Teaching Artists Research Project

There have been remarkable advances in arts education, both in and out of schools, over the last fifteen years, despite a difficult policy environment. Teaching artists, the hybrid professionals that link the arts to education and community life, are the creative resource behind much of this innovation. Their best efforts are redefining the roles the arts play in public education. Their work is central to arts organizations' strategies for civic engagement and diverse audiences. Excellent research has shown that arts education is instrumental to the social, emotional, and cognitive development of thousands of young people. But little is known about teaching artists. The Teaching Artists Research Project (TARP) deepens our understanding of world of teaching artists through studies in twelve communities, and it will inform policy designed to make their work sustainable, more effective, and more meaningful. A dozen study sites were selected where funding was available to support exploration of the local conditions and dynamics in arts education: Boston, Seattle, Providence, and eight California communities (San Francisco/Alameda County, Los Angeles, San Diego, Bakersfield, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz, Salinas, and Humboldt County). A thorough literature review was conducted, and NORC conducted stakeholder meetings and focus groups, identified key issues and began designing a multi-methods study that would include surveys for both artists and program managers as well as in-depth interviews of stakeholders -- teaching artists, program managers, school officials, classroom teachers and arts specialists, principals, funders, and arts educators in a wide variety of venues.There are no professional associations and no accreditation for teaching artists, so a great deal of time was spent building a sample of teaching artists and program managers in every study site. The survey instrument was developed and tested, and then fielded on-line in the study sites sequentially, beginning in Chicago, and ending with the southern California sites. To assure a reliable response rate, online surveys were supplemented by a telephone survey. Lists of potential key informants were accumulated for each site, and interviewers were recruited, hired, and trained in each site. Most of the interviewers were teaching artists themselves, and many had significant field knowledge and familiarity with the landscape of arts education in their community. The surveys collected data on some fundamental questions:Who are teaching artists?Where do they work? Under what terms and conditions?What sort of education have they had?How are they hired and what qualifications do employers look for?How much do they make?How much experience do they have?What drew them to the field? What pushes them out?What are their goals?Qualitative interviews with a subsample of survey respondents and key informants delved deeply into the dynamics and policies that drive arts education, the curricula and pedagogy teaching artists bring to the work, and personal histories of some artists. The interviews gathered more detailed information on the local character of teaching artist communities, in-depth descriptions and narratives of teaching artists' experiences, and followed up on items or issues that arose in preliminary analysis of the quantitative survey data. These conversations illuminated the work teaching artists believe is their best and identified the kinds of structural and organizational supports that enable work at the highest level. The interview process explored key areas with the artists, such as how to best develop their capacities, understand the dynamics between their artistic and educational practice, and how to keep them engaged in the field. Another critical topic explored during these conversations was how higher education can make a more meaningful and strategic contribution toward preparing young artists to work in the field. The TARP report includes serious reflection on the conditions and policies that have affected arts education in schools, particularly over the last thirty years, a period of intense school reform efforts and consistent erosion of arts education for students. The report includes new and important qualitative data about teaching artists, documenting their educational background, economic status, the conditions in which they work, and their goals as artists and educators. It also includes new insights about how learning in the arts is associated with learning in general, illuminating findings from other studies that have suggested a powerful connection between arts education and positive outcomes for students in a wide range of domains

Disciplinary Literacy: a Case Study on How Secondary Teachers Engage Students in Disciplinary Discourses

Secondary teachers are currently pressured to address low adolescent literacy rates by adopting disciplinary literacy approaches. While the pressure mounts, direction on how such approaches may be modified to meet the learning objectives of different subject areas is limited. Each subject area will have different Discourses or ways of speaking, writing, listening and thinking about its field, necessitating different literacy strategies for each subject’s curriculum. Successful disciplinary literacy entails learning which strategies and approaches to learning are most effective for student learning for each subject area. In this multi-case study, I observed two high school teachers in Chemistry and Psychology to witness how they modified content area strategies to meet disciplinary literacy demands, and interviewed them about their experiences of this process. Through observations and interviews with the teachers and the curriculum director, a picture emerged of a district that was relaxed in its approach to the challenges of disciplinary literacy reform. Teachers reported that they were not influenced by the district’s disciplinary literacy initiative, but had other sources that guided their best practices to get students actively learning during class. Classroom reform was largely left up to individual teachers. The district’s lack of a clear purpose in its disciplinary literacy initiative created the feeling among teachers that disciplinary literacy was an administrative fad that would pass in time. Recommendations include guidelines for improving students’ collaborative discourse during group activities and suggestions for literacy coaches working with teachers in multiple departments at the secondary level. The enduring question is raised regarding the role of professional organizations in the identification and dissemination of effective disciplinary literacy strategies

