Living the Nightmare, Redux
All
love is lost Terror succeeds and Hatred instead of Love
And
stern demands of Right and Duty instead of Liberty
William
Blake from The Four Zoas
Such is the nightmare
that is the present (Pinar 2004, p.62).
The continued emphasis on
surveillance, accountability tests, scientific management, fortress-like school
buildings, and prison mentality in classrooms will produce more alienation,
school drop-outs, deprofessionalized and demoralized teachers, and disaffected
students joining gangs in society.
The very thing that we think will make us safer actually exacerbates the
problem (Slattery 2006, p.171).
When I went back to become certified to teach
three years after finishing a degree in English, the education classes I took
laid out how to teach in what seemed to me a very simple manner. It all seemed so logical and
correct. The teacher wrote out the
objectives for the lesson, figured out the activities the students would be
guided through together to demonstrate how to do the task, then on their own
they would demonstrate that they had mastered the task - - learning
accomplished. I realize now that
the Madeline Hunter method I was taught, and subsequently evaluated on, was
pretty much based on Ralph Tyler and the Tylerian Rationale, a very
positivistic view of learning and curriculum.
Over the years I stumbled along slowly wandering
away from the very straight narrow path of this kind of educational thinking,
as I searched for ways that would lead my students to connect with language
through reading and writing. I
felt I had found a comfortable space away from all of the fast, yet controlled,
traffic. I felt I had found a
refuge away from “Modern visions of education—characterized by the Tylerian
Rationale, behavioral lesson plans, context-free objectives, competitive and
external evaluation, accountability politics, dualistic models that separate
teacher and student, meaning and context, subjective persons and objective
knowledge, body and spirit, learning and environment, and models of linear
progress through value-neutral information transmission” which according to
Slattery “are no longer acceptable in the postmodern era” (Slattery 2006, p.
213-214). However I have come to
experience recently, while they might not be acceptable, they are pervasive,
and growing in strength.
I have become angrier over the course of my
doctoral program, and over the course of this semester as my conception of what
curriculum and teaching means has changed. I have always intuitively felt the need to resist the way
the state mandated testing in Texas has been conducted, but as I read through
histories of curriculum and think about what could be attempted through
curriculum I am finding it harder and harder not to start screaming, not just
in frustration, but in a feral anger at my central administrators, principals,
and fellow teachers. “While school
systems may promote critical thinking skills in the published curriculum guides
of the district, the effect of the emphasis on rote memorization, predetermined
solutions to complex problems, canonical hegemony, rigid structural analysis,
and standardized testing all contribute to the impairment of a student’s
ability to meander - -like the river - - and to create, discover, and respond
from a self-reflective perspective” (Slattery 2006, p. 209).
While
control of what is taught has always been an issue, ranging back to the first
curriculum of Harvard to the Committee of Ten in the late nineteenth century,
there has always been some latitude in the classroom, or at least ways to
resist the hegemonic curriculum by what actually occurred between the students
and the teacher in the classroom.
Yet as more and more controls are placed on the curriculum with state
and federal mandates for standards, and accountability through high stakes
testing, more and more controls are going to be placed on the teacher in the
individual classroom.
A
couple of months ago I received an email from my department head in which she
had pasted the instructions she received from our assistant principal in charge
of curriculum concerning the district mandated Curriculum Based Assessments
(CBA). It read as follows:
CBA #2 will be
administered with your mid-term (50% of the grade from CBA, 50% of the grade
from your self-created exam) CBA #1 dates are as follows: Social Studies:
October 30; Science: October 31; English: November 1; Math: November 2FYI: The
reason that I did not schedule any CBA's during Oct 23-26 is because we are
having TAKS retest. That means that up to 150 students would be out to take the
Exit Retest and I know that you would want as many students taking the test as
necessary. CBA 1 will count as a
test replacement grade. Meaning: you can use this grade to replace
the student's lowest exam grade. If the CBA is the lowest grade, then it
does not count. Communicate this to students in the most effective manner you
know.
If we need to
discuss anything please let me know.
(name redacted
by neal)
Associate
Principal of Curriculum and Instruction
I
thought I was going to explode.
