CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: L.30 How Are We Teaching Teachers to Be Teachers? Russel Durst presented “I Just Want My Students to Love Literature: Working with High School English Teachers on the Teaching of Writing.” Durst began by getting the audience to understand how high school teachers in Ohio are standards driven because he thinks we can know more about high school English teachers to bridge our collaboration instead of letting media and other myths doubt each other. Durst works closely with his children’s high school to help set curriculum as a parent who is also a distinguished professor at the University of Cincinnati. He asserts that what we do as college teachers affects what happens in high schools instead of the usual way we think high school teachers affect college instruction. Research shows that teachers teach the way they were taught, more than what they were taught to teach in the few education courses they may or may not have taken. Some teachers, for example, model high school assignments on their college assignments despite the point that many of their students are not ready for advanced analytical writing. Durst runs a summer institute for high school teachers about how to teach writing to address a perceived “disconnect” between pedagogy and training. Durst made a very insightful point about how much of high school English is about literature and writing gets marginalized in high schools. He described the kitchen sink approach to get students to read as much literature as possible to develop their literacy skills. Often reading takes place in class and time for writing instruction is too rarely budgeted. The summer institute initially approached the problem by encouraging curricular changes, but that was not successful and he adapted the work of the institute to find ways to integrate more writing into the literature instruction. He encourages us to improve connections with high school teachers among our colleagues. Eli Goldblatt presented “What Comp/Rhet Can Give Pre-Service Teachers” and followed up on Durst’s presentation by encouraging us to sit in on high school classes. At the center of Goldblatt’s thinking is teacher consciousness which he defines as “that kind of mind that allows you to do your job.” He outlined four critical activities: writing knowledge and ability, reflection on our own literacy, hands on experience with adult learners, and theoretical understanding of literacy, and them emphasized circulation of the four activities or how we get these activities “to talk with each other.” Goldblatt diagrammed the flow of circulation using Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundaries as an example of how teachers can become more conscious by reading and writing with Rose in the four activities he outlined. From reflections on the course Goldblatt teaches to train students, students reported their learning clustered around gaining patience, respect for those who struggle with basic tasks, seeing the importance of multiple pedagogical approaches to address multiple learning styles, understanding the complexity of learning literacy in another language and culture, understanding connections among literacy, language, culture, and history, and realizing the connections between their own stories and the stories of learners. Goldblatt was humorous and his diagrams and teaching insights made it clear that the students in his class were very likely to improve. Marjorie Roemer presented “Divergent Goals in the Teaching Preparation Programs” and asked “is pedagogy the side order on our menu?” Most of us think preparing English teachers is not a primary mission of our English departments and is the primary mission of education departments, but after presentations by Durst and Goldblatt, it was clear that we can do more. Roemer claims “calls for better teaching are all around us.” In what sense is teaching preparation our business, and, is training and influencing future English teachers in our English department missions, are questions that frame the problem. Roemer interviewed teachers and students and found a gap between the kind of learning that goes on in college and the kind of instruction done in high school. She claims that students have too little guidance negotiating the gap and tend to revert to what and how they learned in their own high school experience. She noted a bifurcation between content knowledge and pedagogical expertise, and that the sense of circulation between their understanding of content and pedagogical principles is not strong. Roemer made a strong point to conclude by suggesting that better connection will improve the overall quality of undergraduate education. Tom Newkirk presented “Taylorism.” He started by explaining “taylorism” as the idea abstracted from Frederick Winslow Taylor: Father of Scientific Management by Frank Barkley Copley that says, do what I say and don’t think beyond doing exactly that. Taylorism is essentially a separation between practice and theory. Newkirk applied this term to the ways primary teachers are forced to use “immense manuals” and instructed to teach in a lock step, test driven system that Newkirk sees as analogous to the ways workers in steel mills must do jobs without input or further knowledge of their labor. Next he pointed to prompt and rubric instruction in the SAT testing process. Newkirk found a nineteenth century assignment from Harvard that is quite similar to the sample SAT prompt he offered, but it was his analysis of the prompt and reading of an essay written for the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (where students are taught to make up statistics to succeed on the test) that really showed the formulaic nonsense of writing to the test instead of teaching writing. Newkirk admitted that he didn’t understand the power of the SAT to shape curriculum until recently. Despite presenting in a curtained room near the exhibitions, Durst, Goldblatt, Roemer, and Newkirk overcame the physical problems to offer a comprehensive and inspiring session. Not only in the presentation, but during the Q & A, the need for better teacher training and collaboration among K-16 teachers was echoed and amplified beyond any noise level in the conference. |
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