Reading, Writing, and the Common Core State Standards

During the 2014-15 school year, more high school seniors read the young adult-oriented books The Fault in Our Stars andDivergent than Shakespeare's Macbeth or Hamlet, according to a report that tracks what K-12 students at more than 30,000 schools are reading during the school year. These books are generally self-selected, making it not all that surprising that students would prefer to read a contemporaryNew York Times bestseller than a 17th-century play written in early modern English. And while some of the books that students select are thematically targeted to a mature audience, they are not particularly challenging to read for the average high schooler. The Fault in Our Stars and Divergent, for example, have the readability of a fourth- or fifth-grade text in terms of sentence structure and word difficulty.There is substantial evidence that much of what students are currently reading is not particularly challenging. This lack of complexity in students' reading and writing is likely undermining their preparedness for college and the workplace. In addition, despite the predominant role that reading and writing serve in other subjects and disciplines, literacy development has long been relegated to the English or reading classroom.Take the issue of reading complexity. Three of the top five most commonly assigned titles in grades 9 through 12 are To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, and Of Mice and Men. All three books, while classics, are not particularly challenging in terms of sentence structure and complexity. Does that mean that Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which broaches issues of racial inequality should instead be introduced to elementary school-aged children? Most people—including English teachers—probably would not agree. Readability is only one factor when considering the intended audience of a work of literature.But the difficulty of the reading material to which students are exposed is not inconsequential. An ACT report finds that "performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not." This holds true across gender, race and ethnicity, and family income levels

An Evaluation of Educator Preparedness in Content Area and Disciplinary Literacies in the High School Classroom

A secondary education debate that currently exists between the content area and disciplinary literacy is how content area and disciplinary literacy strategies and educator preparedness to teach those components to fit together to further student achievement. The purpose of my study was to evaluate if educators are prepared to teach content area and disciplinary literacy in high school content area classrooms. The context of this evaluation was to seek information from teachers and administrators about how literacy is integrated within high school classrooms in various communities across the United States. My study demonstrated both quantitative and qualitative data that reflect varied levels of teacher and administrator awareness. I recommended processes to put in place to raise awareness and integrate literacy skills within a high school classroom

Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Success

Presents a vision for literacy instruction from fourth through twelfth grade; examines the challenges; outlines the elements of success, including professional development and use of data; and lays out a national agenda for change based on case studies

Mapping the pedagogic practice of grade ten English teachers: a qualitative multi-lensed study.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.This study addresses the issue of how to track the classroom talk of subject English teachers in Grade Ten classrooms in KwaZulu-Natal. Subject English, as a horizontal knowledge structure, presents particular challenges of content and methodological specification: what may be included, and the means of teaching and assessment, are contested, wide-ranging, and frequently opaque. English teachers are central to the construal of the subject in the classroom and their classroom talk is central to their construal of the subject to their learners. Classroom observations were conducted in four purposively selected KwaZulu- Natal state high schools, spanning the socio-economic spectrum, across the period 2005-2009. Twenty-six lessons were analysed using code theory’s concepts of classification and framing. This analysis presented broadly similar categorisations of strong classification and framing for most of the lessons, apart from some framing differences with respect to evaluation. However, my field observations had identified differences between the teachers’ classroom talk that were not captured. This led to the quest of finding pedagogically well theorised languages of description of teacher talk capable of capturing the range of variation and flow with greater nuance. Application of the lenses of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Jacklin’s tripartite typology extending code theory (2004), Brodie’s expansion of classic classroom discourse analysis (2008, 2010), Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (2014), and conceptual integration theory (2015), were successful in describing and discriminating more fully the range of pedagogy. Detailed analysis of four literature lessons (two teaching novels, two teaching poetry) from the two schools at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum, are presented as exemplars of these lenses’ capacity as languages of description for subject English teacher classroom talk. The multi-lensed descriptions highlighted variations such as: o the degree of use of nominalised discourse (SFL); o more dominantly discursive pedagogy or more dominantly conventional pedagogy (Jacklin); o more overt or more implicit evaluations, greater use of insert moves versus greater use of elicit moves (Brodie); and o cultivation of a cognitively associative literary gaze versus cultivation of a decoding of the text gaze and intricate movements by the teachers between relatively stronger and weaker epistemic and social relations; more frequent and deeper versus less frequent and flatter semantic waving (LCT). A fifth lesson, focused on learner oral performances of infomercials, is analysed using conceptual integration theory, as the sole example in the data set, of pedagogic conceptual integration. These analyses highlight the potential of these lenses as tools for the unpacking and specification of teachers’ pedagogic practice, particularly their pedagogic content knowledge, an undertaking which has been protractedly difficult to achieve beyond localised, intuitive description. They also illuminated the intricate complexity of pedagogy, and the propensity for pedagogic meaning to disintegrate when the level of analysis shifts down to too small a micro-focus. This highlights the ongoing need for research to pinpoint the ‘sweet spot’ of the optimally smallest unit of a pedagogic act. Key components of the pedagogic process emerged that we need more refined understanding of in relation to what teachers do and the impact of this on the epistemic access of learners: teacher pedagogic mobility, pedagogic coherence and pedagogic flow. The study points to the Jacklinian and LCT lenses as offering the most potential for the ongoing investigation of these dimensions

