Narrative Inquiry as Mediational Space in L2 Teacher ...



Tracing Teacher & Student Learning in Teacher-Constructed Narratives

Karen E. Johnson

Penn State University

kej1@psu.edu

• Teacher-constructed accounts of their own learning (Johnson &

Golombek, 2002[1]; Golombek & Johnson, 2004)

• Narrative epistemology (Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986)

• A sociocultural view of cognitive development (learning) (Vygotsky, 1978;

Leont’ve, 1981; Wertsch, 1985)

Research Questions:

• What does the internal activity of teacher learning look like?

• How do certain cultural artifacts function as tools that mediate teacher

learning?

• What initiates and then drives teacher learning?

• How do these transformative processes enable teachers to change their modes of

engagement in the activities of teaching?

• How do these new modes of engagement influence student learning?

“Putting theory into practice: Letting my students learn to read”

Teacher Learning

Excerpt 1: A gap between cognition & emotions

I had been teaching English to mainstream and ESL students in private and public schools for several years. Although I was well practiced as a teacher of writing, my real love was reading, and my students and colleagues generally appreciated my skills as a literature teacher. I had learned how to choose literary works that the students enjoyed, how to craft study guides that delved into the key themes of a text, and how to lead students in provocative class discussions. I was an effective teacher, no doubt, but somehow my teaching didn’t feel right to me.

Excerpt 2: Contradiction between beliefs and practices

My training had emphasized the importance of allowing students ownership over the reading and writing process, a philosophical orientation that I embraced in theory but failed to follow fully in practice. Perhaps my love of literature was part of the problem. As I prepared a lesson plan, my excitement about a reading would sweep over me and thoughts would begin to race through my head. In the classroom, my ideas too often predominated, and my voice was too often the most assured in the room. Although students generally enjoyed and benefited from my classes, in the end, the literature we studied belonged more to me than it did to them. My new teaching position provided me with a chance to shift the balance. But how?

Excerpt 3: Externalizing understandings w/a ‘temporary other’

A close colleague and I were charged with designing and teaching this course. We would draw upon our backgrounds in whole language methodologies and student-centered curriculum as we developed and implemented a semester-long, thematically based reading and writing course. We hoped to lead students toward more complex understandings of their own and one anothers’ viewpoints, and of their places in the larger world.

Excerpt 4: Appropriating theories

Throughout the reading unit, we operated on the assumption that students’ understandings would evolve as a result of several types of interactions with each story. An important part of the process was the use of story maps: graphic organizers that allow students to represent visually the meanings they derive from a text (see Hanf, 1971; Hyerle, 1996). Many reading theorists (Barnett, 1989; Grabe, 1991; Hudson, 1988; Mikulecky, 1984) have noted the effects of formal discourse structures on reading comprehension, as well as the importance of providing students with at least a basic orientation toward unfamiliar texts. In our short story unit, mapping proved to be an effective means of addressing these concerns.

Excerpt 5: Populating theories

Eskey and Grabe (1988) have described reading as entailing two levels of interaction: the interaction between the reader and the text, and the simultaneous interaction of various processing strategies within the reader. In our classrooms, we wished to add to this conception at least one other level: the social interactions of different readers as they worked together to make sense out of what they had read. While respecting the varying interpretations of individual readers, we attempted to structure group tasks that would encourage students to share their linguistic and cultural knowledge with each other as they engaged in the acts of reading, and re-reading and deriving meaning from the texts.

Excerpt 6: Changing modes of engagement

Maintaining such a stance toward the reading process required great discipline on my part. I often wanted to jump in and “correct” students’ initial misinterpretations but soon saw how much more effective it was to let students work out as much as possible for themselves. Although they tended at first to look to me for answers when they disagreed with each other, students soon accepted their roles as co-teachers and called on me only when they were truly unable to work out an answer among themselves. By encouraging students to work together, I was able to give them the space they needed to work out their own interpretations, while feeling confident that I had not left them completely “alone” with the text.

Excerpt 7: New modes of engagement

Book groups have come to form the heart of my teaching, and of my students’ learning each semester. With several different novels being read simultaneously in each of my classes, I can no longer be the primary owner of each text. As I circulate from group to group, helping students to address the issues they bring to my attention, I become a mentor and guide rather than a final authority. The use of book groups encourages -- in fact, requires -- me to take this role, thereby allowing my students to become expert advisors to one another as they establish their own sense of ownership over a wide variety of literary texts.

Excerpt 8: Recontextualization

In subsequent classes, I have used similar approaches to the ones outlined in this chapter, adapting and refining them in relation to the demands of the curriculum and the needs of the students. The content-free guidelines developed for the short story unit have inspired similar sets of guidelines for full-class poetry and novel units. Student- generated questions now form the basis of almost all of my class discussions -- about social studies content as well as literature -- and I am continually amazed as I watch students in each new class establish their own unique methods of negotiating the discussion process among themselves.

Excerpt 9: Transformation

My own growth as a teacher of reading, as I learned to step into the sidelines, allowing my students and their learning to take center stage was as significant as my students’ growth as readers over the course of the semester. The size and heterogeneity of my classes, although challenging at times, ultimately helped me to make this shift. Faced with twenty-five students at such varying levels of linguistic proficiency, I had no choice but to abandon the teacher-centered methods that had worked well enough in my leveled ESL classes in the past. I was compelled to relinquish my old approach for a new one -- one which would prove, over time, to be much more satisfying to me and my students.

