This recent speech was posted on ED’s web site.  In it, Secretary Duncan criticizes teacher preparation programs.  He spoke:

In a speech last fall at the Teachers College at Columbia, I noted that education schools have long been treated as the Rodney Dangerfield of higher education. Colleges of education have traditionally been the institution that got no respect—yet still they are described as cash cows for other, more academically-prestigious departments of the university.

Once teachers finish their preparation program, they enter a profession that continues to treat them as something less than highly-skilled professionals. Smart induction policies and well-designed mentoring for new teachers is the exception, rather than the rule. Professional development is generally of poor quality. Pay is based not on your performance in the classroom or your impact on student learning but rather on your credentials and time spent in the job. Performance evaluations of teachers are largely a sham.

So, how do we explain this paradox of on the one hand revering teachers, yet on the other hand, failing to elevate the teaching profession?

In the context of the current political climate, it seems like these questions fit conveniently with hot topics like of teacher tenure, teacher training, and the use of online courses and blended learning models to broaden the school day.  The iZone work I am a part of in NYC is one example of a major city trying to better understand how new approaches to teaching and learning might be used in over 1500 schools.

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Just moments ago, I submitted my second certification exam.  It’s a fifty-page review of studies related to my own present and future work.  In it, I ask a series of questions to guide the review:

- Why don’t policymakers read educational research?
- Why don’t researchers write for policymakers?
- What gaps exist because policymakers and researchers don’t read and write for each other?
- What assumptions about reading and writing underlie this gapbetween research and policy?

I’m becoming particularly interested in learning more about policymakers and implementers as readers, non-readers, and re-readers.  Many thanks to Jon Becker who replied to my last post and gave me invaluable direction. 

The next steps include meeting with my adviser for breakfast Friday, discussing the kinds of studies this lit review lends itself to, and beginning preparations on a dissertation proposal for a hearing in the May.  If you have any ideas, leads, or links, please send them along!

** On another note, I’m also beginning now to prepare for a reading of Paradise Lost to my son, Declan.  These tender, but literary, posts will pepper the blog in the months to come. **

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I was in the hospital with my new son one night a few weeks when I saw that one of the authors of Disrupting Class, Michael Horn, replied to my previous blog posting.  My son is three weeks today; his father finally has a chance to reply to Horn.  Horn wrote a comment to my posting that begins:

While I appreciated the kudos, a “good catch” does not adequately respond to my point.  Even Horn’s later series of rebuttals do nothing more than dodge the core of the critique.  At the heart of the posting is the concern that the authors of Disrupting Class knowingly misrepresent and dismiss research and scholarship in the field of education.  As a result, the Disruption Theory they create is inherently groundless.  Though it is compelling–no one would argue that the book has had great effects on education policy and reform–it neglects to seriously consider what is going on in actual schools with actual students, and it doesn’t consider what experts in education have to say about those realities.

I agree with Horn that much of educational research doesn’t prove causal relationships (if you do X students will ace their exams).  But that doesn’t mean you disregard it completely.  The weakness of Disrupting Class’s stance toward educational research is that it finds value only in the answers to questions, not the questions themselves.  What questions would have been raised in their book if the authors had seriously considered educational research? What questions, then, would policy-makers and educational leadership have asked?  Questions, after all, are far more disruptive. 

Here’s an example.  One of the gaps I point out is that the authors make “the hasty assumption that adolescents’ use of technology means they can simply learn from it.”  Horn replied to this critique (which was the third in a list) that “we pointedly don’t rely on point #3 that you cite. Others write about this, but we ourselves don’t hinge our argument on this point.”  I’m sorry, but Horn and his colleagues pointedly do rely on students’ use of technology to learn.  If you remove students-using-technology-to-learn from Disrupting Class there is no book.  Who uses the online courses they speak of?  How do the authors imagine students sharing content they create?  And let’s not ignore the fact that not all students learn well in online courses; not all students have any interest or natural skill in posting materials for classmates to learn from. 

If the authors had consulted–just as one example–Donald Leu’s study in which he compares students’ offline and online literacy skills they might have disclaimed that research shows students’ offline and online literacy abilities have no direct relationship.  Great online readers might be shoddy offline readers.  And vice versa.  If they had considered even just studies that compare students online and offline lives, they might have explored certain realities of applying their theory to a school system: not all students are digitally literate; students’ social digital literacies don’t simply apply to online schoolwork; not all traditionally successful students’ talents translate to the online world; not all students even have equitable access to online worlds and therefore to those crucial online skills. 

The above response, I might add, says nothing about the authors’ disregard for the roles of teachers in student-learning.  While they do compliment educators for their hard work, they don’t seriously consider what it means, for instance, to disrupt teacher education using their framework.  Nor do they consider the setbacks and advances being made in the professional development of educators.  Their solution is to take a master teacher like Jaime Escalante and broadcast him to as many students as possible.  I wonder what kind of relationship Escalante would form with his students in such a scenario.  After all, wasn’t it his ability to connect with his classes that made his success possible? 

In sum, we need a real series of exchanges in which the educational research community dialogues with the authors of Disrupting Class.  Ideally, there would be a think tank in which some organization (a university, consulting group, a city) would invite the book’s authors and an array of educational scholars to the same table to talk about ways to ground so influential a book.  The authors of the book might dismiss educational research, but researchers are also quick to categorically dismiss the book.  Disrupting Class has been incredibly influential and is shaping education reform around the world.  Scholars who ignore that simple truth are too tangled in their own academic robes to see that real principals, teachers, students, and parents are and will be affected by this book.  Time to disrobe, if need be, and to seriously consider what it means to disrupt.

NB: There are other critiques of the book as well. One especially thoughtful review is by John Sener.

I came across this statistical overview of the US’s education system according to UNESCO.  Take a look:

Notice anything strange?  Look again, here:

I appeal to my teacher friends and colleagues here: Of the last ten distinct classrooms you’ve walked into (even counting your own), how often did you see fourteen students per single teacher?  I’m not sure where they got these number from, but someone needs to tell UNESCO, “Stat can’t be right!”

Is this what it comes down to: more time in school = better learning?  No, it isn’t.  Though supporters of longer school days and years would like to argue the prior, it is more accurate to say this: more time in school (preparing for exams) = better learning (preparing for exams).

I’m not saying I don’t favor longer school days and years.  I might be very much in favor of it.  What I am not in favor of is the way in which learning has been equated with test scores.  It is most troublesome when I read an article like this one in Ed Week, in which

The first national database of schools that have added learning time to their schedules, which was set for release this week, suggests that the extra time might play a role in boosting middle and high school achievement.

The National Center on Time & Learning, which assembled and analyzed the database, found a moderate association between increased time and how well students did on their states’ standardized English and mathematics tests compared with their peers in nearby schools on regular schedules.

On the one hand, aren’t the success of exams like the ones discussed here predicated on their uniqueness.  Isn’t teaching directly to the test the kind of thing that makes the measurement of such assessments bogus?  On the other hand, is this what learning has neatly become: filling in bubbles and scoring high on tests?

The article calls attention to charter schools in particular, whose success with student achievement is being well documented (Harlem Children Zone was in the spotlight on 60 minutes just last night).  But, if the context of success is limited to learning out-of-context, what good is it?  Edublogger Richard Bryne writes the following about the 60 Minute segment:

One part of the segment that I didn’t agree with was the focus at the end on trying to figure out which one thing is making [founder Geoffery] Canada’s school successful in closing achievement gaps. As they said in the segment, “trying to boil it down to pill form.” If people are serious about closing achievement gaps and want to use Canada’s model, they’ll need to adopt all of his strategies, not just the “boiled down” version. The full segment is embedded below.

I’m inclined to agree.  At the same time, test scores have such weighty status because the education world isn’t presenting any other quasi-convincing form of measurement. Talk about a tough pill to swallow.

A new survey reports that online learning courses are growing quickly and does a state-by-state comparison.  Ed Week notes that

Most of the 26 states that have online programs have seen significant growth in enrollments in recent years, with a dozen of them reporting jumps of 25 percent or more since 2007.

The full report is more thorough than others I’ve seen, providing background context and sample survey questions (though my quick read of it didn’t find all the questions).  It’s also worth noting that the report is underwritten in part by Blackboard, a world leader in online learning. 

The Institute of Education Sciences new director John Q. Easton.  It’s expected that there will be a shift in the kinds of educational research the government supports.  Education Week writes:

The shift “is kind of an interesting next step for IES,” said Gerald E. Sroufe, the director of government relations for the Washington-based American Educational Research Association.

“Clearly, the emphasis was on rigorous research methods,” he added. “I think the new method is going to be to look at what would make research more relevant.”

Under Mr. Whitehurst, the institute’s first director, the agency moved early to increase funding for studies using randomized controlled trials and other rigorous methods in response to widespread dissatisfaction among policymakers and practitioners with the quality of education research.

The agency also created the What Works Clearinghouse, which vetted the research evidence on education programs and policies and made the results widely available on a user-friendly Web site.

One wonders, in light of these shifts, what it would look like for research on the local and school and classroom level to be more supported.  How can hundreds of millions that the IES has in its pockets work not only for systemic change from the state and district level up, but from classrooms too?

If only students could just play games and learn, all our problem would be solved. 

I mean that with a wink an a smile, of course.

Still, this piece in Ed Week this morning caught my eye.  It’s about various game-based learning sites that help students learn about financial literacy.  This seems to be becoming all the rage: Quest to Learn opened a few months ago, which is a NYC school in partnership with NYU’s Institute of Play–the whole model blurs lines of traditional learning and is built on various gaming theories.  Florida Virtual School has a course that gets a lot of press in which students learn about history by playing a role-playing game.  Even NYC’s School of One, written up as one of Time Magazine’s 50 greatest inventions of the year, sought to automate and differentiate learning by creating daily “playlists” for students. 

It’s worth considering voices like that of the UK’s David Buckingham.  In contrast to the ra-ra cheers of James Paul Gee and Marc Prensky, Buckingham notes that the scholars in greatest support of game-based learning don’t really scrutinize it.  They just give it the old homecoming cheer and dance. 

