Which of the case study chapters resonated with you? When did you recognize students, situations, or yourself?
In chapter 9, Campano writes about teacher researchers having multiple identities: activist, interested, vulnerable, and relational. What do these mean to you? In what ways do you feel valued and supported in these kinds of identities, or do you have others?
In this climate of standardized testing focusing on results rather than relationships or process, it is often difficult to sustain these identities, which is where the second classroom comes in. How can you use your agency and community (whether it be your colleagues at school or other places, like this class!) to cultivate and sustain your teaching identities, however you name them?
Unfortunately, my school district has very little diversity amongst students so it was difficult to draw a connection between Campano’s experiences in the classroom and my own when speaking to non-majority students and their experiences in school. Despite this obstacle, Ma-Lee’s autobiographic example paralleled an experience I recently had in my classroom. One of the initiatives our school has recently decided to take part in is called Project Purple. Run by a local sports hero Project Purple is designed to empower adolescents to make positive choices in their lives. The program also seeks to highlight students as individuals by drawing attention to the skills each student values most.
ReplyDeleteOne of the assignments that accompanied the project was having students create an “I am…” drawing. The idea was that Project Purple would supply a template and students would artistically represent how they identified themselves in the provided space. Some students referred to physical attributes (such as “I am tall...”) while others identified with personal strengths (“I am athletic…”). A few students even revealed dark secrets that would surely interest the super-villains of the world (such as “I am Batman...”). However the one project that I truly noticed came in the day after the assignment was due. A quiet, intelligent girl named Kate made a special visit to my classroom to drop off her assignment. While avoiding eye contact she handed me her paper and quietly said, “Sorry it’s late… I had to think about it.” On her paper was a colored self-portrait accompanied by the block letters, “I am… way too complex to summarize on this small piece of paper.” I was ecstatic with her answer which I interpreted as defiant yet completely justified. Kate used the assignment as a platform to find her voice and demonstrate that she is far more complex than one declarative sentence. When reading the final line of the Ma-Lee chapter, “There is more to a person’s life than can fit on paper…” (p. 71), my thoughts immediately shot back to this interaction as I could totally feel where Ma-Lee was coming from; my guess is that Kate would as well.
Building off of this interaction, I feel as though the role I value most as a health and PE teacher is definitely relational. I try to speak to students in both the first and second classrooms in a way that demonstrates caring and compassion for their personal stories. In consciously engaging students from this perspective, I feel like I am reaching out to students, letting them know that my door is always open to hear what they have to say. There are of course students with whom I do not share a personal connection however I continue to make a daily effort in expressing an interest in their non-school related lives. I have admittedly had a difficult time reconciling my new position as a part-time administrator in the building with that of the “trusted teacher and student confidant.” As previously mentioned, I feel as though the general population of students is more skeptical of my informal approach to instruction. This is particularly true of students who have just begun to have health. It is almost as if they assume my conversational tone to be a ploy, like I am trying to gain intel for the evil empire in the main office.
Over the past couple of weeks, whenever I have been in the office, I have made a conscious effort to smile more as well as acknowledge as many students as I possibly can in the hallway by name. In doing this I feel like I am chipping away at the brick wall that is most often present between an authoritative vice principal and the students in his/her building. I have begun to notice some positive changes however it is still early and I’m reluctant to draw any concrete conclusions. Hopefully as I continue to gain experience in the office setting and students become more accustomed to “The gym teacher… wearing a tie?!” I will be able to define my relationship with students not as a teacher or administrator, but as a trusted adult who is willing to listen and offer advice when needed.
Kudos to your student for recognizing her own complexity! Love that critique of the assignment. Shows that there is a difference between self-esteem and self-compassion. As you move back and forth between your identities as teacher and admin, it will be confusing for students and staff. That's natural.
DeleteI also would say that just because kids are mostly white and middle class, that doesn't mean they are homogenous. What do these kids need to know about the world in order to be compassionate, generous, and thoughtful human beings?
