Category Archives: Teaching and Learning

Reflection, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Literature, Technology

My Experiment with ChatGPT

A Laptop Displaying ChatGPT
Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

One of the things I dislike about teaching AP English Literature is that I really need to offer students opportunities to practice for the exam, which means timed writing and multiple choice practice. I don’t think timed writing is pedagogically sound because we are not replicating the kind of writing students will have to do most often in college and career. Sure, students have deadlines, but it will be uncommon for them to have to produce something like a timed essay in the real world. I also tend to ask more open-ended questions rather than multiple-choice questions. I have moved away from giving tests and even quizzes as learning assessments.  But I also don’t want to shortchange my students who plan to take the exam.

I don’t like giving students prompts that are disconnected from our studies. If, for example, we are engaged in a unit on Home and Family and are reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, I would prefer to have students practice timed writing or multiple choice connected to that text or at least to the themes we are exploring in the unit. Unfortunately, the College Board seems to think the best way to organize the class is by genre rather than by theme. Finding timed writing prompts is not too hard, but finding multiple-choice practice based on the texts I teach can be a challenge.

This week, I decided to try ChatGPT to write some multiple-choice questions just to see what would happen. This is the prompt I put into ChatGPT:

Create five multiple choice questions with options A through E about Layli Long Soldier’s poem “Whereas”

Here is a link to the poem. I really didn’t think it would generate much of anything because Layli Long Soldier’s work is not as well known as, say, Robert Frost’s or Emily Dickinson’s. However, in about 15 seconds, ChatGPT generated the following questions:

  1. In Layli Long Soldier’s poem “Whereas,” what is the significance of the title?
    A. It refers to a particular location where an event takes place.
    B. It’s a reference to a legal term used in U.S. government documents.
    C. It’s a metaphor for a state of mind or emotion.
    D. It’s a nod to the Native American oral storytelling tradition.
    E. It’s a reference to a specific historical document.
  2. What is the central theme of Layli Long Soldier’s poem “Whereas”?
    A. The importance of personal identity in the face of cultural erasure.
    B. The complexity and contradictions of language and communication.
    C. The impact of historical trauma on present-day Indigenous people.
    D. The beauty and power of nature as a source of healing and renewal.
    E. The struggle for justice and equality in contemporary America
  3. Which of the following literary devices does Layli Long Soldier use in “Whereas” to convey her message?
    A. Imagery and metaphor
    B. Rhyme and alliteration
    C. Foreshadowing and irony
    D. Flashback and symbolism
    E. Simile and hyperbole
  4. How does Layli Long Soldier use repetition in “Whereas”?
    A. To emphasize the importance of certain ideas or concepts.
    B. To create a sense of rhythm and musicality in the poem.
    C. To convey the speaker’s frustration and anger.
    D. To establish a connection with the reader.
    E. To evoke a particular mood or emotion.
  5. Which of the following best describes the tone of Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas”?
    A. Angry and accusatory
    B. Reflective and contemplative
    C. Humorous and satirical
    D. Hopeful and optimistic
    E. Sarcastic and ironic

Now, the first question is tricky, but it’s the kind of question with a good distractor. Two answers are pretty good, but one is best. The other four are a bit more straightforward. I think they’re pretty good questions. If I had tried to write them, it would have taken over an hour, I’m sure. I am quite sure I wouldn’t have been able to find questions like this online or in any AP prep books.

I told my students where they came from, and one student who had missed a couple commented, “THAT’S why they suck.” Kidding aside, the students generally agreed they were AP-style questions. They also reflected that when I had asked them to write multiple choice questions as a thinking activity in class, it had taken them a good chunk of our 70-minute period to write just one good question.

I tried again with Layli Long Soldier’s poem “Obligations 2,” and ChatGPT didn’t do as well. I believe the AI confused the poem with another text based on the questions it generated, but I’m not sure which one. Still, I think this is a game-changer for including more quick multiple-choice practice questions on the texts I actually teach.

I decided to try again to see what would happen if I asked ChatGPT to create some discussion questions. Here is the prompt I used:

make up discussion questions based on Zitkála-Šá’s poem “The Red Man’s America”

It generated the following:

  1. What message is Zitkála-Šá conveying in “The Red Man’s America,” and how does she use language and imagery to convey that message?
  2. How does Zitkála-Šá’s personal experience as a Native American influence her perspective on the United States and its treatment of indigenous peoples?
  3. In what ways does “The Red Man’s America” challenge traditional American narratives of manifest destiny and the conquest of the West?
  4. How does Zitkála-Šá’s poem reflect the broader struggle of Native Americans to maintain their cultural identity and resist assimilation into mainstream American society?
  5. What role does nature play in “The Red Man’s America,” and how does Zitkála-Šá use descriptions of the natural world to convey her ideas about the relationship between Native Americans and the land?
  6. How does “The Red Man’s America” compare to other works of Native American literature in terms of its themes and style?
  7. In what ways does Zitkála-Šá’s poem challenge stereotypes and misconceptions about Native Americans that are still prevalent in American culture today?
  8. How does Zitkála-Šá’s poem speak to contemporary debates about issues such as land rights, cultural appropriation, and representation of indigenous peoples in popular culture?
  9. What does Zitkála-Šá’s poem suggest about the potential for Native American cultures to survive and thrive in the face of colonization and assimilation?
  10. How does “The Red Man’s America” speak to broader themes of identity, belonging, and resistance in American literature and culture?

I don’t love all of these questions, but I admit most of them are pretty good, and I would use them in a class discussion. I really thought, again, that I might stump the AI with a lesser-known writer, but I didn’t.

Next, I asked ChatGPT to write me a lesson plan based on three Emily Dickinson poems I want to teach. The lesson plan was okay. It wasn’t great, but it was not terrible, either. I decided I wouldn’t use any of it because I had some other ideas about how I wanted to approach teaching Dickinson’s poems.

I think ChatGPT has the potential to save some time for tasks, but it’s not yet as creative as a human. Still, given how much time teachers spend doing some of these tasks, I think it could be a very interesting tool.

Assessment, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Literature, Teaching Writing

Free Rhetorical Analysis Unit

4 Comments

I recently found myself in the position of having to teach AP English Language for about five weeks. I won’t get into why that happened. I have never taught AP Lang. I think I’ve taught just about everything else! I decided it would be a good opportunity to do a quick unit on rhetorical analysis, which I have at least taught in the past.

For context, my classes are 70 minutes long, and typically meet three times per week. What follows below is a day-by-day plan for my unit. Feel free to use any of this. I borrowed very heavily from others and acknowledge or link to their work where I was able to do so.

Day 1

I used a lesson from Jennifer Fletcher’s book Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response. For reference, it’s the Parlor Conversation Metaphor/Learning to Pay Attention lesson in which students examine a painting for ten minutes. I used the same painting as Jennifer and followed her lesson instructions exactly. Because her text is copyrighted, I cannot share the materials here, but I urge you to purchase her book.

Day 2

I introduced students to rhetoric. First, we journaled on this topic: Think of a time someone talked you into doing something or believing something. How did they do it? What tactics did they use? Students may share out journals. I gave students a graphic organizer with a PAPA analysis (purpose, audience, persona, argument) and picked a speech. Frankly, the speech I picked, which was Samwise Gamgee’s speech to Frodo Baggins in The Two Towers, failed spectacularly since students had no frame of reference. Note: that movie is old now. I know. It makes me sad, too. So go cautiously if you use this, but maybe pick something else. You can find a massive list here.

To be honest, I didn’t have time to make my own, so I bought a bunch of graphic organizers from Teachers Pay Teachers. Students worked with a partner to fill out the PAPA graphic organizer. Then we shared out to the class.

For homework, I assigned students an article from Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week website. Pick one you like! I picked this one about food deserts because our school is located in one. I asked students to prepare to have a fishbowl-style discussion on the article using the questions on the article (see the end). Before we ended class, I set discussion norms with the students.

