Our Worthy Target: Planning and Practicing

A Wordle compilation of our planning document

“...we must consider why the conceptual material and tools we are teaching were created, what issues they were meant to address, and what work this knowledge can do.” (Smith & Wilhelm, 2006, p. 58)

Our planning and our re-planning were equally as important. In planning our unit, we strove to implement critical literacy and liberatory pedagogy into our work. In re-planning we made our lessons more relevant to the students based on what we had learned about them that day, knowing how quickly that might change the next day.

One of the greatest challenges we faced was gauging the difficulty or rigor that we should incorporate into our assessments. We didn't want students to fail, and at the same time, we didn't want to belittle them by providing only simplistic or juvenile activities. Our essential question—“How does the way we tell and read news stories influence how we view the world?”—sought to make them think about what we were doing in a bigger context, but at the same time, there were several moments where I felt we had overestimated their abilities. This is a unique kind of teacher-tension, where we are caught between wanting to push students to their best thinking and their best work, and knowing when we are asking too much of them.

I think part of our anxiety about their lack of formal articulation was falling into the trap that Wiggins (2005) warns about: “We caution readers, then, to avoid the common misconception that goals for understanding represent statements that learners must “give back” by the time the lessons are over or that the understandings must be simplistic for younger learners or novices in a subject. On the contrary: The understanding of powerful ideas in use remains our worthy target.” (p. 142).

The fact that they could not produce a verbalized or written answer for our essential question does not automatically mean that our unit “failed” somehow. Their VoiceThreads demonstrated that they could produce stories that had the 5 W's. Their willingness to listen to each other's stories and identify the 5 W's also demonstrated a maturity that we had not see earlier in the week. Many of them could recognize when a news story was “unfair” without necessarily calling it biased.

We knew going in that the way we measured learning was as important as the learning we created. Particularly, the way “assessment” has been structured often serves a purpose that is counter-productive to liberatory pedagogy, for "[to] separate knowledge from interests is to present the former as value-free or objective, and to mask the power implicit in the latter" (britzman, 2003, p. 40). It is important to recognize the ways in which our assessments construct what “knowledge” is for our students and ourselves. I think in many ways our assessment disrupted more dominant ideologies about valuable knowledge—students were encouraged to use their own stories as something “newsworthy,” and they were given the freedom to communicate this in many different mediums—pictures, spoken and written word, and some with movement as well.

“Fortunately, many teachers intuitively know that the best way to achieve their goals is to enlist students' interests on their side. They do this by being sensitive to student's goals and desires, and they are thus able to articulate the pedagogical goals as meaningful challenges” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991).

Uncertainty, Predicting, and Surrendering

 

“The result was not a student who learned the right things, but a student who both learned what mattered in school and society and unlearned or critically examined what was being learned, how it was being learned, and why it was being learned. Learning involved ending up with knowledge and skills that could not have been predicted by either the student or the teacher." (Kumashiro, 2004, p. 28)

No matter how much we planned, we could never possibly plan “enough” to control the classroom we were about to enter. And while that sounds simple, it really isn't. As britzman points out in chapter 6, there are several dominant discourses about the teacher's ability to control a classroom, and its implications for how we view student interactions. In unpacking the incident with Derek*, I blamed myself for my failure as a teacher to predict the unpredictable. As britzman (2003) notes about two subjects in her study, “Both... invest in the belief that they must master the art of premonition and instantaneous response—both of which depend upon the teacher's ability to anticipate and contain the unexpected—to ensure control as a prerequisite for student learning” (p. 224). Essentially, my desire to control the situation, and the guilt that resulted from not being able to achieve the impossible, was at odds with my desire for an uncertain outcome in student learning.

I think that wishing for unexpected and unpredictable learning must go hand in hand with recognizing and valuing the necessity of unexpected and unpredictable behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes in our students. Dominant discourses about schools tend to view uncertainty as being unprepared. While “[such] a construct positions uncertainty as both a character flaw and a problem of management that can be solved by what inheres in the person,” I think that in reality, uncertainty leads to more depth of learning and more authenticity in the teacher-student relationship when those relationships aren't negotiated solely by outside forces (britzman, 2003, p. 225).

For example, I was confronted on several occasions with behaviors and demonstrations of learning that I did not expect, but that were very positive. Derek* was very willing to work with me on Thursday after our incident on Wednesday. I realized that I really had no control over how his day would go, beyond what I could ask him to do in the classroom.

Surrendering a sense of control allows me to exchange for a sense of peace about the ambiguity of working in a classroom. It no longer phases me that the students seemed to struggle so much with our lesson on Tuesday or that many of them could not articulate a learning outcome because that is not what learning is.

When I think about what a smoothly operating classroom should look like, I honestly think about a scene like this one (video). It is a busy street in Hanoi that has no traffic signals. And yet there are no accidents. Ever.

The reality is that our need to predict things is a need to control things. Notions about the need for control are formed by larger discourses about “adolescence” , and discourses about the purpose of schooling both of which are informed by economic and political interests that may or may not align with our own (Finders, 1998).

If we really want to delve into critical literacy, we need to be comfortable with not only intellectual uncertainty, but all of the physical and social uncertainties that accompany it.