Final Reflection for my Course on Litearature and Media

Question: How do we reflect on our practices as critical educators of literature, language, and media?

Reflection: Over the course of the semester, we’ve been bombarded with mental stimuli from all directions, and we’ve been asked to reflect on the practices and genres we’ve been learning about as we’ve been learning, and to reflect on the feedback we’ve been receiving as we’ve been receiving it. In Lit and Media in particular, we’ve been learning briefly about tons of potential literacy practices and genres of media, and we’ve been reflecting on how we might teach them or use them in our own classrooms. However, the question of how we reflect on our practices is one that perhaps hasn’t been sufficiently addressed. Given the frequency with which we’re asked to reflect on our practices, the question of how best to do that merits some consideration.

Deborah Appleman (2010) described the process she went through when reflecting on her role as a reading teacher, so in that sense, she might serve as a model. When we read her text at the very beginning of the semester, I thought about what my role as an English teacher might be, and it made sense that teaching students to read—words, pictures, videos, or any number of texts—was most certainly a part of my role; Appleman made perfect sense. However, reflecting on my own practice proves more difficult.

In the “Classroom Connections” activities I completed for this class, I dealt with reflecting on my own practice as well. How had the strategies I implemented met the goals I had set out for them? Where did they fall short? Why did they fulfill the goals they were meant to, or fall short? I suppose these are good beginnings to reflections on my practice, but there’s a missing step, it seems, and it’s one I’ve danced around all semester, we’ve talked about in class to some extent, and I’m only now coming to any sort of an answer to: Why did I set the goals I set for the practice in the first place?

Dealing with this question, I think, is of critical importance, because how we set the goals of our classes is at the heart of our pedagogical identity. If I see my classroom as one in which I train students to be capable employees or prepared college students or master test takers, my instructional goals are going to be very different than if I see my classroom as a space for open inquiry and criticism of the social forces behind the texts we’re studying. My classroom, I hope, will fall into this latter category. But at what level should I stop reflecting?

In the other classes in this program, we read Peter Smagorinsky’s texts about unit planning—setting instructional goals, planning how best to assess those goals, determining learning goals for lessons that will prepare students for their assessment, and planning activities that will meet the learning goals of the lesson, so that students are sufficiently scaffolded to complete their unit assessment successfully. Much of our reflection in Lit and Media--our discussions of different genres or critical lenses, for example—has been on these levels. Some of the texts we’ve read have offered practical suggestions or sample lessons, while others have expounded upon the importance of various genres in the curriculum, the larger social issues the genres can speak to, etc.

When reflecting on our practice, then, should we be focusing on whether our learning goals were aligned with our assessments? Should we be focusing on ensuring that our goals for student learning match up with the pedagogies/ideologies we’ve established about the role of English Education in student lives, in our school communities, or in society at large? Or should we be reflecting on the validity of the pedagogy/ideology that guides our classroom, critically examining the assumptions we make every day about our students, our discipline, our world, and ourselves?

Like so many other questions we’ve raised this semester, I don’t claim to have a final answer to this question. As I’ve mentioned, the authors we’ve read this semester have dealt, really, with all of these levels of reflection, and I’m sure that each of them is important. But trying to balance all of them, reflect on all of them at any given time, at least at this stage in our teaching careers, can be totally overwhelming, at least for me. So is there a balance to be struck? I think that, most likely, this balance varies from educator to educator, from classroom to classroom, and from year to year and even day to day. But I also know that only once I started thinking about my role, my goals as an educator, I became more engaged and more motivated. Once I began reflecting on my own motives and reasons for the goals I’ve set as an educator and the role I see myself playing, I became excited again about the empowering possibilities of literacies, and that level of reflection motivated me when reflecting on my success or failure at managing behavior in a classroom or aligning formative assessments with learning goals had me totally bogged down.

