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Shifting Paradigms

Shifting Paradigms: Teaching Teachers for Diverse Classrooms

(A Work in Progress)

Valerie Nyberg

University of Iowa

[T]eachers are not abstract; they are women or men of particular races, classes,

ages, abilities, and so on. The teacher will be seen and heard by students not as an abstraction, but as a particular person with a certain defined history and relationship to the world.

Kathleen Weiler

from Ruth Spack

“The (In)Visibility of the Person(al) in Academe

[It’s important that we recognize] “that [teaching] is already politicized and that its political side needs finally to be taken into account more explicitly, not simply as though it were ‘political protest’”. Part of teaching for social justice, then, is deliberately claiming the role of educator as well as activist based on critical consciousness and on ideological commitment to diminishing the inequalities of American life.

Marilyn Cochran-Smith

“Learning to Teach for Social Justice”

When I first thought of creating an undergraduate course syllabus that would address issues of diversity I was rather hesitant if not fully resistant to the entire concept. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t feel as though I could construct a class that could adequately address such issues; instead, it was the notion of constructing a class like every other teacher educator course on diversity that simply looks at the surface in the form of “awareness” training or political correctness instruction. More often than not such courses are additive or piecemeal. As a teacher, I always saw my role as one which involved some amount of social justice or what bell hooks(1994) refers to as, “radical pedagogy” (p. 8). This meant that I approached my subject and my students with a critical awareness of my own as well as their ideological positions, and attempted to challenge those notions by providing an engaging and critical curriculum. Therefore, rather to maintain the status quo of preservice diversity courses that treat the surface, my course titled “Diversity and Literacy: Teaching in 21st Century Classrooms” seeks to challenge and interrogate deeply held beliefs regarding what it means to be a teacher and a student within a diverse populationas a method of exploring classroom instruction and learning based loosely on the sociocultural theory, in particular, communities of practice.

Conceptual Course Design

Research regarding the characteristics of people who enter and stay in the teaching profession, as well as, the attributes leading to the creation of “teacher identity” (Carter & Doyle 1996) are well established. As Lortie (1975) points out in Schoolteacher, those who become attracted to teaching to some degree have been apprenticed. Since students spend so much of their education watching and observing their teachers, along their academic careers, they begin to form models of effective and ineffective teaching based on their own experiences. As a result, as Carter and Doyle (1996) in their research of teacher narratives, (auto)biographies, and personal histories, they found that:

In general [teacher] candidates judged those practices they felt worked or would have worked for them as students as likely to work for them as teachers and rejected those that they did not like in the past…Rather, they actively construct judgments grounded in the “relatively sound personal and pragmatic truths” (Cole 1990, p. 203) that have emerged from their past experiences. In the process, they often ignore cases of teaching that differ from their previous experience and sidestep theoretical arguments by instructors. Their ideal images are also often based on narrow assumptions about the range and diversity of students’ capabilities and interests and on unrealistic beliefs in the power of their own personalities to motivate students. (p. 127)

What this implies is, throughout the preservice teachers’ academic career, he or she is drawing “what they know” about teaching and interacting with students from their own frames of reference. As Shirley Brice Heath (1983) work points out that, this can become extremely problematic when teachers attempt to evaluate students from different backgrounds than their own, especially when they have different ways of knowing and ways with words than from the their own middle-class ways of knowing and ways with words. As a result, in terms of teaching students from diverse cultures and backgrounds, who may also employ different linguistic patterns of communication, it is highly problematic to assume that instruction in political correctness or increased awareness will be enough to prepare teachers for the students they will eventually face within the classroom. Instead, as both Kennedy (1999) and Darling-Hammond (1999) point out, teacher education needs to be more effective in shifting the points of view of teacher candidates in an effort to have them reflect upon and interrogate their “natural” modes of thinking and approaches to teaching as well as to their students.

