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Reimagining The Possibilities
Presidential Address, Jerome C. Harste
89th Annual Convention
National Council of Teachers of English
November 1999 Denver: What If English/Language Arts
Curriculum, Multiple Literacies, and Democracy: What If English/Language Arts Teachers Really Cared?
by Jerome C. Harste, Indiana University and Robert F. Carey, Rhode Island College
For our parents, those lucky enough to finish high school, a good education was a knowledge of the classics, a course in Latin, or at least Latin derivatives, the ability to spin a good phrase in clear, grammatically correct English (with the cost of giving up one’s mother tongue thought to be necessary), and the ability to give a good, clear, persuasive public speech. Citizenship was seen as a convoluted version of the Protestant Ethic: "Work six full days, play hard on Saturday night, but go to church on Sunday." Technologically, our parents had the same basic writing equipment as did Socrates and Confucius.
By the time I and the other author of this paper went to school, the world had gone through two world wars. Our homes and schools had hot and cold running water, electricity, central heating, radios, and movies. While we were in school, we saw the smoky tail of the first jet airplane fly overhead and heard the first sonic boom of that plane breaking the sound barrier. By the time we entered sixth grade, our parents had purchased their first television set. In the year before we graduated from high school, Sputnik first orbited the earth and, because of the Conant Report (1958), seniors identified by school officials as "academically talented" had to forego their free periods and study halls to take advanced courses in physics, mathematics, and English.
In school we read the classics and studied Cliff Notes to make sure we understood the official meaning, but got away with not taking Latin. We still were expected to spin a clever phrase, but neither of us remembers having to have a course in public speaking. Citizenship was equated with patriotism and xenophobia, a deep fear of others, particularly communists. The Protestant Ethic was still alive and well, though we did start "dropping out," "dropping acid," and "dropping our drawers" more blatantly than did previous generations. We still think our best legacy is our liberalization of the dress code.
By the time our children started school, microcomputers were a part of daily life. The majority of the children in our country were spending more time watching television than attending school or reading. The classics were no longer part of schooling. Children were expected to be able to fill in the blanks on worksheets and multiple choice tests, and multinational corporations had become more significant political and economic entities than many nations on the earth. Women demanded equality, African Americans gained an identity through "Black Power," and the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community was shouting, "We’re queer. We’re here. Get used to it!!"
It is safe to say that no one can predict what kind of world our grandchildren will find upon graduation. In three generations the world experienced greater change than at any other time in history. The cultural and technological gulf between Socrates and our parents is much less than the gulf between the world our parents knew and the world our grandchildren will enter.
As we watch this gulf continue to widen, we rightfully need to be concerned. What is an appropriate education for our children? How can we prepare them for an unknown world? What are the possibilities?
In the five decades since World War II, we have tried to make adjustments to curriculum by adding things here and dropping things there. Our personal assessment is that mostly we have been "tinkering." Furthermore, we have been doing more adding than subtracting. The result is that we have lost a philosophical sense of curriculum.
We define curriculum as a metaphor for the lives we want to live and the people we want to be (Harste, 1990). Carolyn Burke notes that curriculum exists "to give us perspective" (in Short & Burke, 1991). Eisner (1982) says curriculum should be thought of as a program of "activities and opportunities" based on selected perception (p. 61).
This paper explores new perceptions for rethinking curriculum. We review the work of several scholars to support our claim that these perceptions should form a conceptual frame upon which we prepare for the future. The analysis we offer suggests a series of needed changes, imposing challenges, and possible choices that could redefine our profession and the roles we play in education in the new millennium.
Curriculum as Diversity
Let’s suppose for a moment that our countries were really democratic and that teachers of the language arts really cared that this were so. One of the first changes that would have to be made is that our conformity and consensus model of education would have to be thrown out and replaced with a new model that advocates and appreciates diversity and difference. Conformity and consensus are about standards, standardized testing, common knowledge, and common objectives. Diversity and difference are about culture and community, uncommon knowledge, culturally responsive schools, and multiple literacies. We hope that by unpacking the phrase "multiple literacies" we will explicate several key notions that undergird a model of difference.
The notion of multiple literacies is not a metaphor. It represents the strength of a curriculum which celebrates diversity in all its forms. We argue that it provides a framework from which we can grow and within which we can celebrate differences which make a difference. It also positions us as inquirers, learners who acknowledge that they still have lots to learn about the cultures and communities in which we teach.
Gloria Ladson-Billings (1999) says we don’t know the first thing about building an educational system based on diversity. While we think this is somewhat of an overstatement and we sort of agree, we believe some progress has been made on some fronts. We’ll share some specific instances of what we see as progress later on.
For the moment, we wish to argue that if we are to make the kind of educational progress we envision we need to make, it is going to have to begin in the language arts classroom. What better place to begin!?! We language teachers, after all, under- stand the importance of voice. Further, we know how to use literature to support critical conversations about social justice (see, for example, Harste, Vasquez, Lewison, Leland, Oceipka, & Breau, in press), how to use reading and writing as a tool for thinking, and how to support children to interrogate text— politically and ideologically—for purposes of developing an awareness of how texts are and can be used to position people and ideas (see, for example, Comber, 1997; Edelsky, 1994). We could even help children understand that they haven’t really finished reading until they have taken some form of social action by mentally and physically repositioning themselves in the world. It is not enough, for example, to read about women’s rights. You have to act and talk differently too.
We see multiple literacies as a composite of three elements: multiple discourses, multiple sign systems, and multiple realities. Let us consider each of these in turn and discuss their implications for learning and curriculum in the schools of tomorrow.
Multiple Discourses
We started this paper with a recent history of what literacy has meant to the four generations of European Americans who are currently alive on this planet. For most of the 19th Century, literacy was defined as the ability to read and write. The crucible was the ability to sign one’s name.
For most of our history, literacy has been seen as a monolithic skill, one which first is acquired and then applied. Literacy was seen as a tool—let’s envision it as a pen knife—one carried in one’s back pocket: When the need arose, you simply brought out the tool, applied it to the problem at hand, and returned it to the pocket. In elementary school, it was thought, one learned to read; in secondary school, one read to learn.
Lately, of course, we’ve come to realize that literacy has more in common with a bulky and expensive Swiss army knife than it does with the simple pen knife of earlier times. We purposefully use the analogy of literacy and knives. Literacy cuts. It cuts people in. It cuts people out. It positions us by reflecting dominant values that are taken as "givens" in our societies.
Let’s consider how conventional views of literacy are still reflected in educational practice:
• For the most part, reading and writing are still considered subjects that need their own time slots during the school day;
• As subjects, reading and writing are still mainly seen as the responsibility of elementary school teachers;
• For the most part, it is still believed that students entering secondary school should already be able to read and write. The goal of teachers at these levels is to ensure that students apply these skills in their classes.
Embedded in these conventional statements of wisdom is the belief that literacy, once acquired, can be universally applied to all subject areas and disciplines.
The last 25 years of inquiry in education have demonstrated quite convincingly that such assumptions and beliefs are no longer valid. Language theorists such as Gee (1996, 1997) and Street (1995) have helped us understand that language is never neutral, but rather reflects particular ways of thinking, acting, interacting, and knowing. Gee describes discourse as "an identity kit" which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act and talk so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize (p. 21). Street sees "literacy practices as culturally constructed," leaving behind models in our minds of how to behave (p. 133).
As an extension of this notion, Gee and Street would argue that if you want to think, act, talk, identify, and solve problems like a scientist or mathematician or a computer analyst, then you need to have internalized the forms of language that such groups use in order to participate in the activities that go with these affiliations. The same is true for out-of-school contexts. When we return to our childhood homes, for example, we participate in the local cultures rather than the culture of "professor- hood." One could get seriously hurt if one didn’t.
"Common sense," says Mary Douglas, "is cultural sense" (as quoted in Hertsfelt, 1990a). "Culture," Hertsfelt says (1990b), "is when you sound like your mother and you never meant to."
Ludwig Fleck (1935) sees various groups as forming "thought collectives," each with its own terms and particular ways of thinking with those terms. To be literate in terms of these groups (scientists, educators, circus performers, Nova Scotia fishermen, Minnesota farmers), one must be inducted into the thought collective.
We can extend this logic to the subjects we teach in school. Each discipline builds upon and utilizes a discourse which identifies it and marks it off as a special domain of knowledge and expertise. If one wants to "do science," or "do math," or "do art," then one must internalize the patterns of discourse that enable one to think, learn, know, behave, and act like a scientist, mathematician, or artist. It enables what Eisner calls the "utility of antecedent knowledge" (1989, p. 64).
When taken to practice, these ideas call for new ways of doing school. Lipka (as reported in Lipka & McCarty, 1994) tells how Alaskan educators are videotaping summer indigenous fishing activities, studying these tapes with community elders and mathematicians to identify what mathematical concepts are employed, and beginning instruction for Yup’ik children from that base.
Such thinking and such practices represent a quantum change in the meaning of the terms "literacy" and "literacy instruction." Instead of one literacy, there are multiple literacies tempered by knowledge domains and contexts of use. While it may be helpful to think in terms of "scientific literacy," "mathematical literacy," "musical literacy," "computer literacy," and "visual literacy," we need to be mindful that these categories are still glosses that need the specifics of context to constitute culturally responsive practice.
Cambourne (1998) warns us that it is also critical that we do not debase these ways of thinking about literacy by confusing them with "skills." Computer literacy must mean more than the limited "skills" one needs to work with a computer. Scientific literacy means more than a nodding familiarity with the jargon of test tubes, or even a passing familiarity with empiricism. Mathematical literacy clearly has more to do with exploring pat- terns than the ability to perform rudimentary computations. Bishop (1991) sees mathematics as "the search for unsuspected harmonies."
What are the implications of this thoughtful shift from "literacy" to authentic "multiple literacies"? There are many:
• Community members and subject matter specialists need to join hands in an effort to successfully induct children into the discourse of schooling.
• Primary school teachers cannot be expected to produce accomplished students who have acquired the multiple literacies necessary for success in secondary schools.
• English faculty should not be expected to sharpen and refine discourse in a discipline if students have not had authentic opportunity to learn that discourse through use.
• Only a real student of discourse or a practicing discourse user can recognize neophyte forms and support their development in others.
Multiple Sign Systems
The study of sign systems is called semiotics. Semioticians arise in virtually every field of endeavor as: philosophers, linguists, anthropologists, educators, literary critics—all can lay claim to the study of how signs come to mean. When applied to the study of literacy, semiotics brings insights on a regular basis.
Among the earliest generalizations derived from the semiotic study of sign systems was the notion that various cultures induct their children into literacy quite differently. What is literacy to us may not be literacy for the parents of the children we teach.
Various cultures have various ways of knowing and, as such, various ways of thinking and making sense of the world. This insight has led cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and educators to investigate the manner in which boys and girls, as well as various racial and ethnic groups—not to mention genders—position themselves with regard to literacy.
Another popular outgrowth of this position has been the theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner (1993) argues that different cultures have different ways of knowing. He initially posited seven intelligences based on his study of cultures and of children and adults who had various brain dysfunctions.
Gardner’s intelligences include verbal intelligence, logico-mathematical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, visual-spatial intelligence, musical-rhythmic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence. Lately, Gardner has posit- ed a naturalistic intelligence characterized by an extreme interest in and sensitivity to the natural environment and ritualistic intelligence characterized by a deep understanding of connectedness and community that comes from participation in rituals.
These intelligences are interesting, perhaps more so to many of us who noticed their correlation with the "core arts" much praised in ancient China: writing, arithmetic, horsemanship, archery, and the rites and ceremonies of public and private life. Gardner says that the lack of interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence is the reason why so many children commit suicide, react with fists and guns rather than reason, and in other ways demonstrate self-destructive and antisocial behavior. He thinks schools should help children learn to read their internal mental states and know how to position themselves with regard to those states in more positive ways.
Gardner argues that while members of each culture have all of these intelligences, each culture puts a different emphasis on some over others. European culture, for example, puts a great deal of emphasis on verbal and logico-mathematical intelligence. Alaskan educators see indigenous cultures as putting less emphasis on verbal intelligence and more on naturalistic intelligence. At the Center for Inquiry in Indiana, we are exploring how the use of rituals might strengthen interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.
Parallel to this work has been research in literacy. Semioticians—those who study how individuals and groups signify and interpret meaning—have suggested that any instance of language always involves more than just language (Halliday, 1975; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984; Johns-Steiner, 1981). Predictable picture books, a topic about which we know some- thing, for example, involve visual as well as verbal literacy. Some even involve aspects of musical literacy in their reliance on rhyme and cadence. As another example, computer literacy seems both verbal and logico-mathematical, not to mention spatial and interpersonal. Flexibility in the use of sign systems to create texts that work successfully in a specific context is clearly one aspect of what it means to "be literate" in the millennium.
