English Language Arts

A Critical Introduction

Julie Gorlewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351761819
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

English Language Arts offers both undergraduates and starting-graduate students in education an introduction to the connections that exist between language arts and a critical orientation to education. Because language influences all aspects of education, English teachers have a unique responsibility to create opportunities for learners to cultivate literacy practices that will empower them to reach their potential. Applying critical and theoretical perspectives to teaching English language arts, this primer considers how meanings are made in intersecting spaces of learners, teachers, and texts.

Julie Gorlewski shows future and current teachers how critical English language arts education can be put into practice with concrete strategies and examples in both formal and informal educational settings. With opportunities for readers to engage in deeper discussion through suggested activities, English Language Arts' pedagogical features include:

• Model Classroom Scenarios
• Extension Questions
• Glossary of Key Terms

1

What Does it Mean to Teach English Language Arts?

Disheartened, Yolanda read her department chair’s notes on the lesson plan she had submitted last week. Based on the novel The Great Gatsby, Yolanda had created a vocabulary lesson that incorporated many of the best practices she had learned in her teacher education program. Her plan included activation of students’ prior knowledge and the allocation of class time for guided practice. It also included expectations for students to make real-world applications of the terms. Her department chair’s comments, however, seemed to ignore the careful scaffolding of vocabulary instruction and the multimodal approaches to engaging students with the assigned terms. Yolanda was particularly proud of her assessment plan, which linked to the learning objectives and offered students choices about how to show what they had learned. Instead of focusing on the lesson structure or content, her department chair posed a series of questions: “Is this list from the board-approved vocabulary list for this grade level? Why are these terms important for students to learn? Who selected these terms, and why? What terms were omitted, and why? How is this content relevant to students’ development as consumers and producers of texts?” Frustrated, Yolanda wondered how to answer these questions, and whether the answers even mattered.

What does it mean to teach English? What has it meant in the past, what does it mean today, and what might it mean in the future? How is teaching English different from, and similar to, acquiring language? And why does teaching English matter?

These questions, and the infinite questions that emerge from and around them, guide the work of English teachers. They undergird our decisions, shape our relationships with learners, and determine the trajectories of our careers. Such questions are also consistent with a critical approach to education, which focuses on questions, relations of power, and the ongoing struggles over the purposes of education. The social purposes and contexts of education are traditionally explored in foundations of education; however, as aspiring teachers focus on methods of instruction and lesson planning, connections between the essential questions of practice fade into the background and often dissolve within the everyday demands of teaching. This book seeks to address that imbalance and to foreground the importance of why we do what we do so that the why’s establish the what’s and the how’s of our work. Because teaching is complex and challenging, and the needs of learners are urgent, it is common to concentrate on the immediate – on lesson plans that are due, on assignments to be assessed, and on the learners before us. But a lens that remains microscopic and fails to consider the broader contexts in which we act, however well intended, is insufficient. To be transformative, to work toward justice through education, teachers must practice through a lens that incorporates microscopic and telescopic perspectives, simultaneously recognizing the tensions of our practice and the need to engage with learners in the present.

This chapter will explore how the field of English language arts is defined and practiced through the experiences of teachers and learners. The reason that the field is contested mirrors the inherent tensions of our pluralistic society in which different people have different ideas about what it means to teach English.

Many aspiring teachers seek to become professionals in settings that are similar to those in which they were educated; they may want to create classrooms that replicate the strengths of the classrooms they loved as students. In English language arts (ELA), this often means that teacher candidates look forward to teaching the texts that drew them to the career. Instead of investigating the meaning of ELA and imagining change, candidates may envision teaching reading, writing, speaking, and listening in classrooms that replicate their own schooling. Some prospective teachers have been taught that there is a canon of the best literary works and that their task is to transmit this culture of human literary excellence to their students. Still others believe that the primary role of the ELA teacher is to provide the tools for future workplace productivity. Yet others believe that ELA is political in that what and how we read and write represents particular interests and promotes particular ways of seeing and being in the world. In this critical perspective, the stories we tell and the ways we tell them matter in terms of who gains access to resources and who gets valued or devalued socially. These disagreements about what an ELA teacher should believe and do are not merely individual. There are patterns to understanding how and why people have these different ideas.

This chapter begins by examining the assumptions and beliefs that underlie the field of ELA and then introduces a critical perspective. The chapter will discuss how professional organizations, policymakers, educational scholars, and practitioners define the purposes and practices of ELA. Careful consideration of what lies behind meanings and definitions is essential. Therefore, implicit and explicit definitions of terms such as ELA, literature, literacy, discourse, pedagogy, and critical theory will be presented and contextualized in terms of their political origins and implications. The chapter will conclude with a set of guiding questions designed to help readers compare and contrast definitions of the field in relation to the beliefs and assumptions that support them.