As a primary way of addressing these issues, Ruth Spack (1997) points out that in our efforts to become increasingly aware of such matters as diversity, educational researchers and writers tend to focus much of their attention on “reading” the students and the texts. However, what is missing is the situatedness subjectivity of the teacher his/herself. Specifically, she states:

Experiences such as Rose’s and Bleich’s suggest the need for teachers to interrogate our own identity and conditioning in order to become freer from bias or at least open enough to acknowledge the multiple perspectives that students bring to the intellectual enterprise. (p. 297)

In other words, too often in our efforts to come to a better understanding of our student and of the learning process, we overlook the role of the teacher. Who a teacher is, and what their educational, life, cultural, et cetera, experiences profoundly impact how they are informed about their subject matter and how they approach teaching. For these reasons, the heart of my course, “Diversity and Literacy,” focuses on how preservice teachers have come to form their identities as students and as teachers, then to look at how that impacts their notions of teaching, their approaches to students, and the use of content. Rather than using the traditional model of diversity education which seems to reinscribe fixed notions of the self and of identity by failing to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the socially informed identities (society, school, teacher, student, and self), in my course, I’m attempting to look at how these identities overlap; specifically, I want students to see these as fluid selves from which they can draw upon to increase our understanding and broaden their perspectives. Essentially, such a model would look as such:

Traditional ModelSociocultural Model

The sociocultural model which my course attempts to develop and carry out is based on Freedman and Ball’s (2004)--informed by Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov—notion of “ideological becoming” (p. 4). This theory centers around the establishment of contact zones where the official discourse, in this case the classroom curriculum, come in opposition to the “internally (p.7) persuasive discourse” of the teacher educator. Through exploration of theoretical texts, reflexive writing, case studies, and authentic teaching, Ball discovered that preservice teachers, situated within communities of practice which nurtured the process of ideological becoming, were more able to “consider issues of diversity in different ways” (p.17). In this same way, my course is designed to begin with the preservice teachers themselves; then work out to considering their students; issues of diversity eventually leading to considering; and enacting teaching practices.

Text Selections and Assignments

Although, as the syllabus states, this course is intended for preservice elementary and secondary teachers from a variety of disciplines, any look at the course readings (as well as the course title) would indicate that there is a primary focus on literacy. This is done intentionally in order to highlight the importance and role of pedagogical approaches as another layer of interrogation. As such, I refer to The New London Group’s (2000) definition of pedagogy as:

a teaching and learning relationship that creates the potential for building learning conditions leading to full and equitable social participation. Literacy pedagogy, specifically, is expected to play a particularly important role in fulfilling this mission…(p. 9)

However, it’s important to note that this definition is often restricted to the traditional notion of literacy as consisting of skills involving reading and writing, but as reconceived by the New London Group, they seek to stretch the boundaries of concepts of literacy in order to accommodate “a multiplicity of discourse” (p. 9) and includes focusing on the linguistic and cultural diversity within our globalized societies as well as broadening the notions of literacy pedagogy in order to account for multimedia, multimodal texts as well as their increasing role in representation in the process of communication (including written, spoken, and visual). As such, I’m emphasizing literacy as a readily applicable site to interrogate teacher representation and evaluation of student knowledge—as much of the work in sociocultural theory states, the ability to separate the cognitive, linguistic, and social experiences that inform our identities and ways in which we think and communicate permeate everything. Therefore, it seems fitting that literacy play a significant role in diversity education since it is also one of the spaces where students of diversity are most likely to experience difficulty.

Having stated that, the texts I selected and the smaller reading selections I made from these texts is intended to replicate Ball’s work (stated earlier) as well as Deborah Ball and David Cohen (1999). Specifically Ball and Cohen advocate for the development of “stance of inquiry” (p. 11) wherein teachers would use intellectual skills in order to scrutinize their own work as well as question their own thinking about their work. Rather than trying to simply make new teachers more reflective, such readings and assignments are thought to combine theory, reflection, and practice together in a way to promote reflexivity which is the ability to go beyond metacognition and reapply those thoughts back to the self. In this way, the snippets of reading are designed to expose students to current seminal work in the field of teaching that (1) are often not introduced at the undergraduate level; (2) reflect the richness and varied perspectives that are informing current research on issues of diversity and language (specifically, literacies, culture, and social contexts); and (3) make connections between their own old conceptions of pedagogy and new ones informed by theory and practice.

In addition, much of the conceptualization for the course and assignments came from using Wiggins and McTighe’s (1998)Understanding By Design which is intended to help teachers construct units driven by their desired results and outcomes rather than by the curriculum itself. Ultimately, I want students to:

  1. To help you to view the roles of “teacher” and “student” as fluid sites of identity performances which are situated within social, cultural, and situational contexts?
  1. To develop an understanding of how and why students, even in homogeneous environments, form a diverse community and to use this understanding of diversity in order to create classroom communities that seek to “transgress” boundaries and borders.
  1. To view literacy and literacy development as a tool or instrument of such “transgressional” instruction.
  1. To provide you with methods and strategies to develop this pedagogical approach so you may enact them within the classroom.