EDUCATORS’ UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENTIFIC SENSEMAKING AND LITERACY: A CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY ANALYSIS

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe a community of middle school science educators’ understandings of scientific sensemaking and literacy during their participation in professional development. Six teachers from Marksboro Middle School initiated and participated in a semester-long book study of Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2018). Three of these science teachers also participated in an interdisciplinary workshop series on sensemaking and literacy across the curriculum with three additional school colleagues from other disciplines conducted by a regional science professional developer and the author, a literacy education scholar. Two professional developers also participated in this study. This study explored two research questions: (1) How were middle school teachers’ and professional development providers’ understandings of scientific sensemaking and literacy demonstrated during their participation in professional development? (2) How were these understandings mediated by the Ambitious Science Teaching book discussion activity system within which this work was situated? Central to this investigation was use of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as both a theoretical and analytical framework. CHAT provided a way to capture the complexity of teachers’ activity and how their understandings were mediated by systemic elements. These elements included social and historical factors of both individuals and educational institutions. This framework was also supported by the use of qualitative research methods and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Educators described their understanding of scientific sensemaking and literacy in similar ways. Descriptions of each included cognitive and social processes of grappling with information, however, what counted as information differed. Sensemaking was generally discussed as a process focused on a scientific phenomenon. Literacy was generally regarded as reading print-based and multi-modal texts. Throughout their work together, teachers also considered students’ equitable engagement in classroom discourse as a feature of sensemaking-oriented instruction. Through their involvement in the activity system, educators demonstrated further understanding of sensemaking as a discrete activity as well as an extended process in which students engage in while learning through science instructional units called storylines. Through their collaborative activity, educators also demonstrated understanding of literacy as incorporating a variety of communicative modes, with student talk serving as the primary vehicle for students’ sensemaking. Literacy was also understood as a set of tools students’ draw upon when engaging in sensemaking. Teachers actions during book discussions demonstrated that considering how to support students’ literacy was a taken for granted component of planning for students’ sensemaking. Teachers’ demonstrations of these understandings were mediated through the community’s use of the pedagogical suggestions provided by Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten, 2018), consideration of performance expectations included in their state standards, and incorporation of resources beyond the focal text. It was bounded and challenged by institutional factors such as time constraints for instruction and the influence of statewide assessments. The findings of this study build on previous research in science education and literacy education and support Hinchman and O’Brien’s (2019) call for literacy scholars to consider a hybridized view of disciplinary literacy. By considering scientific sensemaking and literacy as a dialectic, this study positions literacy as an inherent component of science teaching, rather than as a separate goal for educators to address. It has implications for literacy practitioners working in science spaces and for both science education and literacy education scholars researching sensemaking and disciplinary literacies

Helping to keep history relevant : mulitmedia and authentic learning

The subject based curriculum attracts lively debate in many countries being accused of fragmenting teaching and learning, erecting artificial barriers and failing to teach the skills required in the twenty first century (Hazlewood 2005). Cross-curricular rich tasks are increasingly seen as the means to develop relevant knowledge, understanding and skills. Over the past fourteen years we have developed and evaluated a series of interactive multi-media resources for primary and secondary schools on themes within Scottish History. The generally positive evaluation given to these resources by pupils and teachers points to some ways in which subjects such as history can remain challenging and relevant. The relevance has largely stemmed, in the case of the multi-media resources, from combining the historian's traditional role of problemising the past, with a wide range of primary and secondary sources, new technologies and learning tasks encompassing critical skills/authentic learning. Consequently, we argue that subjects must in future embrace new technologies and authentic learning to maintain their place in the school curriculum

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Building upon a process-and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality -- primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies -- reveals patterns in youth's information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure

Experiences of Secondary Social Studies Educators: The Redheaded Stepchildren of Education

The purpose of this multi-case phenomenological study is to understand the unique experiences of secondary social studies teachers. The number of participants was bound to six secondary social studies teachers from a public school district in a mid-Atlantic state and the experience of the researcher. Data was gathered through in-depth interviews using Seidman’s (2006) Three Step Interview Series and individual profiles were written. The phenomenological data analysis was guided by several methods including Hycner (1985), Moustakas (1994), and Seidman (2006). From the participants’ experiences several themes emerged: similarities in personal learning habits, a dislike for mandatory assessments and curriculum, and a sense of an inequitable status among teachers of core disciplines. Additionally, the data was analyzed utilizing Fallace’s (2017) model of three social studies orientations—traditional, disciplinary, and progressive. Taken as a whole, the participants aligned to both traditional and disciplinary orientations, but many described themselves as leaning toward a progressive orientation of teaching social studies. Findings indicate a need for future research of implications when instruction, curriculum, and assessment are not aligned to a sole orientation or purpose of social studies