Reformers, Teachers, Writers

Curricular and Pedagogical Inquiries

Neal Lerner

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781607328803
• eBook ISBN:
  9781607328810
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In Reformers, Teachers, Writers, Neal Lerner explores the distinction between curriculum and pedagogy in writing studies—and the ways in which failing to attend to that distinction results in the failure of educational reform.
 
Lerner's mixed-methods approach—quantitative, qualitative, textual, historical, narrative, and theoretical—reflects the importance and effects of curriculum in a wide variety of settings, whether in writing centers, writing classrooms, or students' out-of-school lives, as well as the many methodological approaches available to understand curriculum in writing studies. The richness of this approach allows for multiple considerations of the distinction and relationship between pedagogy and curriculum. Chapters are grouped into three parts: disciplinary inquiries, experiential inquiries, and empirical inquiries, exploring the presence and effect of curriculum and its relationship to pedagogy in multiple sites, both historical and contemporary, and for multiple stakeholders.
 
Reformers, Teachers, Writers calls out writing studies' inattention to curriculum, which hampers efforts to enact meaningful reform and to have an impact on larger conversations about education and writing. The book will be invaluable to scholars, teachers, and administrators interested in rhetoric and composition, writing studies, and education.
 

Part 1

Disciplinary Inquiries

1

What Is Curriculum, Anyway?

DOI: 10.7330/9781607328810.c001

As I described in the introduction , my career as a college writing teacher started in California, then shifted to Maryland when my wife took a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. I arrived in Bethesda in July 1990, and by that fall semester, I was hired to teach developmental and first-year writing (three sections total) at Frederick Community College as well as a section of Critical Thinking and Writing and a section of Exploring Language: Thinking, Writing, Communicating at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), which largely served returning adults and active military. This volume of teaching and of preparation for different kinds of writing courses would continue for the two-plus years I lived in Maryland:

• Spring 1991: four sections total at two different community colleges and UMUC.
• Fall 1991: four sections total at Frederick Community College and UMUC.
• Spring 1992: seven sections total (and six different preparations!) at two different community colleges and UMUC.
• Summer 1992: two sections total at UMUC.

Now, while most of the sections at UMUC did not require multiple weekly class meetings (UMUC was a pioneer in various forms of distance education), I was still commuting over 400 miles per week with my wife’s Toyota Tercel, struggling with DC Beltway traffic, and managing the workload of responding to the writing of 100 students or more per semester. While I did not have much choice at the time—postdoc salaries and per-course adjunct pay are notoriously low, and our rent in Bethesda was high—it was clear that this volume of teaching was not sustainable. I began to apply for full-time community college positions, but before I could fully immerse myself in that process, I realized that my future prospects could be greatly enhanced if I were to pursue additional graduate study (a somewhat painful decision considering that I was still paying off my undergraduate student loans as well as the loans I incurred for my MA and secondary English credential degrees). The timing was also key: my wife had accepted a faculty position in the Boston area starting in fall 1992, so we would be moving to Boston, and I began to look into doctoral programs there.

At the time, I knew very little about graduate study in rhetoric and composition, despite how much I had liked these courses in my MA program. I figured that an English PhD would mean the study of literature, in which I had little interest. Further, my community college teaching experiences in California and Maryland had exposed me to the diverse learners and social missions of those institutions, and the two summers I spent as a teaching fellow at two different National Writing Project sites (San Jose and Northern Virginia) had expanded my repertoire as a writing teacher and given me meaningful exposure to teacher research. These experiences, combined with the liberatory pedagogy emphasis of my secondary education credential program, pointed to a doctoral program in education as the best path forward. So that’s what I did.

My first dip into those waters occurred at the College of Notre Dame (CND) in Baltimore, where I enrolled in a certificate program in curriculum and instruction while we still lived in Maryland. I figured this experience would help bolster my applications to education doctoral programs in the Boston area, given that my degrees at that point were in English and that my high school teaching experience had not advanced beyond student teaching. The CND faculty were religious and lay professionals dedicated to education as a means of enacting social justice, and my classmates were a dynamic group of inner-city teachers seeking professional development opportunities. What I learned over two semesters at CND was that “curriculum” and “instruction” were two separate but related concepts. By the time I enrolled in Boston University’s education doctorate program in 1992, I was in a cohort of classmates, many of whom were, once again, in the curriculum and instruction strand (I was in “Development Studies: Literacy, Language, & Cultural Studies,” which seemed most suitable to me when it came time to choose). Starting with my first semester, I was a teaching assistant in a Foundations of Education survey class, and treatment of “curriculum” as distinct from “instruction” was the status quo.

