Practicing Practice

Competing chronologies in our school disciplinary practices

"[The] problem of learning was considered a technical problem of management. Knowledge, broke down into discrete and measurable units, was arranged hierarchically, in order to convert learning to observable outcomes." (britzman, 2003, p. 30)

To be informed first thing Monday morning how we would be grading and disciplining students—including a low-tolerance policy for “misbehavior”—was to confront our first competing chronology. The coordinator described the Take-a-Break procedure, and said “Whatever you do, don't call it time-out. Kids hate that.” While language and its ambiguity plays a large role in our work, does calling it something else really change the perceptions of this disciplining tool?

For my co-teachers and I, we felt that this practice was not only inconsistent with what we wanted in the classroom, but in this instance we felt empowered enough to consciously and intentionally reject it. We looked at each other and said “No, we're not doing that.”

What we could not reject outright, was the reality of grading. This was most frustrating when there was a disparity between the meaning-making conversations we had with students and what they actually demonstrated as knowledge on their worksheets. Even our performative summative assessment, the VoiceThreads, showed more but not all of the learning from the week. Many students were speaking and showed that they were thinking about the concept of journalism in really interesting ways, but their writing on the formative assessments was not as complete or analytical as their conversation. Unfortunately, we were encouraged to collect more tangible evidence of learning, the kind that, short of video recording the conversations, would have been difficult to produce even in a discussion.

Few could articulate “bias” in their own words, but many could recognize when a news story was being "unfair." While working with Rachel* in small groups, she ignored the activity and news article we provided, but in the meantime went to an actual news site and found a different story. She then began telling me all about how a woman was unfairly accused of reckless driving when she swerved to avoid hitting a school bus. She said several times that the people commenting on the article didn't have the whole story (context) and they wouldn't feel the same way if they were in her situation (perspective-taking). Critical literacy was obviously bursting from this student, even though she wouldn't complete any of the formal “school work.” She was creating her own definition of bias, which is what the activity was calling for, but she was creating her own activity as well, to achieve that goal. As Wiggins (2005), notes, “This is why 'uncoverage' is necessary: What might seem like something the learner can simply accept actually demands analysis (breaking it up into bits) and synthesis (putting it back together in the learner's own words or representations) before true understanding can occur” (p. 132). Some of the students who did complete the activity still didn't have the depth of understanding which she showed.

When it came to grading our student's work, we had enough space to really sit down and consider from both the paper-copy work and the face to face time with that student whether or not they had understood the material. Even though this felt more culturally responsive and appropriate, I couldn't shake the other discourses in my head saying that such subjectivity is unfair, or that we were somehow lowering the standards for our students.

We have these fantasies that resistance against the school's chronology will be heroic or satisfying.

In reality, it feels like a contradiction of our mission, like we are constantly under fire for whatever we do.

Just as having to address a writing standard did not benefit students whose learning was shown in verbal and visual ways, reducing the topic of journalism to a “writing” genre also does a disservice to the critical literacy potential in the study of mass media. The mentality behind aligning certain standards or skills with certain contained or as britzman said “discrete” categories seems entirely like the futile efforts at banking education: “The implicit hope has been that if we discover more and more rational ways of selecting, organizing, and distributing knowledge, children will learn more effectively” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991).

Resistance to the the hegemonic chronologies that have dominated education doesn't always feel or look like resistance. Sometimes it looks like you are making up your own activity. In the end, though, it will probably be a better way to meet your own goals for education.