Campano wrote about the process urban teacher researchers as an emergent identity that stretches the ideas of social location and inquiry stance. Yet, I am not in an urban district and I would argue that the same considerations of an emerging identity, considering social location and inquiry stance are equally as important. I would be very foolish of me to think that because I work in a predominantly white suburban district I don’t have immigrant students to consider and students of other complex settings to consider. It is unacceptable to think that the make-up a homogenous population means we don’t need to consider social location and inquiry stance as teacher researchers. I do think that there are frightening generalizations that are made between urban and other types of districts that make it seems as though we don’t need to consider how we collaboratively inquire with other teachers and our students for a shared knowledge base. We are not “off the hook!”
ReplyDeleteI’m still in the process of de-familiarizing myself with traditional school practices and re-familiarizing myself with new practices and new thoughts such as New Literacies. This has been difficult for me, both as a teacher and as a doctoral student. It is important to me when Camapano wrote about remaining interested because we experience the consequences of our work with both immediacy and poignancy. I think this is what first drew me to the program when I was only in my second year of teaching. I did feel there was an immediate sense to consider that our work actually influences the lives of real children! The disconnect between their identities and the curriculum is really what made we want to conduct research in the first place.
Campano wrote about how vulnerability keeps us from lapsing into thinking we are an expert, a specialist or another so-called superior role. I used to think that having a reading specialist degree would solve all my problems for my students who struggled with reading. Moreover, I then thought that a PhD would solve all my problems because I could learn how to connect to students’ identities and either keep or toss the curriculum and find new ways. Well, a year and a half into the program and I am more confused, then when I started. At least I know that means I have a good research question and I’m staying vulnerable! Perhaps too vulnerable because the study appears more about my own insecurities as a teacher than about my students’ reading identities.
I am thrilled to hear Campano’s declaration of the second classroom and its importance in teacher research. I have not started any field notes in the second classroom and I am looking forward to possibly working to try to add this to part of my student. I do worry that trying to take field notes both in the second classroom in the actual school setting and the second classroom (all the other places) might make the qualitative data collective too cumbersome. I believe I can use the second classroom to sustain my teacher research identity. The PhD classes, conversations with my colleagues, professors, and conversations with teachers from other districts, conversations with parents who have students in other districts already support and sustain my teacher researcher interest identity that the sense of work has immediacy and poignancy.
Kristin, you bring up a good point. Campano isn't saying suburban classrooms aren't worthy of study; he just happened to be interested in underresourced schools and their students. Just because kids are economically comfortable doesn't mean they don't face obstacles and difficulties.
DeleteI felt the same way when I went to grad school. A whole new world opened up to me, just like when I taught kids who grew up completely differently than I did. Those interested/vulnerable identities are completely intertwined, aren't they?
I personally can relate with the multiple identies from chapter 9 that talk about the activist, interested, vulnerable, and relational. As a teacher, we all exhibit these traits to some degree in our professional careers. The activist indentity to me exemplifies the interaction between teachers in the educational environment where teachers try to open up and share our ideas, problems, or concerns, both professionally and personally to overall help the “collective knowledge base.” As we are researchers in the educational field, we try to put our findings and observations on the table in a collaborative setting to disect the patterns, themes, or theories that emerge thus overtime we “begin to have explanatory power and general relevance” to situations that arise in the day of an educator. As for the interested identity category, Campano states, “we are interested in defamiliarizing schooling in order to (re)familiarize ourselves with our students; with their histories, values, and traditions and, ultimately, their fully realized potential and humanity.” The fact that we are all teaching with all the complexities that go with the profession on a daily basis makes it difficult to reflect or bond with our students because it may, “radically interrupt the institutional drive for efficiency and standardization.” We are also vulnerable to thoughts of “did my action cause or exacerbate a delicate situation?” I always try to put myself in the shoes of my students to try to understand where they are coming from and if a problem should arise then I try not to diagnose a situation or student and that every individual student is different and one size doesn’t always fit all. The relational identity, the attempts to building relationships is key to everything we do in the classroom, school, or professionally outside the classroom. When we can bring this research to try to practice, learn, share, and improvise to make understanding of our students a relevant concept to help improve instruction be relating to our students lives in the classroom setting.