Semioticians argue that literacy is an ability to create a multi- modal text that is successful (that is communicative in its fullest sense) in a given context using all the ways we have at our disposal to mean. Language alone doesn’t make one a successful communicator. In order to be successful, a children’s author must use art, language, and a sense of music to create a successful text. It is also nice if the author has something to say or the ability to make the familiar strange. Writing, like other expressions of literacy, begins with inquiry and observation. Similarly, scientists need to know when to use a physical model, a sketch, or an analogy to communicate their ideas. It is also nice if they know to make the print on their overheads large enough for people in the audience to see.
Literacy, then, from a semiotic point of view, is the ability to use a variety of sign systems in appropriate contexts to mean. The multimodal nature of literacy and the notion of multiple intelligences offer a variety of ways to approach literacy instruction. We can employ the notion of multiple intelligences in curriculum planning, for example, to give greater access to education to more children.
Students can begin to value other peoples’ differences and begin to gain proficiency in areas in which they are less comfortable. Learning theory would suggest that working in sign systems which are less comfortable for us is at least as important, in a developmental sense, as working in those areas in which we are more comfortable. At the very least, such experiences develop empathy within us for those who are decidedly not verbal, not mathematical, not technological. The goal, as we see it, is not to hone talent so much as it is to expand the communication potential of everyone.
Multiple Realities
Viewing language as discourse explains a great deal. Luke and Freebody (1997), for example, say that all discourses are ideological—another way of saying that embedded within each discourse is a particular belief structure and way of viewing the world.
They argue that language is best seen as social practice. Historically, they say reading has been seen as decoding, and the function of reading instruction was the development of the child’s ability to break the code. During the 1970s and 1980s, psycholinguists and schema-theorists emphasized reader-text interactions and drew attention to "text-meaning practices," or, more specifically, the development of a reader who understands how to use the textual and personal resources at hand to co- produce a meaningful reading.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, sociolinguists and socio- semiotic theorists focused our attention on language in use. During this period, reading was viewed in terms of what it did or could accomplish pragmatically in the real world. More recently, Luke and Freebody (in press) suggested that reading should be seen as a nonneutral form of cultural practice, one that positions readers and obliterates as much as it illuminates. Readers for the 21st Century, they argue, need to be able to interrogate the assumptions that are embedded in text as well as the assumptions which they, as culturally indoctrinated beings, bring to the text. Questions such as "Whose story is this?" "Who benefits?" and "What voices are not being heard?" invite children to interrogate the systems of meaning that operate both consciously and unconsciously in text as well as in society.
In some ways, of course, history is repeating itself. Researchers with limited vision and institutional backing, such as those affiliated with the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, are attempting to bring back a new version of "decoding" as reading (see Goodman, 1999, for a critique and a look at who all are behind this movement). All this occurs as we stand as literate beings on the edge of a new millennium in which it will behoove us not only to know how to decode and make meaning, but also to understand how language works and to what ends, so that we can better position ourselves in light of the kind of world we wish to create and the kind of people we wish to become.
Understanding the Significance of Multiple Discourses, Sign Systems, and Realities
The complementary notions of multiple discourses, multiple sign systems, and multiple realities represent a quantum leap in our understanding of language. When language was seen as meaning making, we spent our time making personal connections and accepting alternate interpretations. Often we treated these interpretations as innocent, inevitable, and logical.
To see language as discourse is to see "texts" as representing particular ways of thinking and knowing and readers as capable of becoming consciously aware of how they are positioned by literacy. When literacy is reconceived in terms of discourse, literacy instruction must actively involve students in interrogating how they have been self-implicated in the thesis of the author by the meaning-making process in which they have engaged and in taking personal and social responsibility for the interpretations they make. While such a stance raises instructional stakes, it also creates tension which propels learning and makes engagement in literacy events an emotionally charged problem situation of personal and communal importance.
This architectonic change in our view of learning has been vastly aided by breakthroughs in cognitive science. Recent advances in brain research using tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are providing us with new information unprecedented in its scope. Symeonides (1999) writes:
Biologically, our brains weigh about 1 1/2 kg, are the size of a cantaloupe, and are roughly the texture of a ripe avocado. After the age of five, there is no new growth, and the average brain contains 100 billion neurons at that point. The brain is basically a web of neurons, and we do not produce new neuron cells; the brain "grows" smarter by making connections between neurons. Neurons make these connections by growing dendrites. Dendrites are formed when the brain is actively engaged.
