Ibsen's A Doll's House: Questions to inspire sociocultural interpretations

December is the time of solstice, celebration, and rituals. It is a time to look at who we are as the days grow dark and the winter casts its long shadow. It's the time for a teacher with responsibility for the English subject area to offer students a glimpse into Victorian acculturation through Ibsen's A Doll's House.

But I'm very interested in interrogating the play through critical theory and pedagogy. I'm asking students to 'play forward' Ibsen's themes to that of contemporary western, and particularly, American society. What does life look like in comparison? To my knowledge, Ibsen was no feminist nor radical. Instead, he sought to use theater as a forum to discuss what is in the hopes of securing discussions of what might be. Questions to drive this unit include:

What is significant about Torvald’s reaction to Krogstad’s crime?

Nora lies several times in the play. Why does she lie?

What information is revealed during the opening scene of Act II between Nora and Anna, her nurse? Frame their discussion against the larger backdrop of Victorian society and culture.

What makes this play fall within the genre of realism?

What is Krogstad’s significance in the play?

Compare and contrast Mrs. Linde and Nora. How does Mrs. Linde contribute to Nora’s personal growth?

How does the relationship between Mrs. Linde and Krogstad illuminate the relationship between Nora and Torvald?

Dr. Rank tells Nora that he will not have Torvald in his sickroom because “Helmer’s delicate nature shrinks from all that is horrible.” How are these words proven to be true? What does this statement suggest about males in the Victorian age? Can this statement be applied in full or part to males in today’s society? How?

What is Dr. Rank’s function in the Helmer household --- really?

To what extent is Nora’s problem due to her and Torvald’s personalities, and to what extent is it due to the values of the society in which they live? To what extent has Nora solved her problems at the end of the play?

How convincing is Krogstad’s rationale not to reveal Nora’s complicity in the forgery? Is his shift from villain to altruist realistic? Consider the backdrop of Victorian society and culture as you decide.

Does Nora have a greater responsibility to herself or to her family?

Who is the more important character: Nora or Torvald? Why? Offer support.

Find three examples of dramatic irony (in which a character makes a comment that the audience knows to be contrary to the full truth) and explain how they contribute to the total effect of the play.

Find three examples of verbal irony (in which there is a contrast between what is said and what is actually meant) and explain how they contribute to the impact of the given scene, or to the audience’ understanding of the events and meaning of the whole play.

Ibsen believed that “a dramatist’s business is not to answer questions but only to ask them.” What questions does Ibsen ask in the play? Does he offer any solutions?

My goals are to infuse popular and media texts alongside the western canon to integrate semiotic knowledge into traditional literacy and alter what student engagement looks like in the English classroom. Literacy is tied inextricably to personal, relational experiences formed through multimodal text experiences, so, when popular and media texts became center stage, interconnections among language, literacy, and culture became stronger (2000; Strauss & Irvin, 2000).

How do privileged youth in today’s U.S. society express their identity in public versus private settings? How do institutional contexts like public education create multiple privileged youth performances of identity? How does the cultural script of privilege create students’ worldviews and assumptions about their identities? These are the questions that interest me as I begin to discuss gender and class with 21st century students.

Adapted from D. Rosenberg in World Literature and M. Meyer in The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature

Melville and critical literacy

Within critical literacy pedagogy, readers can examine, analyze, and deconstruct social and cultural messages embedded in the text. As Linn (1996) argues, “the Great White Story” also means “misogyny and slavery,” and, unlike modernist theory, contemporary postmodern theory looks to “who has the money and power” (p. 136). Billy Budd, by Herman Melville has inspired a range of readings from the triumph of justice to the justice's miscarriage (Yanella, 2002).

Among others, interpretations of Billy Budd less commonly shared with students in the public school classroom refer to homosexuality in primarily male environments (Phillips, 2000). Melville scrutinized the rights of humans, the innocent against the backdrop of civilization, the value of an individual life, and the nature of social conflicts. Milder (2002) suggests the novella is an "ever-deepening inquiry" (p. 102) for truth through alluding to contemporaneous poetry, mostly Whitman's and Dickinson's verses. Coffler (2002) uses an aesthetic lens to claim that Billy as the actor of "the Handsome Sailor myth" is connected to joyous ancient Greeks and biblical martyrs while also celebrating the "mating of Hellenism and Hebraism" (p. 63) as a dialectic response to crisis of the western civilization. Reynolds (2002) argues that Melville's novella is a literary answer to the social and political events of 18th- and 19th-century Europe and America. Revolutionary riots correlate with Billy Budd's characters and plot: Harper's Weekly and New York Times editorials and illustrations about New York massive street strikes and the 1886 Chicago Haymarket tragedy.

During times of crisis, leaders use dominant language culture to supply a whole range of ways of talking about or constructing an object or event (Edley, 2003; Fairclough, 2003; Giroux, 2008). Melville’s interrogation of historical context, normalization, and hegemonic Western world in Billy Budd paralleled much discourse around the 2008 U.S. democratic state. Students in this study were invited into specific learning spaces where they could question what survival of the fittest was for the 30 million people in the United States who lived in poverty (Howard, 2007). They could deconstruct what life was like for children of one or more parents who served in the American wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They could frame an argument around the dissolution of Glass-Steagle Act banking regulations, the forfeiture of civil rights via the PATRIOT Act, the weakening of the American dollar, or the inflated fuel prices as consequence of a military-industrial economy.

But, after analysis of a Disney film that reimagined maritime and military life, would privileged students connect fantasy to reality across time and space? Would privileged students link Billy Budd critically to contemporary U.S. political discourse around national security, terrorism, and militarism? Would privileged students debate democracy’s potential as a collective civic language and as a unifying device for inclusivity? Or, would privileged students recapitulate arguments from dominant ideologies through established and comfortable Judeo-Christian, individualistic, and historical lenses through which their privilege rose and was perpetuated?

Offer your insights on the nature of contemporary discourse at this pivotal time in U.S. history. How would you reconcile the messages of Melville in our postmodern U.S. society?

Senior honors English syllabus

Syllabus for Senior Honors English
2008-2009

Instructor: Carolyn L. Fortuna
http://www.societyissuesidentity.blogspot.com/

“… (E)ducating students to be critical rather than merely good citizens must recognize the multiple narratives and histories that make pluralistic societies” (Freire & Giroux, 1989).

Course overview
English 12 Honors will respect grammar (examination of the component parts of language --- semantics, pragmatics, and syntax), rhetoric (the art of persuasion through language), and dialectics (questioning and argumentation as a means to interrogate the structures of the society in which we live). Our goals are to become more fully literate and to deepen our understanding of ways that society and culture contribute to identity formation and worldviews. The cultural aspect of literacy asks readers to consider texts in relation to context and to recognize the socially constructed components in all human acts and practices.

Called critical literacy, this education will draw from Freire’s model of critical pedagogy and encourage you to ask questions and dialogue with Ms. Fortuna about what you watch, see, and read. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, because you respond in authentic ways when engaged in inquiry. Evaluation of sources comprises a significant role in critical literacy education, so you will examine structures and framing of messages.

Course description
This course introduces students to critical literacy, cultural studies, and communication research through classic texts of the western canon. By examining identity, society, and culture as interrelated constructs, we’ll focus on the role of communication, generally, and of mass media and popular culture, specifically, in ways that illuminate Intertextuality. With respect to these materials, students should expect to be able to do the following by the end of the course:
· Name and define key constructs of critical literacy;
· Compare and contrast different theoretical frameworks;
· Define structural features and intents of multimodal texts;
· Explain and appraise central questions in the field of critical literacy.