And our inquiry discussions in class, at times, have addressed these questions. When we talk about the role of “dangerous” texts like Do The Right Thing, or of “dangerous” topics like violence, sexuality, race, or religion, we’ve been talking around how we see our role as educators, or the role of an English classroom, or the English teacher.

So, how do we reflect on our practices as critical educators of literature, language, and media? Again, I don’t think this class has brought me to a single conclusion, but it has highlighted the importance of reflection on a number of levels. Without “meta-reflection,” reflection on the ideology/ies behind the rationales, though, I think something is missing. It is at this level that I ought to begin, I think, to understand why I set the unit goals, or lesson-level learning goals that I set, or why I select the genres or texts that I select. This level of awareness will, if I can maintain it, make me a more responsible, and more accountable educator, and for this reason, this level of reflection is a necessary step in my reflection on my practice.

Might the Fear of Teaching be the Beginning of (Teacherly) Wisdom?

Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about everything I've talked about and thought about so far, and what I've identified as my (perhaps trite and simplistic) understanding of my obstacles to becoming a worthwhile educator is fear.

I had a student this week say some things that made me afraid--not afraid for me, really, but for him, and for the other students in the class who interact with him. And this really drove home for me some of the real challenges I'm going to face as a teacher. But this isn't the extent of it.

Let me go over some of the fears I have, going into teaching:

1.) The fear of inadequacy. I'm sure we all feel this from time to time, whether we're student-teachers or veteran educators. But it's a paralyzing fear, nonetheless. Sometimes, when I'm planning a lesson I'll be presenting in my placement, I'm almost paralyzed with fear. Concerns run through my mind: Is this topic going to be relevant to students? Will it help them meet their educational goals, whatever those might be? Will it help them to become more critical consumers of the world around them? Is it pedagogically sound? Is it internally consistent? Will it be accessible to students--not over their heads, but not too simple for them, either? Will I be able to implement it well? Am I expert enough in the content to be able to field any questions students might have? Can I give directions clearly? Are my estimates of the instructional time for each activity close approximations? Am I going to be running out of time, especially if I have to take time to manage behavior issues? Will I even be effectively prepared to handle behavior issues at all?

2.) The fear of unethical or ideologically questionable motives. I often, for my own sake, try to articulate why I want to be a teacher, what kind of teacher I want to be, and why. And I come up with extensive lists--Because I love reading and writing and, as an adolescent, found them to empower me in a way that, probably, nothing else could have, and I want to share the power and connectedness of the written word with students; Because I'm concerned about social inequities that exist in our society and I want to make our nation's youth aware of them, in an effort to create a critical and responsible generation of citizens; Because I believe that an English classroom should be so much more than what it too often seems to be--a place to learn formulaic rules about language and composition that are often archaic and usually function as tools to keep some people in power and most people marginalized...I want to be the kind of teacher who pushes students, and demands a great deal from them, but who also appreciates their contexts and perspectives; the kind of teacher who wants to work with the "challenging" students, because they're too often marginalized and deserve to have their perspectives heard and understood; the kind of teacher who is passionate about every single skill set or text she teaches, and who wants to share that passion with students.

Of course, whether or not I'm the caliber of person necessary to become this type of educator, and whether or not my preservice year is preparing me for this goes back to the fear of inadequacy. But my fear here is that these motives, these goals, are just the ones I tell myself I have, and, in reality, I fell into teaching some other way and have simply justified it to myself. Perhaps I felt there was little else I was qualified to do with a B. A. in English, since the challenging life of the professional writer is fairly intimidating. Perhaps the idea of having summers off to pursue further education in English was a factor, too. It's so hard for me to tell what considerations came first. And is my desire to work with marginalized students, particularly those in low-SES urban settings a misplaced sense of superiority, like I'm some savior figure that can come in and save these unfortunate students? I struggle with this consideration, in particular, because of another fear.