My travels through the educational landscape over the next twenty-five-plus years took me farther and farther away from schools and departments of education. Nevertheless, the distinction and relationship between curriculum and instruction in writing studies have been gnawing at me—or, more accurately, I have long been concerned with the lack of an explicit articulation of curriculum. In this chapter, I offer that articulation by drawing on educational theory and apply that definition of curriculum to my syllabus from a recent first-year writing class.

What Curriculum Is and Is Not

Curriculum can be narrowly conceived as “subjects of study” or content in any course. That content—often expressed in a syllabus as specific reading and writing tasks or unit topics—is an important component of curriculum. However, in this book I draw on a much more expansive definition, largely from the K–12 educational literature. For one expansive definition of curriculum, I turn to Nieto et al. (2008), who write that “we view curriculum as including not only texts, but also other instructional materials, programs, projects, physical environments for learning, interactions among teachers and students, and all the intended and unintended messages about expectations, hopes, and dreams that students, their communities, and schools have about student learning and the very purpose of schools” (176). In other words, curriculum consists of the complex relationship between subjects of study, learning environments, and learners’ and teachers’ histories, motivations, and aspirations, among other factors. Ayers et al. (2008) introduce in their definition the ways that curriculum is also political and inextricably tied to issues of power and authority:

Is the curriculum a mandate or is it learning as it is engaged on the ground? Is the curriculum immutable, or is it a dynamic and living thing? Is it a course of study, a body of knowledge, a scope and sequence, a set of settled objectives or directives from those who know best? Is the curriculum a political or a pedagogical thing? Teachers’ encounter with and experience of curriculum encompass all of these shadings and more—and those who become aware of the contradictions, conflicts and questions in play are likely to enter the fray with more clarity, more purpose. (307)

While those definitions address the expansive nature of curriculum and readily apply to post-secondary education, a more categorical definition offers a means to understand what curriculum might look like in writing studies. For that, I turn to William Schubert (2008), who offers the following types of curriculum as commonly found in schools:

• “Intended curriculum” (407), or the curriculum found in curriculum guides, frameworks, outcome statements, syllabi, and textbooks.
• “Taught curriculum” (408), or the actual content with which teachers engage their students in actual classrooms, often in contrast to the “intended curriculum.”
• “Experienced curriculum” (408), or the “thoughts, meanings, and feelings of students as they encounter” (409) the intended or taught curriculum.
• “Embodied curriculum” (409), or the ways that students express their learning through imagination and expanded notions of “self.”
• “Hidden curriculum” (409), or the cultural and social values that curricular choices and the practices of everyday schooling express, whether notions of social control, power hierarchies, or identities.
• “Tested curriculum” (410), or the knowledge, values, and outcomes that are subject to assessment, whether at the classroom level or on a larger scale, as in standardized assessments.
• “Null curriculum” (410), or the curriculum that is not represented in tests and state standards or curriculum frameworks, for example, the paucity of arts and music opportunities in most urban public schools.
• “Outside curriculum” (410), sometimes known as the “extracurriculum” (Gere 1994), or the curricula that students engage with outside of school contexts.

As a way to demonstrate these dimensions, I draw on the example of the First-Year Writing class I last taught (see appendix A for syllabus). Some context: at Northeastern, First-Year Writing is required of all incoming students except for those who place out based on AP or IB scores (typically about 30 percent of the incoming class). It is a one-semester course, offered in both fall and spring, and about sixty to seventy sections run each semester, with a cap of nineteen students (fifteen for sections designated for multilingual writers). Instructors are a mix of non-tenure-track, full-time teaching professors, part-time lecturers, PhD students, and tenure-stream faculty. My particular section had an “experiential education” designation and a relationship with Northeastern’s Office of Community Engagement, which meant that I had a dedicated service-learning undergraduate teaching assistant assigned to the course. She handled all the logistics of working with our community partner—a Boston public charter school with a focus on health science careers—where my students worked as writing tutors.

• Intended curriculum: Writing Program courses at Northeastern, which include First-Year Writing and an upper-division disciplinary writing course with fourteen different variations, are guided by eleven student learning goals (see http://www.northeastern.edu/writing/student-learning-goals-writing-program/). There is not a common syllabus or textbook, so the clearest intention of curricula for First-Year Writing can be found in those goals. In addition, the course catalog description of First-Year Writing reads as follows:

First-Year Writing offers students the opportunity to study and practice writing in a workshop setting. Students read a range of texts in order to describe and evaluate the choices writers make and apply that knowledge to their own writing; learn to conduct research using primary and secondary sources; explore how writing functions in a range of academic, professional, and public contexts; and write for various purposes and audiences in multiple genres and media. Throughout the course, students give and receive feedback, revise their work, and reflect on their growth as writers.