Day 3

Students engaged in a fishbowl discussion of the article they read for homework. If you are new to fishbowl discussion, essentially, you divide the class into two groups. The first group is the “inner circle,” whose job is to begin the discussion. It should be student-centered, and the teacher should listen and take notes. I track discussions like this using an iPad app called Equity Maps. The second group is the “outer circle,” whose job is to listen to the first group and take notes. I set a timer for 15 minutes for the first group. Then the groups swap positions and the second group has a discussion while the first group listens and takes notes. After both groups discussed the text, we debriefed the discussion experience:

  • What did you observe during the discussion of the text?
  • What is one thing you heard that you agree with?
  • What is one thing you heard that you disagree with?
  • How did you feel while on the outside of the fishbowl?
  • How did you feel while on the inside of the fishbowl?

For homework, I assigned students to write a reflection on their learning. I have used the same template for seminar reflections for years. I stole it from Greece New York Public Schools well over 15 years ago. Unfortunately, it’s no longer available on their site, so I’m going to try to link it below.

Socratic Seminar Reflection

Day 4

I introduced students to ethos, pathos, and logos. Because students had read Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy over the summer, I returned to his work and shared his TED Talk with them.

As students watched, they took notes on a graphic organizer:

  • Speaker: Who is the speaker?
  • Audience: Who is the intended audience for this speech?
  • Subject: What is the speech mostly about?
  • Context: What was happening in history at the time this speech was given (Stevenson discusses some of this in the speech)?
  • Why do you think the speaker gave this speech?

I drew a triangle on the board and asked students to tell me which of the questions above related to who the speaker was and how he established his credibility. I wrote “ethos” next to the top corner of the triangle and defined it as an author or speaker’s credibility on the topic. Is the speaker or author reliable or credible? Is the speaker or author knowledgeable? Does Bryan Stevenson establish himself as credible? Why or how?

Next, I asked which of the questions above were related to how the audience feels when listening to the speech. I added “pathos” to the triangle on the board and defined it as an appeal to emotions. How does the text make the audience feel? What emotional appeals does Stevenson make? How does the speech make you feel?

Finally, I asked which of the questions above has to do with research, evidence, or facts (this might be a good time to point out that some areas overlap; context, purpose, and subject might appeal to both pathos and logos). I added “logos” to the triangle and defined it as an appeal to logic and reason. How do the facts and evidence support the claim? What appeals to facts, logic, and reason did Stevenson make?

Following this introduction, we discussed the speech using these questions as a guide:

  • What do you think would happen if these three different kinds of appeals were unbalanced? For example, what if the speech had no appeals to emotions? No facts, research, or evidence?
  • What if it were someone else besides Bryan Stevenson (feel free to play with different celebrities here; could Taylor Swift deliver this speech believably? Kanye West?
  • How well do you think this speech balances the three types of appeals?

For homework, students read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Day 5

I shared the background context (but not the Call for Unity letter… yet) as seen in slide 1 below. Then I posted the questions on slide 2 and asked students to get in small groups to discuss.

We reconvened as a class, and groups shared out the highlights of their discussion. Then I shared the Call to Unity letter so students could check their speculation about question 3 on the slide deck.

I introduced a one-pager assignment on Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Day 6

I gave students this class period to work on their one-pagers. I supplied paper and colored pencils for students who wanted them.

Day 7

For this lesson, I owe everything to the #TeachLivingPoets crowd. They created the whole lesson and shared it at NCTE in 2018. We read Clint Smith’s poem “Playground Elegy” from the collection Counting Descent. We discussed the following questions:

  • What do you notice?
  • What words and phrases stand out?
  • What patterns do you notice?
  • What is the argument?

Next, I asked students to work with a partner or group of 3 to create a rhetorical triangle analysis of the poem. It’s fun to use big sticky poster paper and markers, which I provided for students. You might want to display a rhetorical triangle for students as a reminder. Students should include the following:

  • Speaker/author
  • Subject
  • Audience
  • Thesis/purpose

Students put their large sticky posters up and did a gallery walk. I made them spend two minutes on each poster so they would really read it. I set a timer and everything! Then I asked them to share something interesting they noticed on another group’s poster.

The one-pagers were due for the next class, so I reminded students to finish them for homework.

Day 8

This lesson was also stolen from the #TeachLivingPoets presentation from 2018. I displayed the slide deck below.

I went through slides 1 (with Fatimah Asghar’s biography) to 5. Then I posted slide 6 and handed out copies of Asghar’s poems “Microaggression Bingo” and “Partition” from their collection If They Come for Us: Poems. Students discussed these questions in relation to the two poems in groups. Then the groups shared with the class.

I wrote SOAPSTone on the board and gave students a SOAPSTone graphic organizer with a chart on both sides of the paper. They analyzed each of the poems using the graphic organizer as a class, but you could easily have them do it in small groups.

Day 9

I introduced an out-of-class rhetorical analysis essay and gave students a list of speeches from which to choose. I said they might also pick another speech, and one student did. I also brought in some essay and poetry collections, but all my students opted for a speech. I asked them to fill out a SOAPSTone graphic organizer on their selected speech. Then, I suggested they examine appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos with examples of each, identify style choices and details and build an analysis:

  • What is the writer’s intention?
  • Who is the intended audience?
  • What is the argument?
  • What is the writer’s strategy to make that argument? Why?
  • What appeals does the writer use to persuade the reader? Why
  • What kind of style does the writer use?
  • What effect does this work have on the audience?

Students had time in class to begin all this planning work.

Day 10

I decided to introduce rhetorical analysis of a film by screening Ava Du Vernay’s 13th, which is available on Netflix or free on YouTube.

As students watched the film, I instructed them to take notes on the following aspects:

  • Appeals to ethos
  • Appeals to logos
  • Appeals to pathos
  • SOAPSTone

This film is over 1:40, so we didn’t finish in one period and carried the film over to the next class.

Students continued working on drafts of their rhetorical analysis for homework.

Day 11

We finished the film and discussed it using the Thoughts, Questions, and Epiphanies method I described in this blog post. Credit for this strategy goes to Marisa Thompson. Here is what I posted for students to guide their discussion:

Students were in groups of 3 or 4, and I gave them 15-20 minutes to talk. Then they shared their top 2 thoughts, questions, or epiphanies on the board, and their ideas guided the rest of our class discussion of the film.

For homework, students finished a first draft of the rhetorical analysis.

Day 12

Writing workshop. Conference with students on their drafts, give them time to read and edit each other’s work, or work on their drafts.

Day 13

Ugh. The test. Most of our students take AP Lang exams, so I gave them the 2021 AP Lang rhetorical analysis (Sonia Sotomayor’s speech) as a timed writing practice. We debriefed the prompt after the timed writing. I gave them a copy of the AP rhetorical analysis rubric and went over it. Then I asked them to score themselves on the rubric and add a sentence to the end of the timed writing explaining how they scored themselves and why.

Day 14

We examined the College Board’s sample essays on the rhetorical analysis for the 2021 prompt on Sonia Sotomayor’s speech and scored them. Then I revealed the scores the essays earned and explained the rationale for the score. My students nailed it. They scored each essay exactly as the College Board did! We also discussed how they feel about their timed writing from the previous class now that they’ve seen models, and most students indicated they feel pretty good. At this point, I was preparing to hand the class over to their new full-time teacher, so she took some time to get to know the students with some games.

Day 15

We played rhetorical analysis Jenga. I decided to have them examine a short piece by Temple Grandin from This I Believe. I introduced students to Temple Grandin by showing this short video.

I owe Melissa Smith and Joel Garza for the idea for the Jenga game, which I adapted from literary analysis. Here is a list of questions I used.

You will need enough Jenga games for students in groups of 3-4. Number the blocks from 1-22. You will repeat numbers, and that is okay.

I also collected final drafts of the rhetorical analysis essay.