We also know that the brain has evolved to accommodate rapid thinking and to react to dramatic changes in its environment, like predatory danger. In fact, it is indifferent to situations that do not involve immediate survival. Our brain has evolved and survived over the ages because it is so adept at adaptation. The brain views each problem and adapts its understanding to accommodate challenges. The brain thrives on novelty and seeks to find patterns and multiple solutions. Such an organ, then, is well equipped to deal with sudden emotionally charged problem situations, but is uninspired when dealing with rote, sustained attention activities.
Still Quoting Symeonides:
Another brain factor that has implications for the classroom is emotion. It has become increasingly apparent that emotion has a far greater role in our lives than we often care to admit. It is emotion that prompts attention, which is necessary for learning to take place and impacts on memory and behavior. By loading our educational practices in favor of mastery of skills and con- tent and by ignoring the emotional aspect, our schools have become recipes of misbehavior (p.3).
In all our enthusiasm for cognitive science, though, one caution: Mind is not brain. No amount of research into the biological or physiological bases for social and intellectual behavior is likely to replace careful, sustained observation and inquiry into the actual processes which occur in situated instances of teaching and learning.
Implications for Teaching
How, then, do we teach? What are our roles and responsibilities as teachers in light of these new frameworks? How can multiple discourses, multiple sign systems, and multiple realities inform what we do in the millennium?
Consider these translations of principle into authentic school reform in venues as apparently unrelated as Indianapolis, Indiana; Providence, Rhode Island; Tucson, Arizona; and Juneau, Alaska. These are just some of the ways that we and other educators are seeking reform in our classrooms and in our instruction:
• Instead of falling prey to a "banking theory of education" in which knowledge is transmitted from the knowing adult to the unknowing child, we attempt to create multiple opportunities for our students to be exposed to and to use the language of various knowledge domains in authentic and realistic ways. In selected classrooms in Arizona and in all of the classrooms at The Center for Inquiry in Indianapolis—a public school we created to see if curriculum could be organized around the personal and social inquiry questions of learners rather than around the disciplines—we do this through focused studies. Focused studies begin by immersing students in the language of the study through readings, videotapes, guest lectures, and hands-on activities. In preparing for focused studies, we think in terms of the conversations, both those raging in the field and those in which we want children to engage. The result is that students are positioned at the forefront of the debate (Applebee, 1996). As students become ready, they are invited to find topics of interest to them, which they pursue using the inquiry cycle as their guide.
• In each class session we make time for students to be immersed in talk, reading, writing, and demonstration. The process of writing is highlighted as a tool for thinking rather than as a process of publication (Harste, Short, & Burke, 1988; Short, Harste, & Burke, 1996). We believe, after Vygotsky (1978), that the social becomes the psychological: That is, what students can do first with others orally they later internalize and can do mentally with themselves. It is important that students see teachers who are absorbed in the problems and questions of curriculum. We want teachers who are conducting their own focused studies at the side of the students they teach. (This is, by the way, a good way to get teachers to eliminate from curriculum things they think others think they should teach but which they don’t really care about and hence teach rather badly in the first place.) Students who see teachers absorbed in curriculum become absorbed as well. Theodore Roethke, the poet, once said, "A teacher is one who carries on his [sic] education in public." By placing the focus of our curricula on learning, we have merged the teacher, the students, and the guest experts—be they community elders or academicians—into a collaborative learning team. For this collaboration to work effectively, the teachers must be able to demonstrate collectively through talk and action how people interested in this topic think and act. Everyone becomes both a teacher and a learner engaged in the joint tasks of observation, experimentation, analysis, reflection, and action. Like all good learning, the essence of inquiry, Scollon and Scollon (1986) say, "consists of listening much and speaking little, of observing much but manipulating little, of remaining open to new information and avoiding premature conclusions" (p. 93). Collaboration and inquiry- based instruction are not only the best means of teaching and learning, they are also the best ways to evaluate student learning and education more generally. Instead of desks arranged in rows facing the front of the room, we arrange the furniture so as to encourage students to interact with each other. We do not assign seats, but rather have tables numbered so that we can make sure all students interact with the diversity that our classrooms offer in terms of ways of knowing and thinking. Further, we have found having unclaimed space allows students to form work groups on a need-to basis. Schools have always "othered" some groups of students. This is why we have cliques of African American students all sitting together in the lunchroom while would-be Yuppies "hang" together in another part of the same room, and "nerds" in still another part. The Colorado school shootings, teenage suicides, and the startling jump in the number of children in foster homes demand we do better. While we don’t have the answer, we believe there is no better place than the English language arts classroom for creating space for these much-needed critical conversations.