Quite a lucrative game of their own, you might say.

A report from the Everyone Graduates Center has come saying that 9th grade is unusually good at holding students back.  What seems to be a study that focuses on a particular year of study could equally be interpreted as a reflection on a wide disconnect between middle schools and high schools in terms of what is taught and assessed, not to mention how in both cases.  Here’s an table from the study to consider:

From Pics for Blog

Well done California and UC, Davis School of Education.  Well done.  THE Journal sums up what they are doing like this:

Using funds from a new $1 million grant awarded by the California Postsecondary Education Commission, a team from UC Davis, led by Joanne Bookmyer, director of teacher research at the Cooperative Research and Extension Services for Schools (CRESS) Center, will distribute grants of up to $30,000 to teams of three to five K-12 teachers, who will determine for themselves what measures they can take to improve their effectiveness in the classroom, engage students better, and gain greater mastery of the subject matter being taught.

More than just making the money directly available to teachers, what makes this smart is that the teachers have to work in teams.  By doing so, Bookmyer and others have ensured that teachers will be collaborating in their pedagogical efforts (always a good thing) AND they make it far more likely that the grant proposals they get will be more deeply thought through and more likely to be accomplished.  It’s a model approach to grant giving that’s worth experimenting with elsewhere.

Donald J. Leu recently posted this slide show from a presentation he did abroad.  Some of the interesting things to note include the lack of serious new literacies responses by any of the 50 states and the remaining questions comparing online and offline readers.

Pediatrician Perri Klass has recently written a kind warning to adults who are quick to criticize young people for multi-tasking.  Adolescents might well be able to both IM and listen to music and blog and do their homework. While texting with their toes, of course.  Dr. Klass writes:

A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking — or as Dr. Christakis put it, “The truth is you don’t really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can’t process two high-level cognitive things.” What you are actually doing, he went on, is “oscillating between the two.”

So are teenagers any better at oscillating?

“It may be that multitasking is more of a problem for us old brains,” Professor Hobbs said. Dr. Christakis speculated that teenagers might have some advantages, partly because of their presumably greater mental dexterity and partly — “and this is the part we don’t understand,” he said — “because they really have come of age with these technologies.”

When you consider how little even the medical and cognitive experts know, it’s a wonder how confidently we teachers can dismiss such behaviors as mere distraction.

A recent piece from The Economist discusses a school in New York City called Quest to Learn that has re-conceived of teaching and learning through video games.  The school will serve as a lab for educational research to test theories of video gaming and learning, most popularly discussed by James Paul Gee (who is at Arizona State, now, not Wisconsin, as the article states) and Marc Prensky.  While Gee’s work on Discourses and video games are well known by scholars in many fields like linguistics and sociology–and often hailed quite loudly–his work does not escape criticism.  David Buckingham, prolific media literacy scholar, has said that Gee’s work, like others who champion the pedagogical power of video games, is too often one-sided:

[The] notion of pleasurable learning as an innate ‘human need’ neglects the possibility that pleasure might not always be such a good thing.  [The] identification of learning with pleasurable play neglects the possibility that some forms of learning might necessarily involve frustration, boredom and endless repetition…  Gee’s only evidence about schools comes from studies of innovative science classrooms…which are precisely not the ‘traditional’ classrooms he so roundly condemns. (Buckingham, 2007, pp. 111-112)

As I have mentioned in other postings, the problem of video gaming in education might well be that those companies who design video games best are simply not working for schools.  They work for private companies with multi-million dollar budgets.  Still, this work must be done and the findings widely read.  But let’s go in to it with measured expectations, scholarly eyes, and leave our own super-hero capes at the classroom door.

The conference has been intimate, informative, and heartening. My question as its end approaches is this: How do we remain abreast of each other’s findings and work? One the one hand, it is tempting to consider the conference over after the presentations. But, if we are truly to inform one another’s research, what ways would be most effective to continue doing so?

A few suggestions might include: setting up a TCETC Ning or Facebook group; creating a Diigo group to bookmark work and resources; assigning the updating task to one willing point person who will serve to check in and report. Either way, if we want our experience to continue to guide us, we have to find some way to remain connected.

Katie Ash recently wrote about online learning and how cost effective it is in K-12 settings.  The debate breaks down like this: While online learning might seem at first to be more cost effective, no detailed studies have proven it; on the one hand, the cost of developing courses can be great, but they can be used by many for a long time; on the other hand, other features of schools like guidance and special services are not available online.  In short, “The answer to the question, experts say, depends on what curriculum is used, whether it is a full-time or part-time program, what state you are in, and how many students you need to serve, among other factors.”

There is something else, however.  A bottom line that Ash and other voices in the piece ignore: quality of learning.

It seems to me that online courses in K-12 settings have many advantages.  Two of the most compelling being that online courses serve to meet students in the cyber-setting that many of our students inhabit and that they do this while also easing the pressure for physical space that drives many public schools–in NYC, for sure–to make difficult curricular decisions. (Principals are told, for example, that any time a classroom is left empty during the day they are not operating “efficiently”.)  These considerations are valid ones.  But what about school-based support for taking online courses?

