Thoughts on Staunton

I just finished reading John Staunton’s “Langstond Shakespeake’s Harlem 41: Found Poetry, Found Pedagogy, and the Transpositions of Student/Teacher Inquiry.” This piece has a great “way in” to the mind of the reader through a personal experience from the author, which happened to be fairly humorous and memorable. I absolutely loved the merging of the poems together and found it especially funny that the author was so entertained by the destruction of this poetry.

After listening to him speak this week, I can really appreciate the voice and sense of humor behind this article. Without a doubt, John was one of the more meaningful speakers I have heard; everything he talked about had a practical purpose, not just theoreticals.

Brauer & Clark’s “The Trouble Is English: Reframing English Studies in Secondary Schools”

In Lydia Brauer and Carol Clark’s article, the idea that English education is currently going through a sort of “growing pain” seems to work its way to the surface. In an effort to make cover everything, it seems that there is a growing movement that believes that the teaching of English has been spread too thin and really lacks foundation and direction. From personal experience, class discussions, and some of the readings, it seems that English education is now being centered around the material that is tested by the powers that be. Not only does this take some creativity away from the teacher, but also prohibits exploration for the students, since the cirriculum is so rigidly scheduled around what texts and material must be learned before THE TEST.

Keeping that in mind, the objectives that Brauer & Clark discuss in this article are definitely promoting the idea that English educators are now teaching a wider variety of material and feeling less certain about what their students are actually “getting out of it” than ever before. This tends to put more pressure on the teacher, thus making the whole process seem arbitrary. Personally, I feel that the whole education system, not just English, are struggling to find an identity in the current world where test scores rule the world.

 

 

Anagnostopoulos’ “Testing and Student Engagement with Literature in Urban Classrooms: A Multi-layered Perspective”

In this article, Anagnostopoulos discusses the influence that standardized testing results have on not only the curriculum of a teacher’s classroom, but also the impact that these results may have on the teaching process itself. Through this research, there seems to be several disparities among teachers, especially between “old-school” and “new-school” teachers.

These studies suggest that teachers’ subject-matter beliefs, years of experience, departmental status, and involvement in professional learning communities mediate their responses to external testing (Smagorinsky, Lakly, & Johnson, 2002; Zancella, 1992; Zigo, 2001). More experienced teachers with high departmental status, constructivist views of subject matter, and connections to professional networks tend to resist “teaching to the test,” while novice teachers, and those with conventional subject-matter views and low departmental status, often acquiesce to testing pressures by altering their curriculum in ways that fragment and narrow its scope (177-8).

Anagnostopoulos qualifies these findings by explaining, “These studies illuminate the variability of teachers’ responses to external tests. None, however, closely examine the tests, making it difficult to specify the relationships between the tests and teachers’ instructional practices” (178). This article is talking about many of the issues that we have been discussing over the semester as far as standardized testing and “teaching for the test,” rather than coming up with your own curriculum (refer to findings on pg 189 and on…).

This is a valuable study and it is unfortunate that testing is hurting the education system.

George Newell talks “Autonomy”…

In Newell’s “Autonomy and Obligation in the Teaching of Literature: Teacher’s Classroom Curriculum and Departmental Consensus,” the loss of depth and quality within English programs, at all levels, is discussed. It is especially interesting because teachers within the same department feel like they “aren’t together” (18), which makes it especially difficult for their students. There seems to be a clash between the new-school and old-school English language arts teachers. Basically, it seems to come down to the impatience and over-confidence of the newer generation of teachers butting heads with the fortitude and experience of the older generation.

Although an English department’s formal (written) curriculum or “course of study” does provide overall frameworks for what skills and content are to be covered, even beginning teachers often believe it is less important than the teacher’s day-to-day decisions about teaching and learning (Grossman, 1990). This seems to be where some of the problems lies. Newell explains:

A “common sense” (Mayher, 1990) approach to the development of formal curriculum usually includes a listing of what students are to learn and then the construction of often elaborate scope and sequence charts. However, English language arts has been in transformation with a new vocabulary for discussing teaching and learning. For instance, Mayher suggests that we now think and act in terms of “uncommon sense” by planning and enacting the teaching of literature and writing using constructivist views of learning. And unlike the conventional wisdom about curriculum development, this requires that curriculum become something more than decisions about the scope and sequence of content to be im- parted to students—curriculum must foster “thoughtfulness.” (22).