The graded assessments in this unit were the fishbowl reflection, the one-pager, and the rhetorical analysis essay. I do not believe in grading timed writing or participation. I think it puts too much pressure on students to grade timed writing when it is practice and should be a formative assessment. I have moved away from grading participation because it is difficult to assess what students are learning. Students may dominate discussion without really learning much to rack up participation grades, or they may be introverted and struggle to speak but still learn a lot, so I just don’t do it. I grade reflections on discussions instead.

That’s it! I hope it’s useful.

Teaching and Learning, Teaching Literature

Class Discussion Strategies

4 Comments
My AP Lit Class
My AP Literature class in 2018 engaged in a discussion

After introducing my AP Lit students to literary analysis tools and critical theory, I teach a unit called “Identity and Culture” with Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon at the center. In the past, I have turned this unit into a bit of a slog, as I want to discuss everything that happens. As a result, the discussions have tended to be teacher-led, and we never seemed to get through everything I wanted to talk about. You see the problem, don’t you? It was about me and not the students‘ needs. I can be especially guilty of this pedagogical crime when I’m teaching a book I really love—like Song of Solomon. This year, I decided to change my approach. Obviously, I needed to do something more student-centered.

I attended the Mosaic AP Slow Conference this summer, and in one session presented by Roy Smith and Brian Sztabnik, I learned how to create a digital notebook (see link; their materials are near the top of the page as of this writing). I replicated the notebook that Roy shared in the presentation using this free template at Slidesmania. The notebook allowed students to wrestle with the novel’s characters and themes and analyze the text deeply. We could pull back a bit on the class discussion because I was asking students to do more of the work of analysis on their own. The side benefit is that doing this analysis better prepared the students for the class discussions.

The second change to my approach involved the discussions themselves. I knew I didn’t want to lead full-class discussions each day. I decided to try different discussion techniques that included a mix of small group discussions in which all students could participate and larger group discussions that engaged the class as a whole. I tried each of the following strategies successfully in the unit.

TQE: Thoughts, Questions, Epiphanies

I learned about this technique through Jennifer Gonzalez’s Cult of Pedagogy blog. Marisa Thompson developed this discussion strategy in which students discuss their thoughts, questions, and epiphanies about a text in small groups for 15 minutes. Then they identify their top two TQEs and write them on the board. The student-generated TQEs become the basis for the full-class discussion that follows. I like this strategy because it engages students in both small group discussions and full-class discussions. It gives them a focus. In Gonzalez’s blog post, you can see the stems Thompson uses to help students generate topics for discussion. As students are working in small groups, I circulate and listen. I have also tried this strategy in my Social Justice course with great results.

Small Group Scene Studies

Because the notebooks the students used as they read the text included a section for scene studies, I decided I would ask students to do a mix of independent scene studies and group scene studies. The goal of a scene study is to analyze the events in a scene. What happens? On a deeper level, what does it mean? Do you notice any symbols? How does the scene connect to larger themes in the text? How do characters develop in the scene? Scene studies are great for those pivotal moments in a text, such as when a character has an epiphany or when a major event happens, and you want students to think about the details. We had done a scene study together as a class in which we compared and contrasted Robert Smith’s leap to Henry Porter’s standoff in the first chapter of the novel, so they had a model for the process. Sometimes I asked students to select a scene and do a scene study in their notebooks for homework, but on other occasions, I asked them to work in a small group to conduct a scene study. Groups then shared out their findings about a scene with the whole class. I could easily see this working as a “jigsaw” discussion, too. In that case, each group might analyze a different scene and the sharing would take on additional import as they taught their peers about the scene.

Conversation Stations

Also known as “converstations,” this strategy engages students in small group discussions about characters, scenes, events, themes… whatever you like! I teach AP Lit with a colleague, and she identified several quotes from one of the chapters and asked one or two questions about each quote. These quotes were posted in different areas around the room where students could write responses. Students start at one quote station and move through each station, commenting on the questions and adding to their peers’ comments as well. After rotating through each station as a group, students navigate to the quote that speaks to them the most, and they unpack that station’s commentary for the whole class. They don’t have to move as a group to identify the quote they want to unpack. This method incorporates some movement, so it’s a good way to get students on their feet and thinking. The danger is that some quotes may not attract as many students. I had that happen to one station, and I decided to unpack that station’s commentary. I also did not have the whiteboard space in the classroom where I teach (as my colleague did), so I used large sticky posters.

A twist on this strategy involves creating a slide deck with a slide for each student group where they can write their responses to each station. Each station is a different slide in the deck. The stations can have quotes, questions, or some mix of both. I also borrowed this idea from my AP Lit teaching colleague. It works especially well when you have a hybrid or Zoom class, and you want to engage students in group work.

Protocols

Discussion protocols are also a great way to engage students in small group discussions. The School Reform Initiative has many discussion protocols that not only work well for professional meetings but can also be adapted for the classroom, including many text-based protocols. I tried two text-based protocols developed by SRI: Save the Last Word for ME and the Four “A”s Text Discussion. The only real changes I needed to make were adapting some of the timed portions to fit my 70-minute class periods and changing terms like “article” to “text.”

I used an adaptation of the Four “A”s Text Protocol that asks students to discuss a character’s “assumptions,” what they want to “agree with,” what they want to “argue” with, and what they want to “ask” the character. We used this protocol after we learned about Guitar’s involvement in the Seven Days, which helped the students go beneath the surface and beyond their first reaction to the Seven Days and think more critically about Guitar and his involvement in this organization. This protocol allowed students to explore the nuances and angles in the text.

We used the “Save the Last Word for ME” protocol after reading chapter 9, which rounds out First Corinthians and Magdalene called Lena’s characters and delves more deeply into their stories. This protocol is especially good for engaging every voice, as each participant must speak. Each participant shares a passage, and the other group members discuss the passage before circling back to the presenter, who then explains why they chose the passage. This protocol is also great for driving students into the text, as it is passage-based.

Notebook-Led Discussions

Notebook-led discussions might not be the best term for this strategy, but I called them notebook-led discussions because I asked students to share some detail from their notebooks as a frame for the discussion. Rather than generate questions I would ask them in a full-class discussion, asked them which scene they focused on for a scene study, and they shared what they captured in their notes. Other students added on as they generated questions or ideas about the scenes. This strategy also worked for focusing on characters. I might ask what details they captured about a character’s development in a reading. This strategy is a twist on the typical teacher-led discussion as it asks students to share the details from their notebooks that they want to focus on for discussion.

Socratic Seminar and Fishbowl Discussion

I use Socratic Seminar discussion often but decided to try a Fishbowl Discussion after Part I of the novel to allow students to discuss the text in smaller groups, practice listening and note-taking skills, and analyze the text up until that point. Fishbowl Discussions divide the class into small groups. My class sizes are just right for dividing into two groups. The inner circle discusses the text, while the outer circle takes notes. The groups swap places and repeat the procedure. Students don’t like that those conversations can be repetitive and sometimes want to address a point that came up in the other group’s discussion, but there are ways you can mitigate these problems by allowing time to debrief or creating different questions for each group. My students generate their own questions for Socratic Seminar and Fishbowl Discussions using the Question Formulation Technique from the Right Question Institute. I ask students to do a reflection that includes the following elements:

  • A summary of the discussion
  • Identify a comment made by a peer and explain why you responded to it (agree, disagree, made me think, etc.)
  • Explain how the seminar contributed to your learning
  • Connect the discussion to something else (a personal experience, learning in another class, another book, etc).
  • Assess yourself and set goals for next time

I have been using this reflection template for years. I initially discovered it through Greece Central School District’s (New York) website for their ELA programs, but they have since taken down all of these resources. You can easily create a reflection template that works for you.

If you’ve tried discussion techniques that work well for you, please feel free to share in the comments.

Issues, Reflection, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning

The Problem with Textbooks

2 Comments

One really interesting activity I did in my Curriculum Theory course last year was to analyze a curriculum artifact. My department doesn’t use textbooks, but I really wanted to analyze a textbook after reading Michael Apple’s 1985 article “The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook.” I highly recommend this article, by the way. I found it fascinating, especially as it seems we are still discussing some of the issues Apple identified 35 years ago. This CBS This Morning segment on textbooks includes a really interesting statement near the end regarding the fact that textbook companies can make changes to texts to make them more accurate, but it’s up to the schools to adopt the standards and texts.