ReplyDeleteThe particular case study that resonated with me was, “there is a physical, material component to teaching, an emotional and bodily strenuousness. Their is no separation between contemplation and “menial” labor, between intellectual inquiry and social responsibility. We are literally on the ground with our students, spending countless hours planning, completing paperwork, organizing our rooms, sitting in meetings, performing for evaluators, attending to emotional needs, comforting children with asthma, visiting homes, participating in community events, administering tests, and responding to children’s work long into the night. These are daily facts.” Sometimes we are resolving conflicts, breaking up fights, protesting misguided policies, spending hours in the office trying not to have a child suspended or tracked...and on and on...” This to me is an inside look of what teachers go through on a regular daily basis throughout the school year. Sometimes we as teachers don’t have the time or inclination to correspond and discuss topics that pertain to our classrooms, but knowing that the issues can somehow be validated and/or addressed through professional classes and other collegues or classmates can help funnel these identities and not be constrained with school policy of focusing on standardized testing and results and maybe move toward more sustained relationships with the students, families, and falculty.
Chris, the idea behind relational identities is that they DO disrupt the drive to efficiency and standardization. Campano sees this as a good thing!
DeleteYou're right, teachers do all this work on a daily basis and it doesn't get recognized or considered in policies. It can cause resentment and burnout for sure, which is why having a safe space to talk about it--and even do research on it--is key.
The school I work in and the schools I have worked in have always been labeled “low performing.” Being labeled something does not mean you feel it, or even consider yourself the label that has been put upon you. In my classroom I make the students aware that we may be performing lower than the other classrooms, they see this on the data walls posted in our school. While other classrooms are full of Greens and Blues , signifying proficient and nearly proficient scores; we are a classroom full of Yellows and Reds, signifying intervention and urgent intervention. I explain to them that even though we are not proficient does not mean we are not equally as smart as those other classrooms, it does not mean we are not working as hard, but it is because we are learning English. Therefore, we do not focus on our performance level, rather we focus on growth. This is a hard sell to these students.
ReplyDeleteI am a hypocrite during standardized testing time. I put the smile on my face and tell my students to try their best, meanwhile cursing inside my head that educated professionals are forcing ELLs to take a test that is completely biased and more child abuse than performance based. They are set up to fail. In Chapter eight, Campano says, “…parents do not believe they can question or do not know how to navigate the system.” Many of my students have parents who are new to the country, or living in poverty. Most of the parents are trying to get through the day to day struggles of surviving and do not have the time, education, or English proficiency to navigate the American school system. The PARCC test is yet another standardized test that parents have an option to opt their child out of, but I am sure the majority of my class does not know this is an option.
In Chapter four, Campano speaks about new arrivals to a classroom. Campano feels that this should be a celebration. This is when, like during the testing time, I am a hypocrite. I put the smile on my face and pretend to be as excited as the children are about the new member joining our classroom community. When the new desk, or rather the desk pulled out of the basement that isn’t appropriate for a sixth grader in an elementary setting, but was brought from the middle school when they moved the sixth grades back, arrives I ignore the excited whispers as I think where to put it. I quickly calculate how many days we have been in the classroom and will this student be factored into my reading and math SLOs, mandated by the state and district. If any paperwork has been sent over I look it over and try to anticipate which reading group this student will be in based on their ELP, although this doesn’t usually correlate and I have to wait until they arrive. Meanwhile, I wear the smile for my students and for the new student.
It is within my second classroom, which provides the trust that lies within my students and me. Although I may have to explain to administration why the students are low performing, in our classroom community we can recognize our growth. Although, in the back of my head at times when I differentiate from the standardized curriculum because it does not connect to nor is appropriate for my students, I think what if my boss came in? (Campano speaks to this concern on page 91). I reassure myself that I can justify what I am doing based on data from the testing that is mandated for my students. It is difficult to wear the two faces, one that abides by the mandates of the district and state, and the other that does what is best for the students in front of me every day.
Ashly, this is a very delicate line to walk. You want to build trust, but it's hard to do that when kids see you asking them to do things they cannot do. You are being asked to do the impossible, and I applaud your efforts to support and care for your kids while being conscious of the absolute wrongness of the tests for this population.
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