Above: One student's six-word memoir from the perspective of a slave about an act of resistance.
PROPOSAL FOR INQUIRY PROJECT/
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INQUIRY QUESTION EMERGES FROM CURRENT TEACHING CONTEXT
One of my two student teaching placements at NCHS is in a small learning community (SLC) that the school describes as a behavioral intervention program for incoming ninth graders. Students in the SLC are said to test at basic or advanced skill levels but suffer academically for other reasons, such as chronic truancy, emotional disturbances, or other issues—but not Learning Disabilities. As a rule, the program will not enroll students with Individual Education Programs (IEPs), because administrators aim to narrow the spectrum of student needs the program is to address. My class currently consists of about 7 students on a given day, although 10 are rostered and 5 more are rumored to transfer in in the near future. About 75% of the roughly 100 students in the program are African American, which is not representative of the composition of the entirety of NCHS, which is 34% African American. From my perspective, the stereotypical prejudice that these students face—the school casts them as “the bad kids”—is a significant barrier to the learning that takes place in the classroom. Throughout the school day, my students are constantly learning that they don’t fit the mold of a good learner. Among many other negative messages they receive implicitly, this is reinforced by the fact that the program’s four classrooms are on the same hall as the rooms for physically and intellectually disabled students. At NCHS as in any other school, there is “a hidden curriculum” (Kumashiro, 2004). “We can never know exactly what students are learning” (Kumashiro, 2004).
My observations throughout the entire school building have revealed negative stigmatization of the students in the program. Students inside and outside of the program refer to it as “The Cube,” anecdotally I hear teachers dreading the assignment to teach there, and in a conversation about Medieval social hierarchies in my social studies class, students have cited themselves as “at the bottom” of the social hierarchy of NCHS. These are strong cues that my students receive daily about their marginality in the school and their individual capacities to learn. “If cues in a setting that point in an unsettling direction mount up,” writes Steele (2010), “a sense of identity threat is likely to emerge.” For this reason, I am deeply concerned with creating opportunities for my students to forge positive identity conceptions. On a personal level, I do not believe that I can tell these students what to feel positive about in themselves, or how to have faith in a world that seems so intent on putting them down. Similarly, I cannot teach social studies and history content with directives to interpret the material in just one way. Genuine, “authentic” (Tomlinson & McTeague, 2009) learning will not take place if I tell students how to reach the end of every assignment. The academic tasks I’ve laid out for this inquiry project insist that students make meaning, and not necessarily the same meaning for each individual, nor the same as me. My inquiry question uses the word “agency” to describe the action that my students must take for themselves, in the particular context of the two academic tasks I’ve laid out. The media analysis assignments make implicit the task of using one’s own perspective to identify the perspective of authorship. The unit on bullying and membership makes explicit the agency involved in choosing to participate in small and large-scale societies. Together, they are a non-directive approach to empowering my students to first identify, then reach beyond, their own perspectives in order to critique the world around them, and act on it. My first months in the classroom have reinforced some of my assumptions and knowledge about the role of curriculum in students’ behavior—I believe that “the best discipline is good curriculum” (Dawson, 2002), and I attribute many difficult days of teaching to my own unfamiliarity with the tasks of planning lessons in ways that meet my students’ needs, particularly the need for simple, short instructions and constant, tangible work tasks. But the “need” that seems most critical for my students is occupying a role in the classroom that affirms their identities—not conforming to the identity of a “bad kid,” and not falsely aspiring to be a Magnet student, but sincerely taking on the role of a learner. My students have expressed a genuine lack of interest in studying history—they responded to a written questionnaire in October, and a few of students regularly verbalize their disinterest in what we are doing. They use the words “boring,” “drawn,” “corny,” and did I mention, “boring”? They use that word a lot. So I see my task not as convincing them that they must willingly consume the information of history, but rather to create a real function for historical examination in their own lives. My students are surrounded my information—on the internet, with their phones, on television, in their social circles, walking around NCHS—but they don’t seem to know how to examine who that information is coming from, or how to critique its validity or various perspectives. The academic tasks I’ve outlined attempt to draw students out of the isolation of their individual experience, in order to make use of their own perspective through analysis. They don’t have much practice putting themselves in other peoples’ shoes. But that is the work of studying history. Weinberg (2001) distinguishes between the skill sets developed by professional historians and the mode by which students learn “history” in schools—he insists that teachers must invite students to the tasks of reading, comparing, and analyzing historical sources, rather than delivering a set of monolithic facts. The failure to teach students to analyze perspectives about the past is a failure to teach them how to be literate in their presents. Bain (2006) similarly questions the “authority” of the monolithic author in history texts, and encourages teachers to invite multiple, perhaps contradictory, perspectives into the classroom. I believe that I am prepared, as a teacher, to lose some of my “authority” in the classroom in order to encourage my students’ deeper examination of the world around them. In our shared reality at NCHS, while my students may feel the marginalization that I see in play around them, it is unlikely that they can explain why it exists, or why they are subject to it. I realize that using the term “agency” to describe my goal for my students runs the risk of imposing my whiteness (and certain other social class assumptions) on my mostly non-white students (Anyon, 1980). I do not mean to simplify the forces and factors that challenge my students’ success in school, nor to suggest that my students can simply overcome their travails and obstacles with a good dose of “agency.” But I do believe that in my role as a teacher, beyond being a compassionate and astute person, I must at least attempt to use, as a tool, the academic content I’m employed to teach. My hope for my students, as individuals, is that they will be able to more critically analyze the systems in play around them. |
Works Cited
- Anyon, J. (1980) “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.” Journal of Education. No. 162.
- Bain, R. (2006) “Rounding Up Unusual Suspects: Facing the Authority Hidden in the History Classroom.” Teachers College Record. Vol. 108, No. 10.
- Dawson, K. (2002) “The best discipline is good curriculum.” Rethinking Schools. Vol. 17, No. 1.
- Kumashiro, K. (2004) Against Common Sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
- Steele, C. (2010) Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York: Norton & Co.
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- Library of Congress (LOC). “Teacher’s Guides and Analysis Tool.” http://www.loc.gov/teachers/usingprimarysources/guides.html . Accessed 12/14/12.
- Mandell, Nikki. (2008) “Thinking Like a Historian: A Framework For Teaching and Learning.” Organization of American Historians (OAH) Magazine of History. April, 2008.
- Nieto, S. (1999). “Critical Multicultural Education and Students’ Perspectives.” In Stephen May (ed) Critical Multiculturalism. London: Falmer.
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- Schultz, L. et al. (2001) “The Value of a Developmental Approach to Evaluating Character Development Programmes: An outcome study of Facing History and Ourselves.” Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 30, No. 1.
- Singer, A. (2009). Social Studies for Secondary Schools: Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach. New York: Routledge.
- Vansledright, B. (2010) “What Does It Mean to Think Historically … and How Do You Teach It?” Social Studies Today: Research and Practice. W. Parker, Ed. New York: Routledge.
- Wineburg, S. et al. (2011) Reading Like a Historian: Teaching literacy in middle and high school history classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.
- Zins. J. et al. (2004) Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning: What does the research say? New York: Teachers College Press.