Apple (1985) argues that the textbook is one of the main means through which “legitimate knowledge,” which he defines as “the ‘cultural capital’ of the dominant classes and class segments” (p. 148), is transmitted. This becomes problematic because the market and production methods affect textbook production, and the textbook production industry is decentralized and caught between the tensions of profitable sales and obligations for transmitting knowledge (Apple, 1985). As a result, large markets, particularly in conservative areas of the country, sometimes drive the content of textbooks because these more conservative school districts will not purchase materials that challenge the ideological or political beliefs of those in power in these districts (Apple, 1985).

Textbooks can make things easier for teachers. There are handy questions for discussion in the teacher’s edition. You can assign questions after readings (if that’s your thing). But relying on them means that students often don’t get the whole story because what goes into a textbook is very political. At the time when the article was written, admittedly a long time ago, the top twenty publishers sold the vast majority of textbooks, and most of the people making editorial decisions about the content of textbooks were White men (Apple, 1985). I would imagine that it’s still true, but I’d have to do a bit more research to find out.

In 2015 a student at Pearland High School near Houston found his textbook described enslaved people forcibly removed from Africa as “workers” (Isensee, 2015). Apple (1985) questions “Who determines what this ‘public’ [that publishers respond to] is?” (p. 157), which is a question that I have as well. I would argue that, as Apple (1985) implies, the “public” whose “needs” publishers respond to is probably White, middle- to upper-class, and largely privileged in other ways (such as cis-gender, heterosexual, Christian, etc.) and thus are more likely to see themselves and stories of people like them reflected in textbooks. Texas is one of the largest textbook markets in the country, and textbook companies want Texas school systems to adopt their books, as seen in the CBS video.

Apple (1985) suggests that researchers should undertake a “grounded ethnographic investigation that follows a curriculum artifact such as a textbook from its writing to its selling (and then to its use)” (p. 159), and I think this would be well worth our time as educators to do. When I get a chance to do some digging, I’d like to find out if anyone has done it since Apple wrote this article in 1985.

In case you are wondering how my curriculum artifact analysis turned out—the world history textbook I analyzed devotes twenty pages to the history of the entire continent of Africa (Gainty & Ward, 2011). Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) maintains that culturally relevant curriculum, including learning about topics that affirm students’ identities, will help students, particularly students of color, experience more success in school. The small amount of space devoted to learning about African history may communicate to students, particularly African-American students, that this history is not important or not worthy of study.

To be fair, the book is meant to accompany a larger textbook that I didn’t examine, and I also did not analyze the balance of coverage of societies on other continents in the book, mainly because the main crux of the assignment was to examine the curriculum artifact’s strengths and weaknesses, and in order to make the assignment manageable, I zeroed in on one lesson in the book. In my analysis, I found one strength is that the text asked students to analyze images. Students should learn how to analyze images critically, as this form of media is one of the most common communication methods in the age of Instagram and Twitter and is also not often considered important in schools. Another strength of the textbook is the use of storytelling (from the Epic of Sundiata) to capture a culture. As Geneva Gay (2002) explains, many cultures, including African American, Native American, Asian, and Latino cultures, use storytelling in their communication; thus, learning about a culture through its stories contributes to a more culturally responsive learning experience.

In terms of weaknesses, I felt the questions following the image and the passage are somewhat low level. Asking students to “describe [the] structure” (Gainty & Ward, 2011, p. 225) or “wedding ceremony” (Gainty & Ward, 2011, p. 223) are simple comprehension questions that do not ask students to draw inferences, interpret, or analyze or synthesize information. Even most of the comparative questions on p. 223 of the book are fairly low-level questions on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001).

The book really does not adequately explore African history. According to Gay (2002) “culturally responsive teaching” involves “using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students for teaching them more effectively,” and while she posits that “academic knowledge and skills are situated in the lived experiences and frames of reference of students,” it also stands to reason that the cultural history of those students is as important as their lived experiences (p. 106). Students, particularly African-American students, using this text are not learning much about African history from a text that purports to cover world history. Ladson-Billings (1998) argues that “the official school curriculum [is] a culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a White supremacist master script” (p. 18), and the space devoted to exploring African history in this text certainly supports her argument. This omission is particularly glaring in light of the text’s fairly recent publication date of 2011.

I definitely think teachers who have to use textbooks should do such an analysis of their text. In fact, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to focus narrowly on one issue that you want to make sure students learn thoroughly. For example, it seems to me that a lot of people don’t understand the actual causes of the Civil War, as evidenced in the CBS video, and if you teach American history (or even American literature), see what your textbook says, and if it’s inadequate or misleading, make sure students know that.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet students would be interested to know the textbooks they use are not politically neutral. What if you asked students to analyze the way a topic is presented. Whose point of view is centered? Whose is missing? Why?

References

Anderson, L. W. & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman

Apple, M. W. (1985). The culture and commerce of the textbook. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 17(2), 147-162.

Gainty, D. & Ward, W. D. (2011). Sources of world societies (2nd ed., Vol. I). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(20), 106-116.

Isensee, L. (2015). Why calling slaves ‘workers’ is more than an editing error. NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/23/ 450826208/why-calling-slaves-workers-is-more-than-an-editing-error

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7-24.

Reflection, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning

Here We Are

6 Comments

After the election of the current occupant of the White House, I wrote a post in which I discussed my feelings about it. In the comments on that post, you’ll see a commenter chastise me for bringing my politics into my own blog. Well, the fact is that teaching is political. We all have a positionality and a bias. We have lived our experiences and interpreted them subjectively through the lens of our positionality and bias. Other people do not share those same experiences. However, when people’s lives are at stake, it’s wrong to be silent. It’s just flat wrong.

I was actually raised (or I should say my mother attempted to raise me) to believe that discussing politics was tacky or crass. No joke. Obviously, the teachings did not stick. Nor did the casual racist attitudes of my family. And fighting the racism in which I was brought up takes daily work. I still make mistakes all the time. Racism is so deeply embedded in the fabric of our society. The biggest mistake I think I make on a regular basis is not speaking up to my family or old friends when they say racist things. It’s something I am working on trying to change, but being a bystander in these moments comes from a place of fear, and several years of therapy are helping me grapple with this fear, but it is embedded very deeply in my psyche. Freezing or fleeing are responses to trauma that I have relied on as a coping mechanism. I do it because when I was small, I could not fight.

Fighting does not come naturally to me. I really have to push myself to do it. Even challenging people is very hard for me to do. I struggle with how to do it and have had to learn all kinds of techniques for approaching it. I absolutely fear confrontation. However, I have also realized as I have become older that confrontation and facing these fears are necessary sometimes. Now is one of those times.

I am struggling with how to say what I want to say, so bear with me. This post will likely not be polished. This post will likely ramble.

Racism is wrong. It is just wrong. There is no place for it in our world. It is holding us back as a species. When I think of all we could accomplish in this world if we didn’t spend so much time fighting each other over things that don’t matter, I feel so angry.

Racism is also the lived experience of people of color. And believe it or not, it hurts the people who are racist as well. It twists them and makes them go against concepts they would otherwise believe it—Christian charity, kindness, and love, for example. When you can dehumanize a group of people, when you can see them as the other or as less than human, it is so much easier to devalue their lives. That is what we have done for centuries in this country. We have said over and over that Black lives do not matter. Black lives DO matter. Of course all lives matter, but it is Black lives that are in peril because of systemic, structural racism that our country was founded on. If you don’t believe me, go beyond Jefferson’s writings in the Declaration of Independence (did you realize a passage about Great Britain inciting slaves against the Colonists was struck?) and read his Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he says,

Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarfskin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious* experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it.

Or how about this?

Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar œstrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [Phillis Wheatley]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem.

This man enslaved his own children.

