A high school deep in the heart of suburbia, insulated by trees and residences from the nearby malls, motels, and multiplexes clotted along the freeway. Its student population is distinctly uniform and tends to suburban affluence; the minority group with the greatest impact on the school may be the students with Christian fundamentalist backgrounds.
When I first met Andy, he was fretting over a letter he had written to Charles Johnson, author of The Middle Passage. Andy was concerned that the tone was too critical, an act of arrogance from a mere high school student; he was pondering whether to attend the Northwest Book Festival to talk to the writer in person. I came to know Andy better than any other student during the two weeks I was an observer in his classroom; and I came to know that this kind of personal, intense engagement with literature is typical of him. He is very bright: an Advanced Placement junior with a 4.0 average. Andy comes from a strongly Christian family; he is a committed church goer, conservative in his political views (and mature and articulate enough to have political views), but open-minded and curious, with a finely honed appreciation for irony and humor.
Jill, Andy's classmate, is a bright student too, conscientious and consistent, but she lacks the extra intellectual spark that sets Andy apart. She is a scholastic "good citizen," eager to please her family and teachers and do well. It is probably fair to say, though, that she is less likely than Andy to move beyond conventional interpretations, to ask difficult questions, to fret and stew and ponder ideas and philosophies as he does.
The two lessons I observed for this project took place in a self-selected junior honors English class. The teacher, Ms S, is very popular: approachable, warm, energetic, someone students gravitate towards. Her unconventional literature classes crackle with energy and humor; there is little formal literary analysis, little emphasis on narrowly focused, transmittable rules and facts; her assignments rarely call for the traditional five-paragraph analytical essay. Rather, her lessons are a provocative tapestry, interweaving literary texts with music, film, print and video media and references to history, philosophy, and contemporary culture. .
Ms S has a deep understanding of her subject matter and a lively, informed grasp of historical and political issues. She draws upon all of this knowledge in her teaching, transforming it into representations which facilitate learning for her students; she pushes them to make wide ranging connections, to look both inward and outward in their search for meaning, to recognize their individual experience and knowledge as a powerful tool for literary reflection and interpretation. In this honors class, which involves a survey of American literature, Ms S helps her students make connections -- resonant, sometimes eccentric connections -- across cultures and philosophies and literary and historical periods. Benjamin Franklin is linked with Forest Gump, Thomas Jefferson shows up in Doonesbury cartoons, Jonathan Edwards is compared with Billy Graham. Reading in this survey course thus becomes an extended conversation about who Americans are, what they believe, and how that has changed. .
The class had just finished a unit on Puritan literature with an extended study of The Crucible. The two lessons I observed, on Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, were designed to lead into the following week's reading of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine -- the "dynamic duos," Ms S calls them. She began the first day's lesson by explaining that she wanted to bridge the transition from the Puritans and The Great Awakening to The Age Of Reason, using Franklin and Edwards to personify and explain the changes. She suggested that they would be "poaching heavily on history's territory," but that she wanted the students to understand the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the texts, as well as their place and significance within the American literary tradition. After a quick sketch of the waning of Puritanism and The Great Awakening and the subsequent flowering of scientific knowledge and political ferment in the mid- 18th century, Ms S played a rousing Eurythmics' version of the song "Missionary Man," followed by a group reading of Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," with much emphasis on its incendiary style. .
There followed a class discussion focusing on the text itself, exploring and analyzing its images, metaphors, and rhetorical devices. The class entered into the discussion with gusto, seeming particularly fascinated with the arresting image of God's hand holding mankind over the pit of Hell like a spider on a filament of web, exploring the idea of language as persuasion and a tool for manipulating emotional states. Ms S drew upon familiar icons of contemporary culture in her representations, making comparisons with the rhetoric of Martin Luther King and various television evangelists. The eighty five minute period ended dramatically with another example of "the rhetoric of terror:" a clip from Kenneth Branagh's film version of Henry V, depicting Henry's fiery speech before the gates of Harfleur. .
