Prologue:
“Dear America, teachers are
NOT the enemy! Teachers are NOT the enemy of our nation’s ability to prosper
and progress! Teachers are NOT the enemy of your taxpayer dollars. Teachers are
NOT the enemy of your child's ability or opportunity to learn meaningful
material. Teachers are NOT the enemy of your child's chances at success! Yes,
teachers are human and they are fallible, but they are NOT the enemy, so please
STOP talking about and to them like they are!! (this message has been paid for
by time Nicole should have spent reading)”
---This Week’s Chapter 3-Induced Facebook Status
Last week, as we talked, we touched
on the issue of enormity—both in size and scope—of the NCLB legislation: how
much reading or knowledge of the bill is
enough; when and how do you know that you know enough; and who do your (or do
you not) trust to fill in the gaps you may have in your knowledge. Though I
still feel uneasy about not having personally
read all or most of the NCLB legislation, I was delighted to discover in their
third chapter, “Troubling Images of Teaching in No Child Left Behind,” Cochran-Smith
and Lytle provide precisely the kind of information and analysis I didn’t even
know I was looking for. While their presentation of the material is most certainly
not neutral--as they themselves acknowledge—this chapter provided me with
exactly the kind of detailed examination and close analysis of the bill, its assumptions,
and its embedded ideologies, that I needed to feel as though I was getting a
more complete picture. While it is not a new realization to see that the values
embedded in NCLB emphasize the importance of teachers’ content area knowledge and
the paramount usefulness of “scientific” research in classroom best practices, Cochran-Smith
and Lytle offer a critical and thorough examination of these values in a clear,
concise, and logical way that I have not before seen explored so systematically.
While the banking model of education
is not new to me, I had never before considered fully the ways this model (and
its values) are embedded within and play themselves out through the mandates of
NCLB. Cochran-Smith and Lytle clearly demonstrate
that one of the grounding tenants of NCLB is the an assumption that the job of
education is to pass knowledge from one individual to the next, in a direct, linear,
and systemic way. If, then, knowledge is a commodity that can be passed from
one individual to another, it is flows logically that, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle
point out, “What it takes to teach is subject matter [knowledge], many American
teachers are not competent in subject matter [hence why schools are “failing],
teachers are not competent because existing teacher peroration and licensure systems
do not work” (65). Moreover, if content
area knowledge is steady and unchanging, as NCLB conceives of it, then it
follows that if teachers are primarily responsible for student success, and
student success is measured through standardized assessments of students’’ knowledge
in various content areas, and students are consistently scoring poorly on these
assessments, then teachers must lack adequate knowledge of the subjects they
teach. However, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle point out, “decades of research have
shown that learning is a process of developing useable knowledge… by building
on previous knowledge and experience” (67). My question, then, is, if there are
decades of research demonstrating that learning is a process rather than a
product, and if NCLB is so highly concerned with research-based legislation, why
is THIS research in process-based learning, not the research undergirding the
policy? And perhaps even more disconcerting, I find myself asking, have
these people who wrote this legislation never been taught or learned anything?
I mean, come on, everyone has had that teacher or professor who was brilliant
in practicing their field of expertise, but couldn’t teach their way out of a
paper bag! Do these people not remember learning to ride a bike? Just as
someone cannot explain to you the mechanics of a bicycle, demonstrate their
function, model how to ride, and then you hop on a bicycle for the first time
and ride; neither can academic knowledge be packaged and delivered in a linear way—why
would they think it could be?!
Both more vexing and even
more interesting to me, however, is the portrait of teacher knowledge and
authority which Cochran-Smith and Lytle argue NCLB is creating. They argue, “NCLB’s
assumptions about the nature of teachers’ work and its significance are tied
directly to testing, accountability, and scientifically based research as the
key to improving the quality of what teachers do” (69). As I read this section,
I had—in the words of the immortal Oprah—an “Ah-ha! moment.” Of course, it all
makes sense now. The minds behind the NCLB legislation still conceive teacher
experience, wisdom, and knowledge in the terms of Stephen North’s (also immortal)
house of lore. How can the collective, but localized and sometimes varying, and
often unempirical knowledge of a bunch of teachers (most of whom are women), be
of any use?! They can’t even agree on a single right way of doing things, so
how can this lore, passed like juicy town gossip at the local salon, be of any
value? Furthermore, if we are measuring
the success of this pedagogy of lore based on students’ performances on a
series of large scale assessments which are rooted in terms of unidimensional
national standards, is it any wonder that we understand teacher knowledge/training
as directly causing student failure? When you see NCLB through the deeply rooted
values that undergird it—and which Cochran-Smith and Lytle so effectively unpack
from the law’s language—it’s almost
not hard to see how we’ve become a nation who seems to see teachers as the
enemy and national mandates as the solution.
A Slight Digression and (Unfortunately)
Another Story About Mom:
As I read the latter half of
the chapter, in which the authors pointed specifically to NCLB’s distrust of
localized teacher knowledge and unraveled some of the reasons behind this
distrust, I found myself chewing on a recent and vexing conversation with my
mother.