Language choices have tremendous power to shape a reader’s conceptualization of reading. Texts in this course will include all forms of symbolic expression that create meaning for readers. As a result, texts will transcend print and include visual, digital, and audio sources. This definition of literacy is sometimes referred to as multimodality (Bourdieu, 1977; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).

Course objectives
· To consider what it means “to read”
· To reconceptualize learning as a long-term, thinking-centered process
· To grow as literate learners
· To familiarize yourself with critical literacy constructs and processes
· To speak, listen, interpret, read, and write as significant means in which to reflect on our own thinking processes
· To develop structures for discussing and analyzing texts
· To learn how to plan, draft, and revise a memoir, critical analyses, public speaking presentations, and research poster
· To prepare and deliver several presentations to the class of varying lengths
· To survey online research databases
· To write with peer-reviewed, scholarly research as support
· To help you write in commonly accepted academic style and MLA formatting
· To help you think more clearly and effectively by:
n Organizing your ideas in a well-structured, succinct, and creative manner
n Designing argument statements
n Realizing that what you write is an extension of you and your ideas
n Understanding that good writing comes from rewriting
n Improving your writing and thinking and rethinking

Critical literacy theory
This class will adopt critical literacy theory that includes the following components:

· Content integration: Topics will include examples and content from variety of cultures.
· Knowledge construction: Implicit cultural assumptions and frames of knowing within a subject area do influence the ways that knowledge is constructed. We’ll interrogate those cultural assumptions and frames of knowing.
· Equity pedagogy: Academic achievement of students from diverse cultural, gender, racial, and socio-economic groups will be one of Ms. Fortuna’s goals.
· Empowerment: Regardless of previous high school English class track, senior honors English will seek to accentuate the success of all students, regardless of previous academic performance. (Banks & Banks, 1993).

Course reading texts
Senior honors English requires that you read and analyze text 30 to 45 minutes every school night. The following texts are required in the curriculum.

Your curriculum literature assignments will encompass Chaim Potek’s The Chosen, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and A doll’s house, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness and The secret sharer, Edward Albee’s American dream and The zoo story, William Shakespeare’s Othello, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching god, Thornton Wilder’s Our town, and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering heights.

Sharing these texts in American public schools is often called a cultural transmission process (Banks & Banks, 1993), by which a system of signs and symbols pass on knowledge and meanings to each new generation. In keeping with critical literacy pedagogy, each curriculum text will be accompanied by various peer-reviewed, scholarly companion pieces as well as numerous multimodal texts.

Critical literacy pedagogy also asks readers to distance Self from text in order to interrogate motivations.

Five critical questions for critical literacy (Hobbs, 2006)
#1) Who is the author, what is the author’s background, and what is the author’s purpose in composing this message?
#2) What techniques are used to attract and hold the reader’s attention?
#3) What cultural values and points of vie are represented in this text?
#4) How might different people interpret the messages in this text differently?
#5) What is omitted from this text?

Five core concepts of multimodal literacy (Hobbs, 2006)
#1) All messages are designed carefully through language and images.
#2) Texts contain symbol systems with codes and conventions.
#3) Texts have messages that are embedded with cultural values and points of view.
#4) Different people interpret messages in text differently.
#5) Text messages are constructed to obtain objectives like cultural transmission of knowledge, profit, and/ or power.

Curriculum policies
The senior honors English curriculum contains several core writing assignments. Among them are:

· A style and language analysis, based on Othello by Shakespeare
· A characterization as a reflection of culture analysis, based on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
· A critique of contemporary society after reading Ibsen and Albee
· A 10-page paper, comprised of discussion of two independent reading texts, one curriculum text, and a literature review with ten (minimum) peer-reviewed scholarly research sources

Unless otherwise stated, all assignments are due at the beginning of class. You should have the assignment printed prior to class and ready to turn in. If you’re late to class, so is your paper.

A composer’s digital portfolio
You will keep throughout the year a record of your progress as a writer, thinker, analyst, learner, visualizer, and composer. Aside from full-length curriculum assignments, your digital portfolio is an open field. Here are a few samples of how your thinking might be captured in digital form.

· 25 minute timed writings
· Sample memoirs
· Visualizations
· Cartoons and captions
· Freewrites and notes taken in response to prompts, discussions, readings, and other texts
· Responses to assignments
· Responses to readers’ comments about your writing
· Lecture notes
· Reading notes
· Self-sponsored writing, including personal writing and reflection

All writing for English class must be saved in digital form. This means that certain student materials are necessary for this class:

· Access to Microsoft Office Word
· Travel drive/ memory stick
· Pens
· Spiral notebook
· Folder

Student rights, responsibilities, policies, and procedures

Please note that all Student Handbook rights, responsibilities, policies, and procedures apply to Ms. Fortuna’s senior honor English classes.

Conferences
You will have abundant opportunities for in-class help with individual conferences. In addition, while we’re working in the library or in one of the computer labs, you and Ms. Fortuna will conference. Ms. Fortuna can also schedule occasional conferences before or after school [by appointment only]. Conferences are intended to individualize your learning experience, to give your personal time to brainstorm ideas with an adult, and to give you practical help. It is highly encouraged that you plan for and take advantage of these conferences.

I also highly encourage you to visit the National Honor Society before and after school sessions that take place in Ms. Lawson’s room, B202. I can honestly say this always leads you to getting a better grade on your multimodal compositions. Please bring written documentation of your visit including NHS response, and you will receive 5 points extra credit.

Grading
Grading is typically as follows:

One day assignments: 5 points
Extended day/ process assignments: 10 points
Quizzes: 20- 25 points
Projects: 50 - 100 points (depending on complexity)
Presentations to the class: 20- 100 points (depending on time requirements)
Research paper: 250 points

Resources

Banks, J., & Banks, C. M. (1993). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Karable & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Freire, P., & Giroux, H. (1989). Pedagogy, popular culture, and public life: An introduction. In H. Giroux & R. Simon (Eds.), Popular culture: Schooling and everyday life. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.
Hobbs, R. (2006). Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold.

Critical discourse of youth in education

What is “identity?” How do youth in today U.S. society express their identity in public versus private settings? How do institutional contexts like public education create multiple youth performances of identity?

These are questions of interest to me lately as I begin to explore data I collected over the last year as a teacher researcher. Identity is typically defined as a series of qualities that distinguish one individual from another. In psychological terms, identity reflects a series of mental features such as beliefs, memories, preferences, and the capacity for rational thought. However, society and culture impress upon individuals many different characteristics and pressures and create complex relations between sociocultural groups. Thus, sociocultural identity, as marked by ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, race, gender, heritage, or combinations of these, creates a particular type youth discourse in the public school classroom.

I propose that youth identity in the public school classroom transcends individual manifestations of psychological phenomenon and emerges through the accumulation of social and cultural capital. While psychological, social, and cultural structures may overlap, the relation of self to sociocultural structures creates students’ negotiation between peers and teachers in a dance of similarity, indifference, difference, compliance, acquiescence, and opposition.

Individuals’ sense of self is certainly an important element of identity. However, students’ identity is more significantly dependent on ways that students position themselves and are positioned through roles dependent on hierarchies within the social and cultural structures of the institution of education. Bourdieu (1977) argues that the role of education is to reproduce “the structure of power relationships and symbolic relationships between classes” (p. 487). Interactional student negotiations are constructions of others’ perceptions and representations and are byproducts of larger ideological processes and structures. Students’ self-conceptions surface in the social world of the classroom through discourse.