My perspective is that people struggle with absolutes. Either the founders of this country were brilliant men who conceived of a radical idea about a new government, or they were horrible White supremacists who wanted to preserve their way of life. Actually, yes, they were both. Being able to hold these contradictions in your head at the same time is the essence of critical thinking, and it is sorely lacking in this country right now. There is no reason why we shouldn’t have learned about Jefferson the man with all his contradictions and problematic aspects in addition to Jefferson the statesman.

Let me be absolutely clear. When I teach my students, I teach this full picture. This includes the inclusion of a variety of voices that our curriculum has traditionally excluded. I am not going to apologize for doing that. I think it’s a moral imperative. I think teachers who DO not do that need to do some hard thinking about why they are silencing certain perspectives. Take a look at Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.” This poem is not new.

There is actually a logical fallacy called “appeal to tradition” or argumentum ad antiquitatem. The crux of this appeal is that we should not change things because we have always done it that way, so therefore, it’s the best way. While there is nothing wrong with tradition, there is something wrong with clinging to practices and beliefs because they have been held a long time. One of the worst accusations I have heard politicians level at one another is “waffling.” You used to believe something else, and now you don’t anymore, so that must mean that you don’t stand for anything. No, it means that you changed your mind. Or to quote Taylor Mali, “That changing your mind is one of the best ways / of finding out whether or not you still have one.”

I have changed my mind many times as a result of new learning, and changing our minds is something we need to do to save ourselves from the sicknesses in this country. Educating ourselves is critical. We live in a country in which a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Three other officers stood by and did nothing. Police officers murdered Tamir Rice in the park for playing cops and robbers with a toy gun, an activity many White children engage in without being in danger of their lives. Trayvon Martin was walking home to his father’s house from a store with a package of Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea, and because a racist man didn’t recognize him and saw only his hoodie and skin, he felt like it was okay to kill him. And he escaped penalty. How many more? I could offer a list.

Ahmaud Arbery

Tony McDade

Breonna Taylor

Freddie Gray

Amadou Diallo

Botham Jean

Dreasjon “Sean” Reed

Philando Castile

Jamar Clark

Michael Brown

Ezell Ford

Eric Garner

Sandra Bland

The sad fact is that I could go on an on and on with that list. I don’t have to worry if my son leaves the house that he won’t come back. I don’t have to talk to him about how to comport himself with police officers so he can avoid being killed. That’s it. Bottom line. Meanwhile, my friends send their beautiful Black sons into the world knowing the world fears and despises them.

Look at your own child, if you have one. Can you fathom being able to do that? For God’s sake, put yourself in someone else’s shoes and learn some empathy. You can’t sympathize with the feeling because it is not your experience, but unless you can try to picture what that experience must be like, we are lost.

And the leadership we have in this country right now demonstrates a frightening lack of empathy. I do not think the current resident of the White House is capable of empathy. That means he doesn’t care about you, either. He is completely morally bankrupt and incapable of any feelings that are not rooted in self-interest.

Make no mistake about where I stand. Black Lives Matter. We are a sick country, and we have always been sick. We are also a country with some pretty wonderful ideals, if we could ever manage to live up to them. As James Baldwin said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” America can be both great and terrible. But it cannot become better unless we have an honest reckoning with systemic racism. As Baldwin also said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

This is a wholly inadequate response to what is happening in our country, but it’s only the start. I’m going to work on doing better. Racism is a cancer. We don’t eradicate cancer by pretending it doesn’t exist. Eradicating cancer takes extreme measures. I’m going to work on learning more. I am going to try to be braver and confront racism and injustice.

Are you?

Reflection, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning

NCTE 2018 Reflections

3 Comments

Each year, I try to take some time to reflect on my learning at NCTE. Last year, I actually did it in three parts, which I don’t think I will need to do this year.

Some perennial issues remain unaddressed. For example, rooms are still over-crowded for certain popular sessions. I know this is hard to figure out, and predicting which size room presenters need is blind guessing, but it’s essential that whoever is making these decisions has the pulse of conversations happening on social media. I could have predicted, for example, that the #DisruptTexts and #TeachLivingPoets sessions would be full to bursting based on chat participation, but neither were in big rooms. On the other hand, my session, which was up against the ALAN Breakfast and some heavy hitters (see below), had scant attendance, and we were in a ballroom. That session should have had better attendance, but it’s hard to compete against the ALAN Breakfast (to say nothing of big-name presenters).

Another issue: We are still an echo chamber to some extent. I tweeted this out twice during the conference:

There are some folks who present every year, and unfortunately, it’s pretty much the same thing every year. I realize not everyone goes every year to hear them, but there are folks presenting multiple sessions, and they do it every year. And they’re selling books and professional development workshops. And some of these folks have great, innovative ideas. But we need to share the floor. Caveat: I have presented several times, too—six times since 2010. Some of the folks I am talking about have presented six times in the last two years or less.

I also know some folks who were in the session in which writer Sarah Cortez apparently said some hurtful, homophobic, bigoted things. Two horrible results: 1) fellow panelist and author Bill Konigsberg was hurt by the remarks, 2) many of the others presenting in the session were also hurt and are preservice teachers experiencing their first NCTE conference. I know in the moment, it’s hard to know how to respond, and it is very easy for those of us who were not there to say what we would have done, but it’s important that this is addressed with whatever agent that helped NCTE book this author and also that this author is not invited back again. Clearly, it was not something the fellow panelists should have had to address.

I had actually marked that session as one I might attend and went to High School Matters instead. I loved getting Carol Jago’s book recommendations at that session, and the two roundtables I attended were great. One was “Taking Writing from the Personal to the Public Minded: Teaching for Social Justice and Global Citizenship,” and the other was “Reading Between the Lines: Using LGBTQ Literature with Middle and High School Teachers and Counselors.”

I’m already out of order with my reflection. I missed A and B sessions as well as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s keynote because my flight landed at 6:00 PM. Usually, that’s not an issue with NCTE, but this year, some sessions were moved up so that Sunday could end a bit earlier (that’s my conjecture, anyway), and I like this change, but I didn’t know it would happen when I booked my plane tickets months ago. Lesson learned.  I hated missing Adichie.

I went to Cornelius Minor’s session, C.01: Raising Student Voice—What is Our Role in Equity and Justice in the English Classroom? He is a dynamic speaker, and I enjoyed hearing from him. We received free copies of Kwame Alexander’s Solo, too! Unfortunately, I didn’t get notes. I was sitting on the floor in the corner and couldn’t see, too, but that’s because I was late. I had gone to a Penguin/Moth breakfast that morning, and it ran into the first session. I’m not sure if Penguin was aware they were running into the next session or not.

I skipped a D session so I could eat and check out the exhibits. I only went to the exhibit hall this one time. The more often I attend this conference, the less interested I am in the exhibit hall. I can’t tell you how much free stuff I’ve taken that I’ve never looked at again. I’m really thoughtful about what I take now (my husband would probably disagree, but it’s true).

I went to Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, and Julia Torres’s session F.65: #DisruptTexts: Dismantling and Rebuilding (Reimagining?) the Literary Canon. If you haven’t been involved with #DisruptTexts on Twitter, you should fix that. We missed Kim Parker, but the group shared a stellar rationale for why we need to do this work and how we can do it—even if we have limited options about changing our curriculum, we can still disrupt it. I do hope they will share their slide deck. It looked like they had linked some interesting things on the slides themselves and also cited some research worth digging into. Josh Thompson took good Twitter notes (see the entire thread):

https://twitter.com/jthompedu/status/1063523112212410370

One big takeaway from this conference and from #TeachLivingPoets: I have a renewed interest in poetry. I admit I had let this interest slide because I was looking in the wrong places. We are in the midst of a poetry renaissance, and we need to be sharing these poets with our students. The picture at the top of this post includes all the books I heard about from #TeachLivingPoets either before or at the conference. I went to two sessions with the #TeachLivingPoets crew: G.34: #TeachLivingPoets: Redefining the Canon to Discover and Develop Student Voice through Living Poets and M.18: The Argument for Poetry: How Poetry Can Help Students Hear Other Voices and Raise Their Own. Both sessions were fantastic, and the great news is that both groups shared their slides and are linked above. I will try to share the book recommendations in a future post once I’ve had a chance to read them all.