There is a disparity between these two schools of thought that is undermining the whole act of teaching. The four issues discussed on pages 34-36 encapsulate this argument. They are as follows:

Issue 1. We need to consider the value of the department chair in coordinating the English program.

Issue 2. The department as whole needs to accept responsibility for developing a coherent program.

Issue 3. Because teachers’ sense of coherence and continuity comes from various sources, the English program needs a set of principles that can accommodate a range of teaching philosophies and a range of students from various backgrounds.

Issue 4. Individual teachers need to be supported in their own efforts to be effective according to their beliefs and the needs of their students. However, the English department can be a key instrument in providing individual teachers with a means for judging the merits of their own cur- ricular and instructional choices.

Overall, it seems like the biggest issue at work here is the desire to be “correct.” There might not be one absolute way the contextualize the curriculum, but I think having a plan is better than making rash changes one semester after another.

John Guillory “The Canon as Cultural Capital”

In this article, Guillory discusses the idea of the education system throwing different schools of thought together without grounding them in context. Basically, he feels that schools are teaching things that are deemed to be “culturally significant” without really delving into why they are considered to be such. Guillory states in the early paragraphs of this article, “School culture does not unify the nation culturally so much as it projects out of a artifact-based knowledge and imaginary cultural unity never actually coincident with the culture of the nation-state” (219).

After sifting through his argument and various examples of how this current system of cultural osmosis is failing, he makes a great reference to the another author, Bourdieu. This reference explains the current system from a more data-oriented approach, thus providing some grounding. The final paragraph of this article is very powerful and suggests, rather sardonically, a revised system of contextualized cultural transference that “makes sense” to him. If nothing else, this article provides some entertainment for the interested reader.

 

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Stanley Fish on Recognizing Poems

Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” examines the practice of learning to “read” poetry. It seems like the vast majority of people treat poetry like they do Shakespeare; even if you don’t understand it, you still want everyone to think you do by using buzz words like “dramatic” or “deep” or one of a thousand other words that no one can really explain, but everyone uses to describe works of literature and poetry.

There were a couple of quotes that really stuck with me as I was making my way through this essay, particularly when Fish explains, “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as my studetns were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess” (270). This is definitely true. When a students sees a poem that does not fit with the standard layout and rhyme scheme, they panic. However, if they know that it is a “poem”, then they begin to look for aspects of poetry they have been taught, like similes, metaphors, and alliteration.

Fish refers to digesting a poem like following a recipe. He states, “It was almost as if they were following a recipe – if it’s a poem do this, if it’s a poem, see it that way – and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes, for by directing readers as to what to look for in a poem, they instruct them in ways of looking that will produce what they expect to see” (271). Overall, the idea that Fish is trying to get across here is that poetry does not exist in a vacuum. The standards that poetry is perceived to have are those that have been set in motion by generations of readers, teachers, and students.

To My Readers…

Sorry about the reading issues on my blog. I have resolved them and we should be good now. I look forward to reading your blogs as well.

 

Viswanathan’s “Introduction to Masks of Conquest”

In this article, Gauri Viswanathan promotes a new way of combining thoughts about the the history of English studies and today’s classrooms. The juxtaposition of British colonization was  very helpful, because it put today’s students in a similar scenario to the citizens under British rule. It was really interesting to think of the manner in which teacher’s project the selected texts to their students. It seems as if teachers are allowing space for students to interpret readings on their own, but then end up making the final judgments themselves anyway (meaning that they are really only teaching one version of the text).

I realize that at some level, students must be lead down the right path, but at what point does guidance become imposing control?

Terry Eagleton’s “The Rise of English”

It seems like I can’t make it through a Literature or Literary Criticism course without reading something from Terry Eagleton, and with good reason.

From the perspective of Eagleton, literature not always defined as writings of the imagination, but writing that society would appreciate and find useful. Literature took on a meaning of objectivity without shedding light on anything purposeful, except daily living. This was quite popular, especially given examples like Dicken’s publications and such.

Literature is seen as a device in which morality and ideas about humanity can be spread, and could be used to promote certain ideologies politically and religiously, and could satisfy peoples’ longings for universal questions. Since the amount of accountability is relatively low in literature, except for famous authors, it is much easier to make bold statements in writing. These statements are even more powerful and controversial when coming from the pen of a world-renowned author.

Literature will always be the one of the most influential ways to spread ideas to the populace.