Discourse comprises the ways that people communicate in verbal and non-verbal ways: spoken, written, signed, and body language and through multimodal and multigenre forms of communication. Discourse is a dynamic that creates tensions between language, structure, and agency. The relationship between discourse and social practices is dialectical in that elements are internalized by other elements. Students’ past practices and imaginative futures become embedded in social practices and networks.

Buckholtz and Hall state that identity is emergent in discourse, does not precede it, and is an intersubjectively achieved social and cultural phenomenon (2005). Students’ experiences can be deeply felt yet unnamed, even unnamable, within discourse, as dominant ideologies drive and deepen discoursal tentions. Fairclough (2003) says that ideologies are representations that “contribute to establishing, maintaining, and changing social relations of power, domination, and exploitation” (p. 9). Such a definition of identity as a construct of dominant ideologies challenges essentialist definitions of identity, or definitions in which identity is viewed as fixed, singular, or binary, or in which concepts of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation exclusively create self-concepts. Addressing sociocultural identity is part of the work of critical pedagogy, in that critical pedagogy explores new identity categories and the development of relatively new discourses for addressing sociocultural identity, difference, and diversity. Discourse within contexts of social and global justice advocates equity in representation for marginalized groups locally, nationally and internationally.

Fairclough (1995; 2001) outlines a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse, moving from analysis of language texts, to analysis of discourse practices, and, finally, to analysis of discursive events as sociocultural practice. In the public school classroom, critical discourse analysis can help to unveil the culture of student voice and silence, of advocacy and resistance. For example, how do youth negotiate difference and come to understand democracy? To what degree do youth today understand themselves to be citizens who participate altruistically in community-based duties and responsibilities? How are youth today developing national and political identifications? What does it mean for a new generation of U.S. citizens to share common democratic values? How does identity play into definitions of national, regional, and group identifications?

Use this forum to respond, either as a teacher, youth, or interested observer. And keep peeking in on this blog as my data analysis takes on life through my own reflection.

Resources
Bourdieu. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Karable & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buckholtz, & Hall. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.
Fairclough. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2001). Language and power. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York, NY: Routledge.

Looking back at public school as a rite of passage

At the end of this month, many high school seniors around the country will complete their twelve years of formal and mandatory education. Ahead will come a series of new decisions about career and identity. This rite of passage can be invigorating, illuminating, and illusory.

To the high school seniors who read this blog, you are a child no more. You are an adult who’s made many initial decisions about your life and future. You’ve traveled a very long path to be at this sometimes tenuous, sometimes wonderful moment in time. Before you take that last step off your high school campus, I’d ask you to take a few moments to think about life as it was for you as one of America’s children, especially in your former role as a student. You can also help those of us in the field of education to know your generation a little bit more, if you will. (Please note that the comments to this blog are pseudonyms. Anonymity offers a certain freedom.)

Consider the Native American proverb, “No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.” How do you look back on the twelve years of formal education? Are you nostalgic? Relieved? Reticent? Why? Do fond memories of simpler times resonate? Or was life never really simple? Do life lessons that once seemed traumatic now seem just an awkward stage, even cathartic? What was it like for you to be a learner at the cusp of a new millennium?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist, said, “Not in his goals but in his transitions is man great.” Life when Emerson wrote surrounded small New England community enclaves; discourse rose primarily from family and religion. Your life is very different. How did the society and culture in which you were nurtured create pathways for your academic integration into school culture? What is life like when you are ready to graduate high school? Pesky calls you “a digital native” due to the ubiquitous technology in which you have been emerged. He says:

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Do you agree with his statement? What advise to you have to offer to educators? If you were given the power, what institutional changes would you incorporate for other students in public schools who follow you? To what degree do you feel that school has been a microcosm of society? What were the best parts of school? What challenges continue even though you will no longer be a participant?

Dr. Michael Welch, a cultural anthropologist and digital enthnographer from Kansas State University, recently uploaded a short video to YouTube called Web 2.0, the Machine is Using Us. The video discusses how the Web is changing how and how fast humans around the globe communicate. After you view the film, offer a socio-cultural critique of Wesch’ argument. Is his view accurate? Why or why not?

As you think about your answers to these questions, I’d like to thank you on behalf of educators in the United States everywhere. You have offered us vicarious links to the energy and enthusiasm of our own youth. You’ve also introduced us to many new ways of knowing our own worlds. A part of you will live on with us and in the students we’ll help to grow as learners in the future to come.

Blogging as part of classroom learning

What is a blog?

The word “blog” is short for "Web log." A blog is a specialized site that allows an individual or group of individuals to share a running log of events and personal insights with online audiences. (www.pvt.com/oth/glossary.htm) It offers readers the opportunity to reply to opinions and link to their own blogs. (www.iab.ie/FAQs/DefinitionofTerms/) Some blogs have definite authors who disclose their names, and some has anonymous authors who use a nickname.(www.searchenginegenie.com/search-engine-glossary-b.htm)

Why am I requiring students to post on a blog?

As part of a “Society, Issues, and Identity” unit, two of my classes will post occasionally to a classroom blog. Because it is important for them to be safe and protected when using the Internet for classroom purposes, they are posting on the classroom blog using pseudonyms.

What is a pseudonym?

A pseudonym is a "false name" or alias used by a writer desiring not to use his or her real name. Sometimes called a nom de plume or "pen name. (home.cfl.rr.com/eghsap/apterms.html) A pseudonym serves many purposes. An assumed name protects the anonymity of an author.(www.reddeerbookexchange.com/terminology.htm) Fictitious names are often used when the person performs a particular social role. (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn) In this situation, students are using a blog to publish their classroom learning experiences.

Do all students have to post to the blog for every assignment?

No. Several windows for extra credit opportunity will open and close for students to post. In a privileged community where grades are intertwined as status and pathways to academic capital, grades are very important to my students. They like extra credit opportunities.

Periodically, however, all students will be required to post as part of scaffolded learning events. Upcoming, for example, is an assignment called, “Citing Your Sources: Ancient Greece Society and Life.” Each student will submit a post in conjunction with a self-selected Issues Group.

Who is the moderator for our sophomore blog?

I am the moderator for the blog. This means that I review and sometimes abbreviate posts from the students. Some posts that are submitted to the blog may not be accepted, and yet other posts may be accepted without any editing. It is likely that most submissions will get posted with some editing.

What is the address for the blog?

http://societyissuesidentity.blogspot.com/

What has been the reaction to the blog so far?

In the week since the students have become aware of it and its potential for digital discourse, nine students have posted on a voluntary basis. Several of those students have sought me out in person to ask, “What did you think of my blog?” The blog has invited conversations around topics that a teacher might not freely address in this era of restricted teacher freedom of expression.

What do you think about incorporating blogs as part of classroom instruction? Add your own ideas.

Submit a comment to this blog in which you describe your own experiences using blogs in the classroom. Did you seek administrative approval, like I did? Was it approved (my questions were never answered, so I went ahead, anyway)? Have students or families resented the requirement to publish their work for a wider audience than teachers or classroom peers? Have students who live in a Web 2.0 world embraced the opportunity to reconcile their inside/ outside school personas, at least to a small degree? Has manipulation of form ever exceeded unveiling of students’ learning content and making links among ideas? If so, what did you do to streamline that learning process?