After formulating these four aims, I then selected my texts and designed the course assignments in ways, I thought, addressed my aims in specific ways. As a result, an implicit intention of using such a method for developing my course, is to provide students with a usable “real” template for their own unit of instructions which they will then use to teach.

Classroom Design

The last component of my course “Diversity and Literacy” centers around classroom practice and design. Admittedly within the course syllabus itself, this is an area which is not prominently mention, nevertheless, it is a significant part of how I envision such a course. For the most part, in keeping with sociocultural theory, my intention is for the class to form a community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991) where students participate in a system of activities that promote a shared knowledge concerning what they’re doing and what/how their work reflects upon the larger community of teachers and students (p. 98). At the center of this is the idea of collaboration. In order to gain “legitimacy” I’m using Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez, and Alvarez (2001) notion of collaboration as a:

process in which participants acquire knowledge through co-participating, co- cognizing, and co-problem solving with linguistically, culturally, and academically heterogeneous groups throughout the course of task completion. The goal is learning, and joint activity facilitates or mediates learning for the participants. (p. 123)

By pairing and grouping students in order to complete activities that necessarily draw upon their theoretical readings, in order to make real-world application, it’s hoped that these experiences, enriched by classroom discussions and individual reading postings will create an environment replicate the restructuring of teacher education conceived by Roth and Tobin (2002). In their work with an “urban” teacher education program, when they instituted the notion of “coteaching/cogenerative dialoguing” (p. 126) based on the situated social practice of teaching itself, helped all the participants (student teachers, cooperating teachers, university supervisors, and students) to conceive of themselves as teachers and learners. Again, besides attempting to institute theoretically sound pedagogical approach to my own course, I’m also doing so with the notion that, if done well, preservice teachers have yet another “real world” model by which to fashion their own teaching.

Conclusion

At this point, I think that it’s important to note that as I conceive of this course, mixing and mingling the different theoretical positions on teaching and learning, I do so as a former teacher turn graduate student, turn PhD student. Part of this process, I’ve recently come to realize, requires letting go of the security of other people’s words and ideas in an effort to form my own. Currently, I am in the process of formulating what I consider as a new developing pedagogical approach that centers on situated activity theory and communities of practice as sites of disequilibrium in order to form a new approach to recognizing that as both students and teachers enter the space of the classroom, some amount of discomfort and change is required in order to make new bridges. Like my children who are Native American, Eskimo, Swedish, Irish, and Black, hybridity in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, experience, language (as well as a multitude of other factors) will play increasingly important roles in how teachers teach and how students learn. It has been my attempt in this paper and accompanying course syllabus, to begin enacting these notions and theories as my own contribution to the field of education.

Works Cited

Ball, D.L., & Cohen, D.K. (1999). "Developing Practice, Developing Practitioners: Toward a Practice-based Theory of Professional Education.” In Darling-Hammond, L, & Sykes, G. (eds.). Teaching as the Learning Profession. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Carter, K, & Doyle, W. (1996). "Personal Narrative and Life History in Learning to Teach." In Sikula, J. (ed). Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. New York: Macmillan.

Cochran-Smith, M. (1999). "Learning to Teach for Social Justice." In Griffin, G. (ed). The Education of Teachers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Darling-Hammond, L. (1999). Educating Teachers of the Next Century. Rethinking Practice and Policy. In Griffin, G. (ed). The Education of Teachers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. NY: The New Press.

Gutiérrez, K.D., Baquedano-López, P., & Alvarez, H.H. (2001). Literacy as hybridity: Moving beyond bilingualism in urban classrooms. The best for our children:Critical perspectives on literacy for Latino students (pp. 122-141). ColumbiaUniversity: Teachers College.

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. NY: CambridgeUniversity Press.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Kennedy, M. (1999). "The Role of Preservice Teacher Education." In Darling-Hammond, L, & Sykes, G. (eds.). Teaching as the Learning Profession. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

New London Group. (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In W. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 9-37). London: Routledge.

Roth, W-M., & Tobin, K. (2002, November). Redesigning an “urban” teacher education program: An activity theory perspective. Mind, Culture, and Activity: AnInternational Journal, 9, 108-131.

Spack, R. (1997). “The (In)Visibility of the Person(al) in Academe” In Zamel, V. & Spack, R (eds.). Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Wiggins, G & McTighe J. (1998). Understanding By Design. Alexandia, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.