• This does not mean that we do not ever do more conventional paper and pencil activities. But, instead of students working independently from textbooks and worksheets, we encourage students to work collaboratively in completing charts which summarize, recap, explain, extend, as well as transform the meanings, concepts, and connections they have made. Ideally this work is publicly displayed so that it can be revis- ited, reread, and rediscussed frequently. Importantly, we focus as much upon tension—surprises, oddities, anomalies, differences—as we do patterns and connections. The mind we know naturally gravitates to the new (Bateson, 1972, 1979). I must confess we also teach to the test; i.e., when skills are encountered that we know are on the test, we teach them directly and try to use the natural context in which they came up as justification. Teachers simply feel too vulnerable, given the focus on raising test scores in our district, not to be mindful of this constraint. By the way, last year, children at The Center for Inquiry in Indianapolis performed 40 points higher than other children in the district, matched on race, IQ, and socio-economic status. In all-too-many modern-day contexts, Susan Ohanian (1999) reminds us that literacy is still defined in terms of "the schwa." We need to fight such nonsense proposed by what Ohanian dubs "standardistos," while facing the political realities of our times. Ohanian charges that some school districts have co-mingled "the schwa" and Shakespeare. The new battle cry in these districts is: "The schwa. The schwa. My kingdom for the schwa" (p. 35).
• In addition to flooding our classrooms with books and writing materials, we have art and musical instruments readily available. Students are encouraged to create multimodal texts as well as rerepresent what they make of reading in art, music, or drama. Asking students to take what they made of some- thing into an alternate form often reopens discussions and captures aspects of meaning not attended to earlier. Further, the arts seem to encourage attention to the emotional aspects of learning. Porter (1999) recently finished her dissertation, studying Sam, a Mexican-American student who did poorly in English but brilliantly in art. Her inquiry transformed her notions of learning and of teaching. Multicultural literature is being used to support critical conversation in monocultural and bicultural classrooms. After using several titles of children’s books which support critical conversations about literacy—pulled together by NCTE (Mitchell-Pierce, in process)—Lee Hamilton, a second-grade teacher in a high SES School in Bloomington, Indiana, reported, "I can tell you one thing about these books. You can hear a pin drop as you are reading them" (Leland, Harste, Oceipka, Lewison, & Vasquez, in process).
• Instead of rushing out the door at the end of the day, students are encouraged to spend the last five minutes reflecting on their learning by writing at least one observation, one surprise, one connection, and one question in a personal learning log. How people learn alone and in groups is a topic of constant inquiry in our classrooms and made explicit through various charts and banners. Becoming conscious of the range of strategies people use as learners opens up options. To be literate in the 21st Century, students need to see stance as an option and understand the consequences of how they position themselves as an individual and as part of a group. "How people learn" is a yearlong, every year, focused study. While we try to create ourselves into a community of learners by beginning and ending each week with rituals, we also want "the differences that make a difference" between us to expand our horizons and reengage our imaginations.
• Literature is used to raise critical issues. We try to select books that explore what differences make a difference, that enrich our understanding of history and life by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalized (we call them "the indignant ones"), that show how people can begin to take action on important social issues, that explore dominant systems of meaning that operate in our society to position people and groups of people, and that help us question why certain groups are positioned as "others." In as many ways as we can, we try to connect schooling to the personal and communal lives that our students know. We record key ideas from these conversations on what the children in Vasquez’ classroom (1999) called "a learning wall" and decide what social action to take, based on core values and explicit discussions about what we think constitutes a "better community." In inner-city Indianapolis, where a second Center for Inquiry is being located, we did manage to get a numbers house closed down. School officials have promised to turn the area into a school parking lot and the current parking lot into a school playground appropriate for all age groups. Can you imagine a school without a playground!?! They don’t understand that play is inquiry not even once removed.
• We’d like to do more with computers and technology, but unfortunately we work in inner-city environments where the inequities of a property tax as a way of funding schools are all too blatant. Probably the National Council of Teachers of English, the International Reading Association, and other literacy groups need to start a class-action suit against some large school districts. For better or for worse, computers are a way of life. Students who do not have access, even to all the silly stuff you can waste your time with on them, are disadvantaged when compared to their computer-literate, suburban age-mates.