New Digital Media: Teachers' Roles as Trustees

The GoodWork® Project at Harvard University has been studying how individuals strive to achieve work that is “excellent in quality, ethical, and engaging to the worker” (http://www.goodworkproject.org/research/digital.htm). Much of their recent work has turned to digital media --- cyberspace --- in which youth engage in social as well as work activities.

Pettingill (2006) reports on the trust that youth place in internet sources. She found that participants who engaged in social networking sites daily were “more likely to cite Wikipedia as a trusted source for information. Subjects in this subset also had a tendency to search for content that has a perspective similar to theirs and exhibits consistency with other sites” (p. 7). Moreover, the researcher determined that teachers are regarded as trustees, “particularly regarding how to choose credible sources of information” (p. 9).

All right, teachers: raise your hands if you are comfortable with new digital media. Hands down.

Okay, I’ll start again. What is new digital media?

When digital computers became ubiquitous, our homes became sites for the Internet and computer games. Yet those media were only the beginning of new media, however. Online publications have emerged. Typographic press has been transformed through image manipulation software and desktop publishing tools.

Thus, new media represent new forms of digital media and remake traditional media forms. Think of CD players and their reincarnation, IPODs. VCRs became DVD players, and those are being supplanted by fascinating applications of video and audio streaming. Most importantly, information is shared and modifed by a number of users. No longer do intellectual property rights carry sacrosanct, individualistic meanings for composers.

In a recent study, ETS ("ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings", 2006) found that most students possess undeveloped Internet comprehension. Additionally, students seemed unable to critically reframe traditional media into new digital media genres.

Students rely on their teachers as guides to collective mapping as to what is and is not credible in the new digital media world. So, teachers, raise your hands if you agree with the following statement: “Teachers in the 21st century need to gain fluency in use of the tools of new digital media in order to help students ascertain credibility of the information they encounter online.”

I, for one, have my hand raised skyward. I’m starting tomorrow. I’m going to take a risk. I’m writing an e-mail to the Technology Coordinator in my building to inquire if our school has any policies about teachers and students blogging as part of public school instruction. Yes, again I will be extending past the curriculum mandates. Yes, my rebel status will rise in conversations. And, more pragmatically, my time as an English teacher will have a new layer of response added in what is already a time management nightmare. Sure, I will have to spend careful time monitoring students’ comments. Yes, I anticipate that I will receive phone calls, e-mails, and maybe even a few personal visits from parents and guardians who will voice concern about public posting of student work. But my instincts and pedagogical beliefs tell me it will be worth it.

I feel that more important than collegial critique is my role in Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development as someone who can scaffold students’ learning. Who knows? Maybe, someday, when my students have long forgotten my name and face, they may encounter an Internet scam and know how to assess its value. Maybe one of my students will figure how to distinguish between sources as entertainment or superficial information from those of scholarly research when a personal crisis occurs.

In all likelihood, my influence in asking students to participate in a classroom social networking website will have more immediate results. New digital media in the classroom may introduce opportunities for us to have conversations about ourselves, the various personas we all embrace, and the occasional vulnerabilities we all feel in our lives and world.

Those chances to reach out transcend any classroom risk or traditional and new media applications: real conversations about lives lived penetrate the heart of lifelong learning.

Resources

ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings. (2006, 03.31.08). from http://www.etc.org/ictliteracy
Pettingill. (2006). Trust Without Knowledge: How Young Persons Carry out Research on the Internet [Electronic Version]. The Goodworks Project Papers, 48, 1-17. Retrieved 03.31.08 from http://pzweb.harvard.edu/eBookstore/PDFs/GoodWork48.pdf.
Vygotsky. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hard versus soft data?

Eighteen months ago, I was really lucky: I received a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation. In my technology-deprived high school, SMART Interactive Whiteboards are more myth than mainstream. Yet I was going to receive one due to a research project I had proposed! It was titled, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” I wanted to study whether students’ overall literacy levels could improve by utilizing both print and visual texts, with the SMART Interactive Whiteboard as delivery vehicle within the traditional public school classroom.

Since the Call for Proposals included the criterion “should have a sound, rigorous research methodology,” I designed a mixed method research design.

Now let it be said: as a qualitative researcher, I was most interested in analyzing data on students’ learning processes. I like to observe then tell the stories of students’ lives as learners. This project would take most of an entire school year, and I was keenly interested to compose four narratives about students who fit the description of “the children we worry about the most” (Hankins, 2003).

However, I was conscious that quantitative research is still more highly prized. Thus, I offered to code and analyze via SPSS to describe frequencies of identified variables; one sample T-test with test variable “curriculum track in English class;” paired sample T-test, with variables “score on previous standardized test” and “think of self as literate;” and, comparisons of pre- and post-test assessment indicators. Ultimately, I wondered, “Would incorporating SMART Interactive Whiteboard Technology enhance student performance on mandated statewide testing?”

Fast forward to 2008. I’ve completed the qualitative aspects of the report and am now beginning collaboration with a colleague who will check (and probably heavily edit) my quantitative data. You can view the qualitative component of my report at http://smarterkids.org/research/library_subject.asp.

This week, I received my first response to the article I wrote. The response was, honestly, a backdoor compliment at best. Yes, the person who found me through the internet was delighted that my students had received and learned through the SMART Board so positively. She knew of many qualitative and anecdotal reports with similar findings. Yet, she required “hard data” to sell her own district on the merits of capital investing toward SMART Boards in their district classrooms.

Hard versus soft data, hhhmmm? There's that issue of researcher bias emerging again. And the targets seem to be almost exclusively qualitative researchers.

Regardless of socio-economic class, race, or gender, all students have tremendous abilities to be critical readers of their worlds when offered the tools for success. Drawing from a Freirian (1992) perspective, I help learners to struggle for academic success “not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (p. 34). This social justice orientation raises complicated issues about power and knowledge and does contain bias. As a teacher-researcher, I must constantly identify ethical dilemmas. Our lives as practitioners and our lives as partners, members of cultural communities, and political citizens are intertwined richly. As Haraway (1988) argues,

“…only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (p.583).

I believe a false dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity, between the personal and professional, pervades educational thinking. Actions in many domains of all teachers’ lives contribute to praxis. While I argue that a teacher cannot leave one identity at the public classroom door and assume another elsewhere, I also recognize that teachers, students, and their families do not always share the same values. We live in a pluralistic society. Values are a community standard. I constantly debate issues of justice versus caring (Noddings, 1984), and I reconcile the two by creating a classroom climate that is safe, meaningful, and consistent with community contexts.

I will leave you with questions to ponder. How many quantitative researchers offer climates where all students have chances to be successful? In what ways do quantitative researchers really know the humans they are studying and, so, live in conscious states between personal and professional --- never really leaving one to become solely the other? To what extent do quantitative researchers accept and identify their own areas of biases?

Hard data versus soft data are jargon, and distinctions between the two rise from an accepted American binary cultural system. Do quantitative researchers seek to escape binary thought and attempt to navigate the multiplicity of learning possibilities in our postmodern world? Let's just say it: all researchers have bias. As teacher-researchers, our focus must become how to reconcile that bias with the humans we observe in the constant goal to foster educational reform.


Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Generational divides

Texts that changed our lives are not our students’ texts

A recent professional development seminar for our high school English department asked me to consider and write for twenty minutes about the following question:

“What book changed your life?”