3. The fear of too-high aspirations--though I don't know if that's really a good way of putting it. Is it right for me to (believe that I) want to teach to marginalized, struggling students? Or does my desire to do this type of work come from a belief that they need extra help, my help? For what? To become upwardly socially mobile? I don't think this is the goal of education, but is it not my students' (present and future) goal? If it is, shouldn't it be my goal? Or would saying something like "you need to learn to read and write well so you can go to college and get good jobs" (which is not what I believe, I don't think, but is perhaps what many students and parents, and certainly several educators and policy-makers might say) just de-value where the students come from? And can I even say that students "come from" a place, or does that generalize in a harmful way, and blind me to students' individual situations? In any case, what it comes down to is, am I aiming to work with "at risk" youth because I think they need my help? If so, isn't that a horrible, condescending thing to think? And won't that attitude, even on a subconscious level, make me a bad teacher? But what's the alternative? Teach students whose social status is more "like mine?" As if that's an option, ethically or just realistically? And how do I uncover prejudices I might have, combat them, and still function as a good educator? Can I even do this (see #1, the fear of inadequacy)

4. The fear of saying the wrong thing(s). This fear is closely related to #3. How do you show that you genuinely care about students, respect them as individuals--many of them as adults, care about their contexts and their perspectives, but still manage their behavior, ask them to do things that they don't necessarily care about or want to do, or that might be useless or even harmful to them? Should I be asking them to do things they don't see the value in? Is it my job to make them see the value in a task? What if they don't buy into my explanation of its importance? How do I create rigorous expectations for my students while still validating their literacies, experiences, and interests? How do I push back on students thoughts and statements without seeming confrontational or authoritative? And maybe the biggest challenge of all: how do I make my students successful students and citizens whilst simultaneously making them totally critical consumers of the world around them? How do I prepare them for PSSA's while still allowing them the space to challenge the test makers and the school administrators and the policy makers? How do I prepare them to enter the work force and negotiate job seeking skills while teaching them to interrogate the validity of corporate rhetoric or media images? If I do only one and neglect the other, I'll be doing my students and society a disservice. That's a lot of pressure, and those stakes seem pretty high to me.

This is just a beginning. I'm also afraid of living in an urban area, of dealing with the low pay and the tons of work that go with being a teacher. If I get a job in an urban school, I'm going, I know, to be terribly afraid every time I walk from the train station to the school, because of the neighborhood it's in. Right or wrong, I know I'll be afraid. And, supposing I get a job teaching high school english in Newark, for instance, and I walk in to a classroom of 25-35 on-level 10th or 11th grade students. I'm going to be afraid. No matter how much I tell myself to be confident, I know I'm going to start out being afraid. How can I manage a classroom like that? Will the students respect me? Will I come across as uppity, or worse? AM I uppity or worse? Can I teach those students effectively? Without being overwhelmed by the difference between their lives and mine--a difference that would be shocking based on the different setting alone? Will I make unfair assumptions? Will I say something really horrible and offensive to a student without realizing it? Will I get mugged on my way to the train station?

These are fears that I wish I didn't have, that I know might be based on a whole slew of factors, ranging from my own ignorance to seriously valid concerns. The hard part is drawing the lines to determine which fears are founded and which are unfounded. But regardless of all that, I think that I sort of came to a conclusion today: what's important isn't whether or not I have these fears--I can't control that. What's important is how I deal with them. Like I said, this might come across as trite and oversimplified, but as long as I acknowledge the fears I have, which I tried to do here, and press on, trying to do what I think it the best I can do in spite of my fears, I think I'm on ethical and responsible ground. And I know I'm going to mess up. Professor X has assured me that all research suggests I'll mess up over and over and over again my first year in particular. And that's REALLY hard to acknowledge, because students don't deserve to be impeded by their novice teachers' mess-ups. But there's no way around it. It's going to happen. All I can do is try to be real with myself and my peers about that, and learn as much as I can, and try as hard as I can. And I have to figure out how to balance different priorities, which will take time.

