Emergent Student Practices: Unintended Consequences in a Dialogic, Collaborative Classroom

It’s a commonplace to decry the folly of “best practices” in education. They make many practitioners and researchers twitch, fearing that the good-- or even just decent--practice will soon be setting the tempo in the steady march toward standardization. The argument against best practices, then, is the argument against one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Instructional practices must come with a necessary humility, based on situating students within the picture, with particular attention to with histories of institutional and societal othering and marginalization. Good practices cannot be delivered or imposed, and therefore, if successful, they become suggestions or starting points carried out with greater and lesser “fidelity,” and informed by the cultures of school, teacher, and students. This study of a middle school science classroom in a racially and economically diverse urban charter school looks at how the laudable practices of dialogic, inquiry-based STEM instruction and the concomitant agenda of collaboration and inclusion were exceeded and transformed by students in moment-to-moment interactions. The focal students engaged in talk that carried them beyond disciplinary boundaries to explore stereotypes and create new narratives around racial identities, all while asserting their own positions within the power dynamics of the classroom and small group. As activity systems analysis and narrative discourse analysis revealed, the larger classroom culture permitted this kind of extra-disciplinary knowledge construction; the teacher’s practices gave rise to the emergence of alternative, student-made practices, resulting in unintended consequences that remained largely unmonitored and unsung. We have much to learn from such creative and engaged acts as examples of student work that constitute a worthy academic discourse, a deviation from the imagined best path to a different route that was unpredicted by the teacher, and only owned in the moment by students, as makers and users, and primary practitioners

Issue 43: Possibilities and Problems in Trauma-Based and Social Emotional Learning Programs

Social, emotional, and affective experiences are impossible to separate from thinking, doing, and being in the world. Increasingly, schools and community-based organizations are recognizing this truth through the adoption of programs that focus on the emotional lives of children and youth, especially when emotions are fraught, and lives have been difficult. Programs such as social emotional learning (SEL) frameworks and trauma-informed practices (TIP) are not only popular, they are deemed “essential” in almost every corner of the social services sector

Learning from a Funders' Collaborative: The Human Services Strategic Restructuring Pilot Project

In 2009, Eighteen funders in Northeast Ohio joined together in the Human Services Strategic Restructuring Pilot Project (the Collaborative) to examine how to support nonprofit organizations in strategic restructuring. This the final report on that project

Mobilizing Love in Literacy Classrooms: Connection, Resistance, and Pedagogy

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2017. Major: Education, Curriculum and Instruction. Advisor: Cynthia Lewis. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 271 pages.That love has something to do with teaching and learning is a claim that finds its way into numerous, overlapping, and contending theoretical frameworks, including arguments from critical, progressive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and post-structural traditions. However, to date there is very little critical empirical research that seeks to better understand and make solid this claim, to link it to everyday classroom actions and interactions. This multi-site critical ethnographic study asks how love is mobilized in an exploration of powerful, sometimes difficult, moments of connection and learning in two English-Social Studies classrooms--one in a large city high school, and the other in a small charter middle school--with teachers who sought to challenge educational inequities through a critical literacy curriculum and critical instructional practices. Using mediated and critical discourse analysis to examine classroom actions and interactions, the study looks at how students affect and are affected by their social “others” in meaningful and complicated ways. A theory of “cosmopolitan desire” is offered to describe the affective experience of connecting across difference. The study also frames students’ aesthetic and resistant projects as expressions of armed love (Freire, 2006); these demands for self and community are necessary rejections of oppressive and damaging discourses, fueled by the desire to envision a more just social reality. Finally, the study explores practices of pedagogical love, finding instantiations of dialogic (Freire, 1996) and nurturing relationships (Noddings, 2013), as well as demonstrations of radical inclusion and love (Greenstein, 2016; hooks, 2003). This work has implications for how we might realize and better understand the stakes in the vague schooling goal of “getting along,” bearing in mind the ongoing conundrum in hoping that through public education, “youth [will] accomplish what we haven't been able to accomplish--to establish rich, vibrant, and cooperative interracial relationships, contexts, communities, and projects” (Fine, Weis, & Powell, 1997, p. 248). It also makes plain the scale of a teacher’s labor, and considers how to make academic literacy productions meaningful, and potentially transformative

Artists as catalysts: the ethical and political possibilities of teaching artists in literacy classrooms