I couldn’t remember one particular book, but a vivid story did come back to me. Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood was spent in the same way: my mother, my younger brother, and I would visit my maternal grandmother, a widow. I can still see my perch on her brown couch with its red diamond pattern and the oil painting of the brunette woman at the piano over my head. I imagined that the pianist was my mother.

Certain, very specific rules accompanied my brother and me on those Sunday excursions. Television and radio were forbidden. We were required to sit politely, listen attentively, and talk when asked a question. We were not to play games, run around, or cause any commotion, and we were absolutely not to divulge the inner workings of our own 1000 square foot home, three miles away.

We were allowed, however, to read.

I took full advantage of what I perceived as this exception to civility. I read all of my mother’s Nancy Drew mysteries, and then inhaled my brother’s Hardy Boy series. I read --- albeit abridged --- Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I cried when the spider died at the end of Charlotte’s Web.

And I learned to yearn for those Sundays spent reading, for dedicated times to explore ways of seeing and knowing and living beyond my very provincial small town, whose boundaries even then seemed to kick the breath out of me.

I liked that writing assignment a lot, and I considered asking my students to complete the same assignment. But then it occurred to me: I was a Vietnam War child. Mine was the first generation to watch a war broadcast live on the evening news. The mass media as we know it today existed only in the imaginations of a rare few: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Marshall McLuhan.

Which media would my contemporary students remember with nostalgic fondness? I suspect their texts are a lot closer to Barney than Isaac Bashevis Singer, more Simpsons than Sounder.

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) executive committee has asked its members to think more intently about shifts in literacy.

Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

In an era when our students are blogging, adding to wikis, accessing podcasts, watching webcasts, and social networking, what are we, as teachers, doing in our classrooms to enrich their full literate lives?

We need to move beyond fear of our own inabilities to access new media. We need to treat literacy as more than a functional skill -- one's ability to read and write --- and, instead, as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces.

Finding the Middle in the Curriculum Versus New Literacies Wars

As I begin to make decisions about a framework for the data I’m collecting for my dissertation, I continually question how traditional literacy instruction can meet the world of new literacies. The answer circles back, over and over, to Freire’s (1992) critical pedagogy, in which teachers and students are co-learners. Thus, through critical literacy, students’ and I together recontextualize literacy processes through translation of symbols, analysis of social constructs, and negotiation of meaning.

When my senior classes read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1997), they also sort through intertextual layers and connections: Chinua Achebe’s essay, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1977); the film, Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979); documentary footage of the Vietnam War; articles from the progressive community website, CommonDreams.org on US colonialism; and a Google search using the text keywords to analyze the effect of Conrad’s text on modern American society.

After sifting through a variety of peer-reviewed research sources, students decide which frames of knowing, observing, and interpreting they will incorporate into their final projects. “Frames are powerful not only because we have internalized them from media, but because they have become second nature to us --- they allow us to process information efficiently and get about our lives” (Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom, 2002, p. 4). The frame is a portrait of trends rather than a particular individual’s identity. The concept of frame is constant as I incorporate a critical literacy framework into the classroom.

Due to the efficacious means of producing, circulating, and exchanging information, popular and media cultures are central ways in which my students can learn about themselves, their relationship to others, and the world beyond their homes (Giroux, H., 1999). I seek to create critical readers who can identify ways that body, power, and gender messages contribute to discourse (Gee, 2003). I want students to “read” their worlds in new and increasingly reflective ways, to add a metacognitive layer to learning, to adopt an outsider perspective in order to become analytical; and to interrogate the media as major political, pedagogical, and social forces (Giroux, H., 1999; Giroux, H. & Simon, 1989).

If my students own these strategies, then my influence will have transcended one school year. I teach students to question textual authority and use reasoning to come to autonomous decisions. Rather than trying to superimpose a particular world view on my students, I attempt to help them to achieve critical distance as they read their worlds in order to make independent and informed decisions as to whether to support or refute messages about identity within economic, social, political, historical, and aesthetic contexts.

For example, a senior honors female related a narrative to me about her maternal influences. “My mother refused to wear a veil on her wedding day,” Kelly Leigh began, “because her mother did, too. My grandmother said it was a sign of being submissive to her husband. She wasn’t having any of that.” A huge smile burst onto her face. “I’ve decided to wear one, anyway.”

Kelly Leigh had constructed “meaning through the integration of existing and new knowledge and the flexible use of strategies to foster, monitor, regulate, and maintain comprehension” (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991). Through a critical literacy classroom, she was able to express and reconcile hegemonic gender messages. She made her own decision in light of evidence and after reflection.

Students like Kelly Leigh who become critically literate will question hegemony in its various forms and have the wherewithal to choose to accept or reject the mythology of the American Dream. It is a critical means to reconcile curriculum and embedded messages of cultural transmission.

Resources
Achebe. (1977). An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Massachusetts Review, 18, 782-794.
Conrad. (1997). Heart of darkness: Signet Classics.
Coppola (Writer) (1979). Apocalypse now. In Z. Studios (Producer). United States: Paramount.
Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson. (1991). Moving from the old to the new: Research on reading comprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 239-264.
Freire. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Gee. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom. (2002). Framing public issues. Washington, D.C.
: Frameworks Institute.
Giroux. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Giroux, & Simon. (1989). Popular culture as a pedagogy of pleasure and meaning. In H. Giroux & R. Simon (Eds.), Popular culture: Schooling and everyday life. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.

Media Literacy Teen Council

Shifting the Landscape of Literacy at High School

I’ve been thinking lately about what media literacy in school must look like through the eyes of teens. I’ve decided that, with the exception of segregated units in Health classes, the primary function of media texts in education is as rainy day fillers [the movie version of Chapter 22 of Wuthering Heights” (Wyler, 1939)] or vehicles for substitute teacher lesson plans [Grammar Rock (Warburton, 1995)]. Media literacy is not viewed as essential to literacy instruction.

Media systems provide the majority of texts through which students view themselves. Modern communications media include television, cinema, video, radio, photography, advertising, newspapers, magazines, recorded music, video games, and the Internet. “Children have gained power, not merely as citizens but also as consumers; and indeed the two may have become impossible to separate,” argues Buckingham (2003). Yet most public school classrooms do not interrogate media texts, even though all fifty American states incorporate media standards into frameworks.

How might media literacy evolve in schools across the United States? Maybe it needs to come from the teens themselves. All too often, teachers experience discomfort when called upon to use new technologies, which go hand-in-hand with new literacies. Maybe the teens could teach the teachers.

I’ve decided to propose a Media Literacy Teen Council (MLTC) at my high school for the 2008-2009 school year. If accepted, the project will invite youth interns to learn media production, media literacy education, peer teaching, and entrepreneurial skills during the first term and then share their learning during the remainder of the 08/09 year with other students, faculty, and governmental institutions.

The MLTC project will enrich the curriculum through student exposure to tools to analyze messages in media texts and to understand how structural features -- such as media ownership --- mythologize the world. Students will be encouraged to solve as well as to pose problems. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, so the MLTC will respond in authentic ways when engaged in inquiry. The MLTC will become skillful creators and producers of media messages to facilitate understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium.

“There’s always something decentred about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures,” argues Hall (2003). By transforming media consumption into an active process, the MLTC will gain critical distance from the pervasive texts of their lives in order to acknowledge reasons for enjoyment, potential for persuasion through symbolic representations, and media’s ability to re-create the world in fictional and non-fictional ways.