Imagine students taking most of a course online–whether or not it was designed by their teachers or others is irrelevant for a moment.  Then, on Fridays let’s say, students met for an hour with teachers in their school to talk about their learning meta-cognitively.  The main question being: How are you learning online compared to past and current offline learning experiences?  The goal, in the end, is to make students aware of how they learn best for themselves.

Now, what online courses suggest for certain subjects, though, needs more consideration: What is lost and gained, for example, in the teaching of literature online?  Doesn’t literature require a certain kind of presence and physicality and orality?  Of course, I ask this as an English teacher and as one who has chosen to commit my life to the teaching of literature.  Students, if asked, might well respond that offline learning is, well, just off.

A recent interview with Vicki Davis, classroom teacher and leader in the movement to “flatten” education, talks about the work she is doing with her students to research the ways in which new technologies will change teaching and learning.  That the students are put in positions of authority is essential: new collaborative and social networking technologies level hierarchical structures in ways that heretofore haven’t been possible.  (Consider the way the Obama campaign used social networking or the way Facebook responded recently to its users’ outcry).  These technologies have the ability to bring human beings together to work for a cause.  That will be its legacy, I predict.  And, it is precisely this that Davis ensuring carries on through her classroom work.  Well done.

Charter schools might or might not be any better than public schools, so says a recent study.  Hardly epiphic news. The report, in addition to emphasizing the mundanity of its own findings, betrays a fundamental flaw in any attempt to assess the efficacy of education:

But the researchers still found it difficult to determine whether charter school students on the whole were learning more, as measured by their test scores, than they would have in their regular public schools. That’s because most of the elementary schools lacked any base-line data for the kindergarten students they enrolled. When researchers looked at charter secondary schools, they found few differences in learning gains between students in charters…

By “learning more, as measured by their test scores” we see it: Learning = Test Scores.  But it doesn’t.  Research on learning strongly opposes this idea.  And yet it lingers.  Why does it persist?  I think it’s because education, more than any other field I can think of, perpetuates its own failings.  We can never forget that those who are imposing testing and writing tests and administering tests all came through a school system.  Something happened in their education that led to them growing up and thinking that testing was actually going to solve education.  Educations past shortcomings recur.

In recent months, the Obama administration has sung the praises of charter schools and testing.  They want us to believe in the miraculous power of charter schools.  Let’s spare the suspense: Charters are much like other schools.  They test like mad in the wake of NCLB.  They burn out teachers.  They meet the needs of some students and don’t of others.  The main difference, however, in many cases is that students must apply to get in.  Well, parents have to apply to get their children admitted.  There’s the difference!  Parent involvement.  It’s hardly more testing or the establishment of bevies of new charter schools.  Education starts at home, continues at home, and never ends at home.  Education, at its best, isn’t about school.  It’s about everything else.

If only we wrote and shared more about our classroom practice.  If only we flooded teaching journals with our insights and research findings.  But we don’t.  Even journals devoted to secondary education, like English Journal, tend to be made up by article mostly be university educators.  Our voices, as secondary teachers, gets lost.

In a recent article in English Education, Anne Whitney analyzes a decade of articles in four major NCTE journals.  She notes that while teachers writing for “the field” often affects the way they view their own practice, those same teachers are the exception to the rule: teachers aren’t rewarded for publishing their ideas the way professors are.

Is this because our expertise isn’t valued or because we don’t value our own expertise?

While Whitney does an expert job in presenting her findings, she doesn’t explore much how sites like this play into teachers’ sense of community and “field”.  How might blogs and social networks be better used to create a sense of importance and expertise in English education?  I have a friend who is a professional financial blogger.  He posts 6 – 10 postings a day.  And people read it.  People in other fields want to know immediately what is going on all the time.  Can we imagine ourselves so intrigued by the thoughts of distant colleagues?  How might it affect practice?

For related information:
- Whitney, A. (2009). NCTE journals and the teacher-author: Who and what gets published. English Education, 41(2).
- Blog Reader
- NCTE

Recent studies out of the University of Connecticut suggest there is no correlation between a student’s offline and online reading skills. The study defends the notion that “few, if any, of these new literacies have found their way into the classroom.  Indeed, many seem to be resisted overtly, by deliberate educational policies, or covertly, by educators who sometimes are not nearly as literate with the Internet as the students they teach.” Researchers studied the reading strategies of both strong and struggling readers using the state’s reading exam as a measure (even monitoring students’ eye movement with a tiny camera). The study examines the idea that students who perform well on traditional paper-based reading tests would perform well on an online reading assessment as well.  The authors say this supposed correlation between online and offline reading underlies policymakers’ own suppositions when creating literacy benchmarks.  Reading, after all, is reading—isn’t it?

Reading is not reading.  The research finds there to be zero correlation between students’ offline and online reading abilities.

There are limits to the study, of course. Firstly, both tests assessed efferent readings. There was a specific task to be done; there was information to find. The notion of reading as aesthetic or pleasurable was unimportant in the study. Secondly, students are assigned a problem to solve online. They are assigned.  The researchers don’t explore the assigned nature of the task enough.  Students’ online lives don’t tend to include mandated assignments. By institutionally requiring such assignments, you could argue that students’ online behavior will be altered.  They aren’t acting of their own volition.  Together, these two limitations raise questions for English teachers, some new and some old.