The second day's lesson centered on an excerpt from Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, exploring the possibility of achieving moral perfection. Ms S was sick this day, shelving much of what she had planned to teach: in consequence, it was a much more sedate, less richly textured lesson than usual. Once again, she set the historical scene, mentioning Deism, describing politics as the "hot literary topic" generating the writing of this period. She presented Franklin as a Renaissance Man, and pointed out the discrepancies between his promiscuous, immoderate life and his championing of temperance, chastity, and order. She asked students to look at the tone of the piece and the ironies implicit in it, and suggested that The Autobiography, with its step-by-step plan for attaining virtue, could be considered as part of an ongoing American fascination with the idea of self-invention and aphoristic, self-help literature -- the students themselves provided plenty of contemporary examples. Following this, the class read the text for themselves and started on the assignment. .
D. A. Norman, in Learning and Memory, discusses the ways in which the human ability to generate relationships and associations among ideas facilitates learning. In Junior English Ms S encourages her students to make connections between what they are reading and what they have read before, between what they know of life and what they are discovering in literature. These connections, Norman argues, "allow us to relate our different experiences, to discover similarities, to use past experience as a basis for interpreting the present." Jill and Andy, as fully functioning members of familial, academic, and peer cultures, bring to Ms S's class a sophisticated body of knowledge about human motivation and behavior and about how individuals and society interact. Both students thus have in place a variety of schemata which serve them well in their reading. They have a highly developed ability to make inferences and draw connections, to apply and reformulate what they already know to the texts they must study. .
Andy, in particular, was able to make use of schemata which helped him interpret and understand this lesson. When I asked him for his reaction to "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God," Andy was enthusiastic. "I love this stuff," he said. "I'm the public speaker type; I'm really into drama and debate." He thought a while, then added "Jonathan Edwards appeals to me on a religious level. I know the Bible pretty well and I go to church and I'm interested in theology, so I was intrigued by his ideas about God and wanted to see if I agreed." .
Clearly, Andy had a whole web of personal experiences and interests to aid him in. assimilating the ideas of the reading. Jill's links to the text were more tenuous, her schema less developed. She admitted only sketchy knowledge of the Bible, and little personal passion for Edwards' rhetoric, but she did produce one association which helped her relate to the diction, language, and imagery of the text: her familiarity with television evangelists. "It made me think of Oral Roberts when I read this," she said. "That's what I thought of, but I don't think we're as gullible as Edwards' congregation were." Both Jill and Andy, then, called upon a personal religious-rhetoric schema to construct meaning from the Edwards piece, but while Jill had drawn hers mainly from a contemporary media model, Andy drew upon a more sophisticated schema built on his passion for public speaking and church-going experiences. This may well mean he is able to read the text with a more resonant understanding than Jill -- than, indeed, most of his classmates. .
Both students were also able to relate various schemata to their interpretation of the Benjamin Franklin text. Jill and Andy are conscientious and articulate adolescents who have a developed framework of convictions, belief systems, and behavior models to draw upon in their interpretation. Both were able to appreciate the irony implicit in the dichotomy between Franklin's intemperate, promiscuous life and his espousing of such virtues as chastity and moderation, and they were sensitive to the subtle question of tone. Was Franklin looking back in amused tolerance at the earnestness and naiveté of his youthful self? Both Andy and Jill picked up on these textual nuances. Jill said that she didn't think the piece was meant to be taken seriously, that Franklin was "not straight faced." .
I mentioned that while Franklin was revered in his lifetime, D. H. Lawrence later labeled him "a virtuous little automaton." Andy wholeheartedly agreed: "Yes, he's smug; he compromises himself--He's a hypocrite." Both students suggested that a "change in views and values" caused the change in estimation of Franklin's worth in later years. .
D.A. Norman's iceberg metaphor of teaching and learning is a useful representation of the relationship between Jill and Andy's understanding of the readings and the prior knowledge they bring to them. The pinnacles of the iceberg are the texts and the ways Ms S represents information about them; the submerged mass of the iceberg is the tangle of theories and prototypes about the nature of written language and human behavior Andy and Jill bring to their reading. I see this particular iceberg as mostly peaks and few troughs, because the formal and personal knowledge structures the students have in place appear so sophisticated, their grasp of such textual elements as voice, tone, irony and audience so sound and confident.
Jerome Schwab asserts that most disciplines have multiple structures. A structure, he says, is a "highly flexible pattern which is continually adapted and modified...." Structures are adapted in response to the myriad approaches, preferences, and aptitudes individuals bring to any discipline. This diversity in the choice of structure is clearly true of English teachers, who vary widely (and sometimes bitterly) in the ways they comprehend and represent the study of literature. What, then, is Ms S's choice of substantive structure to guide her teaching? What messages is she giving her students about the "right" way to read and interpret literature and to judge and produce good writing? And what understanding of the structure of the discipline are Andy and Jill constructing from the content, methods, and atmosphere of her class? .
The concepts and approaches Ms S's students acquire depend upon her distinct and personal framework for the reading of literature; it is that framework which shapes the teaching and learning that occur in this classroom. When I asked Andy and Jill to tell me what they thought Ms S most wanted them to get from their reading, they responded similarly. .
"In this class you can say 'I"' Jill said, suggesting that Ms S emphasizes personal relevance and response. .
Andy concurred, adding that "she makes everything relate, the culture of then and now, our own lives." .
It is true that Ms S sees the interpretation of literature as a personal process. "That's how you hook the kids in," she told me. "You make it count in their own lives, you help them make the connections, you honor their individual responses." .
But Ms S also helps her students bring formal literary and historical knowledge to bear on the texts they read. Andy notices this. "She isn't just interested in what we feel about Franklin and Edwards. She had us look at Puritan beliefs and The Age of Reason and the imagery and language stuff that you study in English classes." .
Ms S's model for teaching literature, her choice of a substantive structure, partly involves using the text as a focus for students' personal response. But while she encourages them to bring what they already know about human nature and contemporary culture to their literary interpretations, she also emphasizes the idea that texts should always be considered with reference to their historical and cultural context and as part of an ongoing conversation about the collective American experience. My classroom observations and individual interviews made it clear that her students look for significance in their reading in ways they have learned from her; they have constructed a sense of substantive structure in English which echoes Ms S's own. .
When asked what she thought Ms S wanted them to get from the readings, Jill said "she wants us to understand the differences in the cultures, the 1700s and now, and see how much power language had over them, and whether that's different from us or not." .
When I asked what sets Ms S's Junior Honors English apart from other English classes, both students again responded similarly. "This class is so different. We get to connect books to history and movies and music, and the assignments," Jill said. .
Andy described the class as "not tedious. She wants us to like and experience good literature and know what it is and make all kinds of connections to today." Culture and history, personal experiences, the language of the text, and above all, connections: these were the threads Andy and Jill picked out of the rich fabric of Ms S's teaching. This is the way of reading she elicits from her students, and this is the sense of disciplinary structure they have constructed from her approach. .
But while Ms S advocates a particular approach to reading, she is never closed to other approaches. She does not constrain or over-direct her students' reading and interpretation. I think this may be what Andy and Jill were responding to when they both referred to her "flexibility," willingness to listen, and emphasis on making "all kinds of connections." They are taking from her the idea that there are many different but valid points of view and methods of response and inquiry available in the study of literature. .
As Schwab points out, teaching methods are never neutral; thus Ms S 's instructional framework clearly embodies her beliefs about the reading of literature and conveys those beliefs to her students. Jill and Andy know that in Ms S's class they can apply their skills and knowledge about social situations and contemporary culture to their reading. And they know this because Ms S encourages --indeed requires -- them to do so. She specifically shapes the direction of her questions, the texture of her representations, and the content of her assignments around her choice of a socio-cultural and reader response structure for the study of literature. .