The MLTC will offer guidance to students and teachers about ways that media in the classroom make space for conversations as a means to build relationships, negotiate learning and teaching, and analyze processes and strategies.

Project Description: Who will participate? Students will learn of the project during a publicity drive in June 2007. Each of the 100+ staff persons will be asked to nominate two students. Of particular interest will be students who may not achieve academic distinctions but who may have keen interest in media texts and who could benefit from belongingness that will emerge from participation in the project. The MLTC can be a place for students to have voices.


While 20-30 students will participate on the MLTC, the larger impact is on the students and staff members who will be invited to attend workshops, improvisations, simulations, and seminars led by the MLTC after initial leadership training.


What will the teachers and students do? The following are sample activities:

Leadership Essentials. Come to this workshop to explore essential skills of leadership: really listening to others and finding effective ways to talk with peers to get things done. Learn aspects of civics responsibility; outreach techniques through phone calls, mailings, presentations and public speaking; work with other school leadership groups and committees See how a teen council model could work for you.

Acting Out Against Big Media. What is the impact of advertising? How does it influence us? In this workshop we will find answers through exciting theater improvisation games. Be prepared for an extremely interactive workshop, seeking to educate, empower and inspire people to become leaders for positive change!
Spam. Spam. Spam. Do you feel like you live in a spam culture? Learn how teens can oppose corporate efforts to dangle an ad in front of our eyes at every moment. Corporations claim the right to pester us with marketing, telemarketing, spam, ad creep, etc. Fight for the right to be let alone.

"That's so Gay." Come talk about how to make your school a safer place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning students, staff, and families. Analyze media representations of heterosexuality and homosexuality. This workshop breaks down the myths & stereotypes of LGBTQQ people & really gets at the root of what homophobia is & what we can ALL do about it. Be prepared to move around, participate and believe it or not, laugh.

Drumming toward Teamwork through Music. Come hear what it takes to make music from western and other cultures with 20 strangers. Definitely a hands-on workshop! Conducted in cooperation with the Music Department.

Media "News" on the War in Iraq. How does the media convey the news of the war in Iraq? Whose voices are heard and whose are silenced? We will screen a short film about independent media in time of war and discuss this important topic.

Anti-Racism & Institutional Oppression. Defining institutional racism, sharing your own heritage, understanding white privilege, describing lateral oppression as bullying and finding ways to take action are the core of this workshop. Interrogate media texts for hidden signification. Interactive exercises help us focus on topics that can often be hard to talk about.

Food Activism. When eating lunch, you are absorbing more than just the food on your plate. Your consumption is related to the foods and beverages you see depicted on screens. Come learn how students can make their cafeteria dining experience more sustainable.

What's Gender Got to Do With it? Ever wonder why girls wear pink & boys wear blue? This workshop focuses on exactly WHAT gender is & more importantly, what YOU can do with it, about it & to it. Be prepared to cross the gender line, more than once in fun, interactive activities that get you up and moving around!

Alcohol Laws 101. What are images of alcohol in excess like in media texts? What really happens when the cops bust up a party? This workshop will highlight the laws around alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, but more importantly, will explain in an honest and straightforward fashion what really can (and does) happen in our community.


Community Assessment and Evaluation. Be part of a Youth Survey. Learn how to construct and use surveys to find out where teens hang out on media. It's like a big scavenger hunt. Afterward, come back and do presentations on you’ve they've found as a way to inform faculty about possibilities for inclusion in the curriculum.


Politics. Travel to the state capital to advocate for enhanced media literacy in our state’s public schools. Send the message that there's a great constituency in youth and that politicians should represent them. Show them that media is an important part of literacy instruction.

What are the expected learning outcomes? Outcomes in the realm of worldview --- cognition and affect--- are likely to occur. If participation in media literacy curricula allows individuals to learn something new or something more about media messages, practices, processes, institutions, or influence, then important cognitive development will have occurred. Outcomes point to increased knowledge of key concepts or terms used in the study of media and increased awareness of media persuasion, conventions, and ubiquity.

Some examples might include knowledge of strategies used in advertising to encourage favorable responses; awareness of the ways that violence is shown in the media that make it look cool; media strategies that glamorize risk-taking behaviors; or attention to roles that women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups are given in the media. Participation might contribute to a student's approval of some media messages, practices, processes, institutions, or influence and the disapproval of others.

Overall, if a student develops the ability to deconstruct, or break down components of and closely analyze media messages, then media literacy has been effective and student are becoming critical thinkers about the media.

How will they be assessed? Outcomes will be assessed in formative and summative ways: reactions to individual workshops as well as products created by the Council members. After the project is completed, a qualitative data analysis will be completed. Results will be written and submitted to an educational journal for consideration for publication.

Conclusion What are your ideas about the ways media literacy, or a teen council, or a public school could enhance teens’ deconstruction of the pervasive media texts of their lives?


Resources

Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. Malden, MA: Polity.

Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Green Mountain Peer Project, 180 Flynn Avenue, Greenhouse Bldg. 4&5, Burlington, VT. 05401,
http://gmppvt.org/print.php?name=workshops&ID=

Hall, S. (2003). Encoding and decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 507-517). New York: Routledge.


Warburton, T. (Writer) (1995). Grammar Rock, Schoolhouse Rock. United States: ABC/ Disney.


Wyler, W. (Writer) (1939). Wuthering heights. US: Samuel Goldwin Company.

Obstacles to critical thinking in the classroom

When I announce to the senior honors class that today’s learning event is to analyze a clip of the film, La Cage aux Folles (Molinaro, 1979), Larry asks, “Will we be graded on this?”

I also taught Larry four years earlier at a heterogeneous eighth grade level, and he was keenly innovative, clever, and distinguished from other students in his thinking. Even when I respond “no” to his question as to whether I will assign a grade to the lesson, he and other students react to this humorous French film in a constrained and muted manner: short giggles, some blurted-out chuckles, a few out-and-out roars. It makes no matter whether humor is based on double entendres, socio-cultural comparisons, sexual binaries, or pratfalls. The class of students consciously muffles their responses.

Larry and other high-tracked students recognize that explicit communication about learning (Sambell & MacDowell, 1998 ) --- taking academic risks---- is distinct from embodied subtexts about high-status curriculum. They do not want to jeopardize their chances for admission to prestigious universities (Rogers & Oakes, 2005) or alienate themselves from their peers in that mysterious world of adolescence, in which identifying with adults is, in and or itself, an isolating activity.

My expectations for success differ from my contemporaries’ and may not sit easily with current department, district, or even state pedagogical philosophical ties to conferring content knowledge and passing of examinations (Davies, 2006). This plays out in ways that fall on a continuum from the merely startling [the teacher in the adjacent classroom asks, “What were you watching early today in class?” after she heard Cantonese exclusively spoken during House of Flying Daggers (Zhang, 2005)], to an outright professionally frightening [after a third summons to the principal’s office, I requested a union representative to accompany me as witness to the hegemonic discussion of what instruction for the public sector should look like].

I help students synthesize their own experiences, identify suppositions, trace inferential clues, and reflect on their own thinking, among an infinite number of ways to define how humans actually think. Reflection, however, is particularly important, as reflecting on assumptions, stereotypes, and other embedded notions before, during, and after literacy events helps students to process their feelings and experiences (Wade, 1997).

Thinking about thinking is important for students to make meaning in a symbol-saturated contemporary world.