Even before Louise Rosenblatt’s work raised question of efferent and aesthetic readings in literature classrooms, the reason to read literature was a topic for debate. (These discussions continue today in our own Ning community.) Without trying to answer the question definitively, it might be safe to say that reading only for information—which this research privileges–is insufficient. If information reading is all students need, there seems little reason to read literature or to unpack film or to write anything other than information-laden (and often formulaic) essays.

What’s more, much has been written about the unique nature of adolescents’ new literacies practices. Even this study supports the idea that those practices are dramatically different from print-based ones. Not only do students read in nonlinear ways–their eyes likely to zigzag around the screen rather than moving left to right like the hammers of a typewriter–but they read and write other modes: video, music, html code, to name a few. It’s worth noting, too, that the texts read and written online are often done within a social network. Online, audience matters in ways we teachers might struggle to understand. Online texts are public, social, and often collegial.

In the end, the study does emphasize how distinct online and offline reading are.  Its limits seem to be its definition of what constitutes reading, not to mention the types of texts worth reading in schools.

For more information, see:

- Leu, D. J., Zawilinski, L., Castek, J., Banerjee, M., Housand, B. C., Liu, Y., et al. (2007). What is new about the new literacies of online reading comprehension? In L. S. Rush, A. J. Eakle & A. Berger (Eds.), Secondary school literacy: What research reveals for classroom practive. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE.

- The UConn New Literacies Research Team

In the Winter issue of Harvard Educational Review, researchers explore what genuine inquiry looks like in classrooms. In particular, they study a school in Canada in which both teachers and students are involved in less scripted curricula where the students own interests and questions propel their studies. Of the school, the article says, “One of the powerful consequences of their determination to understand and to develop vigorous practices in inquiry is a consistent commitment not only to providing inquiry-based classrooms for children but also to developing a scholarship of teaching…that demands an inquiry stance…in their own work” (676). Inquiry comes in many shapes and sizes. It’s a word, much like “rigor” and “data” are used in NYC public schools nowadays, that can mean nearly anything the speaker’s heart (or agenda) desires. Despite my initial hesitations, this article makes a sound and fresh case for its own brand of inquiry.

Inquiry-based classrooms, for these researchers, is about the students developing their own questions. It puts the weight of question-asking on students, not teachers. Teachers are there to suggest approaches or to help students deepen their own inquiry. There is no telling exactly where an inquiry will go, which perhaps frightens some teachers something horrible. The authors seem to say that, in general, teachers want answers. Right or wrong ones, preferably. Education honors, they say, “the assumption that you can only tell what someone knows if she can show it to you by herself, and unassisted” (680). Despite the fact that this article is written about a science class, the authors seem to be talking to us when they write, “For decades, countless grade 11 students have turned in essays on the imagery of blood in Macbeth–and now they are downloading them for free” (680). By this they mean that teaching with predetermined answers at the heart of your curriculum and method will only produce prescribed answer. Learning, they claim, isn’t about prescribed answers given on private exams. Rather, “Genuine inquiries demand that understanding develops in a public space in which each person’s abilities, interests, perspectives, and talents help move everyone else’s thinking forward” (680). It is communal by nature.

The article anticipates concerns from educators, like the question of academic rigor. One might say that rigor is determined by the difficulty of the task the teacher gives students. (On an aside, I’m always troubled about “rigor” being “justified” simply because one reads a specific author, or because the teacher assigns a lot of reading or homework. Busyness is not rigor.) Rigor, for the authors, however, is not about the teacher posing traditionally hard content questions; it’s about posing more philosophical and methodological questions. For instance, “Inquiry demands an orientation to what matters: What, as far as we can tell, is crucial? What’s just noise? How can we tell the difference?” (683). It is the students who grapple with these questions in the context of genuine interest in a self-chosen topic. A far cry from typical educational methods.

But, what does this mean for English teachers? Can we, too, teach in this type of inquiry-based model? Do English teachers really have the curricular time to do this sort of thing when there are literary devices to learn, books to read, and writing skills to practice? I suggest yes. In two distinct instances, I think I approached such inquiry with my own students in 9th and 10th grade English. In the one case, we inquired into whether or not Chaucerian poetry was comparable to today’s rap music: consider end rhyme, concern for social issues, the role of vernacular English, even occasional bawdiness, not to mention popularity. The inquiry resulted in students recording a literary critique in the form of a rap album. Granted, I raised the initial question and relied on students as co-researchers, but, still, perhaps a step in the direction described above. In another case, my students confessed that they didn’t read when I (or other teachers, for that matter) assigned readings. Instead, they had several methods of faking reading, if they bothered to read at all. The result was an abandonment of planned curriculum and an inquiry into the question, “What happens to the joy of reading?” In the end, students re-read books from their pasts that they remember enjoying and wrote essays about what happens to reading in school. Are either of these what inquiry might look like in the English classroom? What are others doing? What other possibilities are still unexplored?