• We have tried to bring the community into the school by inviting parents to run discovery clubs that feature their ways of knowing: brick laying, karate, gardening, or karaoke. We have begun to invite parents to inquire with us into their student’s learning. The culturally responsive school movement in Alaska has much, we believe, to teach us (Oleka, 1992).
• Taking Eisner’s wit and insight to heart (1989), we’ve stopped educating "by litter." All of our classrooms are multiaged. Experience is a bigger factor than age when it comes to learning (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984), and social-learning theory has taught us that most of what we know we have learned from being in the presence of others (Wells, 1986). Whoever came up with the idea of herding all six-year-olds together for purposes of instruction doesn’t understand how learning works in real-life situations. Bateson (1972, 1979) says a theory of difference is a theory of learning. We have yet to explore this fundamental insight or use it as an argument to support inclusive classrooms.
• As teachers, we form ourselves into study groups to share what worked and what it is we are having trouble doing, given our vision of the world we want to create and the people we want to be. Like Lipka and McCarty (1994), we see the function of teacher study groups as creating zones of safety. Here is what they say on this topic:
The notion of safety implies risk, boundaries, and even danger. These are not "comfort zones"; they are sites of great personal and collective discomfort as teachers revisit their own educational histories and as they challenge their pedagogical assumptions and those of the institutions in which they work. Schooling occurs within contested space. . . . [Study groups] created room within that space for opposition—for critically examining their roles and the context of schooling itself. The study group process has been one of self- revelation and group identification. . . . The process is equally one of contention and trepidation. . . . [While] powerful institutional forces can and do suppress and marginalize the work of such groups . . . the most appropriate way to conceptualize the success of these teacher groups may be to consider the situation with- out them. The historical record, unfortunately, all too clearly documents the latter alternative [by which the authors mean a state of schooling as usual] (pp. 250–251).
This is what makes NCTE’s Reading Initiative (Smith & Crafton, 1998) such a powerful project as it invites university and school partnerships, long-term commitments, inquiry-based learning, and situated knowing. Further, it confirms what we all know: The key to school change is a knowledgeable professional in every classroom. That is why school districts need to reinvest in professional development and support teachers in attending conferences like this one.
Engaging the Future: Some Final Thoughts
Nearly everyone would say that the purpose of education is to prepare students for the world they will enter after graduation. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as part of marketability, we could guarantee that they had the inquiry skills to continue to learn as the world continues to change? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they knew how to use reading, writing, speaking, and listening to actively support them as life-long learners? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we knew how to create spaces so that all voices could be heard in the creation of a more just, a more thoughtful, and a more democratic way of living out the imagination of our elders?
We maintain it will only happen if we prepare. We further maintain that it will only happen if English language arts teachers seize the opportunities that have been given them through the way that their discipline has positioned them for leadership. This begins with mental preparation rather than rock-solid plans. Scollon and Scollon (1986) say:
Planning is our most frequent defense against the unknown future. . . . With a plan we seek to control outcomes, to eliminate change, to eliminate the random and the wild. . . . Preparing is different. In preparing we always expect diversity of outcomes. In preparing we enlarge the future in our imagination . . . [and] we seek to make ourselves ready (p. 94).
We know that, given the way schools are structured and resources distributed, the barriers to teaching in new ways may seem overwhelming. In most middle school and high school classrooms, teachers are faced with 40- to 55-minute periods, large numbers of learners, itinerant classrooms with no place to call "home," and an examination system which emphasizes and tests knowledge of content. Such policies and barriers almost force all teachers to adopt a "transmission of knowledge game plan."
This does not, however, mean that we should give up. More than ever, we need as many highly literate students graduating from our schools as possible if we are going to survive as democratic nations in the next millennium.
How will educators at the end of the next millennium describe their grandparents, their parents, and their own education? Let’s hope they can say, "Wow, there was a radical shift in education at the turn of the 21st Century. All of a sudden, being different was valued and diversity was seen as knowing twice as much."
In preparation, together, we need to forge a discourse for education which sees diversity and difference, not as problems, but as new possibilities for the revitalization of both teaching and learning in the societies in which we live. Like good literature, we English/language arts teachers need to begin by reawakening the imagination. What can be imagined can be done. What cannot be imagined has no hope of ever being done. We English teachers know this. Let us teach the world.
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