Ms S doesn't just teach lessons on aphorism or persuasive language and hope it lodges in students' heads; she asks that her students flex their knowledge by trying it out in their own writing. For example, in the writing exercise she assigned after the Jonathan Edwards lesson (see appendix), Ms S asked her students to choose an issue of personal significance to them and write a sermon on the subject using the kinds of explicit imagery and figurative language they had encountered in the Edwards text. This assignment exemplifies Ms S's approach to literary study, because it requires that students both engage with the text itself in order to analyze and replicate its language, and forge connections between the text and their present beliefs and concerns. A writing exercise such as this allows learners to, as Dennie Wolf puts it, "step out of the role of language consumer," and try out for themselves the processes and struggle involved in creating new work and knowing when it is done well. .
There are many ways to step out of the role of passive reader and become active creator; Ms S knows this well, and allows ample opportunity for her students to produce rather than consume. Andy, for instance, was enthusiastically planning the delivery of a bone-chilling oral presentation of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" to his class; Jill was working on an artistic rendition of an aspect of Edwards' imagery which particularly struck her. Her students value this aspect of her teaching highly. In his ideal English classroom, Andy said, they would be "writing all the time, in all kinds of forms." Both Andy and Jill mentioned that Ms S's assignments and writing exercises are nothing like the kinds of work they are usually asked to produce for English classes, that they are much more fun, that she asks for more creativity and gives more flexibility. Such assignments in fact constitute one more step in the process by which Andy and Jill absorb both the syntactic structure of the discipline and the ideas and questions about literature which Ms S represents as most interesting and worthwhile. .
In "150 Different Ways of Knowing," Wilson, et al. argue that teachers with rich subject matter knowledge often relate specific concepts or topics to others within the discipline. Ms S took just this intra-disciplinary approach when she used in her Jonathan Edwards lesson a speech from a Shakespeare play -- a whole other genre and culture and historical period -- to underscore what she wanted her students to know about the "rhetoric of terror" and the sheer raw power of language. Wilson et al. further suggest that knowledgeable teachers are more likely than less knowledgeable teachers to "utilize opportunities to "digress" into other discipline-related avenues." .
I have mentioned that Ms S has strong content knowledge both within her discipline and outside it, and that she consistently weaves into her representational repertoire the principles and concerns of historical and political inquiry. This exhilarating interweaving of concepts within the discipline and across disciplines in turn becomes part of Jill and Andy's sense of structure. They begin, I think, to see the study of history and literature as a kind of tapestry in itself, made up of many possible critical interpretations, responses, or narratives, and they trust that Ms S will give them plenty of room to define and explore their own structures, to work out individual and divergent analyses, to pursue the questions most vital to them within the discipline. .
Howard Gardner, in The Unschooled Mind, argues that students often bring engrained simplifications and stereotypes of disciplines to class. Gardner suggests that teachers must confront pervasive student mythologies about "history" or "English" and the ways they are perpetuated by students and some teachers, conveying instead a richer, more developed sense of the field. In order to try to uncover any misconceptions Jill and Andy might have about the study of literature and about reading and writing, I asked a series of questions about their previous experiences with these subjects, about "typical" English and history classrooms, and about what distinguishes Ms S's class from others. Jill, for instance, mentioned that they had "done" The Great Awakening and Jonathan Edwards in her American history class a couple of weeks earlier. By this, I discovered she meant that they had read about Edwards in a textbook, but had not read his writing directly. It was much more fun, and more memorable, she added, to be reading "Sinners" with Ms S in English Honors. .
Andy said that the way history has been taught to him "absolutely depends on the teacher. Some only use the textbook and some use other sources. Ms S wouldn't teach fact by fact -- she'd tie everything to things happening now and other events in history." In Ms S's English class, then students are learning to interpret texts not only within the framework of the study of language and critical analysis, but within the context of a particular cultural community. She guides her students through their reading of Franklin and Edwards so that they recognize, embedded in the language, clues to the emotions and preoccupations of the writer and the values and biases of the particular time and place. .