Conclusions - Teacher Learning

• regained self-regulation, overcame cognitive & emotional dissonance

• reconceptualized how readers engage with texts by enacting new modes of

engagement

• transformation is evidenced by new modes of engagement in new contexts

Cognition & Emotion

• emotional dissonance initiated the recognition of cognitive dissonance

• emotions may be a driving factor in cognitive development (learning)

Mediational Tools – help create a temporary ‘other’

• close colleague, theory - ‘expert’ knowledge (Kennedy, 1999)

Intersections of Experiential and ‘Expert’ Knowledge

• ‘expert’ knowledge became the basis upon which this teacher was able to ground

her internal rationale for alternative ways of teaching (new modes of engagement)

• ‘expert’ knowledge was appropriated and populated (Ball, 2000) by her as she

theorized about her work

Student Learning

Excerpt 1: New modes of engagement

One of the liveliest discussions was about “Alien Turf,” an excerpt from Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets. Twenty-one of twenty-six students participated verbally, many of them connecting personally to the issues of racial prejudice and urban violence that are central to the story. Desmond, an intense but quiet boy who had been listening attentively but silently throughout the forty-five –minute discussion, spoke up:

Everybody talking about gangs and violence, and I see that, too. But in my mind that’s not what the story’s about. When I was reading, I keep thinking what Piri really want is love from his father. Like when he was fighting and he was thinking what would his father say. Then at the end he knew his father loved him. When he say he’ll bring the rollerskates, it’s like he’s saying that he really love his son.

Had I planned and led this discussion, I might or might not have pointed out the father-son relationship that is at the heart of the story. If I had, however, my introduction of this theme would not have carried nearly the same weight as Desmond’s contribution did, for him personally as well as the rest of the class. There was a feeling in the classroom that the conversation had progressed to a different level as a result of his astute observation.

Excerpt 2: Internalizing new ways of engaging with texts

The processes of question posing and journal writing were repeated in the novel unit as well. By the time, most students had become skilled at composing thoughtful questions about deeper meanings of what they had read. I sensed, moreover, that they had internalized this strategy as part of the reading process. At the start of the short story unit, students sometimes took an entire period to come up with eight questions; during the novel unit, most groups were able to compose their questions much more quickly, suggesting that prior to consulting with their classmates, student had already begun to formulate interpretive questions, consciously or subconsciously, on their own.

Excerpt 3: Reconceptualizing reading in English

Although group interactions play an important role in my students’ literary experiences, perhaps most significant are the opportunities provided for students to derive intellectual satisfaction and personal meanings from the stories they read. I was particularly impressed by the opening paragraph of one student’s final response to Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima:

This is the first big book I ever read in English. At first, I thought it is too long and hard for me, but after some time I became to really like the story. The people are Mexican like me, and some parts of the story were in Spanish. Sometimes I was confuse about what happen, but my group always help me to understand. I felt so good after I finish it, that I can read a book of 262 pages!

In her final essay, she offered a highly original analysis of the effects of World War II on each of the characters’ lives. These connections were in no way explicit in the novel, and some of Maria’s more advanced classmates struggled to meet the challenge. Buoyed by a sense of intellectual investment, personal connection, and the support of her classmates, however, Maria was able to construct her own meaning from a demanding literary text.

Conclusions - Student Learning

• new modes of engagement led to more personal and meaningful engagement with

texts

• students began to internalize new ways of engaging with texts

• reconceptualized the way they think about reading in English

Conclusions – Teacher-Authored Narratives

• provide rich evidence of cognitive and emotional dissonance with which teachers

struggle and the resources they exploit to mediate their learning

• highlight, in teachers’ own words, how, when, where, and why new understandings

emerge and new modes of engagement get enacted

• document how teachers understand their own learning within the settings and

circumstances of their work

• provide evidence that as teachers enact new modes of engagement, students

engage in new ways of learning, internalize new ways of engaging in learning, and

(may even) reconceptualize how they think about themselves as learners.

References:

Ball, A.F. (2000). Teachers’ developing philosophies on literacy and their use in

urban schools. In. C.D. Lee & P. Smagorinsky, (Eds). Vygotskyian perspectives

on literacy research. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cole, M & Engestrom, Y. (1993). A cultural-historical approach to distributed

cognition. In G. Saloman (Ed.) Distributed cognitions: psychological and

educations considerations, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Golombek, P. & Johnson, K.E. (2004) Narrative inquiry as a mediational space:

examining emotional and cognitive dissonance in second-language teachers’

development. Teachers and teaching: theory and practice (10) 307-327.

Johnson, K.E. (2007). Tracing teacher and student learning in teacher-authored

narratives. Teacher Development. 11 (2) 175-188.

Johnson, K.E. & Golombek, P. (2002) Teachers’ Narrative Inquiry as Professional

development. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, M. M (1999). Schools and the problem of knowledge. In J. Rath & A.

McAninch (Eds.) What counts as knowledge in teacher education? (pp. 29-45)

Ablex Publishing Company.

Leont’ve, A.N. (1981) Problems of the development of the mind. Moscow: Progress

Press.

Polkinghorne, D.E. (1988) Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany, NY:

State University of New York Press.

Sarbin, T. (Ed.) (1986) Narrative psychology: the storied nature of human conduct.

New York: Praeger.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wertsch, J.V. (1985) Vygotsky and the social formation of the mind. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

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[1] All data sets are from Johnson & Golombek (2002)

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