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.