For the full article, see:
“Testing the Waters: Three Elements of Classroom Inquiry” by Pat Clifford and Susan J. Marinucci. Harvard Educational Review, 78.4. (The Winter 2008 issue).

For more about my work, go to:
www.tomliamlynch.org

I can’t stop thinking about content and form.  Hardly the thoughts I would choose to have burrowed into the Unforgettable realm of my mind.  But that is exactly where the age-old pair has ensconced themselves.  They will not leave me.  So, I shall escort them out in this posting.  I hope.

In the last two postings, I’ve been trying to make sense of how both Gerald Graff and Laurel Richardson’s views of writing—in terms of content and form—relate to each other.  At first, they seem to be unrelated to me.  Richardson calls for us to consider writing as thinking; to write is to think.  She seems to be responding especially to the notion that in order to write one must know beforehand what one wishes to say.  In addition, Richardson thinks that the forms in which we write help to create knowledge themselves.  There are some things that one might only think of when trying to write a monologue, or in a strict poetic form.  Richardson’s position resists the trend in academia to write in a particular style, an opaque form that makes its content that much harder to understand.  Gerald Graff has a similar view, which he calls Arguespeak—the cryptic language in which scholars speak and write, and a way of communicating in which students are often denied explicit instruction.

Initially, it seems that Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say method of academic writing is in line with Richardson: they propose a form in which students can write, a form that ensures students’ ideas will remain focused and cogent.  But, there is a difference between the Graff-Birkenstein method and Richardson’s call for writing as thinking.  The difference is this: Richardson suggests formal conventions like genre, poetic rhythm, or characterization; the Graff-Birkenstein method gives students the language to think, isolating the core of a student’s idea.  This distinction is important because it sheds light on the inadequacy of my terms, content and form.  And especially form.  What is the difference between the conventional form of a genre—lyric poetry, for example—and the providing of (some) exact language with which students should think?  What effect does thinking in someone else’s sentences have on students’ own thoughts?  While it might ensure that they preserve cogency, how will it effect aspects of writing like voice, for example?

To be clear, Graff and Birkenstein suggest that after students master the basic idea—how to weave others’ ideas into their own—they are free to alter templates to be more original.  In this sense, the Graff-Birkenstein method is one way to train students to think a certain kind of way—a way that does not come easily to some (or many) students.  This is said with great clarity by two graduate students at University of Wisconsin-Madison who, addressing a colleague’s concern that the They Say/I Say method is too formulaic, write: “It seemed to us that our colleague had conflated Graff and Birkenstein’s transparency with a sort of rote, mechanistic method of learning that reduced the complexity of writing to a set of skills that could be grasped and implemented easily.” I agree.  (I wonder if I myself, in my first previous few postings, have fallen into this trap of rash opinion-making: mistaking clarity for glibness; treating content and form so separately; suggesting that Graff was either an education or and English professor.) As with most tools and methods, this one could be of great value to the writing teacher.  That is, as long as it is one tool among others.  A course in which this is the only way of writing—or, a teacher who teaches it as the “right” way, the only way—would be limiting students to only one way of thinking and expressing ideas.  And, unfortunately, as often happens when administrators wish to implement standardized pedagogy, it is quite possible that what would be a valuable tool might be misused as a magic wand.  This is precisely what happened with 6-Traits of Writing, Reading/Writing Workshops, and even Do Nows.  They Say/I Say is a valuable way to help students organize their ideas.  But, administrators must remember the most important word of that sentence: a.

Sociologist Laurel Richardson thinks that writing itself is a form of inquiry.  For her, writing is not something you do only after you have figured out what you want to say.  Writing is how you think it.  In a chapter on writing as a form of inquiry (Richardson, 2000), Richardson writes that “by writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (923).   Qualitative research, she thinks, is boring.  As a result, research doesn’t get read and has no impact on the field, let alone the world.  Richardson’s tone seems hopeful when she writes that qualitative research “could be reaching wide and diverse audiences, not just devotees of individual topics or authors.  It seems foolish at best, and narcissistic and wholly self-absorbed at worst, to spend months or years doing research that ends up not being read and not making a difference to anything but the author’s career” (924).  Both Graff and Eagleton would nod their heads to this in agreement.

Richardson then goes on to describe how the wide gap between content and form came to be.  She points to the 17th century, where the “world of writing [was] divided into two separate kinds: literary and scientific” (925).  Literature became synonymous with falsehood, science with truth.  What’s more, literary writing became associated with flowery poetry while science was plain and to the point.  Despite changes in 20th century, the distinction still remains mostly intact.  This is certainly the case in education where any research done in the era of No Child Left Behind must be “science-based” (Lewis & Moorman, 2007).  Richardson concludes the chapter with a series of writing exercises and tips for graduate students and other qualitative researchers.