Through her teaching, students see that there are many ways in which the structures of English and history complement each other. Both involve paying close attention to text and language, both involve narrative and individual interpretation, and both, ideally, allow students to step outside of themselves and experience the texture of other lives. I saw all of these things happening in Ms S's classroom. Andy, for instance, exercising his historical imagination, brought up the vital question of audience. He remembered that Ms S characterized The Great Awakening as "the last flare of a dying flame." Andy suggested that the decline of Puritanism might have inflamed Edwards' rhetoric to its white-hot level. "I think he was desperate, so he really laid it on. Puritanism was dying and he was trying to save it." Jill -- an intensely social student, a drill team star who always moves within a pilot fish cluster of friends -- seemed to be bringing her own social agenda to her analysis when she commented that Edwards' congregation "wanted to believe what their neighbors believed; and they all really believed in Hell, saw it as an absolutely real place, so they were vulnerable to what Edwards had to say." It seems to me that both students are internalizing the ways of reading historical and literary texts that Ms S encourages: that they are locating the texts in a specific time and place, locating them within the American literary tradition, and moving beyond their own belief systems to achieve real insight into the works they study. .
It is evident that there were many more similarities than differences in the responses of the two students interviewed. There are superficial variations: Jill is the more social of the two, the more anxious to conform to parents' and teachers' expectations. Andy loves to ponder the tortuous questions and relishes thorny subjects like calculus or theology; no wonder he took exception to Benjamin Franklin's aphoristic, pompous prose. Yet as Gardner stresses, almost all students bring to the classroom a rich store of intuition, competencies, theories and values, simply by virtue of being functioning members of their individual worlds. Jill and Andy, coming from similar family and cultural backgrounds, also share a similar academic history. They can each capitalize on a variety of schemata in their reading and writing; they are completely comfortable with the discourse of their English classroom. All of these factors help explain affinities in Jill and Andy's interpretations, but ultimately, I attribute this to Ms S's skill as a teacher. In her Junior Honors English class there is a clear and positive relationship between teaching and learning. Students are learning not just about American literary traditions and cultural experiences, but about how to forge a living, breathing engagement between themselves and the text, and to articulate that experience. .
I talked to many of Ms S's students, and they all regarded her with affection and esteem. When I asked what made her such a fine teacher, they always answered first, "her personality." This is true, of course: her warmth and humor are irresistible. Yet while her students obviously respect her, I don't think they can be fully aware of the skill and work that underpin her exhilarating, unconventional teaching methods. Ms S's disciplinary and cross-disciplinary knowledge is formidable, her ability to generate intra- and interdisciplinary representations enviable. And who could possibly resist a teacher who draws analogies between Benjamin Franklin and Forest Gump, or who has students studying The Crucible devise the "ten best Salem Chamber of Commerce" slogans? It was fun being a part of Ms S's classroom; but more than that, it was a privilege
I think the most troubling aspect of the whole SLP process for me was the impotence I felt as observer/interviewer. I couldn't make students come up with the kind of luscious material I craved: rich motherlodes of misconception and naive theory. I suffered too from ugly discipline envy -- math or science people had it much easier, I thought. I could try to use subtle, probing interview techniques, but ultimately the kind of data I would get was dependent on the teaching and learning of others. It's the nature of the research interview beast, of course, but the process is new to me, and I felt vulnerable.
And so I worried. I worried about Jill and Andy not showing up, I worried about Ms S getting sick (and she did, but showed up to teach the lesson just for me); I worried about car crashes and earthquakes and appendicitis and other cataclysmic events that might get in my way. I railed helplessly against American educational culture when pep rallies and Homecoming and standardized testing disrupted the normal school day -- I learned there is no such thing as a normal school day. .
Nonetheless, the interviews were completed as planned. Were I to do them over again, I would go through the readings step-by-step with the students, asking them to think-aloud with the text in front of them. I would focus much more specifically on the material of the lesson, probe deeper into the detail and nuances of the students' thinking. It would have been easier too, I think, if there had been a greater contrast in understanding, response, and attitude between the students I interviewed. .
Jerome Schwab was a big black raven perched on my shoulder during this project. I was outraged when I first read him: I thought it the worst example of convoluted, obscure academic writing I'd ever come across. In the course of writing this paper, however, I came to understand that writing about the structures of disciplines with any kind of grace and precision is difficult indeed. I think that by now Schwab and structure are as much a part of me as my bones, and I think I may be a better, more aware, more careful teacher than I could have been in my pre-Schwab existence.