Risks for both teachers and students come when we together seek answers to hard questions. Risks are the norm because interest, enjoyment, and challenge in immediate experience to arouse student development (Dewey, 1898) receive less emphasis in the current instructional climate than does pedagogy toward cultural transmission. Dewey’s 1939 observation holds true today: “…there is much information about which (students’) judgment is not called upon to respond” (p. 41).

Students are not being invited to draw education, experience, knowing, and thinking into ways of assessing their identities within a democracy. But how can we as an educational community state that we create life-long learners if we do not actively insist on the varied process of thinking that stimulate real abilities to think about, interrogate, and know their worlds?

How do students’ thinking, reading, knowing, and learning rise from a backdrop of American enculturation? Does the ability to analyse one text transfer to another? To what degree are students able to discern communicative messages at each phase of the study? What levels of metacognition lead to student meaning making? How is student cognition related to hegemonic structures? These are the questions I am addressing with my own students this year in a teacher-researcher study.

I turn it over to you now: as a teacher or learner, how do you best accommodate new structures for thinking in this symbol-saturated world? I’d love to hear your comments.

Resources
Davies. (2006). Global citizenship: Abstraction or framework for action? . Educational Review, 58(1), 5-25.
Dewey. (1898). The primary education fetish Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Dewey. (1939). Freedom and culture. New York: Prometheus Books.
Molinaro (Writer) (1979). La cage aux folles. In L. P. A. A. Da Ma Produzione (Producer): MGM.
Rogers, & Oakes. (2005). John Dewey speaks to Brown: Research, democratic social movement strategies, and the struggle for education on equal terms. Teachers College Record, 107(9), 2178-2203.
Sambell, & MacDowell. (1998 ). The construction of the hidden curriculum: Messages and meanings in the assessment of student learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 23(4), 391-413.
Wade. (1997). Service. In R. Wade (Ed.), Community service learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum (pp. 66). Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Zhang (Writer) (2005). House of flying daggers: Sony.

Why should a teacher conduct qualitative research?

In 2006, I was awarded a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation to conduct a mixed methods study called, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” Of interest was students’ discourse around literacy issues and students’ final design products after intensive visual literacy instruction. How did communicative messages and socio-cultural contexts link to social networks and meaning making in a high school English classroom?

Year 2007 state standardized testing results were returned in late autumn 2007. Literacy levels of the participant group, which had been lower in grade eight testing, were higher than the control group in grade ten testing.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods draw on the empirical process, or understandings based on observations or experiences. However, it was the qualitative data that I collected for the SMARTer Kids Foundation --- student artifacts and case study narratives--- that unveiled richness of discourse upon which students drew to describe images and create critical interpretations about their own products. Data analysis utilized social semiotic and social discourse theories. Through analysis of multimodality in this context, qualitative research encouraged perspectives denied students in “traditional research paradigms” (Bogad, 2002). Qualitative methodology revealed insights into students’ culture, literacies, and identities; qualitative methodology helped me heuristically as a researcher.

Modern qualitative research typically falls within several categories. Phenomenology occurs when a researcher attempts to understand how one or more individuals experience a particular phenomenon. Narrative analysis is story construction, a process of creating reality in a systematic way on common patterns of behavior and relationships by people in their own societies. Ethnography describes the culture of a group of people. Case study research focuses on a detailed account or one or more cases, or a single event or occurrence. Grounded theory attempts to generate and develop theory as result of data collected. Historical research looks to past events and attempts to understand them.

Whatever the type of qualitative research, the goals are to explore, describe, predict, and/or influence. Qualitative researchers experience joy from generating ideas, creating characterizations, showing why and how, anticipating trends, and/ or extending applications that might impact communities, cultures, societies, or even the world.

My rationale for qualitative research

In the 1960s and early 1970s, action research by teachers was typically carried out in collaboration with consultants, partly in response to critique that action research was not scientifically valid. Qualitative researchers today face an increasingly hostile research climate in which definitions of research are narrowing, often casting qualitative inquiry as a poor imitation of real science. As a result, American federal funding for qualitative inquiry is dwindling as researchers must struggle to articulate the legitimacy of their practices and findings (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). “Conspicuous by their absence from the literature of research on teaching are the voices of teachers themselves—the questions and problems teachers pose, the frameworks they use to interpret and improve their practice, and the ways teachers themselves define and understand their work lives,” according to Lytle & Cochran-Smith (1990, p. 83). Teacher research has the potential for application beyond that of a heuristic role for an individual teacher: it should be valued a role in the formation of the knowledge base for teaching.

My work is based in the tradition of qualitative research (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003). I function as a participant-observer in the context of my position as a public school teacher. I define teacher research as systematic, intentional inquiry by teachers. Qualitative research design involves the use of data such as analysis of documents and participant observation to understand and explain social phenomena. According to Seigel (2005), “A main task of qualitative research is an explication of the ways in which persons in a particular setting understand, account for, take action, and manage their day-to-day situations” (p. 341).

Qualitative research utilizes the inductive method to observe and to search for patterns in that world. It is a “bottom up” method that is refreshing for me as a public school teacher. Generally, teachers are immersed in a standards-based, accountability climate where numbers, not stories, reveal explanations about learning. In qualitative research, research spirals, much like the nature of teaching: one stage leads to the next, deepens with each stage, and returns to the beginning with new ideas and ways to seek further meanings. Freire calls this praxis, where, through reflection and action, people discover themselves as the world as “permanent re-creators” (1992, p. 56).

The fit of qualitative methodology to critical literacy praxis

I became interested in popular culture in the public school classroom through my academic studies as a public school teacher inspired by the literature around literacy, learning, and media. Over my career in “Taylor” at both the middle and high school levels, I came to know my own students, many of their siblings, and have kept in contact with several former students who went onto college, careers, and/or adult responsibilities.

Epistemologies refer to researchers’ broad philosophical orientations concerning knowledge and how people come to have knowledge. To some degree, then, my interest lies in the relationship between culture and social structure but also the ways in which individual youth biographies evolve out of questions of how teens know their own worlds in what might be called sociology of youth. Thus, qualitative research, where behavior is seen as fluid, dynamic, situational, contextual, and personal, is the best choice for my research.

Thought and study alone did not produce my teacher-research of how privilege collides with critical pedagogy; it is rooted in concrete situations and describes the reactions of tracked students and upper-middle class families whom I have observed directly during the course of my work. “Critical theory… is critical of social organizations that privilege some at the expense of others.. critical theorists who do qualitative research are very interested in issues of gender, race, and class because they consider these the prime means for differentiating power in society,,” according to Bogdan & Biklen (2003, p. 21).

Narrative approach to qualitative research

Narrative research is an approach located within a long tradition of qualitative interpretation and currently pushes boundaries of scholarship in education, law, and medicine with storied accounts of individuals’ lives. Indeed, narrative inquiry is grounded in notions of experience drawn from John Dewey, the American educational reformer, philosopher, and epistemologist. Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy. He favored a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment. Dewey saw inquiry as an active rather than passive process. He argues that “education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of faculties resident in mind itself… Education proceeds taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind from without” (1963, p. 69). Dewey reminds that consciously formulated methods underestimate the necessary ingredient in learning of “vital, unconscious attitudes” (p. 71).

Narration as opportunity for story constellations

My research is based in the meanings that my students make through the institutional context in which those meanings are created. As Bogdan and Biklen (2002) state, “Meaning and process are crucial in understanding human behavior” (p. 50). Of particular interest to me in qualitative research using a narrative approach are story constellations. Craig (2007, p. 63) explains: “Story constellations seek to make visible the complexities that shape school landscapes, influence the nature of educators’ experiences, and determine who knows and what is known both within, and about, the educational enterprise.”