My research in graduate school concerns eliminating grades, so I went to J.22: Report Cards that Motivate: Including Student Voice in Assessment. I was hoping to encounter research I wasn’t familiar with, but instead, I walked away with a list of schools who are actually doing this work, and perhaps I can figure out how to visit or how to interview people at these schools as part of my research. I’m glad I went for the sake of my dissertation, and I hope I can bring some of the ideas I learned in this session back to my school.

My last session was N.18: Teaching for Social Justice in the Age of Trump: Exploring Empathy and Vulnerability in a Divided America. This was a panel crafted from separate proposals, I gather. Meredith Stewart and her colleague Laura Price from Cary Academy, North Carolina, shared some interesting ideas about an American video essay assignment. They were great, and the assignment looks really intriguing.

I went to an E session that wasn’t memorable and co-opted the work of others, to boot. Nothing new and nothing to report. Same with the I session, which I attended hoping to get some ideas for a text I am not a huge fan of teaching. I mostly didn’t. I guess it’s time to speak with my fellow ninth grade teachers about this text.

I reiterate the remarks I make every year. Please check your equipment. Bring the right dongle. Make sure it works. Share your slide deck so people can listen to you and do not need to frantically take notes and block everyone’s view taking pictures of your slides. If you’re interested in other advice, you can find it here.

I missed part of Chris Emdin’s keynote but caught the second half. It was powerful! It was the only general session I was able to attend. I wish I had had time to get a book signed. I think it’s important that NCTE is bringing in academics like Chris Emdin and inviting authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to speak at this conference.

It might have been my imagination, or perhaps I was more aware of it, but on the plus side, it looked to me like more teachers of color attended and presented, and this is a step in the right direction. So what can we do to be more inclusive?

This conference remains out of reach for many. Some years, I had to pay my own way. It’s nothing to drop $1000 to attend this conference. I’m lucky my current school supports my professional learning, but many teachers are not in this position, and NCTE can and should do more to make this conference accessible to all. They can start by not charging presenters. I have a feeling they don’t want to do that because they make a lot of money from presenters attending the conference, but I have long thought it seems like a lot of money to shell out for a line on a résumé. NCTE is profiting from the work of these presenters. The least they can do is charge them a presenter fee that is significantly less than the full conference registration fee, but the right thing to do would be to waive the fee altogether.

Scholarship opportunities are also limited. Julia Torres and Lorena Germán coordinated an effort to raise money to send teachers this year, but NCTE should be part of the solution on this one. I know many, many teachers who only go when they can commute to the conference because hotel and airfare cost too much to go every year. And the learning they miss out on is substantial. We can do better by these teachers. I know how they feel because I was in their position, and there were some years that I went to NCTE on borrowed money and ate only fast food or snacks the whole time because it’s what I could afford since my school didn’t support my going. I love this organization and conference for making me a better teacher, and because I love it, I feel like I can tell them they need to work to be even more inclusive.

It was great to connect with friends and colleagues again. Despite some hiccups and fumbles and significant problems, I think this is a good conference that can be GREAT, and I look forward to next year already. The conference theme is “Spirited Inquiry.” I already have some ideas.

Reflection, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Literature

How I Changed My Mind Once

6 Comments

John Moore, Getty Images
John Moore, Getty Images

Literature is a powerful means of helping us understand things we don’t understand otherwise. It can offer us new perspectives. It can reflect ourselves, certainly, but it can also help us understand others who are not like us. It offers us an opportunity to see things from a perspective besides our own. It’s incredibly obvious to me that our current president doesn’t read because he lacks that important perspective.

We have all, at one time or another, been blind to others’ perspectives. For instance, I have been thinking a lot lately about homelessness. I have held some beliefs about it that I am questioning, and I’m also questioning why I believed these things when I admit now that I didn’t have certain information. My information about who becomes homeless and why was woefully incomplete. I have had an opportunity to get to know some young people who found themselves homeless, and not for reasons I would have thought.

I was watching some videos last night when I was having trouble falling asleep. Because I went to a U2 concert on Thursday night, my ears are still full of their music, and I’m still feeling that post-concert energy. (I had a really hard time going to sleep Thursday night after the concert.) I was really just clicking through different videos, feeling 80’s nostalgia big time with some of them, and I happened upon this short interview with the Edge in which he describes working on a documentary about homelessness and how he had begun interrogating his feelings about homelessness. It’s fairly candid. It’s hard to admit you were not open-minded about something in the past or that you held political or social beliefs in the past that you now disagree with. Watching that video, in which someone I admire a great deal admits to a certain blindness about a situation—I blindness I shared—helped me figure out what I wanted to say about the current crisis at America’s southern border. We all change. As Taylor Mali says in “Like Lilly Like Wilson,” “changing your mind is one of the best ways / of finding out whether or not you still have one.”

As I have learned from others, I have changed my mind many times. It’s not “waffling,” it’s adjusting based on information you didn’t have before. In order to adjust, you have to be open to that information. Many people reject information that conflicts with what they believe. Cognitive dissonance is not a rare phenomenon. People confronted with information that contradicts beliefs they have held will do one of several things:

  1. Change their mind or their behavior based on the new information.
  2. Justify it in some way.
  3. Ignore or dismiss the new information.

We should interrogate the source and strength of the information, of course, but if the information is both strong and comes from a reliable source or data, we are lying if we do anything except change our minds or behavior. Climate change is a good example. A lot of people are choosing either to justify not doing anything for the climate or to ignore it and say climate change is made up.

A long time ago, I believed every person coming into our country should follow the legal channels. What is the big deal? If you want to become an American, I thought, fine, but do whatever paperwork you need to do. I changed my mind after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book The Bean Trees. What made me change my mind is that Kingsolver opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of people cannot follow legal channels and come to America for a variety of reasons: their governments are so corrupt that they will never be able to complete the required paperwork and go through official channels or their lives are in danger (often because of their corrupt government). Obviously, there are a host of other reasons.

In The Bean Trees, the protagonist Taylor Greer meets a couple, Estevan and Esperanza, who are undocumented immigrants from Guatemala. Taylor’s friend Mattie runs a sort of “underground railroad” for undocumented immigrants out of her home. Kingsolver allows Taylor to stand in for the uninformed reader. Her naivete about what is happening in the world around her mirrored my own, despite the fact that I watched the news, and I knew about the rampant corruption and violence in Central and South America. I didn’t see it because I didn’t know anyone who had experienced it, and one thing novels allow you to do is live vicariously through the characters.

Getting to know Estevan and Esperanza changed my mind about undocumented immigrants. They were fleeing a civil war in Guatemala. Their lives were in danger. Their child was taken from them in Guatemala. Kingsolver gets at the heart of the issue many Americans have with refugees and undocumented immigrants through Estavan. After the character Virgie May Parsons declares that immigrants should “stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs” because “before you know it the whole world will be here jibbering and jabbering till we won’t know it’s America” (143), Taylor feels she should apologize to Estevan for Virgie’s comments. Estevan says, “I understand . . . This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it” (157). We blame victims of oppression instead of looking at policies and systems that created oppression.

Later when Taylor learns that Estevan and Esperanza’s daughter Ismene was kidnapped because Estevan was a member of an underground teachers’ union in Guatemala. Esperanza’s brother and friends are also in the union and are killed in a police raid. Ismene, Estevan and Esperanza’s daughter, is abducted as a form of “ransom.” If they will give up the information they have about the union, the government will return Ismene to them. Giving up the information they have will mean death for union members. Taylor is horrified when she finds out that Estevan and Esperanza had to choose to leave their daughter behind, and she says, “I can’t even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.” Estevan replies, “You live in that world” (184).