Not only did I have to give three of these “Curriculum based”
assessments, but also the second one was going to have to count as half of my
mid-term. But then as Slattery writes, “ The preservation of the educational
bureaucracy depends on the continuation of modernity and social control”
(Slattery 2006, p. 216). The
central administration, to justify its existence and salaries, and in fear of
the students not doing well enough on the tests to please the school board,
parents, local businesses and real estate developers, exert their control by
demanding teachers follow a Tylerian approach to curriculum. “Tyler’s rationale revolves around four
central questions which Tyler feels need answered if the process of curriculum
development is to proceed:
1.
What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2.
What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these
purposes?
3.
How can these educational experiences be effectively organized:
4.
How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?”
(Kliebard 1970 p. 259-260)
Not
that these are not important questions, but rather the reductionist answers
that are too often provided by the fourth question, especially in Language Arts,
drive the ways the other questions are determined and limited. In an attempt to reduce learning to a
number that can be measured, the experiences the students engage with, and
ultimately the purposes of schools are reduced. As William Pinar writes, “With its emphasis on the bottom
line, the school increasingly becomes a business, no longer a factory perhaps,
but certainly a corporation (Fiske 1991), factory or corporation, schools
become (knowledge and skill) businesses, not institutions of education” (Pinar
2004, p. 225). The Tylerian
Rational is appealing to the bottom-line/ business model that is coming to
dominate the schools. There is a
clearly stated goal; if certain steps and methods are followed, the goal will
be achieved. If the goal is not achieved
then obviously the steps were not followed. Even though, as Kliebard states, “it is even questionable
whether stating objectives at all, when they represent external goals allegedly
reached through the manipulation of learning experiences, is a fruitful way to
conceive of the process of curriculum planning” (Kliebard 1970, p. 270).
I
have always been able to ignore the focus on TAKS, because until recently I
knew, mostly on gut instinct and personal experience with my own writing life,
that what I had my students do in class would lead them to doing well on the
state mandated test. I did not
have to make them do endless worksheets modeled after the kinds of items that
would be on the test; I did not have to teach obsessively formulaic writing where
the students counted the number of sentences they used in each paragraph. Much
of what I had them do was based on reading theorists like Louis Rosenblatt who
wrote: “Those who think of language as simply self-contained set of signs
linked to sounds ignore the essential third element, the human being who must
make the linkage between them if there is indeed to be a meaningful word. Language is socially evolved, but it is
always constituted by individuals, with their particular histories” (Rosenblatt
1938, p. 25). I simply had them read and write,
focusing on their choices in texts and topics, which tended to be about
themselves. The more they read and
wrote the better they would become at reading and writing. Every year my students did well on the
test. However, the test was
disconnected from what I did in my class.
This new mandate differed because it would change what my students had
to do for my class.
“Educational engineers today, likewise, believe
that their curricular structures will promote accountability, equity, harmony,
homogenous socio-political structures, and shared Western values in society”
(Slattery 2006, p. 210). No one
can be against accountability, but no one seems to question the value of what
is being accounted for; no one can be against equity, but too often equity is
misinterpreted as meaning that everyone is taught the same because everyone is
the same. Harmony is bought with a
silencing of any dissenting voices, or different voices, or as the Clash
sang: “You have the right to free
speech, unless you are dumb enough to actually try it.” With the increase scrutiny that the
CBA’s brought into my class, what I had been able to ignore as being separate
from my curriculum had forcibly entered into the room to enforce its myopic vision
of what it means to do English.
The
email telling me that half of my midterm was to be a CBA infuriated me. I had come up with a mid-term the first
year I moved to the high school and was told I had to have a mid-term; it asked
the students to choose two out of three prompts where they had to write about
their experiences reading and writing in class and how they thought this
experience influenced their thinking about reading and writing and how the two
activities influenced each other.
I felt rather proud about the meta-cognition my midterm involved. They had to think about what we had
been doing. I agree with Slattery when he wrote, “We must find a way to create
meaningful connections in each present moment rather than imposing a rationale
for delaying meaning and purpose” (Slattery 2006, p. 86). I saw my mid-term as part of the
process of my class, more than a measure of how much information they each had
achieved in comparison to everybody else.
They were making meaning out of their own experience of reading and
writing. I was trying to let them
use “the very thing that makes them human, which is conscious awareness of
their context and their reflective powers through language” (Slattery 2006, p.208). Yet conscious awareness for students is
not necessarily a goal of the school.