Purpose This study aims to discuss the ethical and political possibilities offered by the presence of teaching artists (TAs) and visual artwork in racially and culturally diverse high school literacy (English Language Arts) classrooms. Design/methodology/approach This study explores episodes from two separate ethnographic studies that were conducted in one teacher’s critical literacy classroom across a span of several years. This study uses a transliteracies approach (Stornaiulo et al., 2017) to think about “meaning-making at the intersection of human subjects and materials” (Kontovourki et al., 2019); the study also draws on critical scholarship on art and making (Ngo et al., 2017; Vossoughi et al., 2016). The TA, along with the materials and processes of artmaking, decentered the teacher and literacy itself, inviting in new social realities. Findings TAs’ collective interpretation of existing artwork and construction of new works made visible how both human and nonhuman bodies co-produced “new ways of feeling and being with others” (Zembylas, 2017, p. 402). This study views these artists as catalysts capable of provoking, or productively disrupting, the everyday practices of classrooms. Social implications Both studies demonstrated new ways of feeling, being and thinking about difference, bringing to the forefront momentary possibilities and impossibilities of complex human and nonhuman intra-actions. The provocations flowing from the visual artwork and the dialogue swirling around the work presented opportunities for emergent and unexpected experiences of literacy learning. Originality/value This work is valuable in exploring the boundaries of literacy learning with the serious inclusion of visual art in an English classroom. When the TAs guided both interpretation and production of artwork, they affected and were affected by the becoming happening in the classroom. This study suggests how teaching bodies, students and artwork pushed the transformative potential of everyday school settings

Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” a list of curated and annotated works reviewed and selected by a large group of dedicated educator-scholars in our field. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts within the past year for RTE readers’ consideration. Abstracted citations and those featured in the “Other Related Research” sections were published, either in print or online, between June 2020 and June 2021. The bibliography is divided into nine sections, with some changes to the categories this year in response to the ever-evolving nature of research in the field. Small teams of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in preK–16 educational settings reviewed and selected the manuscripts for each section using library databases and leading scholarly journals. Each team abstracted significant contributions to the body of peer-reviewed studies that addressed the current research questions and concerns in their topic area

Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” and we are proud to share these curated and annotated citations once again. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts within the past year that may be of interest to RTE readers. Abstracted citations and those featured in the “Other Related Research” sections were published, either in print or online, between June 2019 and June 2020. The bibliography is divided into nine subject area sections. A three-person team of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in preK–16 educational settings reviewed and selected the manuscripts for each section using library databases and leading empirical journals. Each team abstracted significant contributions to the body of peer-reviewed studies that addressed the current research questions and concerns in their topic area

Synthetic High-Resolution Line Spectra of Star-Forming Galaxies Below 1200A

We have generated a set of far-ultraviolet stellar libraries using spectra of OB and Wolf-Rayet stars in the Galaxy and the Large and Small Magellanic Cloud. The spectra were collected with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer and cover a wavelength range from 1003.1 to 1182.7A at a resolution of 0.127A. The libraries extend from the earliest O- to late-O and early-B stars for the Magellanic Cloud and Galactic libraries, respectively. Attention is paid to the complex blending of stellar and interstellar lines, which can be significant, especially in models using Galactic stars. The most severe contamination is due to molecular hydrogen. Using a simple model for the H$_2$ line strength, we were able to remove the molecular hydrogen lines in a subset of Magellanic Cloud stars. Variations of the photospheric and wind features of CIII 1176, OVI 1032, 1038, PV 1118, 1128, and SIV 1063, 1073, 1074 are discussed as a function of temperature and luminosity class. The spectral libraries were implemented into the LavalSB and Starburst99 packages and used to compute a standard set of synthetic spectra of star-forming galaxies. Representative spectra are presented for various initial mass functions and star formation histories. The valid parameter space is confined to the youngest ages of less than 10 Myr for an instantaneous burst, prior to the age when incompleteness of spectral types in the libraries sets in. For a continuous burst at solar metallicity, the parameter space is not limited. The suite of models is useful for interpreting the restframe far-ultraviolet in local and high-redshift galaxies.Comment: 33 pages including 13 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

A Literacy of Armed Love: Confrontation and Desire in Aesthetic and Critical Projects

The article argues that creative confrontations with damaging discourses as part of a critical literacy curriculum can be viewed as acts of love, for self and community. Using data from a multi-sited critical ethnography, the study considers the literacy productions of two focal students in diverse schools, a charter middle school and a large urban high school. Mediated discourse analysis of their work explores their aesthetic and critical literacy productions as refusals of oppressive discourses pressing against marginalized identities, and as expressions of desire for imagined, better realities. This research views such performances of multimodal creative resistance as an audacious literacy of desire, valuable as standards-meeting persuasive compositions, but also immeasurably valuable because of the emotional experience of the student producers, who were powerfully affected through the twin pleasures of resisting and imagining. This study illustrates how literacy projects might both inhabit and move forward Freire’s concept of armed love