Last Sunday when I--as my
mother sighed more than she actually spoke at supper—asked her what she was
thinking about, she answered, “school, of course.” She explained that despite
having taught American history for 30 years, she was newly frustrated and
overwhelmed because she was weeks behind where the school district-mandated curriculum
said they should be at this point in the semester. “We’re supposed to be
talking about Reconstruction,” she said, “And I haven’t even started the Civil
War yet!” An American history teacher because of her love stories, she
explained that her trouble was that there are so many cool stories and
activities to be done to teach the lead-up to the war, that she can’t bring
herself to sacrifice her favorite parts of the curriculum for the district
learning objectives. “They just want us to spend so much damn time on
Reconstruction… and how bad it was for black people…” she said, beginning to
trail off, “OK. Yes, we get the race stuff already, but get over it…” Knowing this was not the moment to contest her
racist and narrow-minded statement--and also knowing by the way she held my
gaze for just a split second, daring me to say something, that she was fully
aware of what I was thinking—I said nothing.
For days, though, her words
(and my lack of them) have haunted me. What do you mean, “get over it?” And,
no, you clearly don’t “get it already”
or you wouldn’t think something like that. My reading of Cochran-Smith and
Lytle’s argument and the perspective of NCLB which they lay out, only further
roved to complicate and trouble my consideration of this event.
In this case, it seems to me
that the system- (district-) mandated curriculum has its heart in the right
place. It seems to be espousing (at least on the surface) a pedagogy centered
in critical thinking about the histories we learn and their implications for social
justice. (Either that or I’m giving the curriculum too much credit). However,
my mother, who in this case really does know the material (her content area)
extremely well, either politically or pedagogically doesn’t see a need to focus
on this aspect of history. It strikes me, then, that something is being lost in
translation. As Cochran-Smith and Lytle so aptly point out at the end of their
chapter, teaching “entails how teachers’ actions are infused with complex and multilayered
understandings of learners, culture, class, gender, literacies, social issues,
institutions, herstories and histories, materials, texts, and curricula [and I’ll
add, race]” (84). In other words, as it turns out, teachers are human and thus
subject to all the many human influences as the rest of us.
Thus, if my mother, in this
case, is an expert on the material she teaches, but is ideologically opposed
the district-minded but more socially aware curriculum, what is missing? In
this case—and seemingly in some contrast to what Cochran-Smith and Lytle seem
to be implicitly arguing—the person who (I think Cochran-Smith and Lytle would
expect) should be more likely to teach the more socially and culturally aware curriculum
is not, and it is the system-mandated curriculum that seems to be more aware of
local conditions and issues of social justice. In this case, how can the
district’s curriculum be better expressed in a way that my mother (and other
teachers liker her) might see its value?
Moreover, just because my
mother’s version of the curriculum omits or at very least diminishes this
racial aspect of history, does not mean that what she is teaching is worthless or wrong. She is a story teller and lover
of hands-on experiential learning—a pedagogy which her students have consistently
loved and learned from over the years—so she focuses on the parts of the curriculum
(of history) that best lend themselves to this kind of teaching. The notes she’s
received and the conversations I’ve been whiteness to over the years, testify
to the effect her story-rich, hands-on pedagogy has had on students, helping
them to love learning and history.
So is it better, then, that students
learn a particular, fairly white-centric version of history, but be encouraged to love learning
and history; or is it better that they learn a more complex view of history
that encourages thinking about social justice, but run the risk of not being
exposed to the kind of pedagogy that seems to foster a love of learning? I don’t
mean to suggest that the two sides must be mutually exclusive, because they’re
not, but pragmatically, there just doesn’t seem to be time to do it all. And
even if there was, how can we teach (or guide) a seasoned teacher, complete with
her own set of biases and cultural beliefs, a whole new set of stories (or curriculum)
so that she can embrace them enough to
teach them with the same creativity and passion she has always taught with?
* * * * * * * *
I’m sure the connection of
this story and these questions to the issues raised by Cochran-Smith and Lytle
in the chapter still aren’t very clear. I have a strong sense the connections
are there—and aren’t entirely a self-interested digression—but I’m still having
trouble articulating them. I hope that as we talk, perhaps I can better
articulate my thoughts.
* * * * * * * * *
A Few Connecting Thoughts on
Chapter 4:
To be honest, as I finished
chapter three, I found myself in a pretty dark place, feeling as if the system
was too big, the values too deeply entrenched, and the ideologies that
undergird them only seeming to gain momentum. However, I was pleasantly surprised
to have found a dim light in the darkness in Cochran-Smyth and Lytle’s
examination of “Practitioner Research and University Culture.” As they
explained the various programs and research they have participated in at their
various institutions, and the ways in which they can imagine using practitioner
research to disrupt and potentially rearrange the university structure, I found
hope.
Though convincing
politicians, policy makers, and the larger culture that our cultural understandings
about what education should be and what teachers should do are wrong, feels
overwhelming and quickly leads to me melting into a soggy puddle of distraught sobs,
the notion of changing university culture seems just a bit more do-able. If we
can work, as community of “academics,” to push back against the cultural
devaluations of practitioner research and knowledge, and push universities to
reimagine themselves in terms of this kind of work, perhaps this can be the
first step toward greater cultural change. Because institutions of higher
education hold a good deal of cultural capital, if a critical mass of academics
(and their universities) started doing and valuing practitioner researcher,
then perhaps policy makers and the general public might look up and say, “well,
ok, if our country’s ‘brains’ think this is a
valid way of thinking and making knowledge, than I guess we’ll try it
too.” Though still, likely farfetched very naive on my part, somehow, reimagining
and changing the structures of university culture seems just a little bit more
possible than directly changing the minds of policy makers.
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