Given this variety of purposes, what subject or curricular content do English teachers teach? Skills and content driven by state tests? Character development? Literary theory and criticism? Self-knowledge? Class-based literacies providing upward mobility? Charged with educating students in terms of academic literacy, moral development, cultural tolerance, media savvy, literature appreciation, standards achievement, and civic responsibility, most English teachers (ourselves included) frequently end up feeling like the so-called jacks-of-all-trades—and masters of none" (296).
After reading this passage, I totally identified with the feeling that I am teaching with many of these objectives in mind. Does this "thing" called English Education feel like a grab bag of sorts to anyone else? In my department, there is debate over what books to teach, what to do with each book, how to be creative and yet get our kids read for the standardized tests. In the end, I am at a loss to REALLY know what my kids should be getting and what it looks like when they get there.
B and C are encouraging teachers to understand the frames of influence that shape their methods and objectives in the classroom. I think the most interesting one was that we teach texts as windows and position students as tourists/witnesses. I've been inclined to read vicariously and I encourage my students to do so as well. I do have to take into account a major issue--the way in which I teach is never void of bias. When I teach a text, I am superimposing information that may or may not be present based on my background/experiences. Being aware of that bias can also help me to teach more effectively--partly because I can neutralize the bias, but also because I can help students realize that we are all biased in some fashion.
What will English Education look like in the future? That's up for grabs.
I completely related to the grab bag approach. When I think about our curriculum, that's how it was presented also. There was a list of skills or items to be accomplished in each section: reading, writing , speaking, and technology. I think the set up was easy to approach like a checklist, and a lot of people did it that way, checking off a personal narrative, then a novel, then a speech. I hadn't really thought about that part of it until now. I think they've brought it together a little more since then, but I'm not sure. Either way I'm also trying to pin down the issues and ideas that drive my instruction.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of teaching texts as windows. I read this article, but skimmed more at the end and missed that. It fits into my other research as well! Thanks!
So--what's wrong, really, with the grab bag approach?
ReplyDeleteI think I teach texts in all the ways the author describes:
as "sacred"--I do want students to read Shakespeare in college, and while I don't sanctify him, I do tell students that they need to know one of the most influential authors in the English Language and read him in "his" language, not in translation into a contemporary idiom.
As windows: This happens all the time in my classrooms, but I am sometimes a bit uneasy that we read the literature of "others" as windows into their world and not, also, as works of art. (vice versa, we don't read the literature of most white males as "windows," unless they are gay, perhaps. (And why not?)
What was the third? popular texts that need resisting, that are potentially dangerous?
I am not that taken by the fourth approach either, the one that is supposed to encompass all the previous ones, because it seems a bit forced to me. It is a fact, isn't it, that students are exposed to works in literature classroom, whether highschool, middle school, or college, that they wouldn't pick up on their own. Such exposure is at least one of the things English classrooms do.
I think all three, even all four approaches are important and have a place. It's good, in my mind, to have all of them. Why not?