I lived in that world, too, and like Taylor, I didn’t know. I didn’t know because I had the privilege not to know. The way I handled the cognitive dissonance that came with learning that not everyone can follow the proper channels when they are seeking to come to America is that I changed my beliefs. I don’t feel threatened by people coming to America to seek a better life, but I understand that for one reason or another, many people do feel threatened.

I had the opportunity recently to hear Clint Smith speak as part of the Multicultural Teaching Institute in Weston, MA. I didn’t attend the entire institute; I have attended in the past. The only part of the institute I attended was Clint Smith’s talk. One thing he said really resonated with me. It isn’t indoctrination to teach the truth. Present the information to the students and let them decide what to do with the information. For example, he cited the statistic from a Southern Poverty Law Center study that found that only 8% of high school seniors name slavery as the cause of the Civil War. This, despite the fact that many primary source documents written by secessionists name slavery as their reason for wanting to break from the union. Smith says that it’s not our job as educators to convince students to agree with us. Present the information in its totality, however, and let them grapple. It is our job to complicate the narrative, to show the complexities and contradictions. But the students will need to cope with the potential cognitive dissonance. And they have a few options. They can accept the new information and change their minds or behavior. They can justify it in some way. Or they can reject it. But we need to make sure students have the information they need to make that choice. They need to read books like The Bean Trees. Check out the work in #DisruptTexts on Twitter to learn how to share multiple, diverse perspectives with students.

“Home” by Warsan Shire seems appropriate to share.

https://youtu.be/nI9D92Xiygo

Thank you to my friend Glenda for 1) reminding me to write about The Bean Trees, which has been much on my mind lately, and 2) to challenge educators to write about this issue.

Professional Development, Recommended Reading, Reflection, Teaching and Learning

Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions

3 Comments

It has been a little while since I posted about professional reading here. I picked up Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana at the suggestion of colleagues at my school.

This is one of those books, sort of like Understanding by Design, that makes such a clear, compelling case in such an immediate way that you wonder how you’ve been teaching all your life without using the techniques the authors describe. You can quite literally take the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) described in this book right into your classroom.

Rothstein and Santana argue that students learn better, retain more, and are more engaged if they are trained to ask questions. The way teachers can facilitate this learning is to give students a prompt, which the authors call a “QFocus” or “Question Focus.” I decided to try this out in my short Emily Dickinson unit in AP Literature.

I knew one thing I wanted my students to take away from reading Dickinson’s poetry is that word choices are important. I brainstormed potential QFocus ideas in my notebook. I started with the obvious “word choices.” That wasn’t enough, but I was encouraged by reading in Make Just One Change to start with the basics to generate ideas. Then I wrote “word choices matter.” Just to be contrary, I added: “word choices don’t matter.” In the end, this is the full list of QFocus ideas I came up with (including some quotes I found online while looking up authors’ ideas regarding word choice):

  • word choices
  • word choices matter
  • word choices don’t matter
  • words have power
  • you can use the power of words
  • “The secret of being boring is to say everything.”—Voltaire
  • “Good words are worth much, and cost little.”—George Herbert
  • You have to wrestle with word choice.
  • “I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.”—Robert Frost
  • “Writing a poem is discovering.”—Robert Frost
  • “Words have weight, sound, and appearance.”—Somerset Maugham

I ultimately decided on “word choices matter” as the QFocus that would best help generate questions about word choice without being too obtuse or unnecessarily provocative.

Note: I deviated a little bit from the QFT because I hadn’t read very far into the book when I already knew I wanted to introduce the idea, so I took a risk that paid off. Instead of putting students in groups to generate questions, I just wrote “word choices matter” on the board and gave the students the four rules described in Make Just One Change:

  1. Ask as many questions as you can.
  2. Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any question.
  3. Write down every question exactly as it is stated.
  4. Change any statement into a question. (43)

Then I asked the entire class to share our their question ideas rather than generate ideas in groups. It might seem easy, but it is really hard not to try to rephrase questions, and it is also hard not to place a value on the question through encouraging students who ask good ones. If you comment on the value of a question, you are liable to shut down students who think maybe their questions are not as good. And you do need to remind students of the rules. They wanted to dismiss some of the questions. I should back up and add before we generated questions, we discussed the rules and in particular which ones would be hard to follow. Rule 2 was the one they knew (rightly) they would struggle most with because they love to discuss ideas.

They came up with the following questions (unedited):

  • Why is it word choice matters instead of word choices matter?
  • Isn’t it ironic that word choices matter in a statement about word choices?
  • Why are we doing this exercise?
  • Is this supposed to be about The Hours?
  • In what context is word choices being applied?
  • Is this about Emily Dickinson?
  • Are we still going to see her house? And get lunch?
  • Do word choices always matter?
  • Do authors limit themselves to their own writing style?
  • Do authors limit readers to their (reader’s) interpretation?
  • In what scenarios does word choice matter the most?
  • Is word choice very important to all authors or just some?
  • Do authors disagree about the purpose of word choice?
  • Are we implying that the effect of words are quantified by how they compare to one another?
  • Does word choice limit emotion?
  • What is word choice?
  • How do authors use word choice to enhance their writing style?

As you can see, some of their first questions revolved around the purpose of creating questions, but they quickly generated an impressive list. The next day, I asked students to get in groups and do three things: 1) classify questions as either open-ended or closed-ended (this is an activity described in the book); 2) rewrite an open-ended question so it was closed-ended and vice versa; and 3) prioritize their top three questions.

There was quite a lot of overlap when groups prioritized their questions, and in some cases, the rewritten questions made the cut rather than the originals. This was our final list:

  • In what scenarios does word choice matter the most?
  • How do authors use word choice to enhance their writing style?
  • Do authors limit themselves to their own writing style?
  • Does word choice limit emotion? OR How does word choice limit emotion? (The question was rendered two different ways by different groups.)
  • Why is it word choices matter instead of word choice matters?
  • In what context is “word choices” being applied?

The project students are completing in this unit is to create a video or presentation in which students explain one of Dickinson’s poems and explore her word choice variants. I asked them to choose one or more questions from this list as part of their project’s focus.

One immediate observation: All of the students were more engaged, but in particular, some students who rarely participate were participating, and not just in the question generation. They continued to participate when discussing one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, which is an activity we did after generating questions.

I will be trying the QFT with my ninth graders next week. We are reading Persepolis, and I plan to show them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.”

As I did with my AP Literature class, I brainstormed potential QFocus ideas and also considered positives and negatives for each.

QFocus Idea Pros Cons
stereotypes short and sweet too broad
all stereotypes are bad  more specific too easy to agree with
no stereotypes are good more specific same, but negative, does reframe
stereotypes are both bad and good might generate divergent thinking might not generate a ton of questions
stereotypes are incomplete ties to Adichie, makes me wonder might be hard for kids to parse
social groups judge each other based on difference specific might be too specific?
we all use stereotypes sets up challenge to thinker negative response? argue back?

I was initially inclined to select the last one, but I showed my list to a colleague, and he suggested, “stereotypes are incomplete.” He argued I said myself that it “makes me wonder,” and that perhaps part of my concern about the statement being difficult to parse is what makes it good. The students will have to pick it apart. And it has the advantage of being a direct quote from Adichie’s TED Talk.

If you are looking for something to read that you can take into your classroom right away, no matter what you are doing, this book will offer you some great tools and advice. Towards the end of the book, the authors quote two great educational thinkers:

Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi and scholar who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, asserted at a White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1960 that in a democratic society we should be assessing our students less on their ability to answer our questions and more on their ability to ask their own questions. The educator Paulo Freire was actually thrown in jail by a dictatorship in his native Brazil for challenging its authority and then spent much of his life after that challenging societies around the world to embrace questions and questioning as a fundamental democratic action. (154)

Something I actually wrote in the margins of my book on page 7, “Wonder if Parkland teachers use QFT.” It would explain the students’ activism and leadership.

All I can say about QFT is my first thought is “Why didn’t I think of this before?” and my second is “This is going to change everything.”

Issues, Reflection, Teaching and Learning

Radical Love

5 Comments

love photo
Photo by duncan

My thoughts in this blog post are incomplete, as I am still trying to figure out how to articulate what I am feeling about teaching in our current climate. I finished reading both Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and James Baldwin’s  The Fire Next Time this week. Thinking about the implications for the future of education and for our country (and perhaps even the world) as a whole, I have realized that what we need in this political moment is radical love.

My AP Literature students just finished King Lear. I’m in the midst of reading papers. I actually assign them to write a “rumination paper.” I learned about these types of essays while at the Kenyon Writing Workshop for Teachers. It is part literary analysis and part personal narrative—an excellent way for students to connect with the literature they are reading. At least one of my students wrote about her admiration for Cordelia for refusing to flatter Lear in Act I, Scene 1, when she tells him she loves him “according to [her] bond, no more, no less” (1.1.102). The student sees Cordelia as speaking truth to power. She knows how her sisters feel about her father, and she is unable to lie as they do. She doesn’t see love as a business transaction. After Cordelia dies, Lear is inconsolable and can barely speak:

No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou ’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never. (5.3.369-72)

Lear does not say “I loved her.” But that is what he means. In her essay, my student connected Cordelia’s response to her father’s request to flatter him with her own response to a friend who lashed out against NFL players “disrespecting our flag.” Speaking up has cost my student her friendship, but she had to speak up, just as Cordelia did. Cordelia wavers for a moment, wondering what she will say when her father calls upon her to speak, but when he does, she stands firm, even in the face of his unfair treatment. When he gives her a chance to “mend [her] speech a little,” she refuses to retract her words (1.1.103). However, by the end of the play, Lear realizes he has wronged Cordelia and asks for her forgiveness, which she gives freely. It is an act of radical love for Cordelia to deal honestly with her father. It is an act of radical love for my student to help her friend understand why NFL players are taking a knee.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues that

The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. (50)

Later in the text, Freire says, “If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue” (90). He adds that dialogue cannot exist without humility, faith, hope, and critical thinking (91-92). Freire says that “love is an act of courage, not of fear” and “love is commitment to others” (89).

Baldwin tells his nephew in The Fire Next Time that “To be loved, baby, hard, and at once, and forever” will “strengthen [him] against the loveless world” (7). However, the problem we encounter is that “When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believe as we did” (40).

I don’t understand a great deal of the hatred I have seen since the election. We have slipped into loving only those who believe as we do, and we have lost our way. If we are truly to understand one another, we have to engage in dialogue with them. And as Freire says, we cannot have dialogue without empathy and love.

This lack of love leads to oppression, as Freire and Baldwin describe in their books. However, oppression enslaves not just the oppressed but also the oppressor. As Baldwin says, “Whoever debases others is debasing himself” (83). Freire echoes this argument in claiming that in freeing themselves, the oppressed also “can free their oppressors” (56). Hating others is a way of imprisoning one’s self. One of the reasons we are seeing so much hatred and so much lack of understanding is that we as teachers we are still subscribing to what Freire describes as the “banking model” of education in which treat students like “‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (72) rather than asking students to “investigate their thinking” (109) and teaching them to think for themselves and to listen to others, acknowledging that they may think differently, but that we can still engage in dialogue and try to understand each other. It’s perhaps the only way forward in our current moment.

Reading these two books back to back helped me understand why we are where we are—as educators, as citizens, as fellow human beings. Fear dominates our landscape. We are afraid of a group of people—any group you might consider the “other”—moving out of their “place.” As Freire says, “For the oppressors, ‘human beings’ refers only to themselves; other people are ‘things.’ For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival” (57-58). We feel threatened by so many things at this moment: immigrants, people of other races, people of other religions, people with other political views, people of other genders, people of other sexual orientations. We find it impossible to enter into dialogue with others because we find it impossible to love them. We are so preoccupied with hating others that we are unable to view them as fellow human beings. I’m convinced that almost all the violence we perpetrate against others, whether physical or mental, is the result of not being able to view others as fully human, like ourselves. When we do not empathize with others, it’s much easier to hurt them. And in dehumanizing others, we dehumanize ourselves.

I wonder sometimes if we are in the last gasp of clinging to our fears and hatred before we embrace others in dialogue. I hope so. I’m not sure I believe it is so. Unlike Robert Frost, I’m afraid that ice might be quite a lot more dangerous than fire. As educators, then, we need to embrace radical love. Baldwin says that “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within” (95). We need to accept others as they are and meet them where they are. We need to love ourselves as we are. We need to talk with others so that we can understand them. We need to listen to them. We need to be open to each other. We need to love each other.

Now is not a time for teachers to be fainthearted. I know I’m afraid. It’s a difficult time to be an educator. In particular, it’s a difficult time for any educator who is taking risks that our test-driven culture does not cultivate or encourage. However, if we are to teach the next generation how to save the world, we need to be radical. As Freire says,”The pedagogy of the oppressed… is a task for radicals” (39). And we need to practice radical love.

Issues, Reflection, Teaching and Learning

Learning for Life

My Students

This picture shows three special groups of students. In the frame in the upper left is my last group of advisees at the Weber School before I moved away from Georgia to Massachusetts. They took this picture of themselves at the Winter Formal and framed it for me as a going-away gift. These students graduated two years after I left—Class of 2014. They were such a good group that my colleague Nicki Brite claimed them all for advisory before my last school year had ended. They are sophomores in this picture.

On the bottom are my first group of advisees at Worcester Academy. This crew graduated in 2016, and two of them were my advisees for all four years of high school. I picked up the rest in sophomore, junior, or senior year. They were a lively group. This is their senior picture, and they are wearing their college tee-shirts. My current advisees at Worcester Academy are sophomores this year.

The students on the right are standing in front of Walden Pond. Many of these students were in my class for as many as three years, and I think most of them had my class for at least two years. They are sophomores in this particular picture. At the Weber School, American Literature was a sophomore English class, and most of these students also took my Writing Seminar class as well. We knew each other well. They made this picture because we studied Thoreau in class, and I could not be there with them to experience Walden. They graduated in 2009. I was close to these students. Many of them connect with me on Facebook or Twitter. One of them tweeted this response to my last blog post.

https://twitter.com/JulianGindi/status/923030595587809280

His comment moved me incredibly, but if I’m honest, he didn’t have the teacher I describe in that blog post. I was in a different place when I taught him and his peers, and I learned a lot in the years that followed. Issues of conscience and social justice are much more important to me now. Student agency is far more important to me now. Students have more voice and more choices in my classroom in 2017 than they did in 2007. Yet this student’s comment is evidence of one of my core beliefs. Over time, we will probably forget the mechanics of how to format a paper according to MLA guidelines, what a participle is, or what the red hunting hat symbolizes. What we don’t forget is how our teachers make us feel. If we knew they loved us and we loved them back, we remember their classes fondly. And we certainly remember how they helped us grow in the most crucial ways: becoming critical readers and thinkers, effective communicators, and lifelong learners.

As department chairs at Worcester Academy, we recently read an article called “Four Predictions for Students’ Tomorrows” by Erik Palmer in the March 2016 issue of Educational Leadership. You need to be an ASCD member to view the article at the link. What Palmer argues in the article is that what we think about years after we graduate are the things we wish we had been taught. As Palmer reminds us in the article, we are preparing our students for their futures. It’s a moving target. However, we do know that students are going to need to be critical researchers (especially using the internet well), they will need to be media literate and make logical arguments, they will need to be able to speak and listen, and they will need to be good critical thinkers. None of this is new. As Palmer points out in his conclusion, “Argument, rhetoric, and oral communication have been important since ancient Greece” (22).

Thinking about how my approach to teaching has changed, I am curious: What do my students wish they had learned in my class?

Stay tuned. I just asked my students. I’ll let you know what they have to say.

What about you? What do you wish you’d learned in school?

Citation: Palmer, Erik. “Four Predictions for Students’ Tomorrows.” Educational Leadership, vol. 73, no. 6, Mar. 2016, pp. 18-22.