To study students in their community school is to study behavior in a natural environment and in the context in which behavior occurs. The research is descriptive, exploratory, and full of discovery because shifts in school landscapes can be constructed and reconstructed alongside individual and collective accounts of evolution. The story constellation approach is consistent with the deep-angle methodology I use to examine the depth of phenomenon. Reality is constructed in subjective, personal, and social ways.

Instruments and tools of qualitative research

Among the instruments and tools I utilize as a teacher-researcher are a digital audio recorder, digital video recorder, and laptop computer. However, my most important data collection device is my teacher journal. A journal becomes an account of classroom life where I record our dialogic discourse, note observations, chronicle lessons, and recreate conversations. Outside the classroom, I analyze the totality of experiences and reflect on and interpret dialogic interactions over time. Similar in some ways to ethnographic field notes, a journal captures the immediacy of teaching through praxis: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1992, p. 36). Moreover, because my teacher journal becomes a permanent, written record of practice, it provides me with a vehicle to revisit experiences over time and in relation to broader frames of reference. It invites interpretive perspectives through construction and reconstruction of data from my classroom.

Through dialogic meaning-making, teachers and students can engage in critical thinking: “ thinking which discerns an invisible solidarity between the world and men and admits of no dichotomy between them --- ---thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved,” according to Freire (1992, p. 81). I capture these words in my teacher journal and mold them into categories. Data analysis becomes a search for patterns, themes, and holistic features.

Those who have come before me

Authors of narrative are expected to tell an engaging tale as well as express arguments about the field. Many researchers have relied on qualitative methodology including a narrative approach to conduct research. Rist (1970) explored teachers’ expectations toward certain kinds of children and portrayed how these attitudes were translated into daily interactions with them. Kozol (1967) attempted to capture the quality of children in the inner city. Lesko (1988) studied gender as constructed from a feminist perspective. Hankins (2003) wrote narratives about children about whom she worried in her classroom. Finders (1997) focused on the literacy experiences of girls in middle school, and Smith & Wilhelm (2002) focused on the literacy experiences of boys in a private secondary school. Currie (1999) explored discourses of femininity and consumption in teen magazines and how adolescent girls negotiate them.

I think of education as observing selves in the making.

In this postmodern era, thinking becomes linked with “responses to experiences in the shifting, multifaceted world that are more widely shared than ever before” (Greene, 1993, p. 213). I watch students as they create meanings and form identities through dialogue and narrative. I listen to their stories and come to realize that I am moved to decipher their metaphors and discover their possibilities. Qualitative research will allow me those lenses into students’ literacy identities.

Resources

Bogad, L. (2002). Feed your mind: A qualitative study of youth, power and privilege: Syracuse University.
Bogdan, R., & Biklen, S. (2003). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Clandinin, D. J. (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing.
Craig, C. (2007). Narrative inquiries of geographically close schools: Stories given, lived, and told. Teachers College Press, 109(1), 160-191.
Currie, D. (1999). Girl talk: Adolescent magazines and their readers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dewey, J. (1963). Experience and education. New York: Touchstone Press.
Finders, M. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high school. New York: Teachers College Press.
Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Greene, M. (1993). Diversity and inclusion. Teachers College Record, 95(2), 211-221.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Hayes Jacobs, H. (1997). Mapping the big picture: Integrating curriculum & assessment K-12. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Kamberelis, G., & Dimitriadis, G. (2005). On qualitative inquiry: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kozol, J. (1967). Death at an early age. New York, NY: Bantam.
Lesko, N. (1988). Symbolizing society: Rites and structure in a Catholic high school. London: Falmer Press.
Lytle, S., & Cochran-Smith, M. (1990). Learning from teacher research: A working typology. Teachers College Press, 92(1), 83=103.
Rist, R. (1970). Student social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 411-451.
Seigel, C. (2005). Implementing a research model of cooperative learning. Journal of Educational Research, 98(6), 330-349.
Smith, & Wilhelm, J. (2002). Reading don’t fix no Chevies: Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Tesch, R. (1990). Qualitative research: Analysis types and software tools. New York: Falmer Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Summer reading or reality?

Our high school has a mandated summer reading policy for its students. Freshmen and sophomores, no matter the track, read one title. Juniors and seniors, no matter the track, read the other title.

The summer reading texts this year asked my sophomore students to read Breaking Through by Jiminez and senior students to read Ceremony by Silko. Each text was selected to be one part of an annual task to increase understanding of diversity among the Taylor student body, due to our lack of racial diversity. This year, the target geographic area on which to focus is The Americas; the Jiminez text looks at the experiences of a male adolescent migrant farm worker, and the Silko text moves the native American narrative to the 20th century by looking at the effects of war on an individual who lives outside the white mainstream culture.

What is “culture” about to students did I will teach? Hall (2003)says,

Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed--- the effect of an articulation between sign and referent – but to be ‘naturally’ given (p. 511).

What, then, was the effect of mandated summer reading on my upcoming students? Did they marvel at the ways that other adolescents or young adults negotiate their lives? Did they scrutinize how society affected Others differently because they were not of the white mainstream? Did striking social-economic differences emerge within coming of age events and prevent my students from appreciating the universality of shared experience?

The students I teach are imbued, as a general rule, with high self-esteem. About 2 percent each year so far have been part of families who receive state or federal assistance in the form of reduced or free lunch, Medicare, or public assisted housing. Thus, most of their experiences have not rested with the need to help support the family financially, as did the protagonist in Breaking Through. They have not been asked to acknowledge that their race implies secondary status as an American citizen. They have been surrounded by the discourse of war, however, and yet their impressions seem to rest, largely, on a patriotic sense of protecting their loved ones. How do they react to a narrative where the protagonist is tortured by the memories of death and pain he saw when a soldier in World War I?

Summer reading lessons take significant prior knowledge building to help students to know their worlds beyond that of the immediate and of personal experience. It requires allowing students to articulate their own definitions as well as to slowly help them to tear away what those definitions might imply for their social interactions as adults in the next few years.

Summer reading can inspire moments of explosion, and they are necessary moments to grow as readers, thinkers, and learners. Unfortunately, in my school district, summer reading was a farce, known to all students and most faculty. A core of us --- teachers and students both --- read and took notes and came ready to the first day of school to be learners. The remainder remembered that previous journals had not been graded; that many teachers were not familiar with the texts; that new students emerged who had not read.

Additionally, there was a significant lack of prior knowledge building: were the teachers and students to focus on the America we know, or were we to extend to other parts of the Americas, like the Canadian provinces or Mexican states or independent native American nations?

Summer reading was a farce. Journals were collected, and data was compiled as to how many total students read. Teachers were not surveyed anonymously as to their participation or vision. A core group of professional status teachers spoke up and asked for change.

What will 2008-2009 summer reading look like? Most likely, it will be more of the same, for Taylor schools are emblematic of the difficulties in schools across America. Change costs money. Teacher need to be paid to prepare new texts. Authors need to be reimbursed for site visits. Families who can’t afford books need to have scholarships.

And a vison as to what summer reading should accomplish --- whether within the mandates of diversity or outside --- need to be precisely delineated so that all participants know real expectations for learning and performance.

Hall, S. (2003). Encoding and decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 507-517). New York: Routledge.