What Does It Mean to Teach English Language Arts?

The question What does it mean to teach English language arts? is really two questions: What does it mean to teach?, and What is the curriculum of English language arts? Each question is broad and complex, involving interlocking sets of decisions. Wondering about the meaning of teaching illustrates contested beliefs about purposes of school, especially public schools, which are supported by public funds and are therefore answerable to society. It seems obvious that the purpose of public education is to promote the needs of the society that supports it. However, an exploration of this apparently obvious purpose reveals dilemmas. One such dilemma involves whether public schools should support aspects of a society that are unjust. Historically, public schools have served as social mechanisms of both mobility and of oppression. While stories of education as a part of a system of meritocracy are familiar, schools are also systems that perpetuate inequities of the status quo. For example, in the US, Native children were forced to attend boarding schools where their language and culture were forbidden. Educators, by enacting oppressive policies, enabled children to be abused, families to be shattered, and generations of cultural heritage to be erased. Still today, children whose home culture does not correspond with school culture can experience education as discriminatory.

It is unlikely that anyone would suggest that schools ought to promote inequity; most people would agree that one purpose of education is to provide opportunities for everyone to contribute meaningfully to society. However, the conflicting purposes of education emerge in these examples. Schools, which reflect society with all its positive and negative characteristics, are expected to both prepare students for a society that exists, and prepare them to construct a more just and equitable world. If society were equitable, there would be no conflict between educating for the status quo and educating for justice; and transformation would be unnecessary. However, because inequities exist, a critical theoretical perspective is necessary. Critical theory, which remains by its very nature a contested concept, emerged from a school of thought that involves questioning relations of power. This also involves interrogating how categories of knowledge, including language, are constructed, produced, and reproduced. A critical approach to education intentionally and systematically makes injustice visible. Because it exposes institutional inequities, and schools are institutions, critical education jeopardizes the established existence of the organizations through which it occurs. By raising questions that lead to action, critical education represents change.

Purposes and Practices of English Language Arts

Teaching and learning are complex, intensely human undertakings. Teaching English, teaching about language arts through the arts of language, is relentlessly reflective; to a tremendous extent, we use language to teach and learn language. The term English language arts is itself emblematic of how the field is defined and practiced. “English” is primary; its capitalization and primacy reveals a perspective about content. Despite and through its colonial origins, English has become an informal official language in the US. The unexamined acceptance of this condition conceals the effects of colonization: thefts of Indigenous land, enslavement of disproportionately Black and Brown bodies, and attempted erasure of oppressed cultures. Mandated standardized tests reinforce the dominance of English in US classrooms, since students must demonstrate proficiency in English to earn a high school diploma. Historically, this was not always true; in the early 20th century instruction often occurred in the language that was predominant in the community. “English,” then, would have been a core content area, much like math or history. The “arts” in ELA emphasizes the literary and linguistic elements that underpin the field. Traditional debates regarding how the field is defined center on literature, involving questions such as What types of literature need to be studied? How are acceptable genres determined? What literature belongs in the canon? Similar questions address debates around teaching and learning linguistic aspects of language, such as (How) should grammar be taught? What are essential literacy skills? The term that identifies the field, ELA, is brimming with history, culture, and meanings that often remain unexamined, even by those in the field. It is worth wondering whether “English” is itself content, how its primacy as both content and means of instruction influences learning, and whether the arts of language are elite or inclusive.

Literature, Literacy, and Pedagogy

For English teachers, the “what” of teaching, or the content of our classrooms, consists of texts and skills related to consuming and producing texts. Literature refers to the texts read as part of the ELA curriculum. Literacy refers to the skills necessary to consume and produce multiple genres of texts. As noted earlier, both aspects are contested. Asking one hundred English teachers to identify ten texts every high school graduate should read will yield hundreds of results. Professional organizations and policymakers publish lists of recommended texts, but these serve as guidelines that continuously evolve as new texts are published and a wider array of perspectives are involved in such decisions. Historically, the canon of literature that dominated English classrooms was primarily white, male, and European/American – mirroring the political and economic power structure in which schools functioned. Literature anthologies reflected the canon of colonialism – and many still do. However, awareness of the oppressive nature of a colonial perspective, which idealizes some identities while marginalizing others, has resulted in a more inclusive understanding of what texts matter, and whose stories are worthy of being read. Similar struggles surround the teaching and learning of skills related to consuming and producing texts. English classrooms generally privilege academic language. Teachers and texts dedicated to grammar and usage act to correct uses of language that do not conform with academic norms. This role of teachers and textbooks is consistent with the purpose of school as a means of assimilation; however, this approach to teaching English can also serve to alienate learners whose home language does not match the language of school. An inclusive approach to both text content and related skills can address the needs of learners without lowering standards or diminishing expectations.