A
few weeks after the first district mandated CBA, I was sent to review the
upcoming CBA which was to be half of my mid-term exam. I thought, “Ok, here is my chance to
voice my concerns.” So I went
prepared to discuss the CBA and its inherent problems. I was after all a doctoral student at
the Enormous State University currently taking classes in Curriculum Theory and
ELA Curriculum; I had a lot to say.
Yet that was not to be. The
meeting was designed to control the discussion of the test, and limit the kind
of input the teachers called out of class were to provide. We were broken into groups of three
from each grade level and told to take the test, which had already been
written. We were told in defense
of the test that the CBA’s were like a check up rather than an autopsy. The tests would be used to monitor
progress rather than as a post-mortem to discover why the students failed. Yet the objectives tested were not the
same as the first CBA, so any information one could glean by comparing the two
tests would be invalid, at least as far as student progress on any given
objective was concerned (I’ll leave aside the myth of measurable improvement
for this discussion). I suspected
the tests would be used against the teachers.
However,
the curriculum superintendent went on to say that the tests would not be a club
to beat the teachers with, but then in the next breath he said that if one
teacher’s scores were low on one objective compared to another, then we could
see what the other teacher was doing and then replicate that activity in our
rooms. The assumption being of
course that the students who did not do well did not have as effective teacher
as the ones who did well. The way
the objective was being assessed was not a question that was allowed. Yet, if it
is not assessed as taught, and one wants their students to do well, so that one
will be considered a “good” teacher, then one would automatically want to teach
the objective in the way it is being tested. The way the
results are analyzed creates a commonality of teaching defaulted by the test.
If one does not teach it in that way then your students will not do well on the
assessment, not that they cannot do what is being asked in the TEKS objectives,
but they cannot demonstrate the objective using the method of the test. Critique of the test was limited to the correctness of items
or confusion in the items, not any questioning of the test itself: it was a de facto compliance and
acquiescence to the positivist paradigm.
This leads to reinforcing the knowledge level and recitation method of
teaching. The
proofreading/conventions on the test, because it relies on memorization rather
than the ability to use references and resources, reinforced the teaching method
of drill and kill. Slattery
writes, “Modern curriculum engineers must no longer be allowed to build dams
that prevent learning and levees that attempt to artificially control thinking
and reflection. Students and teachers in the postmodern curriculum must be free
to meander, flood, shift course, and build a new delta” (Slattery 2006,
p.203). Focusing the CBA’s on
easily tested items decontextualized from writing in practice builds levees
which control the way writing is taught in the schools. The students’ way with words (Heath
1984) are not allowed to create the fertile deltas of meaning with the world
they live in.
When
I first started teaching, I thought of curriculum, when I thought of it at all,
as the content of the class, nothing more nothing less. Before school started at the second
school I worked I had a meeting with the other eighth grade teacher. I asked her what was taught in the
eighth grade. She pointed at the
basal text and said, “That.” Over
time I focused on the kinds of thinking that the acts of reading and writing
encompassed, always keeping in mind a broad view of what that entailed. An epiphanal moment occurred when I
realized what James Moffett meant when he had written that English has no
content. I had until that moment
spent most of my time planning these elaborate lesson plans, taking up weeks
with activities connected to various literature experiences that I chose for my
students. For several years after
my sudden revelation, I let the reading and writing experiences become focused
on the students. They read books
they are interested in and write about topics they are interested in, which in
the case of writing means themselves, or autobiography. Over time I have continued to focus on
writing and reading, coming to realize that the experience of reading and
writing is often more important than what I am trying to teach them about
reading or writing. The student’s
engagement with the text they are reading and writing, the creation of meaning
through their language, leads to a creation of meaning in their lives.
Yes, the test is important in that it determines
more and more if a student passes from one grade to the next, or even graduates
high school, which can determine what access they have to the economic and
cultural goods of our society (Gee 1996).
As one of my Assistant Principals asked when I questioned the value of
the disaggregated CBA data, “Don’t we owe it to the student to teach them how
to pass the test?” But it is not the teacher’s responsibility for what a
student learns. “Teachers are responsible for being well-informed and
self-aware, for being pedagogically spirited and adaptable and ethically
committed, for making every effort to engage students intellectually and
psycho-socially. But it is sheer
(political) nonsense to assert that teachers are accountable for students’
learning. Students (and,
secondarily, their parents and caregivers) are accountable for their
educational accomplishment. Teachers
provide opportunities; students are responsible for taking advantage of
them. (Pinar 2004, p. 224). Years ago,
growing tired even then, of teachers waving around the test scores of their
students like prizes from the fair, all the while calling them “my TAKS
scores,” and using the scores to prove their educational worth, I told a fellow
teacher, “I don’t take credit for when they do poorly, so I don’t take credit
for when they pass.” She thought I
was just trying to excuse myself from the students who did not pass. I felt it
unfair to take credit for their success.
