Bureaucracy vs Teacher Desire to Learn

 

Yesterday, an hour before I left to teach my PL course at N., I had a phone call from the head of the centre where the course is held. She had bad news. There are not enough teachers enrolled in the course and the Head of PL in the area has decided to close down the course. Of course she explained that it has nothing to do with the content or the quality of the course, it is a purely financial decision.

My immediate reaction was anger. Why now? Where had they been for the past two months? Why didn’t they tell me before I sat all weekend preparing my lecture? And what about the teachers? They have attended four sessions and they won’t be recognised.

The answers I received were that the teachers will be able to join another course, even though they are also well into the syllabus. Is that taking the learning of the teachers seriously? Do they think these teachers are only studying to show that they are doing the compulsory 60 hours to get their salary rise?

I immediately wanted them to cancel the session, to call the teachers and tell them not to come. When I cooled down a little, I decided that that wasn’t fair and that I wanted to meet them face-to-face. I knew the teachers would be both disappointed and angry and that is how they reacted. They were angry that the learning process we have begun could be cut short. They sat down to write an email to those in charge saying that they are extremely involved in the learning process and that their students are also undergoing changes in their learning and writing as a result of the course.

I don’t know where things stand today, in the next few days I will speak to some of my peers and will try to find some more participants. Ironically, we had a new teacher join us yesterday. She remarked that she was surprised to find the group members talking in a common language and she explained that she could feel that the group had undergone significant learning together.

In spite of everything going on, we held the session. I dared doing something I haven’t done before. I asked the participants to do the writing task from last years national Meitzav literacy examination for 7-8 year olds (grade 2). Surprisingly nobody objected and the discussion afterwards was fascinating. We looked at the process each teacher underwent as she attempted the task. We discussed the differences between the texts produced and explored the teaching necessary to bring young pupils to success in similar situations.

This morning one of the teachers commented that the experience and the following discussion were very important and gave her a lot to think about. I’m happy I didn’t cancel.

As far as the future goes… who knows?

 

Free image: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=694082

Creating Collaborative Relationships of Power in Literacy Teaching-Learning

This book describes another example of university-school collaboration project aimed at teacher learning.

A unique feature here is that the teachers determined the direction of inquiry and not the academic researchers.

The term collaborative here is used to describe the way the teacher researchers learned to work with the uni researchers AND how they learned to involve their students more in their whole language classrooms.

The authors discuss the production of knowledge about teaching and quote Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993, who explain that often knowledge about teaching is formulated in academic frameworks and then transmitted to teachers.

Pappas and Zecker also cite Gitlin (1990) who points out that most in most educational research, issues studied are almost never initiated by teachers. This balance of power in research implies that teachers have nothing to contribute from their professional knowledge.

“Teacher research promotes a new, distinctive way of knowledge of teaching because it privileges teachers as those with the authority to know about teaching” (p. 4).  

“Showing and talking about particular features of their teaching that were working well gave the teachers feelings of accomplishment and demonstrated strategies that others might try… On the other hand, airing difficulties or vulnerabilities in inquiries afforded opportunities to obtain new ideas or directions to consider” (p. 6).

The theory that all humans construct knowledge through social interactions = “socioconstructivist perspective on literacy” (p. 7).

  • Wells, 1994b
  • Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992

Vygotsky – 1962, 1978

  • Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995
  • Moll, 1990
  • Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989
  • Wells, 1994a, 1994b, 1998
  • Wertsch, 1985, 1989, 1991

Pappas, C. C., & Zecker, L. B. (2001). Introduction: Creating collaborative relations of power in literacy teaching-learning. In C. C. Pappas, & L. B. Zecker (Eds.), Teacher inquiries in literacy teaching-learning: Learning to collaborate in elementary urban classrooms (pp. 1-13). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates.