2 posts tagged “action research”
Now that I find myself closer to 40 than 30, closer to veteran than novice, I realize that I stand on the far side of a generational divide. When I started teaching, I may have bumped into my students at concerts, or watched the same TV shows. Now, frankly, we inhabit different realities. They text message; I still handwrite notes. They have YouTube dates; I still tape the shows I want to watch on my VCR. Today’s school age generation has been characterized as understanding their American identities more as consumers than citizens (Kress), as living in “a kaleidescope world of representation, where sound image and print are constantly refracted by each other” (Millard, p. 3), as acquiring literacy from the screen rather than the page (Bearne, 2005), as learning to think by “seeing” information rather than reading it (Heath; Freedman), as postmodern producers and self-referential composers, and famously as “digital natives” (Prensky). Here they sit in twenty first century language arts classrooms with teachers who typically privilege word text over visual, aural, kinesthetic or any other kind of text, in a formalist or new critical pedagogy that situates them intellectually in the early twentieth century (Marshall). My learning disposition does not match theirs anymore. In school, I was taught to conform to convention; their functional literacy is about innovation (Kress).
Probably like many teachers, I teach like those educators I most admired as a student 25 years ago. And like many language arts teachers, I love to teach my favorite books from my school years. I struggle with the notion that the way I experience reading, learning, thinking—what I experience as a great text—that these may seem like antiquated notions to young people, or more disturbing, as useless, boring, obsolete. Even my sense of time is quaint compared to theirs. They live in a time of exponential change.
Maybe as I have heard, and must admit have said, during late afternoon office talk, “these kids just don’t like to think,” or “their junior highs didn’t teach them how to write.” However, it could also be true that I didn’t understand how they like to think and compose, what their comfortable and functional semiotic landscape looks like, or how to use it to ground my curriculum.
This morning, Josh and Sophie insisted that I read the brutally long Disney picture book version of The Lion King to them, so I apologize that every thought I have today will be colored by this notion of the "Circle of Life" and Disney's cutsified adaptation of King Lear. (If by chance, you are the only human being unfamiliar with this film, you can view the "Circle of Life" music video on YouTube.)
Anyway, after I packed the kids off to daycare and school, I settled down to the first hour and a half of my grown up reading for my sabbatical work today. And wouldn't you know, it was all about the Circle of Life. Bob Fecho wants me to take my place among great generations of teachers, sort of.
I'm sorry. I'll stop entertaining myself with cheesy allusions now.
Fecho argues, "If my classroom is one of inquiry, dialogue, and transaction, then I must inquire, dialogue, and transact as well; I must be shaped by the experience just as I expect my students to be shaped" (50). To do my job as a teacher, I'm obligated to seek to understand the whole context of what I'm teaching and to find a way to share that understanding with my students. This is a teach by trust proposition. If I trust in the inquiry process and live it in my classroom as I teach it, then my students will learn along with me.
To be an author of my own teaching doesn't mean merely that I write my own lesson plans--although that could be part of it. Authorship suggests that I research and adapt best practices, reflect on what's working and what isn't, resist the implementation of undigested fads, become comfortable with both the "word and the world" of teaching as we practice it (Fecho likes to cite Paulo Freire). I do what I expect my student writers to do: hypothesize, study, document, reflect, revise.
This didn't seem possible to me as a beginning teacher. However, I was implementing theories even before I had read about them. Many of us tend to teach by instinct or intuition and claim that we don't have time for theory, or that it isn't relevant to what we're doing. But Fecho says, "In the end, it's not a question of whether we theorize and philosophize--I know of no humans who don't--but to what extent we consciously involve ourselves in the process" (43). Part of the job is to let questions of theory surface, to investigate them, document them--because they are present in our practice whether we "take time" to recognize them or not.
None of this is new information. People (my student teaching supervisors, my mentors, my administrators, my professional growth leaders, my department colleagues, my in-building veteran teachers...) have been trying to communicate this message to me in a variety of ways for quite some time. I'm just ready to hear and understand it now.
You have to pardon one last cheesy allusion. Really, you do.
Wise old Rafiki stood at the edge of Pride Rock and help up the cub for all to see. The elephants trumpeted and the zebras whinnied for joy as the future lion king joined the great Circle of Life.