But anyways, I feel like now that I've named my fears (some of them) I have a little more power over the trajectory of my life and career. And I don't think being afraid makes me a bad teacher (at this point, teacher candidate). On the other hand, I think, to be paralyzed by fear, or to try to avoid certain settings, discussions, or experiences because I'm frightened, would kill me in the proverbial crib. Being an English teacher is risky business, and I'm realizing that, and hopefully learning to deal with that realization.

The Role of the English Teacher and Literac(y/ies) Education

What is an English Teacher? What should (s)he be?

As far as my question about the role of a teacher, I had a couple of conversations with professors, peers, and my mentor teacher in which the idea of student "need" came up. Professor X told us about some of the things that make life unpredictable from year to year--one year, you might have students who work independently and stay on task, for the most part. "Easy" students, generally speaking, to teach. And the following year, you might have a group of students that need a little bit more guidance, scaffolding, or support. This got me thinking about the odd phenomena of student need, and the role of a teacher. Later in the week, my MT (I'm just going to start abbreviating Mentor Teacher as MT because it makes my life much easier. Sorry, this abbreviation probably makes no sense to those of you who aren't pre-service teachers or involved in teacher ed), trying, I think, to be supportive when I perhaps sounded to her like I was doubting myself (who'd ever get the impression that I'd ever do that), said to me of her AP students, "Don't worry, they're good kids. You can't really mess them up." This made me think a minute. I mean, is there a distinction between "bad" kids and "good" kids, "smart" kids and "dumb" kids, students who struggle and those to whom learning comes with a fair degree of ease?

Certainly, all students, of all levels of academic and cognitive ability, all areas of interest, confidence, parental involvement, etc., need good teachers. But I think there's a reason that so few of my peers in my special education class have students in their classes with IEP's. I may be wrong about this--I've done no fact checking whatsoever, and no asking of professors or others in my program--but I suspect that student teachers/interns generally get placed in fairly high-level classes--honors and AP classes. I suspect there are two reasons for this--one is that teachers of AP students perhaps feel more confident that we can't "mess their students up," but I think the main reason is that most student-teachers are placed in classes with teachers who are generally considered to be expert teachers, teachers with a fair amount of experience and who demonstrate competence.

But, wait a minute, if you're reading carefully, you'll notice that there's something a little funny about what I just wrote. The AP kids are the one who student teachers are qualified to teach, because regardless of how much we might stumble, we won't mess up their learning, because they're independent learners. (This is not me making truth statements, but just restating the hypothetical logic that I suspect, perhaps wrongly so, goes into our placement decisions) We also end up in these placements because the teachers are experts who we can sort of apprentice, who have a lot of desirable skills. Have you caught the drift of what I'm suggesting yet

