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The Sixth International Conference on Self- …, 2006
The word self in common use refers to something bounded by skin and a skull. By contrast, the self-study of the inherently relational practices of teacher education is often social in orientation. So the theme of Collaboration and Community: Pushing Boundaries through Self-Study was one readily agreed upon as appropriate for a celebration of a decade of coming together for collaborative conversations in lively community at the Castle Conferences. These proceedings would not be possible without many kinds of collaboration. The summaries of the papers presented at the Sixth International Conference on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices include many in which the authors collaborated in research and in writing, a few of which represent multiple pairs or groups of collaborators. Many of the single authors describe partnerships or focus closely on the community built by professors working together with preservice or inservice teachers. Every step, from the call for proposals to distribution of the proceedings at the Castle, has benefited from collaboration.
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Teaching a "New Canon"? Students, Teachers and Texts in the College Literature Classroom
College Composition and Communication, 1997
While graduate students at the University of Iowa, we were lucky enoughtruly, privileged enoughto have the opportunity to reflect upon what it might mean to be a "teacher" of literature in the post-secondary classroom. And while appreciative of that opportunity and of mentors, students, and colleagues, each subject to the consequences of our early mistakes, we also recognized that our training and reflection were largely improvisatory. We "made up" syllabi, grading policies, seating arrangements, presentation styles, responses to student writing, and so on. As we matured as teacherscholars in the midst of debates about the canon and cultural diversity, this pedagogical "creativity" was tested as a reliable means of action in response to the dizzying array of demands placed on us by students, texts, and the institution. We recognized early on that an attention to difference in the classroom must mean a disorientation and resisted the temptation to oversimplify, to retreat into the safety of text-based, teachercentered approaches. Bruce recalls sensing such a pedagogical epiphany when he realized that students' needs, knowledges, and expectations were perhaps the most important text of any class: My interest in the social dynamics of the literature classroom arose primarily out of my experience with a radical juxtaposition of two different teaching contexts. 1 began my college teaching career at California State University, Fresno. where classes were filled with students of amazingly diverse heritage. In a single class, I might have students of Basque, Armenian, African, Mexican, Hmong, Chinese, Japanese and European heritage. The degrees to which these students continued to share in the cultural values and beliefs a these origins depended, Of cool se, xi xii Bruce A. Goebel and James C. Hall For Jim, the need to explore a comprehensive pedagogical strategy was precipitated by the realities of identity politics: As a white scholar and teacher being trained as an African-Americanist, I was aware each and every day of the complexities Of my position in the classroom. Wht.t might "teaching" mean if' it was necessary for me to resist culturally imperialist 1' NS. xiv Bruce A. Goebel and James C. Hall any way." Despite the inclusion of canon-opening texts, the values and biases of the traditional canon remained unchallenged in the social dynamics of the classroom. We felt most imposed upon by these values, for example, when trying to think through questions of evaluation. How were we to reconcile what seemed to be a fairly straightforward decentering of authority with institutional responsibilities to "grade?" Our conversations together were marked by an anxiety about "consistency" and "integrity." How could we be telling students about cultural pluralism and the joys of interpretation while engaging in what seemed at times to be a fairly crude process of determining when people were "right" and "wrong?" While we were never radical relativists, it did seem incumbent upon us to discover what "evaluation" might mean if one was serious about democratic principles and canonical reform. A "new canon" was going to require an intense self scrutiny. These ruptures between literature, theory, and pedagogy brought us to the realization that there was a real need for systematic exploration about the relationship between classroom practice and the institutionalization of cultural democratic ideals. We set out to put together a collection of essays that would explore the needs of teachers who wish to serve their students effectively and also serve the idea of a "new canon." Within this collection, the "new canon" refer3 to more than a set of multicultural texts, fixed or changing. Instead, it indicates and describes comprehensive curricular change and an expanding repertoire of self-reflective teacher knowledge and strategies. In this sense the "new canon" emerges from and embodies an ethical, democratic process removed from utopian theory by its very application to the lives of real, diverse, complex students, teachers, and texts. As James Marshall pointed out during a recent NCTE conference session, theorists of culture and democracy have succeeded in identifying and articulating much of the problematics regarding race, gender, and social class, but they have failed to create a corresponding pedagogical technologylargely because they have failed to account for the social dynamics of real classrooms. Recent pedagogical specialists, from writing process advocates to reader-response theorists, have concretely outlined practical classroom methods but have failed to adequately connect them to contemporary debates regarding the relationship among a literary education, cultural diversity, and democracy.