I try
to provide the best experience I can for my students. I create a language rich environment where the meaning of
words and how we, as language users, make meaning out of the world around us is
the focal point of the class.
However, I agree with Pinar, it is ultimately the students who learn
what they will. Despite all of the
objectives, and testing, and positive notes from my charges over the years, I
have never been truly sure of what my students learn in my class, if anything.
But as Kliebard writes, “The most significant dimensions of an educational
activity or any activity may be those that are completely unplanned and wholly
unanticipated. An evaluation
procedure that ignores this fact is plainly unsatisfactory” (Kliebard 1970, p. 269).
To focus solely on easily measurable objectives is to limit what can be
learned and taught; to focus on a few objectives that have been packaged in
three week bundles decontextualized from the recursive nature of reading and
writing is to stop the teaching reading and writing. But as Kliebard points out not even Tyler would push the
Tylerian Rationale to these extremes, “As Tyler puts it, ‘If we are to study an
educational program systematically and intelligently we must first be sure as
to the educational objectives aimed at’ (Klibard 1970, p. 260). The real objectives of English Language
Arts, that of using the TEKS in the act of reading and writing are ignored, or
at best given lip service, and the easily tested rote memorization of decontextualized
“skills” is stressed and privileged.
Since the beginning of this semester, a phrase Dr.
Cary said, “Everything is curriculum” has continued to resonate in my working
and waking life. It summarized
something I had been thinking for a long time. Everything that goes on in my class, ranging from what the
students bring into the room to my autobiographical babbles as I am trying to
get the students to be comfortable writing about themselves; all of this is
what is being taught in the classroom.
It is what Lave and Wenger call situated learning, or legitimate
peripheral participation, which “is proposed as a descriptor of engagement in
social practice that entails learning as an integral constituent (Lave and
Wenger 1991, p.35). The social
practice in my classroom is reading and writing. The learning that accompanies this social practice is not
reducible to, or measured by simplistic fragmented decontextualized objectives. The curriculum in my class is explicit
and tacit; stated and unstated; everything I intend and much more that I do not
intend, or perhaps am even aware of as existing. I have stopped playing by the rules, as long as the powers
of the school don’t come in to check.
Because
If
we continue to play by the rules created by our ancestors that no longer make
sense in the post modern world and that repress the dignity and identity of
students then curriculum will continue to be a meaningless technocratic
endeavor removed from human experience (Slattery 2006, p.170).
If
we continue to place strictures and build levees to control the thinking and
meaning of what the students are to learn and create, then the situated
learning that takes place on the periphery, no matter how many controls we
apply, will create the breeches in those same levees and we will be inundated
by a flood to drown us all. The
students are always smarter than we are willing to allow them to be; they will
always find a way to learn, with or without us.
Much of what I have been reading in regards to
post-modernism has been incredibly liberating. I have lived with a high-stakes test of one kind or another
since the first year I taught, with the pressure of the test increasing for the
last twenty years. The hardest
thing for me to do was to give up the fear of my students doing poorly on the
test if I taught my class the way I felt, and was backed up by research, would
really be effective and maybe even transforming. I wanted, and still want my students to be able to take part
in the conversation that makes up the discourse of our world, “that engage
erudition, animate creativity, . . . cultivate independence of mind” (Pinar
2004, p. 62), and to be alive to the possibilities and power they have over
their own lives.
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul (1996), Social
Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, New York:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Heath, Shirley Brice (1984), Ways
With Words: Language , Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms, New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Kliebard, Herbert M., The Tyler
Rationale, The School Review,
vol. 78, No. 2 (Feb, 1970, pp.259-272).
Lave, Jean & Etienne Wenger (1991), Situated
Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Pinar,
William (2004), What is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah, New Jersy: Lawrence
Erlbaum
Rosenblatt,
Louise (1938), Literature as Exploration. New York: The Modern Language
Association of America.
Slattery,
Patrick (2006), Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era. New York: Routledge.
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