Essential to conceptions of ELA in schools are the methods and practices of teaching, or pedagogy. This returns us to the question of what it means to teach, leading to considerations about the roles of teachers and learners. Pedagogical theories address how teachers and learners interact with one another, as well as how they engage with the content and skills of curriculum. Curriculum can be defined narrowly as a list of content, or broadly as a course of study. Drawing on the work of Parkay, Hass, and Anctil, Fenwick English notes that definitions of “curriculum” tend to involve three categories: designation of content, learning outcomes, and “virtually all of the experiences a student might have in school” (10).

Curriculum, Student Achievement, and Accountability

Curriculum – through testing – can also be used as a means of accountability, or as a way of ensuring that expectations are met, responsibility for results is accepted, and results are reported. Political leaders seek to ensure that public schools, funded by tax dollars, are meeting the expectations of stakeholders. This is perceived as a way of holding educators accountable for their work. To that end, tests are given at regular intervals to evaluate the extent to which content and skills are being learned and developed. When curriculum is imposed by external entities through standardized assessments, the definition of curriculum becomes narrowed:

Control is central to accountability. Most notions of accountability, especially those embodied in legislation that are punitive or remunerative, assume that school personnel are in control or can control [emphases in original] those factors that will lead to improved test performance. For this reason, the definition of curriculum is that it consists of any document or plan that exists in a school or school system that defines the work of teachers, at least to the extent of identifying the content to be taught children and the possible methods to be used in the process.

(English, 10)

Limitations of this approach to school and teacher accountability are numerous. As English explains, standardized tests fail to consider out-of-school factors that may affect student performance. David Berliner identifies six out-of-school factors, or OSFs, that can affect the learning opportunities of children and potentially limit the ability of teachers and students to facilitate academic achievement. OSFs particularly relevant for children from communities marked by poverty include:

(1) low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2) inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics.

(Berliner, 1)

An additional concern about using standardized tests as a means of curricular accountability involves myths of objectivity that surround and undergird these assessments. Historically, standardized assessments have been used to maintain systems of power and oppression, reinforcing dominant narratives about what it means to be intelligent, articulate, and educated. Developed and implemented by the academic and cultural elite, standardized assessments have contributed to ideas of racism, sexism, and classicism; mass standardized testing continues to reflect and reinforce social hierarchies related to race, gender, and class. From kindergarten screening to SAT scores to GRE results, standardized assessments act as gatekeepers to academic achievement and professional opportunities. Despite a wealth of evidence revealing deleterious effects of such assessments, they continue to be used as a measure of school and teacher accountability.

Of course, teachers are accountable to learners, to communities, and to society, and public school teachers should be able to demonstrate the results of their classroom practice. From a critical perspective, in which assumptions are continuously questioned, it would be beneficial to ask: To whom are teachers accountable? And, To whom are schools accountable? If policymakers mandate curriculum linked to accountability measures that could negatively influence the prospects of learners, should teachers be accountable to policymakers or to learners? If needs conflict, should teachers follow directives of political leaders or community members? Scores on standardized tests provide one method of assessing accountability toward meeting certain instructional goals, but other curricular goals require different kinds of assessment associated with learning objectives that are less linear and more difficult to quantify.

Given the role of education in shaping society, many education scholars use the term “curriculum” to mean everything that teachers teach and everything that learners learn in school. This definition includes the “hidden curriculum” of behavior, expectations, and unspoken understandings of what it means to be educated. The hidden curriculum is distinct from the written curriculum that is published and intentionally presented in classrooms. The hidden curriculum is unofficial, involving norms, values, and messages about what expectations and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. What Does it Mean to Teach English Language Arts?
• 2. Who Are Learners and Teachers, Really?
• 3. Curriculum in English Classrooms: Who Should Decide?
• 4. How Can We Teach Texts in Context?
• 5. Being and Becoming Writers: Who Can Be an Author?
• 6. The Politics of Teaching: Are Teachers Agents of the State or Agents of Change?
• Appendix A: Using the EXPAND Framework to Foster Critical Reflection
• Appendix B: Glossary of Key Terms
• Index