The Richardson you read above, however, was not always so innovative.  Her dissertation (Richardson [Walum], 1963), for examples, reads like the voiceless template writing Graff advocates. Richardson begins her dissertation, “The major concern of this thesis is the explication and testing of a theory in the sociology of knowledge. Empirically, it is a study of the relationship between production of pure mathematics and social sanctions” (1).  Her voice is frigid.  There is no “I” here.  And it doesn’t get better.  Her introductory paragraph ends with the liveliness of a funeral march: “The thesis concludes with a summary of the theoretical orientations, procedures, and findings.  The major contributions are assessed and suggestions for future research are presented” (3).  Presented?  By whom?  As we continue, in the third paragraph of Chapter II, there is some sign of life: she uses the word my.  All at once there is a sense of Laurel Richardson, that she’s wriggled loose of academe’s suffocating grip.  Before reading her small possessive adjective, you wondered if a human being wrote this at all.  That simple two-letter word invites you into her page.  That is, until she follows my with: “orientation is not to the construction of a master conceptual scheme wherein all sociological concepts are integrated into a systemic whole” (4).  Richardson of 2000 wouldn’t know Richardson of 1963 if she, well, looked in a mirror.

The point of the juxtaposition between early and late Richardson isn’t to suggest the researcher a hypocrite.  Rather, it’s to temper her recent ideas with a harsh academic reality: breaking the rules of academic writing is not as simple as it seems.  There are times in young scholars’ careers when playing by the rules is necessary for advancing.  When Richardson wrote for her three-person committee at University of Colorado, she pretended like she had never even heard of form, let alone style.  Importantly, Richardson has chronicled at length (Richardson, 1997) the struggles she has faced trying to get her work accepted by others in her field.  Her representations of research as poems and plays are gleefully received by some, but woefully read by others who see her work as nearer a wordy prank than scholarship.

It is with great caution that a young scholar bends the accepted forms of academic writing.  There are resources available and pockets of alternative-minded professors out there, but young careers are fragile things.  Both Graff and Richardson are well established in their careers; they can write however their scholarly hearts desire.  They can also encourage their advisees to break the rules, if they like.  But graduate students beware: you do so at you own risk.

Part 4 to come soon…

It’s not only a handful of scholars who treasure content over form. Content runs amok throughout academia. In his book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, Gerald Graff (Graff, 2004) describes how the school system—universities especially, but also secondary schools—has become an exclusivist system only concerned with the perpetuation of itself. He draws attention to the problems of academic disciplines, the gibberish with which scholars speak about their scholarship, and the way in which students are forced to play a game of insincere studentship just to get through school. Unlike his contemporary Stanley Fish, who thinks that scholarship is an end unto itself and that’s the way it should be (Fish, 2008)—Graff thinks that scholars have a responsibility to make their work accessible to non-academics. Not dumbed-down, but accessible.

Students suffer because academics yatter with only other academics in mind. In what he calls the Law of Relative Invisibility of Intellectual Differences, Graff (Graff, 2004) claims that “to the non-egghead, any two eggheads, no matter how far apart, are virtually indistinguishable” (7). Despite this yen for elitism, Graff describes how intellectualism creeps into popular culture with greater and greater frequency. College-educated audiences crave intelligent entertainment. In addition, “academic ideas are increasingly popularized, not only by the media but by academic writing itself, as university presses court the wider audiences of trade houses while trade houses increasingly publish academics” (19). So, not only is the populous craving intellectualism, the universities are craving the masses.

Graff then goes on to reveal to us “one of the most closely guarded secrets that academia unwittingly keeps from students” (21). He calls it Arguespeak. For Graff, much of scholarship is a matter of making arguments. But, because students don’t know this secret, they flounder about trying to decode their instructors’ magic spells. He goes on to write that “the first step toward demystifying academia is to start being more explicit about the academic centrality of persuasive argument” (22). Academic culture is more like a volleyball game in which an idea gets tossed back and forth between players. Students, however, don’t see academics played this way because “the game is fractured into so many unconnected courses and subjects that it drops out of sight” (27). Graff sets out to change that.

In response to the popularity of Clueless in Academe, Graff and his wife wrote a guide to academic writing (Graff & Birkenstein, 2005) called They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The writing manual lays out a series of templates for students to adopt and adapt in their writing. The templates, the authors argue, help ensure that students frame their own ideas in response to the thoughts of others’, thereby ensuring that Arguespeak is at the center of their own writing. For example, one template might look like this: While some say Shakespeare’s plays are _____________, I think Shakespeare’s plays are ________________. By writing within this template, a student is sure to frame his ideas in terms of others’.

This is where Graff’s astute point about the opacity of the academy starts to wobble. His template method for academic writing ensures students’ ideas are cogent at the expense of the craft of writing itself. He pries apart thinking and writing/content and form, isolating the former and relinquishing the latter. He seems to think that content and form are distinct, that writing and thinking are unrelated. This might be fine with him. There are others, however, for whom writing and thinking are very much conflated.

Part 3 to come next week…

Somewhere in the doctoral process graduate students learn to write like scholars.  They realize that in order to get published or to receive the accolades of their discipline they must write a certain way.  It’s as if there exists a secret scroll on which is penned the sacred law of academic writing: Write to convey only content and do not fall prey to the seduction of form.  If readers are bored, that is their fault.  If readers think they understand you they are mistaken and only have a pedestrian comprehension at best.  To be a scholar, we are taught, is to write opaquely.  Fortunately, the saving grace of scholarship is this: it is only read by other scholars, anyway.

