brought up in the Robinson video. What incredible psychosis we have as a nation, to cheer the individual and pay lip service to Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, but still expect everybody to proceed through their academic careers in exactly the same way at exactly the same pace! (Educational policymakers also seem to have misappropriated Gardner’s desire for frequent “feedback” and interpreted it as frequent standardized testing, which I’m quite sure was not his intent.)
This factory-line, quality-control mindset is easier to adopt if one holds that education is not thought to demand special expertise, as Ball & Forzani (2007) point out. “Despite persistent problems of quality, equity, and scale, many Americans seem to believe that work in education requires common sense more than it does the sort of disciplined knowledge and skill that enable work in other fields” (p. 529). In such a social context, everybody who has a bit of what he or she considers “common sense” is certain to have an opinion about what should be done about our schools. This mindset also equates profit with success, and if the “currency” of the school system is grades and credits, then a competitive, profit-model, business-like approach is naturally put into play in an attempt to improve the “sales.” In this context, the development of well-rounded and self-directed human beings is regarded as an extra, or perhaps even as a detriment. After all, challenging the status quo does not help pass multiple-choice tests.
However, I will point out that this is not the kind of education I received as I grew up, and I sometimes question whether the assumption of this draconian and inflexible structure is really as accurate as we think it is. bell hooks (1994) made such a generalization: “Let’s face it: most of us were taught in classrooms where styles of teachings reflected the notion of a single norm of thought and experience, which we were encouraged to believe was universal” (35). This is nowhere near my experience. In middle school I learned the geography of Africa better than I knew that of the United States. In our mock United Nations exercises, I represented Mexico one year, Jordan another year, and Zaire the third, and I had to understand the priorities and traditions of each nation in order to craft legislation that represented them. In high school I learned to appreciate the belief structures of China and Bali. My sophomore-year social studies teacher engaged the class in elaborate participatory exercises to help us understand the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic value before we read Things Fall Apart. One year in English we had a unit of literature by Jewish authors, and another year we read Gardner’s Grendel to get the monster’s side of what happened with Beowulf. Was such a multicultural and multi-perspective curriculum truly as uncommon as hooks suggests? It didn’t seem unusual in my public school, at least not in the 1970s and 1980s. If anything, I think it’s becoming less common now. But how often are we getting caught up in the assumption of oppression, and how often does the narrative of actual experience reveal something quite different?
We have also examined the context of education as experienced by marginalized groups. Lortie (1975), Weiler (1997), and hooks (1994) all examine the experiences of women, as students, teachers, and subjects. There can be no question that all three reveal deeply institutionalized gender roles and social expectations. Tatum (year?) and Howard (2013) also discuss the experiences of operating within a game where the cards are unfavorably stacked. When the structure is a competitive one with strict expectations, and the optimal conditions are not available to a student, how is that student then to be expected to trust the representative of the system, the teacher? Trust is essential in order for the classroom to operate in the manner which Dewey and Hawkins describe, but incredibly hard to develop when students have decided there’s no sense in trying to win at a losing game.
Conclusion
It is this challenging terrain -- administration that I perceive to be inhospitable to my educational priorities and style, state mandated policies that seem counterintuitive to what I know my students need to be decent humans, societal devaluation of the work I do, and students operating on the presumption of failure -- that found me on the painful edge of burnout as we started this class. However, examining these elements and being able to give them names and narratives to help me understand their origins is giving me a second wind. In our first class discussion of what makes a great teacher, we repeatedly returned to ideas of authenticity. I’ve been able to recognize my burn-out as a symptom of having sacrificed much of my authenticity for the sake of keeping a job that was becoming less and less of what I wanted to do. It is helping me to find my grit, and that is what I hope to do for my students, moving forward.
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