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.