If not, let me be explicit. In my experience, in my placement now and in the high school I attended as a student, the vet teachers, the real "expert" teachers, taught the AP, honors, and academic sections. The new teachers taught the on-level students, or the "vocational" track students. Again, I don't have the studies/research to back me up here, but it seems to me that the best teachers in the biz might be teaching to the students who, supposedly, need them the least. Of course, I'm not suggesting that AP students don't need good teachers. Certainly, I think they do, which is why I worry so much about failing them, not being the teacher they deserve me to be. But don't struggling students, students with IEP's, students with low levels of parental involvement, students from low-SES homes, single-parent homes, working-parent homes--don't they need strong teachers even more? Perhaps they don't. But I do know one thing for nearly certain. Most of the "lower-level" classes at my placement tend to be a lot larger. And the same was true in high school. And, as far as I know, that's a pretty typical pattern to see in urban low-SES schools (again, no research to back that up, so don't take it for truth--I'm basing this on my experience and what I remember hearing, not always the most reliable sources, and they certainly wouldn't stand up to peer review). At the very least, planning for large classes is a big struggle that, in itself, requires expert maneuvering. My point in all of this--and I know I'm slow at getting to it; I told you, I had a LOT of time to think while I was brooding last week and cheering this week and blogging neither week--is that I'm trying to decide where I belong once I finish my program at Pitt. I was thinking, really, truly thinking about teaching at an urban school in NYC for the first couple of years, at least, of my career. My reasoning was that I suspected there was a higher need for talented, committed educators in those schools (and at that time, I still saw myself as potentially talented. Now, I may be revising that idea. I still think I can do it--teach well, that is--but it may take a lot more work than I anticipated) and I had a duty to go to the schools where the need was highest. This, perhaps, is an incredibly, incredibly arrogant thing to think--as if I'm going to spend two years in a school in the Bronx and suddenly the students will realize that they have value and will become scholars and grow up to be congress(wo)men, all thanks to my self-sacrifice. Maybe it is arrogance, but I think it's important for me to work with students who other educators don't want to work with. Maybe it's a misguided feeling--I can't really fully articulate a rationale for it, but I feel that it's important for me to do it, and maybe that's enough, but maybe it isn't. Anyways, regardless of my motives, last week, when I was feeling lower than a bow-legged caterpillar, I was certain that I wasn't qualified to work in an urban school--I was sure that I didn't have the "with-it-ness" (or is it spelled withitness?), the classroom management skills, the rapport-building-skills, the experience with "difficult" students to teach in an urban school. But then, something funny (not in the "hahaha" way, but in the "oh-my-word" way) occurred to me--urban schools are the ones with the job openings, the ones where we, entry-level teachers, are often told we may have to work for a couple of years to gain experience before getting the jobs we "really" want. Shouldn't we be sending our best teachers to our "high-need" students and leaving the ones that "you can't mess up" to the rookies? I don't know how much of my reasoning here is solid logic with facts to back it up and how much is my cynicism coming across, but I know the job I'm going to get as an entry-level professional will not be working with "good" "independent" learners--they're a reward for dealing with the tough kids for enough years, it seems.

Anyways, what this weird little aside comes down to is simply this: I don't know what the role of a teacher is/should be, and I don't know how much that changes based on the "neediness" of a particular group of students. And I don't know if it's even fair to think of urban schools as "high need" schools. Who are we to think they need us? (Those pronouns aren't plural because I have a group in mind, but mostly because I don't want to think of myself as the only arrogant starry-eyed educator to feel this way) Do they, or don't they? Do low test scores mean high need? Are students failing just because they're not doing well academically? Bob Fecho wrote about students in his "urban" school in Philly, which served a largely black and Carribean student body, refusing to "play the game" of standardized tests. (Sorry, I don't have the book with me right this second to give a full citation) I don't know if that can be generalized to all "high-need, low SES, urban" schools, but I know in my placement, many of the students with below basic scores on their PSSA pretests seem smart and engaging enough to me, but they don't want to play the game of school. Is it clear, I wonder, what I mean by that? These students demand authenticity, transparency about purpose. If they're doing worksheets just for the sake of completing a packet and covering a unit, they don't buy it, and they don't care. And then they don't do well, and so teachers give them lower level work. Then, they care even less. And I can't blame them. Is it my job to make them care? (The answer to this question may be different between my pre-service year and my first year teaching)

It all comes down to what English classes should look like, and this was another question I had. A lot of my students don't care about English, because it's hard for them--many of them have learning disabilities that make reading really hard for them--and the purpose isn't clear, so it doesn't seem to be worth the effort it takes. I wish they saw words the way I do. I love words so much, because I use them in so many ways, and I see how much they empower me--they put me in dialogue with experts in Education, many of whom I'll never be able to meet, they help to expose me to so many different world views and cultural perspectives that inform my own and help me see the richness of the world, they help me express myself, understand how I'm feeling when I miss my fiance who's living in NYC but also can't bear the thought of going in to a class I know I don't understand, they help me tell others about my struggles with my teacher prep program and seek insight into my career trajectory, and they help me see through political speeches, media bias, and so much other crap that gets thrown at me daily from all sides (for example, I'm at y brother's house right now, on his computer, totally inside, with the TV off, and I can spot 5 advertisements from where I'm sitting) This awareness gives me power. I want them to have the power of words, too!