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Mapping the pedagogic practice of grade ten English teachers: a qualitative multi-lensed study
2019
This study addresses the issue of how to track the classroom talk of subject English teachers in Grade Ten classrooms in KwaZulu-Natal. Subject English, as a horizontal knowledge structure, presents particular challenges of content and methodological specification: what may be included, and the means of teaching and assessment, are contested, wide-ranging, and frequently opaque. English teachers are central to the construal of the subject in the classroom and their classroom talk is central to their construal of the subject to their learners. Classroom observations were conducted in four purposively selected KwaZulu-Natal state high schools, spanning the socioeconomic spectrum, across the period 2005-2009. Twenty-six lessons were analysed using code theory's concepts of classification and framing. This analysis presented broadly similar categorisations of strong classification and framing for most of the lessons, apart from some framing differences with respect to evaluation. However, my field observations had identified differences between the teachers' classroom talk that were not captured. This led to the quest of finding pedagogically well theorised languages of description of teacher talk capable of capturing the range of variation and flow with greater nuance. Application of the lenses of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Jacklin's tripartite typology extending code theory (2004), Brodie's expansion of classic classroom discourse analysis (2008, 2010), Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (2014), and conceptual integration theory (2015), were successful in describing and discriminating more fully the range of pedagogy. Detailed analysis of four literature lessons (two teaching novels, two teaching poetry) from the two schools at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, are presented as exemplars of these lenses' capacity as languages of description for subject English teacher classroom talk. The multi-lensed descriptions highlighted variations such as: o the degree of use of nominalised discourse (SFL); o more dominantly discursive pedagogy or more dominantly conventional pedagogy (Jacklin); viii o more overt or more implicit evaluations, greater use of insert moves versus greater use of elicit moves (Brodie); and o cultivation of a cognitively associative literary gaze versus cultivation of a decoding of the text gaze and intricate movements by the teachers between relatively stronger and weaker epistemic and social relations; more frequent and deeper versus less frequent and flatter semantic waving (LCT). A fifth lesson, focused on learner oral performances of infomercials, is analysed using conceptual integration theory, as the sole example in the data set, of pedagogic conceptual integration. These analyses highlight the potential of these lenses as tools for the unpacking and specification of teachers' pedagogic practice, particularly their pedagogic content knowledge, an undertaking which has been protractedly difficult to achieve beyond localised, intuitive description. They also illuminated the intricate complexity of pedagogy, and the propensity for pedagogic meaning to disintegrate when the level of analysis shifts down to too small a micro-focus. This highlights the ongoing need for research to pinpoint the 'sweet spot' of the optimally smallest unit of a pedagogic act. Key components of the pedagogic process emerged that we need more refined understanding of in relation to what teachers do and the impact of this on the epistemic access of learners: teacher pedagogic mobility, pedagogic coherence and pedagogic flow. The study points to the Jacklinian and LCT lenses as offering the most potential for the ongoing investigation of these dimensions.
1993
Focusing on three literature teachers who have lived with and through the changing representations of the discipline, this paper, an examination of the nature of inquiry in literature education, describes the multiple realities that such teachers must negotiate for themselves and their students. The paper discusses conceptions of reflective inquiry; the content and processes of inquiry; and kinds of inquiry, such as autobiographical inquiry, curriculum inquiry, pedagogical inquiry, and inquiry of possibility. The paper concludes with three essential principles that summarize the formulations, processes, and outcomes of the inquiry: (1) although practice as product is the observable act, teaching, as these teachers demonstrated, is a process; (2) working within the school culture may not determine, but does affect, teaAlers' images of possible and desirable teaching and learning; and (3) one common thread in the three teachers' motivation for inquiry was their need to confront the rapidly changing views of teaching and learning literature. A figure listing principles of curriculum planning and a figure listing critical questions in learning literature are included. Contains 110 references. (RS)
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Curriculum Inquiry, 1997
This article focuses on the role of self-reflexivity in challenging traditional academic assumptions about learning, teaching, and "appropriate" ways for students and teachers to interact. In attempting to implement a critical pedagogy in two undergraduate reading classes for preservice teachers, I ended up reinforcing much of what I had attempted to disrupt. Multiple sources of data inform this descriptive study: students' written assignments, exit cards, two sets of focused class writes, my journal, and my recollections. This article explores the way in which my unacknowledged biases/expectations sabotaged my conscious attempts to change the traditional power structures created in college classrooms. I also aim to further the discussion of unsettling traditional methods of analyses by sharing how I moved through the actual process and fought my own biases about what was "valid." Similarly, I seek to show how the process of implementing a critical (liberating?) pedagogy can be as much of an internal struggle for the teacher as one of teacher against "the system" and/or the students.