I'm your instructor and this is what I think...

Hey...

Welcome to my class!

My name is Melanie and I'll be your instructor for this fine semester as we discuss language, literacy, and learning...I teach for many reasons, but perhaps the most important is because I want to make a positive impact in my community...and this is how I do it:

As both a doctoral student and an educator, when asked to provide words to describe how I view what is most important in teaching, my answer has been primarily that it should be deliberate and intentional. These two words are carefully considered, especially in consideration of the complex work that is involved in integrating effective literacy instruction with disciplinary teaching, attention to a multiplicity of texts, and honoring the diversity of teaching contexts and the situationality of classroom instruction.

As I have come to realize more and more the effect of a teacher in the classroom, both my effect in my own classroom and then the effect of the students I teach as they enter their own classrooms, I have to acknowledge that effective teaching is not accidental. It is well planned in response to both qualitative and quantitative measures that inform instruction, and with attention to the complex and contextual variables that shape each classroom interaction, while also conceding that these variables shift over time and with the learning that occurs in each classroom. It is an iterative process that requires the best from us as educators of educators, pushing us to create more complex and contextualized definitions of literacy and learning ourselves, even shifting those definitions depending on the purposes of the courses we teach and the goals of the students who attend.

With these ideas in place, some key features characterize the literacy instruction courses that I teach. The first feature is an emphasis on helping students to become aware of their identities as teachers, the assumptions they hold because of their own learning experiences, and the ability to critique these assumptions when they promote narrow definitions of literacy and learning that promote “accidental” teaching, or teaching that looks like what they’ve always seen, but have never considered in regard to how it promotes literacy acquisition in different disciplines for their own students. This attention to heightened consciousness leads to discussions of critical literacy which promote deliberate and intentional analyses of ourselves as teachers and how our own identities and beliefs influence the instructional and curricular decisions we make. Given the attention that is currently being given to how literacy differs from discipline to discipline, and how a lack of attention to this idea has promoted resistance to literacy integration in content area instruction, literacy instruction can no longer be solely viewed as teaching students how to comprehend and interpret texts. Instead, it must also include teaching students how to actively challenge and “talk back” to texts, especially those that perpetuate false assumptions about a discipline and more importantly, social injustice on the basis of gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, language, and race. In accordance with this belief, I design activities and discussions for my students that encourage them to think about their own stances on social issues that they have developed as they have begun to attain a teacher identity, how these stances affect their classroom instruction, how they encourage students to read a variety of multimodal texts from critical and empathetic perspectives, and how they can use reading, writing, talking and listening to effect change in the world. I encourage them to be more deliberate in their choices and reflections about who they are as teachers.

Along with situating literacy instruction in the context of social issues, I also situate literacy instruction within larger debates about theories of reading and writing. Within this context, a second key feature of my courses is that they are extremely pragmatic, with each lesson designed in response to the question, “What might this look like in actual practice in classrooms?” For example, in the Teaching Language Arts in Elementary Schools course that I am currently teaching, many classes begin as I model a brief lesson based on the component of literacy instruction that we are studying (e.g., oral language, reading and writing connections, connecting assessment to instruction, etc.). My students typically evaluate the model lesson, noting what they liked about it, how it could be improved, and how it did or did not align with the principles that they read about in that week’s assignment. Working in small groups, students also develop and teach model lessons to the rest of the class. After debriefing these model lessons, they plan and implement instructional activities that they will use in their practicum experiences, and then reflect on those. By modeling this cycle for them and labeling what I am doing in my teaching explicitly so that they can critique it, I encourage them to be more intentional in the instructional choices they make.

Many of my students are often working in or placed in schools with predetermined curricula that strictly adhere to literacy programs or to multiple-choice worksheets designed to improve standardized test scores. Consequently, a major goal of my teaching has been to prepare students to be “creatively compliant and selectively defiant,” (Hoffman, Assaf, Paris, 2001) operating as deliberate and intentional professionals who can work within the constraints of institutions and political systems while still advocating for their students. Ultimately, I want pre-service and practicing teachers in my classes to develop a deep understanding of several domains of literacy instruction, both theoretically and through reading research, and how they can be applied in different social and institutional contexts. I hope that with this understanding, my students are able to enact deliberate and intentional instruction that encourages meaningful reading and writing while building the metacognitive awareness of learning processes that will help their students to effect change in in their worlds.

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From Hoffman, J. V., Assaf, L. C., & Paris, S. F. (2001). High-stakes testing in reading: Today in Texas, tomorrow? Reading Teacher, 54, 482-492.