But they're not getting it by filling out worksheet packets. Or by not filling out worksheet packets while their teacher shakes her head.

The Purpose of English Class: The Power of Literac(y/ies)

I don't know what the students think the purpose of English class is. I don't know what my placement school or my MT think the purpose of English class is. But I know what the purpose is for me. Making students strong, strong, strong. Showing them how to determine what was influencing the author of a text--living in a racist, sexist society, for example, and either incorporating those assumptions into their texts or pushing against them. Talking to them about how we can read a book to think about history--not the facts of history, but an artifact of a cultural moment. Teaching them to read the world around them with a critical eye. Teaching them how to advocate for themselves, how to actively oppose unfairness without needing violence. I want them so badly to know the power of writing in their own voice, dialoging with themselves through writing to understand themselves. I care so much about English and so much about students. But is this really what English classes are for? Is that what my MT's classroom does? I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. About a lot of things I've written here. But I know it's possible to gain autonomy and power from literacy, because I've read parts of Malcolm X's biography, and I've read Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and I've read Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigary and Gloria Anzaldua (forgive the absence of accent marks, I have no idea how to insert them in a blog post. Why can't html cooperate with word processing software keyboard shortcuts?) and so many others who say such brilliant things that people get to read and talk about only because they're written.

These students aren't reading these things, though. So is this a canon war I'm fighting? Or is it a pedagogical one? Or is the "war" a figment of my imagination, and, really, an overreaction to a fairly good education system. (Sir Ken Robinson doesn't seem to think so http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U ) But what do I do about that?

Let's say we can buy my premise that English classrooms are about empowering students with literac(y/ies) skills ( I just got Reading, Writing and Rising Up and Teaching for Joy and Justice, 2 books by Linda Christensen, at the recommendation of a very smart peer/colleague of mine, we'll call her Catherine, and I suspect, though I haven't read them yet, that they may support this premise, as well. She spoke--Linda Christensen, not Catherine--at the PCTELA conference I wrote about last time, and she dealt with this idea a bit) and that my presumption that AP kids are fairly independent learners with a pretty sophisticated repertoire of literacy skills, and that the students not in AP classes--the students in my MT's remedial reading class, for example, with IEP's and low-SES backgrounds, who live in foster homes and haven't been "good at school" in a very long time--aren't getting access to those literacies, which leaves them, in some ways, disempowered. Oughtn't someone step in, and say, "enough, quit cheating these kids out of a fair chance in a game that is, in a lot of ways, fixed against them." Okay, so that's a grossly oversimplified way to think about it, but it conveys the general sense of frustration I feel when I try to negotiate the sophisticated "best practices" I'm learning from Pitt with the students at my placement who just need me to make sure I don't mess up too badly, and with my prospective job options--what I feel I ought to do, would like to do, but don't know if I can do vs. what I think I probably could do but don't feel "called" to do. I know the notion of being "called" to work in an urban school sounds so, again, condescending, and I don't mean it to be. I don't know, perhaps my attitude isn't the right one, and I'd be inauthentic and not confident enough and wouldn't be successful in an urban school as a result of these types of thoughts exactly. But who's going to teach in the cities, then? New teachers waiting for the jobs they really want to open up?

Sorry, this entry really must be laborious to read. It's what I'm thinking right now--back and forth, back and forth, highs and lows, highs and lows--which must be torturous to read--assuming anyone's bothering to read by this point--but maybe it'll put you in my shoes a little. No linear path of logic to follow. Just trying to navigate a minefield of thoughts and doubts and questions without losing all my limbs before getting to the other side.

But, since I'm into the topic of what English classes should look like, I might as well move on to my arch frenemy for the year--unit planning!