In his book Figures of Dissent (Eagleton, 2003), Terry Eagleton criticizes two theorists on this point.  Post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, Eagleton claims, ignores her readers in the name of her own intellect: “Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonizing about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible” (159).  Who, after all, would write a sentence that reads, “many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism” (ibid)?  Spivak’s most fanatic reader is likely Spivak herself.  Eagleton’s criticism also extends to Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom.  “It would be charitable”, writes Eagleton, “to think that Bloom writes as slackly and cackhandedly as he does because he is out to attract the general reader. He is admirably intent of rescuing literature from the arcane rituals of US academia and restoring it to a wider audience.  Even so, you cannot help suspecting that this rambling, platitudinous stuff is the best he can now muster” (169).   In both cases, the scholars’ pens drip pretentiousness.  It’s no wonder graduate students end up writing like windbags, Eagleton might say.  Windbags are all they know.

Eagleton is not alone.  In a review of a now popular work in critical geography (Soja, 1996), Andy Merrifield criticizes the book’s ideas and the stylelessness of the author, Edward Soja.  After trashing several core ideas from the book, Merrifield adds that “maybe the real problem here is Soja’s prose.  It is far too remote and wordy, and often screams out for clear-spoken directness.  His verbosity militates against him really getting down deep, really immersing himself in the convulsions of daily life and in the cracks and marginal twilight zone of urban life. This is where his Thirdspace [theory] resides and it is plainly where he wants to be, but he cannot quite stoop that low” (347).  Ideas are only part of scholarship; the way in which ideas are presented is equally vital.  What do we call that “way in which ideas are presented”?  Some might call it form, others style or representation.  Since content and form are a well-known twosome, we’ll keep them together.

To be continued next week…

General Electric just gave the New York City public school system $17.9 million. It’s the largest single grant given to the city schools and will be distributed over a five-year period. The mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, had this to say: “Public-private partnerships like this one with the GE Foundation have been essential to our success in turning around a failing public school system. This generous grant will help to prepare our students to be the leaders of the 21st century economy which will be built on science, math and technology” (http://www.thecro.com/node/725). While it’s not clear how exactly the money will be used to help schools (something about funding a “pilot program” in ten city schools), I’m intrigued about the mayor’s, GE’s, and other politicians’ emphasis on science, math, and technology. As an English teacher, I’m trying to avoid the pitfall of discipline jealousy: a sort of Marsha-Marsha-Marsha response to watching the above three content-areas be given so much attention and money as funding for the arts dwindles. And we see the effects of this in the research being produced, for example.

Literary studies have played Jan to other disciplines’ Marsha for at least a century. The famous scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams graphs poetry based on the instructions from a popular textbook is an example:

In the early 20^th century, lacking scholarly respect and funding, literary scholars developed a method of critiquing literature that sought to be as objective about poems as the scientific method was about data. It was no longer about the art of poetry; it was about the poem as an object for quantifiable study. The idea was that literature and poetry were too open to rampant interpretation—the reader could read a work however he wished—and some other academically rigorous method was needed if the study of literature was to be taken seriously. We see the results of this movement, referred to as New Criticism or Formalism, even on the New York State Regents exam today:

The notion of showing how an author used certain literary devices evidences the type of attempt at objective literary analysis that developed in the wake of the reverence and funding for the sciences that was alive and well a century ago. Take, as another case in point, the work of researchers in what’s being called content-area literacy. Rather than just focusing their studies on what it means to read and write, some researchers are aiming their work at what it means to read and write in a specific discipline, like science. I don’t wish to discount or discredit this type of research. I only wish to point out that a professor researching how students process information in science class might well be more likely to get funding than a professor doing a similar study in English class, and certainly music class. It’s not, however, that the tide has suddenly shifted towards funding the sciences or technology.

For example, the mayor’s use of the word “technology”carries with it an interesting story. Often nowadays we are likely to hear science, math, and technology all lumped together. Not to mention “21^st Century” education. What pols mean by “technology” isn’t what scholars mean by it, though. One scholar, Walter Ong, posited the notion that the act of writing is in fact a technology insofar as it uses a tool (a pen, pencil, stylus) to aid humans to do something they can already do: communicate. But writing is not what GE or the mayor have in mind when they bestow millions on the City school system. I wonder what they imagine technology to look like: do they think of computers (hardware, networking, repair), the internet (web site design, research), or maybe even blogging? Would the overseers of this grant consider students who blogged about their learning to have been worth GE’s investment?

Doubtful.

Words like “science”, “math”, and “technology” have little meaning to the dolers of monies. And without clearer meaning, the grant is as likely to trickle into sub-contracted organizations that can justify the measurement of their success any way they like, using words like “achievement” and “succeed” and “growth” or phrases like “move students” and “the data suggests”. Whereas the value of literature will always be inexplicable, much to the frustration of the teachers and scholars in its field, the real value of GE’s grant is likely to be as inexplicable–only its results are likely to come with the graphs and charts and data that have always appeased businessmen and mollified scientists. The Dead Poets might say these same graphs and charts and data frighten the art out of poetry.