Thus, the intended curriculum values particular student actions (study, practice, read, evaluate, apply, learn, conduct, explore, give and receive feedback, revise, reflect), particular contexts for those actions (workshop setting, academic, professional, and public contexts), particular rhetorical concepts (various purposes and audiences), and particular media (range of texts, multiple genres and media).

The intended curriculum is also found in my syllabus description, particular to my section:

Another manifestation of our class theme of writing, literacy, and education will be in the research and writing you do over the semester, whether exploring your own literacy experiences, making sense of the literacy experiences of your classmates, writing opinion pieces on issues specific to our theme, or conducting empirical research on your tutoring practices at [our high school partner]. These activities are guided by the Writing Program Learning Goals (see below), the theme of this course, and the evolving needs of the class members.

In this statement, I offer a more explicit idea of the theme of the course and the content of students’ writing that will grow out of that theme, as well as their connection to the Writing Program student learning goals, all expressions of the intended curriculum.

• Taught curriculum: As director of the Writing Program at the time I was teaching this course, I would like to think I aligned my taught curriculum as tightly as possible with the intended curriculum. However, the program’s eleven student learning goals are impossible to achieve in equal emphasis, as some are more appropriate than others in particular contexts and for particular assignments. In my description of each assignment, I would list the learning goals I felt the assignment responded to, and in the reflection on their writing that students completed, both with each assignment and at the end of the term, I asked them to describe which of the learning goals they felt they addressed. Nonetheless, I cannot say they were all equally addressed, much less met, by each student.
• Experienced curriculum: As I note above, I did ask students to reflect on the relationship between their writing tasks and the Writing Program student learning goals, and I required ongoing reporting of their experiences tutoring high school students at our community partner site. However, these authorized statements of the experienced curriculum are, of course, only partial, composed in a context in which I, as instructor, controlled the mechanisms of evaluation, that is, grades.
• Embodied curriculum: In the weekly informal writing I asked students to do in response to readings or to their service-learning experiences, many would offer descriptions of personal experiences or narrative that were in many ways explorations of identity. Yet these responses were also required, monitored, and sanctioned, surely limiting the extent of students’ “personal connection” (Eodice, Geller, and Lerner 2016) to this writing.
• Hidden curriculum: As instructor of the course, I likely had many blind spots when it came to what aspects of curriculum were hidden or expressed through my actions, particularly my response to and evaluation of students’ writing. My in-class activities featured a great deal of collaborative work, as did some out-of-class assignments, and the service-learning component meant that the undergraduates, a largely privileged though fairly ethnically and racially diverse group, would be working directly with mostly underprivileged students of color in the eleventh and twelfth grades. Thus, aspects of the hidden curriculum potentially included working well with others, exposure to others unlike oneself, and creating reciprocal relationships with community partners. Also, as expressed in my syllabus via policies on attendance, timely submission of work, academic integrity, and classroom interaction, the hidden curriculum of what I value in terms of effort, timeliness, and cooperation is, perhaps, not terribly hidden.
• Tested curriculum: Students completed three written projects and a final reflective portfolio. While all evaluation criteria for these tasks were generated and negotiated by the class itself (see Inoue 2005), I also graded students on their completion of online discussion prompts, their attendance, and their participation in class activities. The particular behaviors and dispositions I was testing for and thus valuing were additional aspects of the hidden curriculum.
• Null curriculum: Curricular elements not present were many, as is inevitable in any course, whether as a result of the choices I made as instructor or the parameters as offered through the Writing Program Student Learning Goals. My students were also part of a community in which many peers are also taking First-Year Writing, likely in sections quite different than mine, given the service-learning component. Those sections might have curricular elements, some highly valued by students, some not, that were not present in my section.
• Outside curriculum: That my students have rich literate lives outside my class is a given, considering the saturation of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and visualizing in mainstream culture. The extent to which my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Disciplinary Inquiries
• Part 2: Experiential Inquiries
• Part 3: Empirical Inquiries
• Appendix A: Syllabus: First-Year Writing Course
• Appendix B: WCOnline Synchronous Tutoring Environment
• Appendix C: Frequency of Student and Tutor Knowledge Claims with Examples
• Appendix D: Example of HyperResearch Coding Environment
• References
• Index